Greg Williamson, burning the candle at both ends… pretty typical of him!

Gregory Stuart Williamson, an unsung hero and longtime collaborator, died suddenly last week, apparently of a blood clot and stroke, while standing at a supermarket. He was not even 60 yet.

I want to take a moment to remember and honor Greg. I spent 17 years in close collaboration with him, and I don’t think anyone I ever worked with was as reliable, as diligent, as uncompromising, and as generous as Greg Williamson. He was also legendarily stubborn, curmudgeonly, and had a temper that had to be experienced to be believed. And if you were his friend, as I am proud to say I was for many years, you definitely experienced it!

But if there was ever anyone with a prickly outside and big soft inside, it was Greg Williamson. He was smart, critical, often sarcastic, and frequently hilarious. We had one of those office art Xerox signs on the wall for many years that said “The beatings will continue until morale improves” with the addition of an ‘s’ to morale, since Greg’s name in Processed World was Primitivo Morales. We would roll our eyes when he would launch on one of his oft-repeated aphorisms, like “The People United, Will Never Split a Pizza!” But now we’ll never hear it again.

Passing the pipe, the cheshire grin emerging from the sweet cloud of smoke…

It is said about some people that they would give you the shirt off their back. Greg was such a person. He worked as a programmer for many years, usually getting a decent salary but he went through his money as fast as he got it, and partly it was because he was damned generous. He came across the Bay (bitching about BART nearly every day) at his own expense, entering with two six-packs, a couple of bags of chips, and a pipe that was soon being passed around with the best quality pot available.

I probably saw Greg in this position more hours than any other… here at the Grant Building around 1997…

Processed World collating party at 460 Ashbury in 1984 for issue #12.

Once he was at the office (starting around 1983-84 at our digs at 460 Ashbury, then at “The Cave” at 37 Clementina from 1985-1990, and then the Grant Building from 1990-2007) he was always ready to get down and work. He was a stalwart member of the Processed World collective for most the magazine’s life (in fact, he was probably still a bit pissed at me at the end, that I had quit the project in 1994; he often lamented the loss of the magazine and the community that came together around it).

He stuck around to do the backbreaking schlepping of boxes and collating of pages long after a lot of other folks had bailed. He wrote an incredible article about his upbringing in Los Alamos, NM, where both of his parents worked in the nuclear bomb program. He wrote many other pieces in Processed World too, and contributed his insane wit to the blistering graphic humor therein as well.

In 1994 when we began plotting Shaping San Francisco, Greg was in the heart of the effort (kicking and screaming all the way, it must be said—he never put much faith in a grassroots community history project as having any radical political impact. And yet, his thousands of hours of unpaid labor made it possible in a way that no one else’s labor could have). When we finally rolled out the first edition on CD-ROM and public kiosk in January 1998, it was a triumph of his creative programming skills as much as it was anything else. He kept those kiosks running when vandals would descend on them, he helped figure out how to make the software install and the CD-ROMs run, how to get the peculiar software to jump through all the hoops we wanted it to jump through.

Greg at the Grand Rollout of the first edition of Shaping San Francisco at the SF Main Library. The kiosk is hidden behind the woman in the foreground.

A better view of the first kiosk, art of the three “newsies” who grinned from behnd the computer by Mike Mosher.

And when Microsoft changed the operating system to Windows XP, it killed all his work. The project stopped functioning with the new Windows, and we were faced with a mountain of work to undo what we’d done and re-engineer it in a way that would free us from proprietary software forever. It took several years but Greg managed to extract everything from the version he had so painstakingly built, and set the stage for what we finally migrated to and opened in 2009, FoundSF.org.

Some of the core production team for the first edition of Shaping San Francisco (left to right) Jim Swanson, Marina Lazzara, Joe Caffentzis, Greg Williamson, Magali Barre, Chris Carlsson; (not pictured) Jim Fisher, Dimitri de la Marea, Daniel Steven Crafts, and a host of other friends, interns, and contributors…

I’ve been lucky in life and enjoyed a lot of “success” in terms of doing projects that have affected many people’s lives (not the kind of “success” this society normally recognizes, that which leads to money). I’ve also enjoyed a disproportionate amount of fame from these projects (Processed World magazine, Critical Mass, Shaping San Francisco), which has left people like Greg in the undeserving shadows. Greg Williamson and all the work he did is why today over 30,000 people a month can access the remarkable archive at Foundsf.org. He stopped being directly involved with Shaping San Francisco some years ago, before we got the Foundsf site open, but without the unnoticed, unrewarded, endless toil he put in to it through long nights over years in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, we could never have brought it to its present state.

Greg was also a constant presence in various other efforts. He loved street theater and political interventions, so here’s a few images to remember those things too. The “Prisoners of Daily Life” float was part of the End of the World’s Fair, and that’s Greg’s old green pickup being dragged by those prisoners through San Francisco. The rest of the Processed World crowd made the “Terminals Have Ears” float which also rolled that day, May 12, 1984.

Greg’s green pickup as the “Prisoners of Daily Life” float at the May 1984 End of the World’s Fair.

“Terminals Have Ears”, the other Processed World float at the End of the World’s Fair.

In 1998 we joined with Art & Revolution, taking the self-satirizing name “Shaking San Francisco” and produced one of the dozens of performances that together made up “Reclaim May Day” that year. Ours was based on a 12-foot tall, four-sided box with gorgeous painted canvases on the outside, we called “The Rememberator.” We’d take turns going into the box and coming out as historic characters, while as an ensemble we performed a variety of office chores and did choreographed moves to various spoken word and poetic pieces going in the foreground.

Rehearsing for The Rememberator at Reclaim May Day, May 1998. Greg is second from right.

The Rememberator performance at Dolores Park, Mayday 1998. Greg is in back under the red arrow. Bill Kersnowski as Emperor Norton gesturing at the actual device: The Rememberator!

A year later, Shaking San Francisco appeared as “Interference Theater” at the corner of Market and Montgomery, garbed in office drag with white plastic half-masks with UPC codes in the forehead, miming office toil and then doing strange ritualistic kick-lines and acts of obeisance to the stock tickers in downtown during an otherwise “normal” lunchtime.

Yep, that’s Greg, making his appeals to the higher gods of the stock exchange!

Greg showed up. He was here. He didn’t flinch, and he really didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought. He loved and he yearned for love back. He got a lot more of it than he generally wanted to accept or even recognize. That was hard for all of us, who wanted his happiness as much as anything. I’m so sad that he’s gone. I hope he knew that all his old comrades always had a place in their hearts for him. I know I’ll always remember and honor him, for what he did, who he was, how he steadily put himself forward to make the world a better place, to fight for justice, to take no guff, and finally, to keep laughing in the face of tragedy and absurdity. Gregory Stuart Williamson was an extraordinary man. I’m lucky he was part of my life.

I had the pleasure of seeing John Holloway last week, and meeting his compañera Eloína, an equally impressive character. They were in San Francisco thanks to Andrej Grubacic at CIIS inviting him to be a visiting scholar to present his work over three nights of lectures. I could only make the last one, where he set out to show how we are the crisis of capital. The next day we had them over for lunch, so we had a fantastic leisurely afternoon over a good meal, spending about three hours talking and laughing and enjoying the sun streaming into our dining room on a beautiful afternoon. Eloína is a computer scientist who has become an ethnobotanist, and runs a nursery in Puebla, Mexico where they live. Her work dovetailed with some other folks who passed through a year ago, who have done a lot of work on the hydrological history and future of the Valley of Mexico, so we happily shared their books.

Sara Maria Acevedo caught me asking a question of John Holloway at his talk.

I read John’s Crack Capitalism during the week before he arrived and really liked it. There are many places in the book where I felt a very strong resonance with the analysis I made in Nowtopia, and I was honored to discover that he quoted me in his book. Like his earlier book Change the World Without Taking Power, he is taking a very deep and basic Marxian concept, in this case the dual nature of work, and expanding it in fresh language, reworking the concept to confront and unpack the despair we often find ourselves feeling in the face of global capitalism. Part of his mission, too, is to repudiate the cul-de-sac of traditional Marxism with its elision of the dual nature of work in favor of an emphasis on the struggle between capital and labor. Holloway emphasizes again and again throughout his books that capital and abstract labor are two parts of the same thing. If your radical politics starts from what you do as wage-labor, as abstract labor, you are already trapped in the logic of capital. The point is to fight against abstract labor, against the subordination of our “doing” (whatever we may choose to do) to the logic of money and markets.

The ambition of Crack Capitalism is impressive. He situates most of the divisions and schisms facing contemporary radicals in the subordination of subjectivity to abstract labor. It can seem a bit dense and complicated at moments, but overall I want to congratulate him on a well-done effort to bring these concepts out into the light of day and making them quite accessible and clear. Here is a quote where he summarizes his critique of identity politics:

Identification or reification is an enormously destructive force in everyday struggle. We give our protests a name, a label, a limit. Our struggle is the struggle of women, of gays, of workers, of the unemployed, it is the struggle for indigenous rights, for uncontaminated food, for peace. It may be that we are at least vaguely aware that our struggles are part of a wider whole, perhaps even that they are the product of the way in which human doing is organized in the world, but, precisely because that form of organization seems permanent (‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’), we enclose our struggles within limits, within an identity. And so we have a world full of protest, a world of people aware in some way that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way society is organized, and yet so many walls separating these struggles, so many dykes preventing them from flowing into each other. And all these walls are identifications, the grand framework identification of the capitalism-that-is-and-always-will-be, and the lesser identifications of ‘we are gay, we are women, we are indigenous, we are Basque, we are Zapatistas, we are anarchists, we are communists’. And all these identities become so easily the basis for sectarianism, the perennial self-destruction of the left that makes life easy for the police. Far more effective than any system of secret police, identity is the reproduction of capital within anti-capitalist struggle. (p. 114)

Pioneer Monument gets a cleaning in SF...

His book’s title indicates the frame of inquiry Holloway is following. He sees cracks in the façade of capitalist society that grow from all sorts of non-subordination (to abstract labor), and occasionally from insubordination. By the end of the book he acknowledges that none of the myriad activities and initiatives are perfect, or even necessarily guaranteed to succeed. Our obsession with being pure or uncompromised is one of the ways we paralyze our own capabilities:

There is never any purity in these experiments, thank goodness. All are contradictory. The dedicated revolutionary who abandons his children to go and fight for the great cause, the indigenous organization that accepts funds from a church dedicated to subordination and misogyny, the radical professor who participates in the quantitative measurement of students’ work, the cooperative that sells its products on the market, the car worker who spends most of his time producing objects and that kill and contaminate and then organizes a community garden in the evenings and at weekends, the student who organizes demonstrations but does not question the categories of the subject she is studying: all, all are self-contradictory, we are all involved in the re-creation of the social relations we are trying to overcome. It cannot be otherwise in a capitalist society. The movement of doing is not a pure movement, but a moving in-against-and-beyond labor. There is no purity here: we try to overcome the contradictions, we rebel against our own complicity, we try in every way to stop making capitalism, we try to direct the flow of our lives as effectively as possible towards the creation of a society based on dignity. We are part of the social flow of rebellion, and in this flow there is no room for rigidities and hard lines. The concepts of correctness and betrayal, its complement that is so rooted in the culture of the left, are obstacles to the flow of rebellion. To create rigidities and dogmas and ‘we do not talk to them because they are reformists’ and ‘we will have nothing to do with them because they drink coca-cola’ and ‘we will not cooperate with them because they are sectarian’, is to take an active part in the freezing of the flow of rebellion, to reproduce the definitions and classifications and fetishes of capitalist thought. (p. 257)

I admit I was really happy to read this bit on patience. I’ve spoken publicly many times about “radical patience,” characterizing it very similarly to how he does it here:

Creating another society cannot be just a question of events and intensities. Beyond the puncturing of duration, beyond the discontinuities of excess, there is also the question of creating other social relations, of doing things in a different way, at a rhythm of our own choosing. Probably we need to think of revolution in terms of both temporalities: the temporality of rave-and-rage, performance-and-dance, and the temporality of patient creation, of gardening-and-weaving. This is not the old virtue of revolutionary patience, based on the idea that we must wait until objective conditions are ripe. This is a different sort of patience that says ‘no waiting, let’s get on now with constructing a different world, but it is not something that can be created in an explosion of fury, it requires and always will require a process of patient creation’. (p. 238-39)

Before I read Crack Capitalism I was perusing George Katsiaficas’s magisterial history Asia’s Unknown Uprisings in preparation for his appearance at our Talks series in March. I went straight to the chapter in Volume 1 (South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century) about the Gwangju Uprising in May 1980. I remember well rushing to buy a New York Times during those late May days that year, trying to get news about the uprising underway in Gwangju, South Korea. Practically the entire population of the city of 700,000 threw out the military, then a state-of-the-art, fully supplied ally of the U.S. under the brutal dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. In Katsiaficas’s telling, the amazing bravery of bus drivers, taxi drivers, and countless students, housewives, factory workers and others in overcoming the extreme brutality and murderous onslaught of crack paratroopers in armored vehicles is just stunning. Then, during the week of May 21-27 they held their city against a relentless effort by the dictator to suppress them militarily, while the revolt spread to the rest of the surrounding region in the southernmost part of Korea. Inside Gwangju daily assemblies of up to 100,000 people made democratic decisions and organized their armed resistance. Part of why this could work was that as a marginalized and downtrodden population within South Korean society, the people of the area still had an intact civil society rooted in generations of shared life. Here is his analysis of what was going on:

Dubbed the absolute community, the organic solidarity of participants in the Gwangju Commune embodies what I consider to be humans’ instinctual need for freedom—grasped intuitively—an unconscious need that was sublimated into collective expression during the uprising. The sudden emergence of hundreds of thousands of people occupying public space; the spread of the revolt from one district to another in South Jeolla; the intuitive identification of hundreds of thousands of people with each other and their simultaneous belief in the power of their actions; the self-organization of the Citizens’ Army; and the suspension of normal values like competitive business practices, criminal behavior, and acquisitiveness are all dimensions of what I call the “eros effect.” —George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings Vol. 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century (PM Press: 2012)

I love this description and the labels “absolute community” and “eros effect.” I felt that eros effect in the May 21, 1979 “White Night Riot” here in San Francisco, and many times since in Critical Mass rides and during the Nov. 2 General Strike last year during Occupy Oakland, and so on. It is something we yearn for, something we seek out wherever we can find it. No matter what, it’s not something we can just conjure up through will power or wishful thinking. It appears when it appears, and it requires great nurturance and patience to keep it alive and expanding. But the best part of it is the effect it leaves behind in the shared imagination of the people who have experienced it. It is the bedrock from which further initiatives can grow.

Tahrir Square in Egypt is another recent case in point. While reading Crack Capitalism I was also reading Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (Bloomsbury Publishing, London: 2012) by Ahdaf Soueif, a lovely literary first-hand account of the heady days of the uprising against Mubarak and the Egyptian state. We know now that it hasn’t reached its goals yet (in fact the Egyptian revolution is facing serious obstacles as I write, though steady demonstrations and protests continue to rock Cairo and other cities there). Soueif acknowledges as much several times in her beautiful book, saying that we reading her words know more than she does as she is writing them back in 2011 or early 2012. But she is there in Tahrir Square and brings us in with her to taste that eros effect in full bloom during those special weeks:

All the ills which plagued our society in the last decades have vanished overnight. Young men, who a month ago could have been thought a menace to any woman on the street, were chivalry itself. People offer each other biscuits, dates, water. People chat, people pick up litter. We revel in the inclusiveness, the generosity, the humor that come so easily to us. Students, businessmen, waiters, academics, farmers, civil servants, unemployed—we are all here together, all doing what we’ve not been able to do for decades: each and every one is speaking, acting, expressing themselves and insisting on being counted. (p. 56)

One hundred pages later, after some setbacks but as Mubarak is finally giving way and leaving office, she fights her way through crowds and traffic to make it into the Square (or the Midan as the Egyptians call it).

…once you’re inside, the Midan is amazing. Even the light in here is different, the feel of the air. It’s a cleaner world. Everything’s sharper, you can see the leaves on the trees. Badly lopped, they’re trying to grow out. Everyone is suddenly, miraculously, completely themselves. Everyone understands. We’re all very gentle with each other. As though we’re convalescing, dragged back from death’s very door. Our selves are in our hands, precous, newly recovered, perhaps fragile; we know we must be careful of our own and of each other’s.

The Midan is sparkling clean. The rubbish is piled neatly on the  periphery with notices on it saying ‘NDP Headquarters’. The fence of corrugated iron stands again around the mystery building site and screens newly constructed washrooms. Lamp posts have put out wires so that laptops and mobiles can be charged. The field hospitals provide free medical care and advice for everyone. A placard reading ‘Barber of the Revolution’ guides you to a free shave and a haircut. A giant transparent wall of plastic pockets has gone up. The shabab sit next it. People tell them jokes and they draw or write them and slot them into the pockets; a rising tide of jokes and cartoons. A Punch and Judy show is surrounded by laughing families. A man eats fire. There’s face-painting and music and street theatre and a poetry stand. (p. 159)

I haven’t been feeling very inspired lately. The absurdity of living through a second full-on tech boom with its concomitant obliviousness and entitlement, its ethnic and social cleansing scouring our neighborhood, threatening us too with the tidal wave of money displacing all in its wake, is disheartening on a daily basis. But I was glad to find solace in these remarkable books, in extracting myself for some hours from the nose-to-the-ground worries to remember that the flow of history is much bigger than our little drama here in the Mission. We have our own fights, to be sure, but the bigger effort to change how we live is ongoing, and takes place in fits and starts across time and space. Our allies are everywhere and it’s easy to overlook how much has happened in recent years when despairing about what is happening in this immediate moment in my immediate surroundings. So take heart! I’m going to give the last word to John Holloway:

Our struggle is to open every moment and fill it with an activity that does not contribute to the reproduction of capital. Stop making capitalism and do something else, something sensible, something beautiful and enjoyable. Stop creating the system that is destroying us. We only live once, why use our time to destroy our own existence? Surely we can do something better with our lives. Revolution is not about destroying capitalism, but about refusing to create it. To pose revolution as the destruction of capitalism is to reproduce the abstraction of time that is so central to the reproduction of capitalism: it is self-defeating. To think of destroying capitalism is to erect a great monster in front of us, so terrifying that we either give up in despair or else conclude that the only way in which we can slay the monster is by constructing a great party with heroic leaders who sacrifice themselves (and everyone around them) for the sake of the revolution… To pose revolution as the destruction of capitalism is to distance it from ourselves, to put it off into the future. The question of revolution is not in the future. It is here and now: how do we stop producing the system by which we are destroying humanity? Rephrasing the question of revolution as stop making capitalism does not give us the answers.

I gave a Shaping San Francisco presentation on the history of Dissent in the Bay Area (mostly San Francisco) at The Holdout in Oakland at the end of February.

Map of Europe: 1000 AD to present day

I loved this animation… just wish they’d put in the dates too!

I just turned 56 on March 11, and find myself paying closer attention than ever to what kinds of things get remembered, forgotten, overlooked, and flushed from public consciousness.

My telltale posture at the top of the City on a beautiful sunny March 11, when I turned 56.

Very nice of Twin Peaks to provide me with a gorgeous display of wildflowers to celebrate!

Living through this period, with another jaw-dropping wave of evictions devastating my circle of friends and acquaintances throughout San Francisco, the displacement of long-time residents is one obvious example of historic phenomena that get systematically flushed from the public record. I went to a discussion about the recently passed Proposition C Housing Trust Fund at SPUR a couple of weeks ago and there was nary a mention about the eviction crisis. Other politicians are trying to throw gasoline on the fire by passing a special ordinance to allow 2,500 units of “tenancy in common” apartments gain immediate condominium status. If it passes without the multi-year moratorium on condo conversions demanded by tenant activists, the wave of evictions is sure to accelerate beyond its already frenzied pace.

I consider my own building’s fuse to have been lit with the commitment of our landlady to state conservatorship… it’s probably only a matter of time before we’re evicted too, but with luck, maybe we can last another 2 years, or even 10! And we’re going to make our best effort to set up a Community Land Trust option for this building, so that maybe, just maybe, we can figure out a way to stay in San Francisco.

It would be a pity to be evicted from the city after working on San Francisco history for nearly two decades. Back in the first Gulf War era I felt strongly the amnesiac culture when friends I’d marched alongside couldn’t remember that we’d been part of a large anti-war movement in 1990-91. Now we’re at the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War and the media is mostly still repeating the history-flushing lies they promulgated at the time—that no one knew that the government was deliberately lying to get us into war. Actually San Franciscans shut the city down because tens of thousands of us knew perfectly well the venal lies that were hurtling us down a barbaric path. A decade later we can say “we told you so,” but it’s an empty effort, gaining no traction or amplification, and thus practically invisible, probably forgotten even by many of us who were in the streets in March 2003.

Canessa Gallery on Montgomery.

I popped in to the charming Canessa Gallery on Montgomery Street (the site of the original Black Cat Café in the 1950s, home on the ground floor to Jose Sarria and the first open gay scene in the City) where the Living New Deal Project is hosting a modest exhibit of New Deal art, including these recently made posters about the Post Office. They’ve been campaigning to save the many post offices around California and the country that are getting privatized and closed, and losing their architectural and artist treasures in the process. They are also promoting the idea of a New Deal Museum in the Presidio, so if you’re someone who likes to comment on such proposals, it’s open at the Presidio to chime in with your support.

One of the posters created for the new campaign to oppose the attacks on the Post Office.

You’d think there’d be plenty of support around here for cultural institutions like a New Deal Museum, a San Francisco Museum, etc., but the focus is on mega-office development. Here are is a shot showing the new massive Transbay Terminal building under construction (going five stories deep to make a place for the future high-speed train to come in… will it ever happen?), which will be far taller than anything previously built in San Francisco. Just a half block away the last of four Foundry Square buildings is being rapidly erected too, just one of the dozens of massive construction projects going on all over town.

New Transbay Terminal construction... five stories down, eventually will tower over the skyline.

Foundry Square, the 4th corner to be filled by this development... one of dozens of massive building projects dominating San Francisco at the beginning of 2013.

Sat in on a meeting convened by the California Historical Society that brought together quite a lot of local museums and organizations, all to consider how to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—the World’s Fair that San Francisco hosted in 1915. It was an interesting first meeting in the sense that it offered a clear view of how history is “made” by the choices of curators, writers, archivists, museum directors, etc. Shaping San Francisco will participate in some fashion, so I look forward to fanning the flames of controversy as the time draws nearer.

Shaping SF had a table at the History Expo at the beginning of March, the 3rd annual event held in the Old Mint that is supposed to become a Museum of the City of San Francisco, but seems that it probably won’t ever get there under present management. The SF Museum and Historical Society has been spinning their wheels and spending millions for the past few years with very little to show for it. The Expo is their way to try to position themselves as the overarching organization encompassing the many local history groups and efforts. But what the Expo really demonstrates is how vibrant the diverse and decentralized community of local historians is, and how irrelevant to the actual work of producing histories, extending historical consciousness, engaging historical debates, etc. the SFMHS is.

Remarkable 3D mural on the facade of the Marine Firemens Union on 2nd Street, now dwarfed by massive offices and hotels on every side.

While they’ve been churning through funds and resources, ostensibly to convert the Old Mint into a Museum, a brilliant exhibit that does a lot of what a local city history museum should do has opened at the Visitor Center of the Maritime Museum in the Argonaut Hotel in the Cannery at Hyde and Jefferson. It’s called “The Waterfront” and it’s a simply fantastic collection of displays, dioramas, artifacts, audio and video clips, and does a wonderful job of tracing the history of San Francisco—which after all, took place largely along the waterfront for most of its life until the mid-20th century.

This new mural of a pre-Europeanized Bay Area greets you as you enter "The Waterfront" at the Maritime Museum's Visitor Center.

Mostly "The Waterfront" focuses on San Francisco's history, but this remarkable example of Polynesian navigational tools caught my eye. The white buttons are islands, and the sticks represent water currents and directions.

Meanwhile, the Exploratorium is about to re-open at its fancy new digs on Pier 15. In the Observatory’s 2nd floor my friend and colleague Susan Schwartzenberg has brought together the work of many scientists, artists, archivists (esp. the Prelingers, who have put together a library and a collection of new Atlases which are brilliant!), and others, to create a science-focused museum of San Francisco, the Bay, and the huge inland watershed that the Bay drains. Combining the maps, overlays, animated fog flows, tidal histories, global carbon flows, and much more, and one’s head begins to spin with more data than anyone can digest. But the profound depth of knowledge available about where we are and what’s happening to it, beyond the political boundaries and obsessive concerns of the petty politicians who have generally had their way here, is another dimension of what a local City museum ought to provide.

I had started to wonder if a Museum can actually still be interesting, and after visiting the Maritime Museum and the Exploratorium this week, I have to say definitely “yes!” But a proper history of San Francisco cannot be a shrink-to-fit approach that foregrounds self-congratulatory corporate histories at the expense of the dense and complicated stories that actually make up this City. Luckily, a lot of the best historical materials are already well installed around the town. Along the Embarcadero are several dozen pylons and cement installations, black-and-white striped with yellow panels showing historic photos and brief explanations. Elsewhere along the waterfront from north to south are various plaques placed in the sidewalks, like this one for Buried Ships.

This installation tells about the White Angel Jungle that fed hundreds of down-and-out men during the Depression... the same site is now Levi's Plaza!

I just put the information on this installation into FoundSF here. A beautiful map of the buried ships under the City is in the “Waterfront” exhibition at the Maritime Museum too.

This is in an alcove with a fantastic time-lapse map of Yerba Buena Cove, a new one better than any I've seen before.

Between the Maritime Museum’s “The Waterfront” and the Exploratorium’s Bay Laboratory, we might wonder what need there is for a City Museum that is organized by an organization that is primarily concerned with shilling for the corporations that have dominated the City’s history? Why not just give the Old Mint over to the dozen organizations who are already producing, maintaining, and sharing the history of the city in a multitude of voices, styles, and methodologies?

I had fun a couple of weeks ago scouting with my pal Jason for his upcoming birthday ride. We rolled along the Oakland Estuary and came upon some nice historical surprises, including a relatively recent sculptural installation called “Sigame!” (Follow me!), which highlights famous women of Oakland history around its base. I’d snagged a pamphlet of walking tours around Fruitvale when Adriana and I visited the Peralta Hacienda last month, itself one of the oldest buildings in the area, once ensconced in the midst of many acres of orchards.

¡Sigame! (Follow me!)

One of the women honored in the base of the Sigame statue.

another...

The Peralta Hacienda... well worth a visit, though it's not open very often. They have a great map of an indigenous village founded in the post-Mission era by remnants of Ohlone, Coast Miwok and others, at the spot where Pleasanton is today.

Later we cruised around “Jingletown,” a neighborhood divided by the Nimitz Freeway not far from the Fruitvale district, which was obviously discovered by artists more than a decade ago—the Institute of Mosaic Art looked well established there. When we went to take a close look at a big old cotton factory on 22nd Street, we found this plaque explaining how Jingletown got its name from the coins in the cotton workers’ pockets after they got paid… true or not? Not sure, but makes a nice story. We met a guy coming out of the building who was a self-styled local historian and he sent us to check out the Cohen-Bray House on 29th Street, a gorgeous uninhabited historic Victorian.

Institue of Mosaic Art in "Jingletown," Oakland.

The old California Cotton Mill... artist live-work spaces now of course!

Sign on the Cotton Mill building, another example of local history in plain view...

In 1895 these Portuguese immigrants made up the majority of the workforce at the California Cotton Mill.

This Cohen-Bray House on 29th Street in Oakland was paid for by Alfred Cohen, the Cotton magnate.

I loved this wrought-iron fencing, apparently made in Texas! but maybe it was just an ironworks called "Texas"...

This raven met me at the top of Twin Peaks when I climbed up there on my birthday. He was very noisy and it really felt like he was trying to tell me something. Maybe it was just happy birthday, or maybe it was a warning about the City slipping away and that we have to do something…. Wish I could speak “raven” so I knew!

My birthday raven.... what quoth the Raven? danged if I know!

Long time, no blog. Might’ve called this the Winter of my Discontent, but I don’t really want to get into the details of the past few months. Housing and income dramas are underway, with no particular end in sight, while various political and social groupings left me feeling isolated and disappointed. So it goes. And I just haven’t felt like writing. Photos in this post not related to what I’m writing about, but kind of a parallel story of high tides and beautiful winter light.

Early January view north from Twin Peaks (south). San Rafael bridge visible across the edge of Angel Island.

I find myself staying up and getting up late (it was really bad during the holidaze), reading a lot, staying home instead of going out, reducing my internet time though not as much as I ought to. Never fails to amaze me how much time I can waste noodling around the internet, reading posts, news, catching up on this and that. I’m going to come back to this in a later post, but one cluster of books I read recently included Geert Lovink’s Networks Without a Cause which informed me that no one reads blogs, or if there are some readers, certainly no one comments on them (that has long been my experience—stats indicate that there are usually about 1000 visitors a month, but how many are real people? How many read anything through? And comments? Less than a dozen per year of non-spam, actual thoughtful commentaries.) I’ve always understood this blog, and my writing in general, to be in service to what I want to say. I don’t write for an audience. I appreciate it when people get something out of what I write, but I have never written FOR an audience, but for myself.

Surprising that a view like this is possible from the same spot on Twin Peaks.

Anyway, I just started teaching 19th century San Francisco history at the SF Art Institute again, and decided I needed to get better informed about the first half of the 19th century that preceded the founding of San Francisco or the acquisition of California by the U.S. Some months ago I read about Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars against the large cultures of the southeast (Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, Chocktaw, Chickasaw), pushing them west across the Mississippi during his Presidential reign 1828-1836. Even earlier than that I read about the Comanches and the empire they anchored in the southern Great Plains from the mid-18th century to after the Civil War, a story that is left out of most histories. Due to the severe pressure of Comanche raids on Texas, Mexico liberalized immigration to the territory, leading to an influx of Americans who became the majority of the population by the early 1830s. The Texans gained their independence from Mexico in 1836 and were an independent country for about nine years before annexation to the United States in 1845. But those years of independence involved huge debts incurred to British and U.S. banks, a floundering economy, and a persistent claim by Mexico that Texas was still part of it, while at the same time the Comanches continued their dominating economic role of raiding and trading all around and in Texan territory, making economic development along capitalist or even just large agrarian lines nearly impossible.

Amy Greenberg’s excellent history “A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico” helped me grasp a lot of the missing pieces politically of the decade and a half before the beginning the city of San Francisco. Perhaps the most remarkable single item I learned was how the U.S. started the Mexican-American War. I had assumed it had to do with the gold discovery in California and that there had been some kind of pretext to allow the U.S. to attack. But I hadn’t realized that the pattern established in 1846 became the DNA of U.S. military expansionism and is still being followed to this day.

California King Tide in January led to coastal flooding, a sign of things to come!

Democrat James Polk (an Andrew Jackson protégé) won the 1844 presidential election, first getting the nomination over the presumed Democratic nominee, former president Martin Van Buren, and then much to the entire country’s surprise, defeating the longtime national political figure Henry Clay, the candidate of the Whig Party. The Whigs lost in Pennsylvania and New York, the latter by only 5,000 votes, in a state where 16,000 abolitionist votes were cast for the Liberty Party. Had a third of those votes gone to Clay, he might have won, and if he’d won, it’s unlikely the annexation of Texas would have proceeded, nor the ensuing invasion and war with Mexico.

Polk, as Greenberg’s account makes clear, was set on taking California from Mexico before he came into office, long before the discovery of gold. He was a committed partisan of Jacksonian expansionism and a pro-slavery Democrat. San Francisco bay was the coveted target, but so were the rich lands of California, and access to the wide Pacific rim markets too. No doubt the need for expanded territories for slavery played in his agenda as well.

A big herring run during the King Tide led to a wild bird feeding frenzy along the bayshore, here at Warm Water Cove off 24th Street.

Soon after Polk’s election, but before his inauguration in March 1845, the U.S. Senate ratified the annexation of Texas agreement that had been presented by outgoing party-less President Tyler (who had served most of the four-year term for William Henry Harrison, a Whig general who died of pneumonia a month into his term), Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march his army into Texas, ostensibly to protect it from possible attack from Mexico. He also ordered the Navy to get ready off the coast of Mexico and California for possible hostilities. Taylor was sent not to the recognized southern border of Texas at the Nueces River (today’s Corpus Christi), but another hundred miles south across the disputed “Nueces Strip” to the Rio Grande in what was recognized by everyone as Mexico (except for some Texan expansionists).

After Taylor’s army set up camp across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexican forces began to gather. A Colonel Hitchcock in Taylor’s army wrote in his diary: “We have not one particle of right to be here… It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.” Dozens of American soldiers deserted to the Mexican side, including some who later fought in the storied San Patricio Battalion (mostly Irish immigrants). When a Mexican cavalry patrol crossed the Rio Grande they were met by a detachment of U.S. soldiers. The Mexicans captured them and killed 11 in the skirmish. This became the event that Polk had been waiting for. He had been composing his declaration of war for weeks, and now he declared to the Congress that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil”—a bald-faced lie.

Seal Rock at low tide during January sunset.

So the war began and it went badly for Mexico, which was politically in disarray, economically dysfunctional, and militarily quite weak. A good account from the Mexican point of view which I also read is “A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States” by Timothy J. Henderson. I won’t try to explain the crazy, Byzantine power struggles among the Mexican elite that tended to revolve around the disgrace and rehabilitation of Santa Anna, who served as President of Mexico on 11 separate occasions. The U.S. army under Winfield Scott managed to occupy Mexico City, but during those months of occupation a steady guerrilla war was carried on by Mexican partisans. Meanwhile, the U.S. forces that invaded from the north under Taylor, as well as Scott’s troops, became famous for rapes, murders, and atrocities wherever they were, another way we can see the DNA of U.S. militarism being well established before the middle of the 19th century.

The wars against various Indian civilizations, of course, were of much the same nature. White settlers invade their lands, and then claim they’ve been wronged when Indians fight back. Later, the model is repeated in the Philippines in 1898, when Admiral Dewey cuts a deal with the Spanish to take Manila harbor after some hours of shelling, and then weeks later, when a vote is imminent in the U.S. Senate to annex the Philippines (and does not have enough support to pass), a U.S. patrol is sent over a bridge that separated U.S. troops from Philippine nationalist fighters. Shots are exchanged, and a cable arrives in Washington DC the night before the vote claiming that the U.S. has been brazenly attacked. The ensuing hysteria and patriotic frenzy switches just enough votes to get a bare majority for annexing the Philippines, which remains a U.S. property until after WWII.

More "stuff" steaming through the Golden Gate...

And in the same way that vets bring the trauma and violence home with them from Vietnam, Iraq, etc., some of the volunteers who fought in the Mexican-American war came to California and carried out a genocidal slaughter against California Indians, and later attacked Chinese, Chileans, Mexicans, and others with impunity. One group of New York volunteers who set out with their commander to California but never saw any actual action in the war became a predatory gang known as the Hounds in San Francisco’s first year.

It’s great finally getting to delve into all this history. Richard White’s book “The Middle Ground” is started now, about the Great Lakes Indian and French societies that developed over 150 years from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s… Then Bill Cronon’s “Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England” soon after that…

Not sure when I’ll be back blogging more regularly, but I do promise not to abandon this at any point. It may be less frequent, but I will pop up here from time to time as it strikes me…

Rincon Hill and Bay Bridge, Berkeley, etc. from Twin Peaks...

Candlestick Park (to be demolished in two years), and in the distance the Coyote Hills park on the southern east shore of the Bay.

Pt. Reyes from Twin Peaks ring road... far to the north on a crispy January afternoon.

I went to Mexico City over Thanksgiving to visit my wife, who is hard at work on complicated project involving a penal reform initiative there. The photos scattered through this post are from my visit, but have little to do directly with what I’m writing about.

Penny-farthing riding woman in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City.

I had lots of time to read and managed to whip through a couple of books while there, one about Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars in the early 1800s (a grim story), and the other, Paul Mason’s remarkable and highly readable Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (Verso 2012). Mason’s book does a great job of putting the uprisings of 2011 in a longer-term historical context, as well as helping to emphasize that they are far from over (the past week’s new uprising in Egypt served as a loud exclamation point on this larger argument!). It complements in a fascinating way another short book I read the week before I left by Franco “Bifo” Berardi called The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Semiotext(e) Intervention Series No. 14). In fact, at one point Mason quotes Berardi from an essay he co-wrote with long-time cyber-theoretician Geert Lovink called “A Call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software,” labeling Berardi as the “figurehead” of “autonomism,” and crediting it as the political theory that most influenced the exploding horizontalist social uprisings of the past year.

A large demo left from near our hotel on Saturday Nov. 24, part of the International Day Protesting Violence Against Women... it was probably 2000-3000 with people from all over Mexico City's neighborhoods represented.

The Marxian concept of General Intellect has been inspiring to me for a while already. I wrote about it at length in Nowtopia, using the concept to contextualize the myriad ways people take their time and technological know-how out of market relations to begin producing a social and technological foundation for a post-capitalist life. The concept goes back to Karl Marx’s Grundrisse and “the Fragment on Machines” which has been heavily plumbed in the past couple of decades for its prescient analysis of the stage of capitalism we seem to be in now, more than a century after Marx first described it. The most commonly quoted piece of it is this: “The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

Paolo Virno wrote a much-cited essay on Marx’s concept of General Intellect wherein he criticizes Marx’s limitations on behalf of a Postfordist, autonomist sensibility:

According to Marx, the general intellect – i.e. knowledge as the main productive force – fully coincides with fixed capital – i.e. the ‘scientific power’ objectified in the system of machinery. Marx thus neglects the way in which the general intellect manifests itself as living labor. The analysis of Postfordist production compels us to make such criticism; the so-called ‘second-generation autonomous labor’ and the procedural operations of radically innovated factories … show how the relation between knowledge and production is articulated in the linguistic cooperation of men and women and their concrete acting in concert, rather than being exhausted in the system of machinery. In Postfordism, conceptual and logical schema play a decisive role and cannot be reduced to fixed capital in so far as they are inseparable from the interaction of a plurality of living subjects. The ‘general intellect’ includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive ‘machines’ in contemporary labor and do not need to take on a mechanical body or an electronic soul.

Mason and Berardi both address General Intellect in their recent books, in interesting ways. Mason makes the simple but important point that people now “know more than they used to.” He attributes it to the proliferation of new technologies, the Internet especially, and the many portable devices that have allowed it to become part of the daily life of people across the world. Mason tends to overemphasize what we might call “technological enabling” in explaining the changes in the world lately. No doubt there are many more ways to access much more of the accumulated knowledge of humanity now than there were a generation ago, and that is a big help to an evolving population and to the diffusion of complex ideas.

But I would argue that the technology is secondary to the spreading political sensibilities that favor horizontalism vs. hierarchical structures, the increasingly commonsense idea that everyone has the capacity to contribute usefully to whatever is being done. The emergence of assemblies across the planet during the past two years, with their consultative and participatory styles, is the best evidence that something quite different is emerging beneath the lumbering collapse of the status quo. It is becoming instinctive for people to assemble themselves on an ad-hoc basis rather than building elaborate bureaucratic structures (such as political parties or unions); by doing so they have so far retained a remarkable flexibility and creativity in confrontations with the powers-that-be. That said, it is also true that there have been no definitive victories yet in terms of overthrowing life as we know it… at the same time, the millions of people who have been transformed as they participated in occupations, protests, demonstrations, etc. over the past couple of years are still alive. They weren’t slaughtered in the tens of thousands as they were after the Paris Commune in 1871, or in the millions during WWI after the widespread “Great Unrest” class wars of the 1905-1913 period.

Credit to Paul Mason for introducing the “Great Unrest” period to my awareness—I’ve been very aware of the hot class war in San Francisco from the turn of the 20th century to the 1917 entrance of the U.S. into WWI, but didn’t realize it was a nearly global phenomenon. He also makes an important analogy between that period (he is using 1908-1913) and its flourishing humanism, individualism, and cultural ferment, and our contemporary era. It’s a cautionary analogy since his point is that few involved in the bacchanalian, ribald, tradition-busting subcultures of the 1910 period could imagine that the whole of Europe would soon descend into the barbarism of WWI, much as we today have a hard time imagining the world becoming smaller again, more closed, harsher and less tolerant, or even the possibility of another globe-spanning war.

The Sunday Streets in Mexico City is called the Cicloton, seen here from our hotel window at the Angel de la Independencia...

They closed 32 kilometers for this last-of-the-month Cicloton, but it is a weekly event that usually takes up somewhat fewer miles.

Cyclists fill the Paseo de la Reforma during the Cicloton.

The Cicloton on a street not far from the Zocalo.

Berardi has a chapter in his book called “The General Intellect Is Looking for a Body,” and he sounds a contrary note about the liberatory prospects for the general intellect: “… even if the general intellect is infinitely productive, the limits to growth are inscribed in the affective body of cognitive work: limits of attention, of psychic energy, of sensibility.” This is part of Berardi’s longer effort to understand the transformation of work during the Postfordist era: from the life-killing rhythms of industrial factories to the fragmented, fractal, and recombinant bits of labor time that we occasionally sell to enterprises embedded in global flows of signs, symbols, fashion, software, brands, etc. But immaterial work is not all-dominating, as Berardi tends to have it in his analyses, given that as Mason correctly points out, the world’s labor force nearly doubled since the late 1980s, with millions in China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, east Asia, Africa, and South America all entering into global production, leading to a stagnation or fall in real wages in the U.S. and Europe.

Berardi became very depressed after the non-event of Y2K (hilariously he calls it “the most horrible night of my life” because he’d staked everything on claiming it would wreak havoc and nothing happened), and the near collapse of political movements after 9/11, writing elsewhere that after the unprecedented demonstrations on February 15, 2003, there might never again be a political movement capable of physically taking to the streets. When the Arab Spring and Occupy movements erupted in 2011, he was happily repudiated by reality, and wrote the aforementioned collaborative essay with Geert Lovink. Paul Mason quotes it in his book:

There is only one way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed, frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only one way to awake the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the softwarist: take to the streets and fight.

Mason is also addressing the new social subjects who emerged during the 2011 uprisings:

But what we’ve seen since 2004, above all in the events of 2009-11, are revolts led by fragmented and precarious people. They have used the very technologies that produced the atomized lifestyle in the first place to produce communities of resistance…

When I wrote about the so-called Oakland General Strike I was making a similar point. While it wasn’t a “general strike” as understood from past shutdowns of the Bay Area or elsewhere, it was a mass strike of tens of thousands of people who for the most part are not the old working class, but rather the new one, the precarious, temporary, irregular one—still people who need money to make ends meet, but whose relationship to steady employment is haphazard at best. They are often employed in the service sector, but that can be making espresso as likely as software, and in either case, without any certainty of a steady job.

Berardi’s important, if depressing, contribution to this conversation, has been his emphasis on the social outcome of all this precarization of work.

Social subjectivity seems weak and fragmented against the backdrop of the financial assault. Thirty years of the precarization of labor and competition have jeopardized the very fabric of social solidarity, and workers’ psychic ability to share time, goods, and breath made fragile. The virtualization of social communication has eroded the empathy between human bodies… Since the 1980s, precarity has provoked a process of desolidarization and disaggregation of the social composition of work. Virtualization has been a complementary cause of desolidarization: precarization makes the social body frail at the level of work, while virtualization makes the social body frail at the level of affection.

The fragmentation of working class communities achieved by the global restructuring of the past few decades has left most people more isolated than ever. Berardi deconstructs the near-universal enthusiasm for our supposed “connectedness” by making a sharp distinction between connecting and conjoining—the former requires homogenized, standardized systems of message creation and transmission (email, facebook, etc.) and a heavily capitalized and energy-subsidized infrastructure, while the latter involves the meeting of misshapen bodies in real space and time, with the full panoply of sounds, smells, intonations, winks and nods, et al, that create deeper relationships than can ever be approached by electronic communication.

Mason is more optimistic about the outcome of network communication, arguing that it “leaves a residue of collaboration.”

…This understanding of the intangible, hidden value inside the network relationship has begun to permeate not just commerce and work, but protest. When doomed graduates, precarious workers and the poor use social networks to coordinate protests, they are waging a human fight-back against the atomizing effects of the modern marketplace.

One of the key challenges in these moments between upheavals is to dissect the relationship between liberation and cooptation that resides in nearly all our daily acts. No matter how much we might want to escape the bounds of capitalism and the logic of submission, our most subversive acts sometimes embody also the logic we are trying to escape. The most obvious example is the incessant clamor to “shop responsibly” as though we could alter the world by buying the right products, instead of understanding that every time we are reduced to “consumers” we’ve already lost the battle. But even when we engage in political efforts to fight evictions, overturn the domination of private cars, resist agribusiness, etc., we can discover that our projects are also reinforcing larger assumptions about how life should be carried on, how we reproduce ourselves within the institutional framework of this society.

Berardi again gets to an essential dilemma we face:

The prospect open to us is not a revolution. The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything because it entails an exaggerated notion of political will over the complexity of contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradigmatic shift: to a new paradigm that is not centered on product growth, profit, and accumulation, but on the full unfolding of the power of collective intelligence.

And this in turn brings us back to the notion of the general intellect. We know more now than we did a generation ago. We know more about how to organize ourselves within complex and highly technologically mediated relationships, maybe more than any previous constellation of people on earth. And maybe, just maybe, we’re becoming aware of the insane speed-up and intensification that has been imposed on our lives by the virtualization of communication, the imposition of a 24/7 economy that requires full attention at all times. The slower pace offered by bicycling, by growing and/or preparing your own food, by stopping to talk to neighbors in the street, by occupying public spaces in assemblies and taking as long as it takes to hear everyone out—all of these are examples of a human pace taking the deliberate steps it will take to derail the empty frenzy of modern life whose main purpose is to keep us dazed and confused, wondering why we’re missing out when everyone else is having such a good life.

Actually the good life is there to be produced, but not as isolated individuals. It’s only something we can do together.

Separated bike lanes on Reforma.

Pedicabs are proliferating in the city center.

The EcoBici program is a huge hit. During weekdays most of the bikes are in use all over the middle class neighborhoods where they've been well established...

... Turns out the EcoBicis have to be returned to stations where they started, using electric-powered shuttle wagons.

Giant Alebrijes were arranged in a public median, quite impressive!

They're all labeled too. This one was called "Godofredo el Murgratroide."

This lovely image was hanging in the courtyard at the Centro del Pueblo, also home to our friends at Bicitekas.

Courtyard set up for outdoor film screening... this was once a Carmelite Monastery, now it's home to several community groups including Bicitekas.

The Bicitekas workshop.

During the past several months I’ve been quite preoccupied with preparing for the 20th anniversary of Critical Mass, and a big part of that earlier this year was wrapping up the book “Shift Happens! Critical Mass at 20,” which is now out and available both in print and as a kindle e-book. And last June we traveled to Scandinavia and Spain too, so that also filled up my life for a while.

All that is to say that even though I’ve been away from blogging for the most part, I still think of things I want to write about, and today, finally, I’m getting back to a topic that I had been thinking about off and on during the past six months. It started when I picked up Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen, an incredible book documenting a major piece of North American history that is barely recognized or understood. After I read that I picked up The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, a breezy but well-told history of the Dust Bowl. What I realized as I started on the second book was that the stories take place separated by a little more than a half century in the exact same geographic area! Then I found a novel published by the New York Review of Books by John Williams called Butcher’s Crossing, which takes place in the years that the trade in buffalo hides peaked and collapsed in the mid-1870s, exactly when the U.S. Army was wiping out the Comanches by destroying their domestic encampments while for-profit hunters were decimating the buffalo herds on which they depended. And lastly I finally got to read my good friend Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s first volume of her autobiography, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, about her childhood from the late 1930s to the 1950s in a small town that is later swallowed by the greater Oklahoma City metro area.

Taken together these four books provide quite an unexpected and rarely connected history of the southern Great Plains. The territory in question extends from southern Kansas and even southeastern Colorado into New Mexico and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, all the way to Mexico. I’d never heard of the Llano Estacado region but it figures prominently in Comanche history as well as the early histories of the Mexican provinces of Texas and New Mexico. The recent prominence of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in which he laments the late 20th century rise of red-state right-wing politics, underscores the Republic of Amnesia that cloaks the much longer and non-U.S.-centric history of the area. Roxanne’s memoir Red Dirt is so named to evoke the layered histories of the area, the red soil that predominates in Oklahoma, the “red skin” of the many tribes that were driven to “Indian Territory” by U.S. policy in the early 19th century, the strong socialist and Wobbly history in Oklahoma, the left-wing “reds” that created a pro-worker state constitution in Oklahoma and who were smashed during the “red scare” after World War I.

The dramatic untold story is that the Comanches were an aggressive, expansive, and successful empire for over 150 years, from the early 1700s to after the U.S. Civil War, but they haven’t appeared on maps, and have not been much of a factor in most of published history. (An important exception is Caleb Galloway’s magisterial work “One Vast Winter Count” which completely reconfigures the history of North America by seeing it from the point of view of many different tribes, situating them as historic actors and makers of their own history.) Until I read Comanche Empire I didn’t really appreciate how much land the Comanches controlled, in fact I didn’t really even know where they were or how they related to other well-known Indian nations like the Apaches, the Pawnees, the Cherokees, or Creeks. I never knew how much they had successfully prevented the Spanish and then the newly independent Mexicans from consolidating and controlling their northern colonial territories, and how they developed a thriving economy based on a semi-nomadic symbiosis with vast herds of buffalo while becoming expert horse breeders, combined with “raiding and trading” along their frontiers to dominate their neighbors.

The Comanches are thought to be a tribe that emerged in the early 1700s from a breakway faction of Northern Shoshone who had migrated through the Great Basin from north to south. They first appear in a New Mexican diary in 1704 but by a few decades later, they are a fierce and expanding presence on the borders of the Mexican frontier. These maps show the remarkable size of their territory in the early decades of the 1800s, when the U.S. is growing fast and pushing westward.

from http://benedante.blogspot.com/2012/08/fat-comanches.html

A key episode (with a sidelong relationship to San Francisco history) is what Hämäläinen calls “The Embrace,” when New Mexico governor Juan Batista de Anza (the same military official who led the first Spanish party to visit the San Francisco peninsula in 1776) meets with Western Comanche leader Ecueracapa on February 25, 1786 to make a permanent peace. “The embrace brought together two men and two nations, and it saved New Mexico. The meeting of Anza and Ecueracapa put an end to a century of on-and-off warfare, which in the 1770s had nearly broken the kingdom of New Mexico.”

As the Revolutionary War in the 13 colonies was slowly taking shape in the 1760s, the Comanches were besieging and nearly destroying both New Mexico and Texas. But by the end of the 1770s Comanches were at war on their northern border with Pawnees and Kiowas, and Osages to their east, while the trade on which they depended with British, French, and Spanish traders from the Mississippi came to a halt because of the War for American Independence. At roughly the same time, around 1780-81 one of the worst smallpox epidemics in history swept through their territory, having surged northward from its point of origin in Mexico City and decimating populations throughout North America. The eastern Comanches lost nearly two-thirds of their population, about 16,000 people in just a year.

Here’s how Hämäläinen summarizes the remarkable success of the Comanches:

“Taken together, Comanches possessed several of those crucial assets that gave Europeans competitive advantage and allowed them to conquer and colonize much of the globe after 1400. Indeed, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Comanches routinely held a strategic, tactical, technological, economic, demographic, and organizational edge over their main colonial rival, New Spain. Their flexible unity, vast horse herds, cavalry skills, abundant firepower, and ability to muster thousands of warriors were sources of dread and envy to Spanish administrators whose options were curtailed by stifling mercantilist regulations, grueling bureaucracies, an acute lack of high-quality weapons and soldiers, and uncooperative subject peoples.

“But even though Comanches managed to reverse Europe’s material, technological, and organizational superiority, they did not try to use that advantage to create a mirror image of European imperialism. Rather than single-minded conquerors, they were strategic pluralists who achieved widespread dominance with policies that defy easy categorization. They relied on strategies and operations that can be easily recognized as expansionist and exploitative, but the geopolitical order they created was at once distinctly indigenous in nature…”

Among my favorites aspects of Hämäläinen’s book are the descriptions of lengthy negotiations that took place among various rancherias of Comanches, leading in turn to larger gatherings in which agreements were made with colonial leaders in New Mexico and Texas. The political process involved communities of families with a recognized “small chief” who would consense on political decisions, and then their participation in the larger process would also lead to a strong consensus among allied communities facing the colonial competitor. Ultimately the flexibility at the base of its society gave the Comanche empire a remarkable strength and power that surrounding cultures could not resist during more than a century.

“The parallels between the Comanches and other imperial powers are compelling. The Comanche empire was built on conquest—its rise marked the obliteration of the centuries-old Apache civilization from the Great Plains—and at its peak it was a prodigious creation with an enormous, at time hemispheric reach. Comanches operated a trade and alliance network that spanned and integrated several ecological, economic, and political spheres, and they reduced many of their bordering societies and regions to tributary client states, captive markets, and extractive raiding domains. They transformed Comancheria into an ethnic melting pot that had spaces for a diverse array of incorporated peoples—junior allies, slaves, adopted kinfolk, and naturalized Comanches—and they project penetrating cultural power out of their home range. Distant peoples spoke their language and emulated their economic innovations and lifestyle, and their norms of war, peace, violence, exchange, and retribution largely governed the negotiations of the intersocietal space on what historians have called the Spanish borderlands. A bird’s-eye view of the early nineteenth-century Southwest would have revealed an expanding Comancheria that was bustling with economic activity and diverse peoples, a wasting Spanish Texas that was seeping vital resources to the north through tribute payments and plunder, and a Spanish New Mexico whose eastern front was slowly dissolving into Comancheria. It would have revealed a sprawling continental economic network anchored to Comancheria; a constant flow of animals, slaves, and technology from Spanish colonies to Comanche rancherias and trade channels; and an immense, diverging plains hinterland where Comanches’ power, prosperity, and products functioned as a gravitational cultural force.”

Finally, though, the Comanches are defeated by the U.S. military, who in the 1870s could not defeat the warriors in open battle, but ultimately succeeded by destroying the domestic encampments where the families lived and carried out the necessary tasks of reproduction. While this brutal campaign of attacking women, children, and elders behind the battles lines was going on, the immense slaughter of the Plains buffalo herds was climaxing, too, which eliminated a key element of the Comanches’ economic sustenance.

In Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams tells the story of a young man who leaves Harvard in the East to have an authentic experience of the open West in the mid-1870s. He comes to a dusty, frontier town in southwestern Kansas called Butcher’s Crossing, where he uses his ample funds to hire a buffalo hunter to lead a party to a mountain valley only the hunter knows about, where he’s sure they can still find large herds of buffalo in the late summer. The town is centered on the trade in buffalo hides, and after assembling the necessary gear, oxen, wagon, and two others, the four men embark on their journey, all expecting to make a great deal of money if the promised buffalo are found.

After nearly dying of thirst as they blazed a cross-prairie trail towards their destination (leaving known water sources), they ultimately make it to the mountain valley and sure enough, there are several thousand buffalo grazing at the other end. They commence a horrible slaughter, systematically shooting nearly all the buffalo in the valley, with a machine-like obsession driven by the main hunter. But they stay a bit too long and suddenly a powerful early season blizzard snows them in and they are stuck all winter in that mountain valley. The tedium and fear is palpable, and the book lingers on the existential predicament they face, the mystery of weather and geography, the impossibility of moving their hundreds of drying buffalo hides out of the valley until the spring thaw, etc. Finally they leave the next April, and while transporting a third of their take by ox-drawn cart, they ford across a raging river (that had been a mere trickle when they’d crossed the other way the previous summer) which manages to up-end their load and drown the ox and one of the party. The remaining men make their way back to Butcher’s Crossing only to find that the trade in buffalo hides has collapsed and they could not have sold their hides even if they had them. The two-thirds of their hides still waiting for them in the mountain valley, ostensibly worth thousands of dollars, have been rendered worthless by unseen and inexplicable market forces. The young man leaves poorer but wiser and returns to the East Coast, end of story.

Just a little more than a decade later, the famous Oklahoma Land Rush happens, when the federal government violates dozens of treaty agreements with various Indian tribes and allows white settlers to rush in and claim most of the arable lands of Oklahoma, formerly “Indian Territory.” No longer do the Comanches command the southern Plains, and the tribes clustered in the area have no military capacity to defend their lands. Within a generation of the land grab, wheat prices are soaring during World War I, and speculators are moving in to start wheat farms on the last remaining lands that haven’t yet been privately claimed, mostly in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, or leasing lands from large, sparsely populated cattle ranches.

The plowing of heretofore unbroken lands, clearing the centuries-old buffalo grass from the southern plains, sets in motion an unprecedented ecological disaster we’ve come to know as the Dust Bowl. The financial crash and ensuing Depression of 1929 crashes the price of wheat, leading many speculators to abandon their plowed fields. When drought devastates the region from 1929 to 1931 and beyond, the soils are swept up into the atmosphere and vast quantities of topsoil are blown away. The drifting sands and dust destroy town after town, and it takes more than a decade for the Federal Government to commence new agricultural policies and educational programs to stabilize the lands and communities in that area. But before they do, tens of thousands of “Okies” have migrated west to California, well told by John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Dust Storm in Texas 1935. from WikiCommons

Timothy Egan captures the gripping story in The Worst Hard Time, a well-written, horrifying, on-the-ground look at how it was to live through the worst years of the Dust Bowl. Imagine months on end of brown/gray skies as the dust blows incessantly, filling every ramshackle wooden home, covering all clothes, choking old and young alike. Finally a clear day appears, blue skies, but rains never come, year after year. After a day or two of clear skies, a towering black cloud appears on the horizon, rushing towards you. When it hits you are slammed to the ground as the churning dirt-air pounds you down, covering you instantly in thick dust and blowing soil. Egan also does an admirable job of showing how land speculators and fluctuating agricultural prices also driven by speculation joined with ignorance about the role of historic ecological features such as buffalo grass, to rip open the earth at precisely the worst time, just ahead of a years-long drought (a similarly vicious drought is still happening in that area now, though these days the successful program to tap the Ogallala aquifer to irrigate the parched plains is able to keep some farmers afloat in the face of the harsh conditions—but how long until the aquifer itself is depleted?)

from WikiCommons

In 1938 Roxanne Dunbar was born in Piedmont, Oklahoma, now part of the greater Oklahoma City metro region, but at the time, a typical small town full of very poor white folks who had not been able to leave the area during the catastrophe of the previous years. She details her life of childhood asthma and poverty in Red Dirt, sharing her family’s history (much denied and feared at the time) of an Indian grandmother and a Wobbly/Socialist grandfather. As her story proceeds, she becomes a young girl fully indoctrinated into the Baptist Church, fearful of nonconformity and anything deemed communist or anti-American. But Roxanne eventually discovers books, her own brains, and a hidden strain of beats and other bohemians even there in Oklahoma. They set her on a path that eventually leads her to becoming one of the more articulate and prolific radical and feminist writers of the past decades. In telling her story she reflects on how the state of Oklahoma, once a proud bastion of a strong radical tradition, and even earlier the home to dozens of Indian tribes, became a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil industry, committed to keeping its own population racially divided and poor and ignorant.

By the time we get to the 1950s, the complicated ecological and social histories that are the foundation of life as we know it in that area are completely obliterated by conservative Christianity, American patriotic anti-communism, and a sad, fearful culture that depends on denial to function. During this quadrennial madness known as a presidential election, it behooves us to look deeper at the histories that got us here, and realize how much of what passes for debate and difference is mostly a theater of the absurd. A real honest reckoning with the roots of our humanity would bring us face to face with the destruction and devastation we’ve wrought in the name of progress. Perhaps we might start talking about how much different life could be, how much richer and more complicated it actually is than the stories we are told, and maybe, just maybe, we might learn something about a different way to organize ourselves socially and politically by learning from complicated cultures that preceded us on this land.

Or not! What’s on TV tonight??

What an amazing run! The San Francisco Giants have won the World Series for the second time in three years, and this time, against all odds! I just got home from walking up Mission Street from 16th Street to 24th Street, enjoying the thousands of people in the street, bonfires, music, cars honking, everyone high-fiving each other, a huge party…

A spontaneous brass band got a dance beat on near 24th and Mission after the Giants victory.

Bonfires were set up and down Mission while the honking and cheering still hasn't stopped at midnight...

The game ended in 10 innings tonight, with a perfect poetic called strike three fastball down the pipe to triple-crown winner Miguel Cabrera. Sergio Romo worked his magic again and the Giants won a convincing four-game sweep, after winning an improbable six elimination games to overcome 0-2 deficit to the Cincinnati Reds and a 1-3 deficit to the St. Louis Cardinals to get to the World Series.

I decided my costume at Critical Mass on Friday night this year was to be “The Temporary Representative on Earth of the Baseball Gods” and this is what I wrote to explain it:

September: The hated Los Angeles Dodgers trade for star pitchers and hitters, and yet the Baseball Gods allow them to falter and fade, while the Giants surge ahead and win the division with ten days to spare.

The Division Series: After losing the first two games to the Cincinnati Reds at home, the Giants are held to one hit through nine innings in game 3 in Cincinnati, and yet, miraculously, they are tied 1-1 going into extra innings. In the 10th inning, the Giants manage to get runners on base and when Cincinnati third-baseman Scott Rolen bobbles a grounder with two outs (thank you Baseball Gods!), the Giants score, and win the game 2-1. The next two games are a complete turnaround for the Giants and they win 8-3 and 6-4, featuring a Buster Posey Grand Slam in game 5, as the Giants become the first team in National League history to recover from an 0-2 deficit and win three in a row in their opponents’ ballpark, and go on to the National League Championship Series.

The Championship Series: The Giants are outplayed by the St. Louis Cardinals through the first four games and find themselves in another impossible hole, down 3 games to 1, with Game 5 still to be played in St. Louis. Barry Zito is the starting pitcher for the Giants, one of the most famous busts in history with his $127-million 6-year contract having gotten the Giants four bad seasons of very subpar performances. This year, though, Zito righted his ship and the Giants were on a long winning streak when he pitched. He pitched his best game ever and the Giants won 5-0, with a key turning point coming when the Baseball Gods saw fit to have the opposing pitcher catch an easy comebacker and throw it directly into the second base bag, bouncing into center field, allowing the Giants to score their first runs of the game. The series turned on that play and from then on the Giants were on a roll, dominating St. Louis and outscoring them 20-1 for the remaining games, winning the series 4 games to 3.

The World Series: Facing the powerful Detroit Tigers and their ace Justin Verlander in Game 1, the Giants are surprised when the Panda belts a home run in the first inning. In the third inning, now leading 2-0 (again behind the surprising pitching of Barry Zito) the key moment in the game comes when with two outs Angel Pagan (could there be a more perfect name for a San Francisco ballplayer?) hits a squibber down the third base line in what should be an easy out. Instead, the Baseball Gods see to it that it hits the side of the third base bag and caroms into left field, allowing Pagan to get to 2nd base. The inspiring Marco Scutaro follows with a run-scoring single, which leads to the bizarre scene of the Detroit pitching coach walking to the mound to talk to his ace in the third inning (Verlander is considered “above” such consultations!). Verlander is not impressed, and after sharing some smirks and noting that the pitching coach’s visit has fired up the San Francisco crowd, he finally makes the next pitch to Pablo Sandoval, who promptly blasts it into the left field seats for his 2nd consecutive home run. Sandoval would hit his 3rd home run two innings later off another pitcher, giving the game the glow of something blessed and unnatural!

In Game 2, a scoreless pitching duel between Madison Bumgarner (MadBum) and Doug Fister, in the Giants 6th inning Hunter Pence leads off with a single, followed by a walk to Brandon Belt. Two on, none out, Gregor Blanco coming to bat, a known good bunter. He takes a few pitches and with a 2-1 count, gets a beautiful bunt down the third base line. The Tigers decide to let it roll foul, but it doesn’t! The Baseball Gods stop the ball perfectly in fair territory, and now the bases are loaded. The next batter, Brandon Crawford, grounds into a double play, but Pence scores the first run of the game, made possible by the eerily perfect bunt! Giants win 2-0!

After that, here’s how it all wrapped up:

In Game 3, the Giants went in to Detroit and behind the amazing resurgent Ryan Vogelsong and with Tim Lincecum out of the bullpen for 2 1/3 innings of scoreless ball, they win 2-0 again! Incredible! And then tonight in Game 4 they go ahead first when Hunter Pence doubles in the 2nd inning, followed by a screaming triple off the right field wall, the first hit in the World Series by the otherwise struggling Brandon Belt (but great defense at 1st base). When Miguel Cabrera gets a wind-aided 2-run homer you wondered if the magic might be over, but then two innings later Buster Posey rises from his ten-game offensive slumber to blast a two-run homer down the left field line, putting the Giants up again, 3-2. The Tigers got a homer that made it into the right field stands again thanks to the 25-mph winds, again casting doubt on the Giants fate. But Cain made it through 7 innings, and Affeldt and Casilla shut down the Tigers in innings 8 and 9. In the top of the 10th, Ryan Theriot gets a leadoff single, Crawford bunts him to second, Pagan makes another disappointing out, but Marco Scutaro does it again–a solid single to center scoring Theriot, 4-3 Giants! Then Sergio Romo comes in and strikes out the top of the Detroit batting order, culminating in a called strike three fastball down the pipe to Miguel Cabrera! Wow!

What a satisfying championship!

Giants beat Atlanta 5-3 on a Friday in August behind Ryan Vogelsong.

The view from behind the left field foul pole, August 24, 2012.

Critical Mass San Francisco, September 28, 2012, Market Street east from Buchanan.

The 20th anniversary of Critical Mass in San Francisco was a huge success. A rather small “welcome committee” started thinking and talking about it almost a year ago, and somehow, it all came together beautifully. We published three gorgeous posters and thousands of handbills, stickers, xerocratic schedules and appeals, and most prominently, a new book of essays from all over the world, Shift Happens! Critical Mass at 20.

International friends helped out enormously at the Welcome Center during the week.

In addition to all that publishing work, we also coordinated a week of festivities to surround the big “Interstellar Critical Mass” as we dubbed it. Different people organized daily rides around the region and in the city including the Art/Freak Bike Ride on Sunday, the San Mateo ride on Monday, Transit History ride on Tuesday, Eastshore ride to Rose the Riveter monument as well as the NOIZ ride on Wednesday, the Mosquito Abatement Crew ride on Thursday. Each evening something different was happening, starting with Monday’s Artshow opening at the Welcome Center at 518 Valencia (which was open every afternoon from 1-5 pm all week), a Critical Mass video night at ATA, our book release party at the Main Library, two concerts including our big birthday bash at Cell on Thursday, a modest International Symposium on Critical Mass on Saturday, and for the grand finale, real summer weather on Sunday and dozens of us riding to the beach for a long warm afternoon.

And in the midst of all that, the amazing 10,000-strong Critical Mass Birthday ride on Friday September 28, one of the best rides we ever had here, proving that even after 20 years we can still pull it off! Swirling around all these activities and publications we enjoyed the company of several dozen international Critical Mass riders who came in on tallbikes, some riding all the way from Mexico City, others riding across the US, but all getting here in time to enjoy the wild week. The presence of smart, skilled, politicized cyclists from Italy, France, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Japan, Costa Rica, Canada, the UK, and across the US, added a whole different dimension to the experience. In fact, locals are so busy with their everyday lives that there wasn’t a huge attendance to most of our events from people who live here. It’s not even clear that San Franciscans are that interested anymore in the culture surrounding Critical Mass and radical bicycling. But situated in an international milieu as we were during these days, we could feel the vibrancy and ongoing excitement that Critical Mass still generates even after two decades.

A couple of our Tallbiking friends, Gustavo from Peru and Leonardo from Italy, riding on Haight Street in our Grande Finale ride to the beach on Sept. 30.

We were bombarded with requests for media interviews and decided on this anniversary to accommodate as many as we could. An hour-long appearance on KQED Forum on Monday anchored the week, as did a series of interviews with Ben Trefny on KALW. The corporate media stampeded towards us on Thursday and Friday, clamoring for interviews and prognostications of how big the ride would be on Friday night, a question that could not be answered until the actual ride started to roll. Carolyn Tyler of KGO Channel 7 gets special negative mention for having interviewed several of us on Thursday and then going back to her studio to produce yet another rehash of the lies of 1997, repeating again the false claim that 250 people were arrested (it was 112, none were ever charged with any crimes, most of them rounded up in an illegal mass arrest that San Francisco later had to pay damages for), and featuring then-Mayor Willie Brown casually advocating that a bunch of cyclists should spend time in jail (for which crimes exactly Mr. Brown?). Ms. Tyler seems incapable of doing the basic research that one would hope any responsible journalist would do, and instead did exactly what I told her she and her cohort had done repeatedly over the years: fanned the flames of minor incidents to try to produce “hot” conflict for their news cameras.

Welcome Committee and friends heading to Mass Sept 28 2012.

The San Francisco Examiner printed a remarkable editorial that we are still marveling at, recommending that motorists stuck in traffic ponder the inadequacies of our traffic system rather than venting themselves at the cyclists who once a month highlight this travesty. The SF Comicle’s Peter Fimrite on the other hand, managed to write a typically biased account with the inaccuracies we have come to expect from the semi-official paper of the City, dripping with disdain towards Critical Mass and prominently featuring the voices of “responsible” cycling, Supervisor David Chiu and SF Bike Coalition director Leah Shahum. The ongoing effort of the SFBC and its various official allies has been to render invisible the thriving bicycle culture that gave it its impetus (of which Critical Mass has long been one of the primary expressions). Hilariously, the weekly SFBC Calendar of Events sent out last week didn’t even mention Critical Mass, nor its 20th anniversary, instead suggesting that members should enjoy “Bike Valet Night” at the DeYoung Museum on Friday!! This led our friend Quintin Mecke, a longtime SFBC member as most of us are, to write a sarcastic and scathing open letter to the SFBC, which he posted to Facebook and we posted to the sfcriticalmass.org blog.

This in turn led to an institutional freakout over at the SF Bicycle Coalition. Over the years the organization has adopted most of the “rules of the road” of corporate communications and top-down organizational structure. Their grassroots essence has long been subsumed by a professional staff that selectively directs volunteer energy towards activities that bolster their tepid agenda. At least they are finally working for crosstown, dedicated cyclepaths after years of resistance and poo-poohing such proposals as unrealistic. Still, their current goals are quite limited and directed to making a safe path that wraps around the waterfront, and one key corridor up Market Street and eventually all the way to the beach, more useful for tourists and the big bike rental companies than for the everyday cyclists that jam the bikes lanes and smaller streets of the Mission, Hayes Valley, the Castro, Lower Haight, etc. It’s time to at least talk about bike boulevards and a 10% commitment of public thoroughfares to cycling …

Anyway, after Quintin’s message went out on the Thursday before the Friday ride, I was called by three different SFBC staffers, two of whom I spoke with, both of whom were “terribly disappointed” that we had gone public with these criticisms “at a time like this” and wouldn’t we please post another message that was “more positive” to balance the criticism? As it happens we don’t hold universally negative opinions of the SFBC and many of us are good friends with many of the people who have worked to make it what it is today. But if there was ever a good example of an organization that started small, active, democratic and energetic and later became something much different, larger, bureaucratic, top-down, relatively opaque to outsiders, the SFBC is it. Culturally, they hate transparency. They want to project a happy, pro-bike, pro-family message, and won’t tolerate their own staffers putting out any anti-car, or seriously critical points of view, even in their personal email. Members are not encouraged to initiate controversial campaigns without clearing it up the hierarchy. The Board and leadership seem most concerned with their political position vis-à-vis elected authority and local media, and are obsessed, like any typical politician, with controlling the message. When they briefly lost control of the message in the wake of Quintin’s open letter they seemed to panic and put a lot of energy into regaining control of the narrative. Kind of fun to have seen this up close and personal!

Soon after starting, rolling south on Embarcadero under Bay Bridge.

So we put up a different, more appreciative blog post a few hours later, and the panic subsided… much ado about nothing. In fact, such criticisms of the SFBC are vitally necessary not only for the larger political community, but even for their own organization. As I told Leah by phone, they need to hear what most of us have been saying about them quietly for a long time. And it’s not heard if we just say it directly to one or more staffers. They quickly brush it off as irrelevant, outside of their message and their purpose. But when it goes public, whammo! Full court press to get it to disappear… Plenty of SFBC members over the years would love to have a more robust and public debate about SFBC assumptions, politics, goals and programs, but the internal democracy of the big nonprofit organization only shows up in elections for the Board of Directors. The membership are expected to pay up and follow the programmatic plans as laid down by the paid staff, in other words, to act just like most other NGOs. All that said, the SFBC occupies a different niche in the local ecology of transit politics than Critical Mass, and nobody expects or wants that to change.

Pouring through the Broadway Tunnel during SFCM20.

Critical Mass gets lots of harsh criticism all the time from many directions. Another recurrent voice this past week in comments on various online articles was the grumpy old bike messengers who want it both ways: first, Critical Mass didn’t start in September 1992 as claimed by those of us who were there; no it was the bike messengers who started riding together months or years earlier who should get the credit. And second, Critical Mass sucks and has sucked after the first few rides because it was “taken over” by poseurs and idiots who don’t ride every day and don’t know jack about real urban cycling. Markus “Fur” Cook, who helped organize the first ride and was a well-known and much-loved messenger, rock musician, and writer, died in 1996, or he might be able to put this to rest. Other messengers were on that first ride too, and personally I enjoyed a mutually helpful and respectful relationship with dozens of messengers for many years. I know fewer current messengers these days, partly because I don’t have an office anymore and my line of work (typesetting, graphic design) doesn’t need courier services anymore either. But it’s kind of pathetic to see various online comments making false claims about history, agency, and responsibility. I know the history of mass rides better now than I did back in 1992 for sure, and it turns out that mass bike rides were already over 100 years old when we “started” Critical Mass. Various people had been riding bikes to save Golden Gate Park from parking, others rode to protest the 1991 Gulf War (some 50-odd cyclists rode here from Santa Cruz in 1991 and one of them, Jim Denevan, later asked me if that’s where we got the idea for Critical Mass? Nope, hadn’t heard of them. Then it turned out they’d gotten the idea for riding up to protest the war from reading Processed World magazine, where I’d been advocating for more bicycle-based political activity for a few years! It circles/cycles around and around.) So what’s the proper point of origin? Who cares? There are many across time and space, and we’re only talking about San Francisco! There were mass rides in Berkeley and Oakland called “Smog-Free Locomotion Days” in 1969-71 when I was a boy… There were mass rides in Finland in the 1980s, in Bilbao Spain in 1990, etc. etc.

A couple of Black Label bike crew members pausing during the Sunday Sept 23 Art/Freak Bike ride.

David and Jay, organizers of the Art/Freak bike ride...

Art/Freak bike ride passes hideous arrow sculpture along waterfront.

SFCM20 at O'Farrell and Powell...

The most vituperative comments on all articles related to Critical Mass usually come from the folks whose experience of it is reading about it in the mass media. They are sure it’s all a big negative. I love the ones from cyclists who claim we’ve set back the cycling cause, or if we haven’t before, we surely are now that cycling has become almost an acceptable transit choice. A huge number of Americans are obsessed with scofflaw cyclists, apparently offended personally that we don’t stop at stop signs or roll through red lights to the safe empty road on the other side of the intersection. It only reinforces my belief that little will change in terms of popular attitudes as long as people don’t have a material experience of cycling. If you only see cyclists through the windshield of your car as a hazardous and unpredictable impediment, it’s no wonder that you’re confused and sometimes bitter. I think the perfect solution, beyond a robust system of parkways (a City of Panhandles I like to call it) with dedicated bikeways and room for pedestrians and wildlife to cross the urban landscape, is to make everyone ride a bike on city streets for 15 minutes in order to get a driver’s license. Then, even if you don’t choose to cycle, you’ll have a direct experience of how cycling is very different than driving, and that the roads and rules are designed to accommodate cars, not bikes.

The Fossil Fool brought his treebike and tunes on the finale Beach Ride, Sept. 30.

Antonio and Auri from Madrid rolling through the Wiggle on the Beach ride.

The first sunny day in all September, the last day of the month! Perfect for our big final ride to the beach.

Hours of sun and fun on the beach.

It’s almost a week since the amazing, overflowing, massive Interstellar Ride. Thousands of cyclists filled San Francisco’s streets and in so doing, they also tasted that amazing collective euphoria that George Katsiaficas dubbed the “eros effect.” It was as though we all loved each other, strangers and friends alike, for a few hours in the streets. I’ve never seen so many motorists calmly turn off their engines and get out of their cars to applaud us! It was like being a liberating army entering a formerly occupied city!

The overwhelmingly positive response last Friday was matched also by a surprisingly intelligent job of policing by the SFPD. For years we chafed under their silly and sometimes brutal corralling and marshaling of us, hemming us in with motorcycles, picking people off for random tickets, etc. This past Friday they were nearly invisible. I know they had a full complement of officers on duty, but many were on bicycles for a change, and there were very few motorcycles pushing through us, and almost no harassment. Thank you SFPD for a job well done! We’ve never asked to be policed, and the media claims that we expect them to “escort us” are just ridiculous. If the SFPD chooses to police the ride that is their decision. But we always felt we could handle our own needs better ourselves with corking and defusing conflict through kindness and discussion where needed. It doesn’t always work of course. On a huge ride like last Friday’s there are always a few people who lose it and melt down entirely. That’s regrettable and not the intention of the participants. Of course we could do better at helping stuck motorists out of the midst of the river of bicyclists, and we could do a lot better to emulate the huge Bicicritica in Madrid, which is quite good at stopping for pedestrians to cross as needed. No doubt things can be done better. But all in all, the Friday ride was an amazing night and left most people in state of dazed happiness. Me too!

Release party for "Shift Happens! Critical Mass at 20" at the Main Library, Wednesday evening, Sept 26.

Gustavo from Peru and Antonio from Madrid (orig Mexico City) at the gathering before SFCM20.

On to more anniversaries!

San Francisco and the Bay Bridge from Clipper Cove park on Yerba Buena Island. Photo: Adriana Camarena

International Car-Free Day, September 22, is a day that in the Bay Area we don’t normally pay much attention to. But given that the week-long festival celebrating Critical Mass was just beginning, this year we had to do something special. So we went to the middle of the San Francisco bay to have a Car-Free Day Picnic! Yes, it took three van-loads to get us all there with our bicycles, but after a somewhat contradictory and ironic interlude of driving back and forth, the picnic was underway under sunny skies, sheltered from the mounting wind and fog rolling in through the Golden Gate as the afternoon started to wane.

Car-Free Day Picnic in Clipper Cove, Yerba Buena Island, Sept. 22, 2012. Photo: Adriana Camarena

Car-Free Day Picnic in Clipper Cove, Yerba Buena Island, Sept. 22, 2012. Photo: Adriana Camarena

Car-Free Day Picnic in Clipper Cove, Yerba Buena Island, Sept. 22, 2012. Photo: Adriana Camarena

Just the day before, Friday September 21, was International Park(ing) Day, when people take over parking places and turn them into parks for the day. It was well represented along Valencia Street, where a half dozen permanent parklets have replaced parking places during the past couple of years. Park(ing) Day started in San Francisco about six or seven years ago, instigated by the folks at Rebar, and it, like Critical Mass, has spread around the world.

Look what people do with parking spaces when Park(ing) Day rolls around!

The Valencia Pop-Up Habitat was one of the coolest of the day's reclaimed spaces.

Park(ing) Day didn't have quite the participation as in recent years, perhaps because so many delighteful parklets have been established permanently... This one in front of Four Barrel Coffee is one of the best.

But back to our Car-Free Day Picnic. Our choice of location wasn’t accidental. Recently California’s Transportation bureaucracy (Caltrans) affirmed that they are studying a long-term plan to make bicycle and pedestrian crossing possible, in light of the fact that next year the new east span will open with its separate bike-and-pedestrian lane alongside, allowing people to leave the East Bay and make it as far as the middle of the Bay. From there, to make it all the way across the Bay to San Francisco, you’re basically stuck waiting for a bus that runs every 20 minutes and will only accommodate 2 bicycles per journey. In other words, the Caltrans plan to accommodate bike and pedestrian bridge traffic is a farce! (A fuller argument about Bay Bridge access is appended at the end of this account below.)

We wanted to bicycle back to San Francisco as an act of civil disobedience, not to get arrested, but to physically demonstrate the necessity of access to the Bay Bridge, and to underscore our simple and cheap solution. Go back to the 6-lane configuration that existed from the 1937 bridge opening to 1962, and give the sixth lane to bicycles and pedestrians—all this for a few thousand dollars and a day or two of work, compared to the 10 years and $1 billion estimated by Caltrans for their hair-brained scheme. We came very close to riding the bridge, but due to an unpredictable sequence of events, our plans were thwarted.

We waited for the right moment to head up to the Bridge.

As we finished our convivial picnic and mustered our determination to cross the bridge, the word arrived that the California Highway Patrol (CHP) had pulled a car off the bridge and the officer was ticketing them just below our starting point. OK, we would wait. Then it turned out that the motorist was being put in handcuffs, arrested, his passengers evicted from the automobile, and the car was being impounded. More CHP, and a further wait for a tow truck. Finally after 45 minutes it was over and the CHP drove away (or so we thought). Our plan to enter the fast-moving traffic at the Yerba Buena Island entrance was to use a vehicle to block for us, rolling into the right lane with flashers on in a way that we could maneuver ourselves in front of it. Then they would stay behind us as a protective barrier as we would be riding at 10-15 mph while the cars were whizzing by at 45-50 mph.

Riding up to the onramp to the Bridge.

There were high winds by the time we started our approach to the bridge but our adrenaline was flowing and all 17 of us were ready to make the ride. We rode up the long incline to the ramp that curves down to the beginning of the Bay Bridge’s west span. As we reached the entry point we divided ourselves along right and left and let cars pass us, expecting our support vehicle to appear in seconds.

Rolling to Bridge entry. Photo: Paul, Bike Cavalry

Waiting for the help... Photo: Paul, Bike Cavalry

All lined up, only the Bridge ahead! Photo: Paul, Bike Cavalry

Two or three long minutes went by without seeing him, and then suddenly there was a CHP vehicle (later we learned it was the same officer that had the arrested driver in the back of his car—why had he returned to the island? A mystery) who upon seeing us boomed out from his PA system: “All you bicyclists MUST NOT ENTER THE BRIDGE! Turn around now!” We felt caught, so we started to circle back to demonstrate compliance. Still our support vehicle had not appeared, but just as we were riding up the ramp, there he was. Now what? Some people wanted to turn around and go for it. Many others had lost their will.

We had not prepared for this particular contingency and it was difficult to make a decision in the middle of the ramp, so we rode back to our starting point. It was clear then that most of the 17, many of whom were friends from afar in town for Critical Mass celebrations, weren’t too keen on getting arrested. Having lost the small element of surprise we were counting on, I too felt like it was a good time for a strategic retreat.

Rolling back to Treasure Island to organize our departure by bus and car. Photo: Paul, Bike Cavalry

Easing off from the adrenaline of an “almost action” is never easy, but we decided to return home, stay together, discuss and take note of what we learned. We learned that the only way to have a group ride of 17 bicyclists to Treasure Island from San Francisco is by car or by bus carrying two cyclists at a time, resulting in 90 minutes and many trips before everyone got back together. We knew about the enormous grates on the bridge that are a peril to bicycles and require updating to be traversed in the safest manner. We learned that the entrance from Yerba Buena Island onto the bridge is perilous at best. Bicycles and pedestrians require a dedicated lane from Oakland all the way to San Francisco. It will take a “critical mass” of local supporters to bridge the gap across the Bay in a timely and inexpensive fashion.

Freezing at the bus stop on Treasure Island, waiting to go 2 at a time every 20 minutes.

2 bikes per bus.

Ultimately we proved our point, which is that lack of access to the Bay Bridge for bicycles is an absurd impediment and blatantly discriminatory towards those of us who prefer not to depend on private cars and oil to move around. No one will be commuting by bike from Oakland to San Francisco if they have to stop at Treasure Island and depend on a bus that runs only every 20 minutes and takes only two bicycles per journey (we asked to bring more bikes in, as we were stuck there, and the drivers were utterly uninterested and refused—thanks MUNI! Always so flexible and helpful!) And thanks to our strategic retreat, no one is in jail, facing charges or fines, or anything else. Instead we had a lovely ride back from the Embarcadero along Mission Creek all the way to the Mission where we had a party until midnight.

Most of the gang back on the Embarcadero after the action... a glorious day and night, regardless!

And to conclude, here is the text of our flyer we are distributing around now. Feel free to reprint and repost as you see fit.

A Bay Bridge for Everyone!

Next year the new east span of the Bay Bridge will open. Thanks to the diligent and dogged efforts of cyclists and sustainable transport advocates in the 1990s, Caltrans was required to build a bike-and-pedestrian path as part of the new structure.

New Bay Bridge east span nearing completion. Photo: Paul, Bike Cavalry

Caltrans (known as the California Department of Highways for most of its existence) has always been biased in favor of automobiles and freeways, and has never shown any interest in providing bicycling infrastructure. It’s obvious that Caltrans bureaucrats were angered by the requirement to include a bike path. How could it be that in 2012 the primary statewide agency in charge of transportation infrastructure neglects its responsibility to provide fair and equal resources to California’s cycling citizens? Are they trying to prove that nobody wants to cycle across the bay by making it unpleasant? So it seems.

Instead of being put on the north side of the new span, with great views of Marin and the North Bay—and the steady rush of clean fresh air that generally comes with the prevailing northwesterly winds, the new bike lane:

• has been placed on the south side of the new bridge
• faces the old bridge until it is demolished
• will face the hazy view south toward the Port of Oakland
• is a bit lower than the car-choked road deck, putting cyclists’ noses at exhaust pipe level, ensuring a face-full of vehicular exhaust instead of fresh air for bridge-riding cyclists.

Worse still, the new lane arrives in mid-Bay at Yerba Buena Island with NO current prospect of continuing to San Francisco.

A 2001 Caltrans study concluded that a continuation of the path was possible, for a cost of $160-387 million. A September 12, 2012 article on SFGate.com suggests it could cost $800 million or even a billion to build new decks hanging off both sides of the west span. This is a calculated effort to stop talk, in this time of fiscal crisis, of full bicycle access to the Bay Bridge.

Daily bicycling has increased by upwards of 70% on both sides of the Bay Bridge but as far as Caltrans is concerned, their only mission is to maintain the bridge as a motor-vehicle-only freeway. It is a sad commentary on the nature of our government that the only way the state transit agency will take bicycling seriously as everyday transportation is when pressured by demonstrations and organized public demands.

Why don’t they take the lead in opening space for cycling instead of doing everything to obstruct, deny, and prevent cycling? Why do we cyclists have to waste our time going to endless bureaucratic meetings and trying to decipher the Byzantine system of transit planning just to get what should be an obvious priority, fair access to the main trans-bay bridge?

Luckily there is a relatively easy solution that doesn’t even require a reduction in motor vehicle lanes, just a simple narrowing of them.

Bay Bridge with six lanes in 1946 at Yerba Buena Island east interchange.

When the Bay Bridge opened in 1936, the top deck carried 6 lanes of automobile traffic, 3 lanes each way. The lower deck had truck lanes and two railroad tracks that carried Key System streetcars and intercity trains that went all the way to Sacramento.

Six lanes of traffic near the Fremont exit westbound on the Bay Bridge, 1950s.

After the 1962 reconfiguration of the Bay Bridge into five lanes inbound on the top deck and five outbound on the bottom, reserved for motorized traffic only, the lanes were widened to match the new freeways that were supposed to crisscross San Francisco—but those freeways were halted by outraged San Franciscans. Caltrans’ insistence that the Bay Bridge is a motorized-traffic-only conduit is a legacy of plans they were never able to complete—and never will be completed! Now it’s time to reverse their wrong-headed approach and open the Bay Bridge to all types of transportation, including bicycles and pedestrians.

What would it take to re-stripe the western span and lower the speed limit to make space for cyclists and pedestrians? Maybe a few hours of painting and $5,000? Twice that? The western Bay Bridge approach to SF currently has a speed limit of 50 mph and traffic often moves much more slowly than that.

• The lanes are super wide and can easily be narrowed by two feet each, freeing up ten feet of space for a dedicated bike-and-pedestrian path along the north edge of the top deck.
• The speed limit on the famous drive into SF can be reduced to 35 mph so traffic in the narrower lanes will be safer. (The same speed limit is currently in place in mid-Bridge during the construction of the past few years, causing no one any real delay.)
• At the slower speed motorists won’t lose more than a minute or two compared to current speeds (in clear traffic) on their drive from Yerba Buena Island into the City.

Maybe it’s the ease and low cost that makes it a non-starter for the Caltrans behemoth. But Caltrans can’t be left in charge of this decision, having proven again and again that they are beholden to a narrow automobilistic vision of their mission.

Our plan maintains current capacity for auto traffic on the bridge while opening up a path across the entire Bay for cyclists and pedestrians. Isn’t it high time that sustainable transit users get equal access to the most important Bay crossing, especially since it can be done easily and cheaply and at no one else’s expense?

Cycle-Analysts for Fair Access!
critmasssf@gmail.com

Yep, that’s what it feels like these days. Just realized it’s been nearly 2 months again since I last blogged. Goes to show you, I’ve been darn busy. We are less than a week from the San Francisco Critical Mass 20th anniversary week of festivities. Our new book, Shift Happens! Critical Mass at 20, is back from the printer and available at some of the better local independent bookstores as well as online here. Hell, we even made a kindle version!

Just a fraction of the August Critical Mass heading south on Valencia...

While Not Blogging, I’ve been doing a bunch of other projects, including the interview I’m reposting below with David Harvey about his book Rebel Cities, which is well worth reading. I  had to reconjure the “Ghost Streets” article I did a couple of years ago for a journal called MAS Context. There’s an interview with me in Spanish on Spain’s Vida Sana website, covering Critical Mass, the anniversary, Nowtopia, and more. Last week I was badly overbooked, appearing on Tuesday night at the Kitchen Table Talks at 18 Reasons Why, Wednesday we had our regular Talk at our new Shaping San Francisco space at 518 Valencia on “Mexico Today: Dinosaurs, Hashtags, and Popular Revolt,” Thursday I appeared at SPUR with Robin Shulman telling “A Tale of Two Cities’ Food Histories,” on Friday I gave a bike tour for a USF class, and then Saturday I gave a short walking tour in Gerbode Valley in the Marin Headlands as part of the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts 30th birthday party. Finally had a day off on Sunday, but I’ll be teaching my class at SFAI tomorrow, and on Wednesday back at SPUR again for a discussion on “150 Years South of the Slot” about the history of Yerba Buena Gardens area. Whew! And now we plunge into the 8 days of festivities for the Critical Mass 20th anniversary! Maybe I will relax in October!

Meanwhile, here’s the email exchange I had with David Harvey about his most recent book “Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution”. I have to say it was very gracious of him to engage with this, which was instigated by the good folks over at Shareable.net.

I want to start with the opening paragraph of his preface titled “Henri Lefebvre’s Vision” where Harvey reminisces about a poster he acquired in Paris in the mid-1970s… curiously I have the very same poster, equally tattered, on my wall. Here’s a photo of it, and his paragraph, after is the exchange:

Sometime in the mid 1970s in Paris I came across a poster put out by the Ecologistes, a radical neighborhood action movement dedicated to creating a more ecologically sensitive mode of city living depicting an alternative vision for the city. It was a wonderful ludic portrait of old Paris reanimated by a neighborhood life, with flowers on balconies, squares full of people and children, small stores and workshops open to the world, cafés galore, fountains flowing, people relishing the river bank, community gardens here and there (maybe I have invented that in my memory), evident time to enjoy conversations or smoke a pipe (a habit not at that time demonized, as I found to my cost when I went to an Ecologiste neighborhood meeting in a densely smoke-filled room). I loved that poster, but over the years it became so tattered and torn that I had, to my regret, to throw it out. I wish I had it back! Somebody should reprint it.

Chris Carlsson: Who did you write Rebel Cities for?

David Harvey: My aim was to write a book for everyone who has serious questions about the qualities of the urban life to which they are exposed and the limited choices that arise, given the way in which political and economic power asserts a hegemonic right to build cities according to its own desires and needs (for profit and capital accumulation) rather than to satisfy the needs of people.

In so doing, I wanted to provide indications of the kind of theoretical framework to which I appeal and I, therefore, use seemingly abstract (often, but not exclusively, Marxist) concepts. But my aim is to use these concepts in such a way that anybody can grasp them. (I don’t always succeed, of course.) I then hope that people might become interested to seek a deeper knowledge of the sort of framework that I use. For example, in “The Art of Rent,” I use a seemingly arcane concept of monopoly rent, but I hope by the end of the chapter people can understand very well what it might mean and wonder how it is that a society that lauds competition as foundational to its functioning is populated by capitalists who will go to great lengths to secure monopoly power by any means and how they capture unearned rents by resorting to that power.

If people want a broader understanding of my framework, they can use many resources including my own Enigma of Capital, and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and my website lectures (including those on Marx’s Capital) and the Companion to Marx’s Capital). I hope, however, that Rebel Cities is understandable enough without going through all of those materials first. In my view, one of the biggest problems for anti-capitalist social movements in our times is the lack of an agreed-upon framework to understand the dynamics of what is going on; if I can somehow incite activists to think more broadly about what they are doing and the general situation in which they are doing it (and how particular struggles relate to each other), then I would be very happy.

You write: “The chaotic processes of capitalist creative destruction have evidently reduced the collective left to a state of energetic but fragmented incoherence, even as periodic eruptions of mass movements of protest … suggest that the objective conditions for a more radical break with the capitalist law of value are more than ripe for the taking.”

For many people, targeting the “capitalist law of value” is terribly abstract. Can you rephrase that in terms that people can see and feel in their everyday lives?

DH: I could substitute the phrase “capitalist law of value” with the phrase “the maximization of profit in a context of global competition” and then point to the devastating history of deindustrialization (more destruction than creation) from the 1980s across city after city, not only in North America, but also Europe and elsewhere (e.g. Mumbai and Northern China).

But I wanted to use the term “value” very explicitly to raise the question of what it is that capital values and how radically that contrasts with other ways of thinking about the values that might prevail in another kind of society. The capitalist law of value is what animates the activities of Bain Capital, etc. and we have to see that value system as profoundly opposed to human emancipation and well-being, that there is a distinctive “law of value” that capital internalizes and imposes that overrides all other values that stand in its path.

The values that capital internalizes do not contribute to the well-being of people and indeed may threaten our survival. The more people come to recognize the value system of capital the more we can mobilize “our” alternative values against it. To see the fight against capitalism as a fight over values is very important. It has, at various times, animated a theology of liberation that is profoundly anti-capitalist. It is for this reason that the capitalist class does not want to talk of or admit to the distinctive “law of value” that animates its actions. Apologists for capital claim they are for family values, for example, while capitalism promotes policies that destroy families. They claim they are in favor of freedom, but omit to say the freedom they favor is that of a few to exploit and live off the labor of the many, of the Wall Streeters to be free of regulation to gain their inordinate bonuses through predatory practices.

Most of the people reading this website are involved in various types of co-ops, collectives, and projects that are proudly based on values beyond mere monetary profit. But you don’t think this is enough. You argue: “… attempts to change the world by worker control and analogous movements — such as community-owned projects, so-called “moral” or “solidarity” economies, local economic trading systems and barter, the creation of autonomous spaces (the most famous of which today would be that of the Zapatistas) — have not, so far, proved viable as templates for more global anti-capitalist solutions, in spite of the noble efforts and sacrifices that have often kept these efforts going in the face of fierce hostilities and active repressions … Indeed, it can all too easily happen that workers end up in a condition of collective self-exploitation that is every bit as repressive as that which capital imposes …”

You properly point out that efforts to create socialism in one country, let alone one city, or one small enterprise, have always failed. Why do you think people ignore this overwhelming history and keep trying to make it work anyway?

DH: This is one of the most difficult paradoxes embedded in the history of the left (its thinking, its project, and its activities). We can all understand the urge to control our own lives, to achieve some degree of autonomy at work, as well as in the neighborhoods we inhabit; and that basic urge which is, I believe, both widespread and broadly acceptable to many elements in society, can be the basis for a broader politics. When capital collapses as it periodically does, then workers frequently mobilize (as in Argentina in 2001-02) to save their jobs, and there are some long-lasting examples of cooperative systems and of worker control that are encouraging (e.g. Mondragon).

The problem is that these operations operate in a context where the capitalist law of value (Yes, that is why this is so important.) remains hegemonic such that producers are subject to the “coercive laws of competition” that eventually force such independent efforts towards autonomous forms of organization to behave like capitalist enterprises. This is why it is so important to eventually think and act in such a way as to challenge the hegemony of the “capitalist law of value”.

Lefebvre thus notes that heterotopic practices (spaces where something radically different happens) can only survive for a while before they are eventually re-absorbed into the dominant practices. This says that, at some point, we have to mount a challenge to the dominant practices and that means challenging the power of a deeply entrenched and thoroughly dominant capitalist class and the law of value to which it adheres (as represented by, for example, Bain Capital). You are right that this is a somewhat abstract idea; but if we cannot embrace it, then we will simply be ruled by other abstractions (such as those of “the market” or “globalization”).

You dismiss Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons with the point that he is studying cattle herders with privately owned herds, undercutting the very presumption of a commons in land and resources. But you also look critically at Elinor Ostrom’s ideas about the commons, mostly because of her relatively small samples of communities self-managing common resources. Though she short-circuits the banal opposition of state and market, she ducks (as do most anarchists and autonomists, as you argue) the problem of organizing complex, territorially dispersed economic relationships. “How can radical decentralization — surely a worthwhile objective — work without constituting some higher-order hierarchical authority? It is simply naïve to believe that polycentrism or any other form of decentralization can work without strong hierarchical constraints and active enforcement.”

Do you think the state, currently a wholly-owned project of “the existing democracy of money power,” can be made to serve other interests than capital accumulation and economic growth?

DH: The state is not a monolith, but a complicated ecosystem of administrative structures. At the core of the capitalist state lies what I call a “state-finance nexus” which, in our times, is best represented by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve; and I think it was deeply illustrative that these two institutions, in effect, took over the U.S. government entirely in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse. It is notoriously the case within the state that the Treasury has the final say over many projects in other departments.

In parallel with the state-finance nexus is the military industrial complex which is a bit of a misnomer because it is really about the concentration of military and police powers backed by a justice system that is shaped in support of capitalist class power. These make for a distinctively capitalist class state apparatus. Obviously, that form of state power has to be confronted and defeated if we are to liberate ourselves from submission to the capitalist law of value.

But, beyond that, there are many aspects of public administration providing essential public services — public health, housing, education, and the governance of common property resources. In our own society, these branches of government often become corrupted by capital, to be sure, but it is not beyond the power of political movements of the left at the local, national, even international levels to discipline these aspects of the state apparatus to emancipatory public purposes.

Ironically, neoliberalism, by turning the provision of much of this terrain of state action over to NGOs, has opened a potential path to socialize these aspects of the state to the will of the people if the limitations of the NGO form could be overcome. The frontal attack from the left against state power has to target the state-finance nexus and the military/police complex and not the sewage department or the organization of the Internet and air traffic control, even as it has to be alert to how all departments of the current state are likely to be used as vehicles for furthering capital accumulation. The current situation is that the capitalist class is heightening its powers of control through militarization and the state-finance nexus while not bothering with much else.

At the end of your book you write, “Alternative democratic vehicles such as popular assemblies need to be constructed if urban life is to be revitalized and reconstructed outside of dominant class relations.” How do you see the Occupy Wall Street movement evolving in the absence of public space?

DH: It is clear that the vicious police response to Occupy Wall Street is an indication of the paranoid fear of Wall Street that a popular movement might arise to threaten the power of the state-finance nexus and, as has happened in Iceland and now in Ireland to indict and eventually jail the bankers.

Militarization is, for them, the necessary answer, and part of that militarization is the control over public space to deny that the Occupy movement has a public space for its operations. In that case, the liberation of public space for public political purposes becomes a preliminary battle that will have to be fought. The assemblies provided a brief whiff of what an alternative democracy might look like, but the small scales and limited arenas make it crucial to experiment with other democratic forms of popular governance capable of looking at the metropolitan region as a whole… how to organize a whole city like New York or Sao Paulo.

Going beyond physical space, you helpfully point out that, “There is, in effect, a social practice of commoning…. At the heart of the practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as a common shall be both collective and non-commodified — off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations.”

How do you see this logic of “commoning” emerging from the actual social movements of our time, which seem preoccupied with ethical shopping on one hand, or addressing racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other identitarian questions on the other?

DH: The essence of a great urban and civic life, for me, is the free intermingling of all manner of people opening up the possibilities of all manner of encounters. If, for often good reasons, women, LGBT youth, or other so-called “identitarian” groups cannot freely use the public and supposedly “common” spaces of the city, then it is critical that movements emerge to liberate those common spaces for their participation. Such movements can provide a vital opening for a broader common politics. The problem comes when that is the only preoccupation for that group and what begins as a demand for inclusion becomes a movement for exclusions. Alliances are needed and the more it becomes acceptable to liberate public spaces for all public purposes, the more open become the democratic possibilities to go a-commoning, to build a commons and achieve a politics of the commons throughout the city or metropolitan region as a whole. But there are counter-movements that have to be combated. Right now, exclusionary fascist movements (like Golden Dawn in Greece) are precisely occupying space by space urban neighborhoods (e.g. in Athens); they are occupying spaces in the name of an exclusionary politics. This is an extreme case, of course, but I think it critical that the relation between the commons and the balance between enclosures and exclusions, on the one hand, and openings and free uses, on the other, be perpetually open for discussion and political struggle. These are the sorts of battles in which we all have to be involved. There is no automatic harmony to be had and I actually think a certain level of perpetual conflict around urban life is a very positive feature.

Gay Pride in Madrid, Spain, June 2012--a lot of corporate sponsorship but still it's a mass occupation of public space for new urban values...

Demands at Madrid Gay Pride: Ecology, Equity, Democracy, Rights, a Future!

Artists and “culture workers” have historically been leading voices of dissent, but we see a lot less of that now. Most people are beholden to one or another institution of the “nonprofit industrial complex” as the Incite! Collective put it in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. The types of dissent remain safely within boundaries that do not challenge the logic of markets and money.

You write, “It is one thing to be transgressive about sexuality, religion, social mores, and artistic and architectural conventions, but quite another to be transgressive in relation to the institutions and practices of capitalist domination that actually penetrate deeply into cultural institutions…. The problem for capital is to find ways to co-opt, subsume, commodify, and monetize such cultural differences and cultural commons just enough to be able to appropriate monopoly rents from them.”

How do highly individualized and competitive artists and culture producers find common ground to fight for a world beyond remuneration?

DH: I don’t quite agree with the view that the cultural workers are passive. The context has changed (which is what I am pointing to as culture becomes an industry and a vehicle for capital accumulation and building asset values) which means that dissidence has to take a different form of expression. Subversion, rather than confrontation, has to become the main tactic and I see quite a lot of evidence of a willingness to do that. We have, incidentally, very much the same problem in academia. My colleagues have quite a lot to learn about how to go about that and, in the cultural world, that sentiment for subversion is far more widespread.

You write, “The struggle for the right to the city is against the powers of capital that ruthlessly feed upon and extract rents from the common life that others have produced…. Capitalist urbanization perpetually tends to destroy the city as a social, political, and livable commons.” Americans are fairly religious about the idea of private property. Even progressives don’t like to challenge the prerogatives of property ownership.

Do you think there can be any meaningful way to halt gentrification and the debasement of thriving urban neighborhoods that it brings, short of creating collective ownership of neighborhood properties?

DH: The thing that often amazes me is the wide array of instruments already available for left experimentation in all manner of arenas of social life. This is very true of housing with all sorts of possible property arrangements that offer ways to secure housing for low-income populations. Yet these instruments are neglected and underutilized, in part, I suspect, because of ideological barriers but also due to lack of political and other forms of support for them.

Much can be done within existing structures, but, again, the problem is how, for example, limited equity co-ops might be reabsorbed into the dominant practices unless there is an active social movement to keep them in place and expand them. Otherwise, we are in the situation of winning a skirmish here or there (e.g. against gentrification) but losing most of the battles and having no impact on the anti-capitalist war. So when and how are we going to learn to fight the war against the dominant practices?

La Tabakalera, a former tobacco factory occupied by dozens of projects, artists, and initiatives, in central Madrid.

You point to the need to integrate an understanding of the process of urbanization and built-environment formation into the general theory of the laws of motion of capital. Other writers have analyzed the breakdown of Fordist mass production and the evolution of capitalism into a system based on a “social factory.”

DH: I think we should get away from the imagery of the factory entirely. The issue of the urban is quite different because it is not only about production, but about realization of values through consumption, consumerism, spectacle (e.g. Olympic Games which have sent many cities into economic difficulties and played a key role in the Greek collapse of public finances). One of the things I get from Marx’s theories is the relation between production of values and the realization of values through exchange in the market and both are equally important and the urban is “where it all comes together”.

You note, “Public spaces and public goods in the city have always been a matter of state power and public administration, and such spaces and goods do not necessarily a commons make.” How can public spaces become a commons?

DH: Language is a commons and part of what political life is about is changing the languages we use to relate to each other and to understand the world around us (which is why I want to talk about the capitalist law of value). But the commons has to be materialized and objectified (e.g. in print) and discussed (e.g. in an assembly or a chat room). Commoning embraces all of these features. It is not only a physical space, but bodies on the street still have a political priority (as we saw in Tahrir Square) and this is particularly important to the degree that the capitalist class has almost total power over all other forms of political power (money, the repressive apparatus, key elements in the state apparatus, political elections, the law, etc.).

Finally, you argue that “Decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater inequality through neoliberalization.” How do social movements fight this trajectory while holding on to their own autonomist and egalitarian practices?

DH: What is so odd in these times is that much of the left agrees with much of the right that decentralization and opposition to all forms of centralized power is the answer. This is why I talk of the “fetishism of organizational forms” that prevails on the contemporary left. The market is, of course, when individualized, the most decentralized decision-making system you can imagine and it is exactly the organization of such a competitive decentralized market that produces, as Marx so clearly proved, highly concentrated capitalist class power. It does so because “there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.”

If all the world were organized into a series of independent and totally autonomous anarchist communes, then how would the global commons (e.g. biodiversity) be preserved, and what would prevent some communes from becoming much more prosperous than others, and how would the free flow of people and goods and products from one place to another work (most communes have some principles for exclusion)? Interestingly, most corporations are into networked models of administration and there are all sorts of parallels between left and right which pass unrecognized, as well as overlaps between corporate practices and anarchist visions.

There is a lot to be said for a decentralized basis for political action. But, at some point, it has also to jump scales and organize at least at the metropolitan bioregional level to take on those wretched dominant class practices that seem to survive unscathed in the midst of the current plethora of oppositional social movements.

##

David Harvey (born 31 October 1935, Gillingham, Kent, England) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. In addition, he is the world’s most cited academic geographer, and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate; most recently he has been credited with restoring social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism. He is a leading proponent of the idea of the right to the city, as well as a member of the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.