anarchism - 1994 - Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Monkeywrench Press and The Worker Self-Education Foundation of the Industrial Workers of the World

1994

153 pages

This book, Anarchism and the Black Revolution, was a title that surprised me when I was trying to get to know the library book collection of the midwestern rural community college I was tasked with managing. Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is a black power activist and anarchist who spent from 1969 to 1983 in prison for hijacking an aircraft. Before his incarceration he spent the late 60s in the black power movement as a member of the Black Panthers. Towards the end of his prison term he began to write anarchist pamphlets which are collected in this small volume.

One of the most interesting aspects of the first of his pamphlets collected here, “Anarchism and the Black Revolution”, was that Ervin attempted to chart an anarchist course for black revolutionary action in the US, divergent from the Maoist or pacifist courses of action taken by black revolutionaries before him. Furthermore, he addresses, in a 994 piece, issues of white privilege among anarchists and tackles the question of why there aren't more people of colour in the anarchist scene, a question that radical movements keep returning to. Ervin noted that white anarchists exercise their white privilege when they sweep questions of race to the side in strict favour of focusing on class issues. Ervin argues that black workers (along with women) have historically, and continue to be, placed below white men, who, as unionists, are collaborators of oppression when they claim this privilege.

He also advocates for the development of an international Anarchist Black Cross network, the anarchist prisoner support group that took up his case in the late 70s.

He wrote these pamphlets in prison and I don't know how many other things he wrote after his release or if prison was his most productive time as an anarchist philosopher. He does emphasize direct action in his work which he took to extremes in the 60s with ‘skyjacking’, and he also emphasizes the importance of the worker to social movements, and advocates anarcho-syndicalism.

hippies - 2012 - Wanderlust

Wanderlust

David Wain

2012

Apatow Productions

This film is a tale of counterculture tourism. A journey of the heart where the human spirit is led back to their place of origin to find that, yes, yes, middle class conformity is the best possible lifestyle. Thank you... so much, for this portrayal of hippies, culture industry.

Wanderlust is a stupid movie that is sometimes funny although it is mostly exactly the shallow movie anyone who’s watched movies before should expect. A married pair of Manhattan yuppies lose their foothold on the success ladder and are forced to leave the city. The man works in an investment firm that’s shut down by the feds and the woman’s a documentary film director who blows a screening of her latest work in front of HBO executives. After this meeting when the wife seeks solace for her failure from her husband, it's revealed that her filmmaking career was simply a dalliance in a long list of discarded career-paths, revealing that the professional realm is a world of struggle for some and a playground for others. Not just anyone, afterall, can jump into filmmaking on a whim and obtain meetings to screen their projects in front of high-status industry personnel.

So anyways this couple leave Manhattan, the gilded city of success. They had to, because they’re failures now and Manhattan doesn’t accommodate failures. On their trip out of the city they need a hotel, and they find one, but it’s also a hippie commune called Elysium where they feel the good vibrations and decide to become permanent residents after a brief rest in the suburbs with the man's materialistic and success-driven brother. That the commune is also a hotel is crucial in indicating that this turn in their life is as tourists seeking a temporary escape, rather than as explorers of alternatives to dominant values. The man, who was also in the movie Clueless, talks Jennifer Aniston, his wife, into staying with the hippies. Over the course of the film Jennifer Aniston comes to love her new habitat while the Clueless guy wants to leave. Throughout this film there’s all the stuff about naked communing with nature and swaying back and forth to folk music and hallucinogenics and long hair on men that make hippies so hilarious.

There are a few moments in the film that are of interest to me. The first is the already mentioned HBO meeting. Another prime moment of interest occurs towards the end of the film. The husband receives a call for a job interview and is ready to return to the mainstream and besides, he’s not as cool as he thought he was and he likes the commune less and less, so he has a fight with his wife where suddenly he’s arguing that conformity is great if it means enjoying air conditioning again. He argues so passionately in favour of technologically mediated bourgeois urban lifestyles that its easy to forget that earlier in the film he was convincing his wife to give the hippies a chance. The two interesting things about the husband’s statements are, first, at one point he shouts that experiencing air conditioning is the norm in the United States. This statement indicates at once that it is just plain incorrect to live in violation of norms of any kind, and also immediately repositions himself as harshly opposed to the commune. It is interesting to me that his loudest opposing statement to communal life is in reference to air conditioning, which evokes the title of Henry Miller’s critique of American conformity, The Air Conditioned Nightmare.

The second interesting statement in this argument was when the husband accused his wife of ‘drinking the koolaid’. Drinking the Koolade, of course recalling the Jonestown mass suicide where followers of Reverend Jim Jones drank cyanide-laced flavour-ade in 1978, has become a term of critical conformity. Use of this term is how the squares quickly criticize non-conformists for adopting non-conformist dress, language, ideas, etc.

Another scene of interest appears when Jennifer Aniston eats a breakfast meat platter or something like that at a diner in town, far from the isolated rural environment of Elysium. All this meat has to be eaten in secret because the commune is strictly vegan and, uh oh! she finds that the guy who founded the commune is also at the diner eating a big hunk of meat. She’s scared because she’s caught but the commune patriarch reveals that he’s been eating secret meat for years. This scene interests me because it was an opportunity to demonstrate that the strict rules of the commune and its adherents may actually be elastic to some extent... after all, if this hardcore old time hippy can violate the rules, anyone should be able to, to some extent, without facing exile. Instead, this is a secret they share with the implicit knowledge that this violation of the rules means they don’t really believe in the hippie life after all.

The final thing that interests me in the movie is that the commune has a charismatic leader who’s good at everything and has everyone’s admiration and truly believes in the hippie way of living. For some reason he wants to go steady with Jennifer Aniston, and sells out the commune so that he can impress her with his new wealth, even though she had come around to committing to life at Elysium. This was clearly just a lazy movie crisis inserted into the film to move the action along to some conclusion, but it also expresses, I think, a widespread skepticism among mainstream people that anyone can truly avoid the lure of success in mainstream society, because not only is Clueless-man enticed back rather quickly, the hardest-core hippie of the film gives up his lifestyle for reasons that don’t even come close to making sense.

Students for a Democratic Society - 1969 - Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Jerry L. Avorn

Atheneum Press

1969

307 pages

Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.

The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.

beats - 2007 - Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady
Noah Buschel
2007
Jean Doumanian Productions
80 min

Neal Cassady is a biographical film focusing on Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty muse for On the Road, Neal Cassady. This film minimizes his friendship with Kerouac, confining their interactions to the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the movie actually focuses on the second phase of Cassady's career as a behind-the-scenes countercultural protagonist, his relationship to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Cassady is a pivotal figure in American counterculture, first inspiring the beats to write and later befriending one of the best known hippie collectives of the era. His relevance is rooted in his friendships with the era-defining writers of these periods, and some of the scenes in this film use these writers interactions with Cassady as metaphoric markers of the passage of one era to another. In particular tensions are represented between Kesey and Kerouac. Kerouac is shown to reject the hippies who, in return, rejected him as well. Interestingly, Alan Ginsberg, who not only knew Cassady but also enjoyed relevance from one era to another, and was friends with Kesey himself, was not mentioned until 50 minutes into the film. The film is thus two travel narratives, first On the Road and Pranksters On the Bus.

Much of the movie is a simulation of 1960s film footage of the Prankster's cross-country bus trip or of a Ken Kesey party where Kesey pressures a drunken 1960s Keuroac to take acid. This shift in perspective and in media is a technique for conveying a sense of authenticity, and here it also refers to the hours and hours of film the pranksters shot of their voyage, film that was never edited into a proper film but nevertheless has found its way into countless documentaries about the 1960s.

The jazz music soundtrack largely signifies the beat era even if the film's emphasis is on the 1960s and psychedelia.

radical right - 1996 - The Siege at Ruby Ridge

The Siege at Ruby Ridge
Roger Young
1996
Victor Television Production
192 min.

The Siege at Ruby Ridge is a 1996 television mini-series dramatizing the events of the 1992 armed stand-off between the apocalyptic/survivalist Weaver family and multiple federal agencies at the northern Idaho Weaver homestead situated on a mountain hilltop called Ruby Ridge. The stand-off resulted in the deaths of Weaver matriarch Vicki Weaver, her son Sammy, their dog Striker, and a U.S. Marshal. The event was a catalyst for the anti-government far right movements of the 1990s and an episode in the excessive authoritarian force the U.S. government is willing to use to suppress nonconformist citizens. The story of the siege was, in brief, that an illegal firearms sale set off a sequence of events that escalated to an armed stand-off with three dead. For the Weavers, the stand-off was the apocalypse, and it confirmed all of their anti-government ideas and attitudes to be valid.

Something that interests me about the representations of the far right in America is that there is mainstream media willing to portray its figures positively. Probably the most extreme example is the heroic representation of the Neo-Nazi Daniel Vinyard in American History X. Whether as a Nazi or as an anti-racist, Vinyard always lives his ideals, and he suffers for them. Here too, in The Seige at Ruby Ridge, survivalist and Aryan Nations hangaround Randy Weaver, along with his wife Vicki, are represented as intense, unwavering, acolytes of their anti-government worldview who stand rocksteady when the FBI and US Marshals come for them. Randy falters for a moment, considering whether or not he should turn himself in over the charges stemming from an illegal firearms sale, but Vicki encourages him to stand strong against ZOG (ZOG is a white power consipiracy acronym referring to the 'zionist occupied government'). What really interests me is that this work is one of a small number of examples of American mainstream media that positively represents the far right, I am not aware of any such films, television shows, mini-series, etc that represent figures of the American left in a positive manner.

There are films of other countries representing leftists positively, such as the German films The Baader-Meinhof Complex, and The Edukators. There are the Stephen Soderberg Che films about the great Marxist guerrilla leader, a positive portrayal but of an international figure most strongly associated with the Cuban revolution. The 1999 TV movie The 60s portrays its leftist as dangerously ignorant youth who just need to grow up and learn how the world works. There are films about the Chicago 8 and the Black Panthers, for example, which portray their subjects positively but they're produced outside of media systems that draw mass audiences. The Siege at Ruby Ridge was a network TV movie shown on CBS. As far as I know there are no leftist counterparts to this.

The event of Ruby Ridge and the preservation of its memory as a historical example of a dramatic tragedy involving the government repressing non-conformist ideological minorities has its leftist counterparts. The story of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Haymarket Affair are two examples that have been represented in PBS documentaries and independent films. Right wing radicals are more likely to be be commemorated by mainstream American media with a sympathetic portrayal, presumably because their values more closely correspond with those that are dominant in America. I wonder if there will ever be a film like this, shown on network television, that represents the Michael Brown murder, for example, and the subsequent protests in a manner that is sympathetic to the protesters. Given the existing patterns demonstrated in media history, of the choices made in subject matter and ideologies represented in mainstream media, we're far more likely to see a TV movie positively representing the Bundy Ranch affair. A Ferguson film would likely focus on the anguish of the MI governor and other public officials, who have to make the tough decisions to return order.

occupy wall street - 2012 - We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation

We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation
Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds)
AK Press
2012

The Occupy Wall Street Movement was, to an outsider, at some times exhilarating to watch, and at other times, very strange and occasionally disappointing. The police are part of the 99%? An anti-capitalist moment of silence for Steve Jobs? Why? Because he was a vegetarian in addition to being a brutal industrialist? Still it was a real uprising in America, in lower Manhattan, that largely adhered to anarcho-socialist ideals of building a new world in the shell of the old.

Occupy Wall Street generated a lot of literature within twelve months of the movement's start date of September 17, 2011. There were many books about Occupy published even before January 2012, when the movement still seemed like it may continue in its original form. We Are Many, from the venerable AK Press, is a collection of reflective pieces on the movement that came later in 2012, with a number of its authors referring to writing their entries during the summer of that year. Almost all of the authors are almost politically radical and while there is a great deal of variety to the entries, many of the pieces are critical of the more liberal side of the movement. This was the side of the movement who suggested that police were part of their class and, presumably, felt that Steve Jobs was an honorable exception to the plutocratic class the movement claimed to opposed.

The book includes dozens of short entries, including pieces on the handmade signs, spirituality, race and gender issues, connections to other uprisings, movement strategies and constitutive documents, and many personal reflections. The entry that struck me more than any other when I was reading the book was titled, The Tourist Brochures in People's Hearts: A Snapshot from Occupy Santa Fe. This was a piece in which the author, artist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore paints a picture of a local occupy movement directed by people who may be members of the %99 but they wouldn't be members of the %95, if that was the term adopted by the movement.  Bernstein Sycamore's piece expresses a passionate love for the ideals of the movement to be realized, and a bitter critique of a local encampment which was turned into a public relations forum for a thriving local arts market by wealthy art dealers, gallery owners, and artists. The piece reads like an address to a general assembly, and perhaps that's what it was written as, but more importantly it sketches out a situation where all of the radical energy of the movement was siphoned away by liberals and their wish-washy views on society. The idea that the arts community just plain belongs to Occupy is a liberal one. Bernstein Sycamore laments the tears of someone crying in anguish over the closing of twenty galleries, which, sure, sounds bad, until our author goes on to note how many many  galleries there actually are in Santa Fe and how much money and competition there is in their market. You might cry for the art galleries and you probably wouldn't shed a tear for luxury car dealerships but both types of commercial institutions cater to upper-middle class consumers and play a role in economic disparities.

The book covered many aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but not all of them. The role of social media was actually downplayed in this book. I don't remember reading a mention of the 'We are the 99%' tumblr page that featured those iconic and mimetic images of individuals holding up their handwritten stories of woe in selfie shots and affirming their support for the movement. I don't think Anonymous' role in the movement was given much attention here, and I would have loved to have read something about the library at Liberty Plaza. Oh well... it's still probably the best book I've seen on the movement to date.

outlaw bikers - 1971 - Buttons: The Making of a President

Buttons: The Making of a President
Jamie Mandelkau
Sphere Books Limited
1971
157 pages

Buttons was, briefly, the president of the Hells Angels England chapter, and the man who obtained an official charter from the California chapter for the England Hells Angels. Not long after he officially became an Hells Angel, he wrote and published his memoir of his experiences as a biker. Some time after the publication of this book he must of lost his president status as a 1974 BBC documentary of the England Hells Angels shows Mad John as their president and the only mention of Buttons featured in the documentary is a flash of the cover of this book.

I don't know who author Jamie Mandelkau is/was but I suspect that his book was rushed to market to cash in on a late-60s/early-70s craze for biker stuff, and more specifically, Hells Angels stuff. This craze was due in part to the 1967 publication of Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels, as well as some high profile criminal incidents stemming from club activity, most notably the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969. The content of the book shows that there's not a lot of history to Buttons' life and very little to his life as an Angel, at least by the time of publication. The book seems to break down into two large parts: his life as a Rocker fighting the Mods in the mid-60s, and his trip to California to hang out with the Hells Angels and rape teenage girls. His lurid anecdotes of pointless violence and sexual abuse are the stuff of fantasies for impotent men and the sort of deranged losers who also admire serial killers. Wilhelm Reich describes this books target audience in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Mandelkau's transcription of Buttons' dimwitted life story is a dull view into the world of dying masculinity and white supremacism. Getting it on with a bird, doing a blokes head in, etc, in repetition with slight variations, occasional violence and plenty of sexual violence, that's the content of this book. Pornography for people who felt that Hitler's definition of freedom suits them just fine. The book does include a couple of interesting bits about the biker culture in England circa 1971, though: in England bikers all over were wearing Hells Angels patches, and it almost sounds as though bikers who wanted to declare themselves outlaws would do it by putting on their patch. One of Buttons tasks was dealing with unofficial Hells Angels chapters in England. Also, Buttons wore a small deaths head patch, which apparently had some link to the origins of the Hells Angels MC, and only the first four chapters wore that patch until Buttons put it on for England.

The last interesting aspect of the book are with Buttons stories of being a Rocker and fighting Mods in the sixties. I don't know much about these subcultures although I think Dick Hebdige might discuss them to some extent in his Subculture and the Meaning of Style. Rockers are apparently greaser guys into leather jackets and motorcycles and sixties rock. Mods are different although their difference isn't discussed in the book. Still, as far as I know, this is a significant source of information about the Rockers of mid-60s England.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

irish nationalism - 2008 - Hunger

Hunger
Steve McQueen
2008
Film4 Productions
96 Min.

Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger is about the 1981 IRA hunger strikes that took place in Long Kesh prison that resulted in ten dead men, including Bobby Sands, who was elected to British parliament before his death. Hunger was probably one of the best films of 2008 and was almost certainly better than all of the Academy Award best picture nominees of that year.

Long Kesh prison included a set of buildings called the H-Blocks, 'H' shaped structures where IRA prisoners were held. During the late 1970s and early 80s, the IRA prisoners waged a series of protests within the H-Blocks to obtain political prisoner or political status and its associated privileges. McQueen's film, representing these protests, is composed of two long segments. The first features the blanket protest, where prisoners went without clothing to protest their being denied civilian clothing in prison, and also the dirty protest, when prisoners kept their body waste in their cells. The second segment represents the hunger strike with an emphasis on the experience of Bobby Sands, whose commitment to the strike was fatal but still intensely meaningful to those agitating for a united Irish republic. This later segment largely shows

Sands on a bed in a white room, as though he's already in heaven, an apotheosis and a counterpoint to the hell depicted in the first segment of the film.The two sections are divided by a prison meeting-room conversation, about the hunger strike, between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. This scene comprises the majority of the film's dialog. This scene is also a single take, is long, possibly nearing twenty minutes in length, and as a piece of film-making, is incredible.

The rest of the film is largely silent, there are bits of dialog here and there, but otherwise if there are vocal sounds, they're shouts of anger or pain. Otherwise the focus of the film is on the emotional intensity of the prisoner's resistance to the authority of their institutions and the minutia of prison life. The small details of the protests are emphasized, the shit on the cell walls of the dirty protest,
the insects that collect, the architecture of the prison, the damaged knuckles of the guards. This film targets the senses, with disgusting smells, textures, and tastes implied through much of the visual imagery, and the aural compressed into the dialogue scene. The dark and filthy aesthetic of the film in its representation of these protests recalls music videos like Poison by Prodigy,

or David Fincher's video for Nine Inch Nails' Closer.

Those videos take place in a metaphor, while mcQueen's Long Kesh H-Blocks are a dramatic representation of a real and still existing site.

popular uprising - 2012 - Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
Paul Mason
Verso
2012
237 pages

Back in the years of 1994, 1995, and 1996, when the Internet was just emerging as a mainstream media service, a large number of books with titles like 'Cyberia' were published about the new frontier of digital freedoms to be found in cyberspace. These books made grandiose predictions about the utopia that lay beyond the horizon now that the internet's mass availability had just come into view. The predictions about increased democracy and global intelligence and everything else now seems incredibly naive to the critical observer, but now the gushing cheerleaders of 1990s internet freedoms and consciousness, like Timothy Leary, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Mark Dery are replaced by critics such as Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Jodi Dean, and Robert McChesney; critics who discuss the adverse effects digital and networked technologies have on society, literacy, politics, commerce, etc.

One of the early adopters of these networked technologies as they appeared in the 90s, were the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN, popularly known as the Zapatistas, a group of indigenous revolutionaries struggling for greater autonomy in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Beginning their revolution on January 1, 1994, the EZLN disseminated their communiques via the internet, in Spanish and English, to the world, marking the very beginnings of what was popularly known as the anti-globalization movement and what is referred to by anarchist anthropologist (a title he refuses on his twitter page) David Graeber as the global justice movement (a name for the movement which I haven't seen in print in any source other than his work). The Zapatistas use of the internet to get their message out was notable for two reasons, first was the novelty of the internet at the time, and the novelty of its use by political radicals, and the second was that it was being used by revolutionaries in a remote and impoverished section of Mexico by indigenous people. That radicals of the fourth world were using the latest in communications technologies garnered the EZLN the label of the first post-modern revolutionaries. In the year 2000, with the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the anti-globalization movement became a global phenomenon with the full attention of the mainstream media, and one of the aspects of this movement the mainstream media fixated on was the protesters use of technology. At the time, it was of interest to observers that activists were using things like laptops and websites to any extent.

The interesting thing about Paul Mason's book, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere, is not that it has anything interesting to say about the uprisings seen around the globe in 2011. Mason's is far from the only book to examine those events, and what it has to say about them is typical of sympathetic journalists. Of course, Mason gets that the human element of these movements, but personal testimonies of movement participation have been a major feature of these uprisings, and there are entire books from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement written by the people. Its that it's a book-length emanation of this continued amazement over that activists are using digital technologies that makes it interesting. History is filled with examples of radicals using their contemporary communication technologies to disseminate their ideas at the same time that they engage in direct action. Consider the mass of writings produced by radical groups, such as the Diggers during 17th century England because of their access to printing presses, or the Yippies studies of television formats and media theories so they could appear effectively on the medium. That activists use current communication technologies in their struggle is to be expected, but because so much hope has been invested in the internet's potential to direct change, it is still possible, in 2012, for an individual to write a book with nothing more profound to say about activists than that they're using blackberries and facebook to communicate with one another. That's what Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere is, a lengthy assertion that technologies are at the forefront of political change rather than people and their ideas. A return to the hope felt in the mid-90s that the internet has produced new kinds of spaces where all our hopes for mankind will be realized. That recent communication technologies permit activists with rapid-fire abilities to evade systems of control and authority, a point of view that's obviously incorrect. When Paul Mason writes that new activists using smartphones and social media are "pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being", he's echoing the never-realized transhumanist pronouncements of 80s and early/mid-90s tech gurus like Timothy Leary. When Paul Mason makes analogies between the current situation and the French Revolution and says "A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop." He's repeating the same amazement shown in 2000-2001 over activists using computers. I think it is possible that a reader could dive into the literature of the anti-globalization movement and come up with similar statements, and the major difference between then and now, is that now the brandnames for each communication format are noted.

Taken at a broader level, there is an intense delirium for digital technologies in all fields and social areas, and similar books are being written discussing how incredibly epoch making tablet computers and social media are in everything, including political activism. While its undeniable that these technologies are having major effects across society, I don't see how people can look at the internet and its related technologies, and also look at how they're actually used by people on a daily basis, and see their effects only as positive steps taken towards a more perfect world. One of the effects of the internet as a communications technology is that it occupies our fields of vision and sets limits on what we can see in ways that always refers back to itself. In this way, of course, digital and networked technologies appear to us as problem solving in an of themselves if they're all we can see in the world. In Mason's book, he quotes an activist who refuses to read radical texts of the past, instead favoring new ideas, especially if they're spread on twitter. While Mason offers these statements as examples of new kinds of activists who are resistant to ideologies, a ludicrous position as ideology is always at play, this activist actually reveals herself to be vulnerable to manipulation due to her preference in consumer communication products. These new consumer technologies commodify communication, friendship, emotion, and possibly even revolution. What's being described here is designer communication, and it is inserting itself into the revolutionary spirit in ways that are actually insidious. Mason is writing in 2012, now in 2014 it might be interesting to think about how an obsessive fetishizing of these communication tools contributed to the dissolution of the movements they apparently pushed forward a couple of years ago. They are, fundamentally, consumer products and provide consumer experiences, and a book can just as easily be written about these media companies like facebook doing things like deleting the Anarchist Memes page. Activists can hold discussions on facebook, activists can also lose their job for revealing their political attitudes on their facebook page. As communication tools, social media networks should not be taken as inherently revolutionary or the primary means through which revolution is won.

partisan resistance - 2001 - Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans
Seth Kramer
Great Projects Film Company Inc
2001

Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans is a short television documentary from PBS highlighting the existence of Jewish armed resistance units in Germany during the Third Reich. There is a lot of media commemorating or dramatizing the WWII-era partisan fighters in France and other occupied countries but much less about armed resistance within Germany, let alone about Jewish resistance. Direct resistance adds another mode of Jewish response to the atrocities of the Third Reich, that of sabotage and armed direct action, in addition to the more widely historicized accounts of submission, hiding, passing for German, receiving protection from sympathetic Nazis such as Oskar Schindler, and emigration to democratic countries.

The documentary consists of a familiar pattern of showing interview subjects recalling anecdotes from their experiences interspersed with archival footage and photographs representing the referred era. This kind of subject matter provides an alternative kind military history which I am very interested in delving into further, and a quick survey has revealed that there's quite a bit of material about Jewish resistance, and this film is not the only to claim to be telling an 'untold story' in its title. Generally I ignore the military history sections of bookstores entirely but now that I am aware of the tradition of partisan fighters and oppressed populations taking up arms and developing strategies for engaging their enemies in warfare, I consider this a new topic to research within the field of counterculture studies.

To summarize the documentary briefly, the stories these former fighters tell reveal the fact that significant damage was done to the Reich by Jewish partisan fighters. They describe escaping from the ghettos to live in the woods, acquiring guns from a farmer, executing German soldiers and informers, and sabotaging the infrastructure of Hitler's Germany. It is stated during the documentary that there was an estimated 20 to 30,000 such partisans who fought in Germany, a large fighting force that must have made a significant contribution towards weakening Nazi control in Germany. The documentary's primary purpose is to oppose myths that there was no real Jewish opposition to Nazi oppression.

john waters - 2006 - This Filthy World

This Filthy World
Jeff Garlin
2006
Cinemavault
86 min.


John Waters and David Lynch are the greatest American filmmakers, and neither one of them has made a feature length film in years. Waters, in interviews, has complained of difficulties in securing funding for his film projects, a problem which stalled production of his last film in progress, a work titled Fruitcake. Instead they've focused their energies on creative outlets such as lecturing (Waters is listed as a speaker at the European Graduate School), writing, music and photography. This Filthy World is an example of one of Waters' side gigs, a one-man show of the filmmaker speaking about his experiences as a low budget independent Baltimore movie director.

The show is essentially a staged telling of much of the same material that appears in Waters' book, Shock Value. He speaks about his life with the Dreamlanders, the name he and his friends used for the little social group they assembled to star in, and produce his early films. He speaks about his interest in attending criminal trials, his interest in unusual sexual practices, his illegal filmmaking practices, the trashy films and filmmakers who influenced him. This Filthy World shows John Waters joining other 'alternative' figures like Henry Rollins who draw in audiences to listen to them become storytellers of the countercultural past.

culture jamming - 2009 - The Yes Men Fix The World

The Yes Men Fix the World
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno
Arte France
2009
87 minutes

The Yes Men are a pair of culture jamming pranksters whose interventions into media have revealed injustices in the basic structures of contemporary neoliberalist globalization. Their modus operandi has been to mimic the conventional forms by which information is packaged and delivered to contemporary audiences, deliver a message that is absurd, either in the traditional sense or in a modern sense where an inconvenient truth is acknowledged, and then capture the reactions of the audience. The most profound example of this later sense of the absurd which I mentioned, as expressed in the work of The Yes Men, can be seen in this interview wherein one of the Yes Men claim that Dow Chemical will make reparations for Union Carbide's 1984 Bophal (India) disaster, when the company's Bophal plant leaked toxic gasses which almost immediately caused over 15,000 deaths, now that Dow has purchased the guilty company. The result was Dow's stock dropped instantly, revealing the sense of justice encoded into markets, and The Yes Men were instantly acused of giving the people of Bophal false hope.

The film begins with the song 'Get Happy', which I otherwise know from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks.

This documentary, The Yes Men Fix The World (an irritating title for a film that doesn't actually show them offering solutions) shows The Yes Men going behind the scenes of their own work and following up on its results. They used media to pretend as though officials were acknowledging the errors made in Bophal India, and also in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and bringing equitable compensation to those affected populations. They visited these locations to speak with people and to ask them if they were filled with false hope, the generic critique of Yes Men interventions by media pundits. Naturally the people of of those locations have very good reason to be angry at the cruelty of governments, corporations, and markets, on a continuing basis and weren't especially put off by the actions of the culture jammers.

The film's revelation that the duo were so often accused of providing false hope is fascinating. Clearly the Yes Men are playing with media to create an image of what justice should look like when filtered through the conventions of contemporary media channels. Of course, when The Yes Men are revealed as tricksters, and media personalities are not including questions about the withholding of justice by the actual offenders in part of their response to the Yes Men's intervention, then they are choosing to protect the image of institutions responsible for disaster.

The Yes Men are media pranksters, and fundamentally this is a documentary about media, chains of communication and representation, the manipulation of symbols, and the public relations industry. TV's are viewed in strange locations, creating juxtapositions of imagery, the sleek PR television image against what is often a post-industrial setting, for our own consumption via our own screen. I'm not pointing that out to note any irony, but I do believe that the production of a documentary like this serves the purpose of giving the Yes Men a forum for responding to their own imagery and the responses it garnered in turn, since they're used to making images with other people's machinery.

punk - communal living - 2005 - Mouth to Mouth

Mouth to Mouth
Alison Murray
2005
M2M Films
101 minutes

Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.

The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.

The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.

Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.

The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.