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.

anarchism - book - 1998 - Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies

Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies

David Watson

Autonomedia

1998

334 pages

David Watson is one of the ‘lifestyle anarchists’ criticized by Murray Bookchin in his well known text, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.  He is also one of the major voices for anarchism in the post-Bookchin era and the editor of a long running anarchist periodical titled Fifth Estate.He is also the author of his own book length critique of Bookchin titled Beyond Bookchin.  

Bookchin’s critique of the lifestyle anarchists can be summarized by his attack on was he viewed as Hakim Bey's, John Zerzan's, and David Watson's equation of the individual's pleasure-seeking tendencies with a realization of anarchist principles - and that their use of new-age esotericism or anti-civilization ideas allowed them to sidestep analysis contemporary society and its structures. I understand Bookchin’s arguments as they apply to Bey and Zerzan, however Watson, at least in his essays collected in Against the Megamachine, appears allied with Bookchin.

The overlap of Watson with Bookchin occurs particularly in Watson's his view that human exploitation and the exploitation of nature are interconnected (which was the thesis at the core of Bookchin’s Remaking Society). Watson appears to differ with Bookchin in his views on technology, whereas the elder social-ecologist argued in his text Post-Scarcity Anarchism, that technology may be put towards the labour-saving Utopian vision as it was once offered to the public, Watson repeats the position throughout this collection that technology directs its use and determines the society that uses it to the detriment of the actual people who use it.

Watson is essentially an anti-civilization anarchist, much like John Zerzan. Where Zerzan does tend, in his essays, to lament a loss of freedom to the individual imposed by civilization, Watson emphasizes a loss of connection to nature and, by extension, to one-another, in the social realm. Watson’s essays, rooted in an anarchist environmentalist pathos, give an anti-civilization voice to the ideas of Lewis Mumford (probably the most heavily cited author in Watson’s essays), Jacques Ellul, and to a lesser extent, Romanian scholar of religions, Mircea Eliade. Watson is always returning to these authors and drawing a huge amount of inspiration from them for his own ends. One interesting aspect of the so-called lifestyle anarchists attacked by Bookchin is that they all have very strong influences that, with perhaps the exception of the Situationist International influence on Hakim Bey, come from outside the Marxist/Anarchist cannon of radical political thought.

ku klux klan - book - 1992 - The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

Shawn Lay (ed.)

University of Illinois Press

1992, 2004

248 pages

The Invisible Empire in the West is a collection of essays on the presence and activities of the Ku Klux Klan in a number of then small cities in the Western United States. There are a total of seven essays and six are focused on specific urban centres: Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Anaheim, Eugene, and La Grande. Each of these essays focuses on the specific details of each localized Klan unit, and the challenges that the social composition of each of these cities presented to the Klan in those regions.  

This volume is edited by Shawn Lay, a professor of history and current chair of the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina. Lay has written a number of books on Klan history and it appears as though this may be the domain of his expertise.  Many of the contributors to his collection also appear to be Klan historians, and this book may represent the efforts of a particular generation of KKK experts (Lay, in his conclusion to The Invisible Empire, uses the phrase “klan studies”) to impose a radical new historical vision of the once national, ultra-conservative organization.  In the introduction and the conclusion, Lay discusses how recent research into the Klan during the early 1920s (when the Klan was modeled after fraternal groups such as the Lions Club) has revealed the organization to be, at that time, primarily urban and middle class in its cultural situation and composition, and that it was not necessarily focused on preserving privilege for white Americans.  

Lay insists that the view this book presents of the KKK is radically different from the representation produced by earlier Klan historians such as David Mark Chalmers (in his book Hooded Americanism) or Wyn Craig Wade (via his book The Fiery Cross). Lay’s arguments rest on the fact that these earlier historians constructed the Klan as a phenomenon that arose out of rural backwardness.  The historical representation of the Klan as constructed by Lay and company is certainly radically different from that of earlier histories, however I prefer when a historian is also willing to account for the previous, in his or her eyes inadequate or inaccurate, interpretation of a historical phenomena.  Lay simply points out that Wade, Chalmers, and a selection of other Klan historians, simply failed to properly apprehend the KKK of the early 1920s.  

While many of the essays are quite interesting in their investigations of the Klan in various regional contexts (including, for example, an essay about the tensions of a predominantly and militantly protestant KKK recruiting in the almost entirely Mormon Salt Lake City, Utah), Lay’s own assertions about this new vision of the Klan is not really supported by his fellow “Klan Studies” academics.  In his conclusion, Lay argues that this book has shown the Klan of the 1920s to not have been overtly bigoted or violent.  Certainly, the Klan held many prejudices, not just their world famous disdain for blacks, and Lay’s book shows that they were also opposed to Catholics and Jews. The essays in The Invisible Empire in the West, recant numerous instances of local Klaverns (the KKK name for a regional chapter of the organization) expressing their not-so-positive opinions on these other, non-black, socio-cultural groups. Perhaps the specific regional contexts spotlighted by the authors of these essays gave more opportunity to the Klaverns that formed there to target Catholics with their bigotry than they did for other groups. Furthermore, while physical violence may have been rare, the essays include a fair number of accounts of the Klan using intimidating and threatening language against their targets in their crusade to maintain a social order that privileged white protestant Americans.

english revolution - book - 1996 - Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies

Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies
Christopher Hill
Allen Lane
1996
354 pages

Christopher Hill was a major British historian whose specializes in the history of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century.  This history consists of a study of the transition from a full monarchical, feudal society towards a parliamentary government constitutional monarchy where power was shared between various sectors of society.  Probably Hill’s best known work is The World Turned Upside Down, a book about the revolutionary movements of that period (including The Diggers, The Ranters, and The Levellers as well as Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army) although he had written over twenty other books, edited a number of volumes (including an anthology of Digger texts), textbooks, and books about subjects such as the Russian Revolution of 1917.  

Liberty Against the Law is a book published well after Hill retired from academia in 1978.  It is essentially a series of historical sketches of subversive activity in England during the seventeenth century.  The book starts with discussions of issues and controversies surrounding things like the closing off of the commons and its effects on normal people, and the methods by which normal people may supplement the lacks in their life through the use of the forests and progress into brief historical discussions of groups of people who may be identified as subcultures or countercultures, such as pirates or vagabonds.  

Woodcut depicting the Diggers being forced off the common land they're cultivating

Woodcut depicting the Ranters

Woodcut depicting the Levellers' Putney Debates where the constitutional future of England was discussed.

The book is quite large although each chapter is fairly short and provides the reader with a succinct discussion of its topic in regards to its subversive qualities as well as its social value and import to the class which gives rise to it (which, when discussing things like piracy, smuggling, and poaching, is itself subversive).  It should be mentioned that Christopher Hill was an avowed Marxist, and his analysis of historical movements and features of the English underclass (such as vagabondia or a pervasive admiration for the folklore of Robin Hood) is driven by Marxian dialectics.

secessionist, neo-confederacy - book - 2008 - Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction

Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction
Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta (eds.)
The University of Texas Press
2008
338 pages

“This is a book written by two well known opponents of anything to do with confederate history.” Stephen D. Echard

“The authors of this book are all well-known to have a pronounced bias against all things Southern and all things conservative. One cannot expect their book to do anythin else but reflect the biases of the authors.” Michael R. Bradley.

The above quotations are cut and pasted from two ‘one-star’ reviews of Hague’s, Beirich’s, and Sebesta’s collection of essays on the secessionist social and cultural phenomena they refer to as the ‘Neo-Confederacy.’  The above quotations are interesting to me because they presume the exhibition of editorial bias is synonymous with ‘bad book’.  This is not true, of course, but I’m somewhat fascinated by how pervasive and common it is to find this sort of sentiment expressed in regards to critical literature and documentary films.  I’m curious to know what the permitted perspective is on such subjects according to the authors of these ‘one-star’ reviews.  Should all writing be devoid of opinion and just aspire to describe things?  Is this attitude reflective of a facebook-style imposition of a ‘like’ function on all things that fosters an expectation that the public expression of opinion should only be oriented towards approving things?

Heidi Beirich is the current director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which draws a lot of negative attention from the radical right-wing in the United States.  Edward H. Sebesta is an independent scholar who runs the Anti-Neo-Confederacy blog and has done research work for the Southern Poverty Law Center in the past.  He has also maintained a web archive of a newspaper called The Citizens’ Council (the publication of the Citizen’s Council of Mississippi) and has edited another volume of Neo-Confederate literature.  I’m sure that these two editors are the individuals the above reviewers were referring to.  Euen Hauge is current chair of the Department of Geography at DePaul University in Chicago, where he specializes in teaching urban and cultural geography.  Many of his publications take the points where race intersects with place as their focus.

Anyways... Hague, Beirich, and Sebesta have collected a set of scholarly critiques of various aspects of what they call ‘Neo-Confederacy’, which is the persistent assertion that the Southern United States is home to a distinct social and cultural formation which is incompatible with the rest of modern America.  Over the course of 10 essays, this distinct cultural and its ideological supports are investigated by the book’s authors.  Seven of the ten essays were written by the editors, so that accounts for the editorial bias of this book, and they seem quite sharp in their critique of the statements issued by ‘Neo-Confederate’ commentators and writers.  

Many of the Neo-Confederate quotations used by the authors of this book are explicitly racist, or, for example, call for violence as a means of keeping social order.  The authors uncover many tensions amongst Neo-Conservative rhetoric that indicate that the purveyors of a return to the pre-civil war way of living in the American south desire an authoritarian rule for the benefit of white protestant men.  More specifically, the authors identify the white, hot-blooded, southern male as the pinnacle of human evolution, and for this specimen to properly express his values, he must be permitted to engage in violence against any offense to his honor.  Of course, the authors also identify Neo-Confederate voices that consider the perceived propensity for violence among non-whites as indicators of their inferiority.  What they truly call for, then, is a renewed Southern social order where the use of violence is legitimately exercised by white men to keep everyone else “in their place”.  This is a small example of the expressions of southern nationalism critiqued by this book’s authors, who discuss a full range of cultural forms and attitudes found in literature (such as the writings of the Southern Agrarians) and music and in small social groups (such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans) to define and affirm a desire to return to the Antebellum south.

The essays combine to form a critical cultural survey of Neo-Confederate forms, from their attitudes towards race, to the literature and music that expresses their ideals.  The views that Sebestra, Beirich, Hauge, and company critique fall within the far side of conservatism.  Some Neo-Confederate commentators, for example, note that the abolition of slavery was part of an elaborate plot to eradicate Christianity from the south, and furthermore that slavery was sanctioned by the Christian God.  The term ‘Neo-Confederacy’ sounds like a name, created by the editors of this book given to a broad range of Southern-nationalist expressions by the editors of this text.  If we take this to be a secessionist movement, then it is clearly different from the secessionist movement Thomas H. Naylor leads in Vermont.  Naylor suggests that Vermont must seceed because his state is uniquely progressive among the Union.  The Neo-Confederates, however, appear to want to leave the Union and leave the modern era behind.

PS: there is a mockumentary film that imagines that the Confederacy won the civil war titled the Confederate States of America viewable in its entirety on youtube:


 

john zerzan, anarcho-primitivism - book - 1988 - Elements of Refusal

Elements of Refusal;
John Zerzan 
C.A.L. Press 1999 (originally published in 1988)
308 Pages

John Zerzan is, along with Derrick Jensen and Theodore ‘UNABOM’ Kascynzki, one of the major critics of civilization, and one of the loudest voices to call for its collapse.  Zerzan is an anarcho-primitivist, meaning that he advocates a return to primitive ways of life.  He is possibly the chief theorist of that branch of anarchist thought, and he has waved his anti-civilization flag since the early 1980s: by writing books and magazine columns/articles, a weekly radio show (Anarchy Radio on KWVA 88.1 in Eugene, OR) and maintaining an extensive speaking schedule.  Elements of Refusal was Zerzan’s first book.  It was also one of the earliest books to carry an anti-civilization philosophy, and is perhaps one of the strongest collections of essays to advance such an idea.

Elements of Refusal is an anthology of Zerzan’s essays (some of which were also published in Adam Parfrey’s anthology of ‘forbidden knowledge’ titled Apocalypse Culture, some were published in far-left journals such as the Fifth Estate and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed).  Some of Zerzan’s books primarily focus on the benefits of a primitive/paleolithic lifestyle, however Elements is more a negative critique of contemporary western civilization.  Zerzan identified a series of cultural forms as the foundations of human subjugation and investigates how they arose to form the edifice of civilization.  The first part of the collection focuses on numbers (and mathematics), agriculture, and art; the basis of scientific practice, sedent human habitation and symbolic thought.  The second part of Elements collection focuses on relatively recent issues of labour and industrialization.  The third part focuses on the period during which Zerzan was writing these pieces, particularly the 1980s.  In this third part Zerzan describes western civilization as a world that is accelerating towards a painful collapse.

The most common criticism levelled against the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan has been that he is a technological determinist.  This means that, according to Marshall McLuhan’s critics, McLuhan’s analysis of the use of media technology over the centuries amounts to describing how humans and societies are formed by such technology.  Zerzan may be considered a technological determinist to an extreme, in that his anti-civilization theories chart a course between a cultural tool, the invention of numbers, for example, and a nightmarish view of western civilization.  McLuhan’s theories were often connections between the adoption of a new medium or technology, and some cultural shift.  Many of his theories are based upon quotations drawn from secondary sources, and many of his theories were purely speculative. Somewhat similarly,  Zerzan’s strategy is to find a series of historical steps by which he can advance his idea.  Through the genealogy Zerzan constructs for his object of study, he finds that their contribution to the rise of civilization as a contemporary apparatus for control was never an accident.  The forms he discusses, such as agriculture or numbers, never took a wrong turn somewhere in their history.   Actually, they were inevitably leading towards the modern world Zerzan loathes.  Hence my consideration of Zerzan as a technological determinist to the absolute limit.  Zerzan’s unspoken solution (unspoken in this text) is to return to the pre-numbers, pre-agriculture, pre-art world of the paleolithic.

Interestingly, in Zerzan’s preface to my copy, the second edition of Elements of Refusal, he ends the brief piece with a statement refuting Hakim Bey’s charge that he has had once written an essay against humour.  I have read Bey’s Millennium, the text in which this  essay is originally mentioned, and before reading Zerzan’s preface I was positive I had read this essay.  It turns out that it does not exist and Zerzan’s ontological anarchist rival, Bey, invented it, probably to poke fun at the primitivist philosopher.  Still, Elements of Refusal is an excellent primary source for anyone seeking research materials on anti-civilization thought, or a number of other countercultural fields of study.