For the past month, I have had the privilege of traveling with a friend through Patagonia, a gorgeous region with scenery and colors that seem to stretch far beyond human understanding and imagination. The long rides and hikes through endless landscapes and blue skies have served the perfect backdrop to reflect on life and these changing times; on current crises and burgeoning movements like OWS; on the work that fellow friends and activists and I have been involved in over the past year to fight for jobs, public sector services and free education in London; on where we’re at, what we’ve accomplished and where we should be going…

ANGELA

These reflections have been nourished by Angela Davis’s totally badass autobiography, written at the very young age of 28, that I’ve had the pleasure to read along the way.

The book is a beautiful personal insight into a time when the struggle against racism in the African American community was at a boiling point (1960s-early 1970s) in as disparate places as the  Jim Crow South, the east and west coasts of America,  as well as in other parts of the world such as Germany and post-revolutionary Cuba.

Davis takes us back to Birmingham, Alabama, where the author is from, and depicts in vivid detail a time when segregation was alive and kicking and Black families ran the risk of having their houses blown up (on “Dynamite Hill”) for moving on the white side of the street. Her recollection of the brutal murder of 4 black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 is gut wrenching and extremely powerful as she takes us beyond the now well-known historic headline to describe her friends robbed of their childhoods while trying to navigate a world hell-bent on destroying them and the budding uprising of Black people in the South. Ultimately, it is not, as Davis explains, a couple of “bomb-wielding racists” that were responsible for their deaths, but “the whole society [that] was guilty of this murder” [...] “the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder.”

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable.

Great movies and novels tap into our dreams and help bring our deepest desires to the surface. Even not so great movies accomplish this task. They provide a break from reality and an entry into imagined worlds, often giving life to our most absurd and explicit fantasies. So why should Dr. Pop celebrate these avenues of escape? Is not delusion an enemy of transformation? Isn’t Dr. Pop all about helping people to face reality? And to actually do something to make it better?

The short answer is: Yes and No. We at Dr. Pop are 1000% committed to positive social transformation. There is no question about that. Yet we believe that in order to be 1000% committed to anything requires radically embracing our fantasies, our dreams, and our deepest desires. In fact, we believe that ethical illusions can be used to draw people closer to their actually existing surroundings. This means embracing storytelling and seeing fiction as more than just a form of weekend entertainment. It means creating and discovering ways to bring the world of fantasy into our political lives.

This is precisely what Stephen Ducombe calls for in his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. In the book, my latest favorite work, Ducombe challenges progressives to embrace spectacle as a way to manifest our ethics of fairness, justice, and equity. The ballot box, conventional protest, and enlightening panel will never be enough to transform our world, precisely because these political methods largely fail to tap into our dreams the ways that movies and novels so easily do. Instead, Ducombe argues, our politics must take on bolder and more fantastic forms. Our streets must be reclaimed, our stores must be occupied with song, and our imaginations must be channeled in ways that well-reasoned arguments will never achieve alone.

Among his key points, Ducombe claims that truth and power belong to those who tell the better story. To make his point he frequently points to the Bush administration which was able to maintain incredible power for eight years despite its obvious lies and deceptions. Yet what the Bush administration clearly understood is the need to entertain and to create spectacles that can be exploited for political ends. If these methods are bound to be used, the question then becomes – toward what ends?

Make no mistake, Ducombe is aware of the dangers of such fantastic methods and he cites Nazi Germany as a clear example of how political spectacles can facilitate real-life horror stories. Yet just because stories and spectacles have been used a vehicles for hateful destruction in the past is no reason to abandon such methods outright. Like Dr. Pop, Ducombe asserts that imaginative political acts can actually be filled with enlightened ethics and expressed in ways that expand democratic participation rather than augment dictatorship. For beautiful examples of these possibilities, look no further than Antonus Mockus, the former superhero mayor of Bogotá and unofficial muse of Dr. Pop.

What Mockus understands – and what all successful progressives must come to grasp – is that politics cannot be separated from human motivation, from the actions and events which speak to our inescapable irrationality and satisfy our emotional needs. And so we must learn how to mobilize human motivations in ways that increase transparency, expand social consciousness, and deepen participation. Only then can we expect to build a social movement whose events are deemed a better use of people’s time than NetFlix, Twilight, and Gossip Girl. Indeed, only then can we help people to find the courage to face reality by diving into the romance, honor, sacrifice and mystery of social change efforts.

In summary- Accomplishing goals as lofty as justice for all, means being comfortable with lofty methods. It means organizers becoming unafraid to don superhero capes, politicians daring to share fantastical visions, and everyday activists creating new, risky ways to shine light on the worlds around them. If you know of great examples of such courageous dreams in action, please share them through your comments below.

The main character, Troy, a tough girl with four rambunctious brothers, was and is someone I could relate to as she’s always trying stick up for herself both inside and outside the home. She also seems to be the one most aware of  the financial problems of her parents, who are constantly fighting about not making ends meet.

As a kid who didn’t know much about how folks live outside the city, one of the most interesting parts of the film is when Troy is sent to stay with family in the South. The South is a whole other world for Troy–structure, order, and definitely no stoop. When her aunt Song, criticizes the way her mother does her hair, Troy goes from having braids to getting her hair pressed for the first time. Her experience in the South becomes part of a major turning point for Troy as she soon finds out that her mother is ill and then must return to Brooklyn.  Troy then steps up as the matriarch, not realizing that she’s forcing herself to grow up without mourning her mother’s death.

Despite the hardships the children face–poverty, instability, the loss of a parent–Spike Lee manages to still remind us that while things although might not always be perfect, let alone easy, life in the city does not have to be tragic.

While the Continental Op stories are not chopped liver, but for my money, the Maltese Falcon is the template for the characters and situations that come along decades later, even today, in mystery and crime stories.  The patter, the cynical PI (“He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” Hammett wrote), the duplicitous femme fatal, the quixotic villains, and the fabled dingus that everybody is willing to do everything to obtain.  For a couple of years not too long ago, me and writer Eduardo Santiago taught several reading and discussing the classics classes to incarcerated youth.  This was part of a project by the Children’s Institute — our friend and fellow novelist Nina Revoyr who works there brought us onto the gig.  The goal was the bring the love of reading to underserved communities, and you can’t get more underserved than young men in the joint.

These youngsters weren’t loveable rapscallions like the Dead End Kids.  Some were in for homicide and others sex crimes.  Yet in addition to romance novels, to the one, they all dug the Maltase Falcon for how each character never exactly said the truth and how they were only out for themselves – or so it seemed.  We’d read the chapters in round robin fashion and stop at various intervals to dissect a passage then go forward again.  While these youngsters were not what you’d call ideal students, we could get them quiet enough to pay attention and read, for the old-fashioned dialogue always hooked them.  Like this example when Spade is questioned at his apartment by two cops he knows about the recent murder of his partner, Miles Archer, early in the novel.

“Having Miles knocked off bothered me, then you birds cracking foxy.  That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re up to.”

Once we got to talking about Hammett’s words, Eduardo and I could also then engage the  youngsters about plot, symbolism, foreshadowing and so on.  Read the Maltese Falcon if you haven’t, and if you haven’t read it in awhile, do so again.  You’ll dig it.

Another mystery writer figures in my selection of the indie film, A Better Life.  I’m not sure if it’s one of my all time favorites, but it’s certainly one of the best I’ve seen this year.  The film is based on a reworked screenplay by Roger L. Simon, the creator of the burned-out-would-be-revolutionary private eye Moses Wine in the Big Fix — called the hippie Sam Spade by the L.A. Times.  Originally entitled The Gardner, it’s a simple but powerful tale of a father and his knucklehead, but well-meaning teenaged son.  Pops is a humble, hard working gardener.  He’s an undocumented worker who borrows money from his sister to buy a used pick-up truck so he can be his own boss in the gardening business in L.A.

The truck is stolen by a fellow day laborer to sell for money to send home.  The film’s most direct antecedent is De Sica’s post-WWII The Bicycle Thief, based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini. In that story, a poor man must find his stolen bike to keep his movie poster pasting job so as to feed him and his young son in war ravaged Italy.  Also like Charles Burnett’s  1970s The Killer of Sheep, A Better Life chronicles people’s everyday small triumps and tragedies in a nod to the Italian neo-realism style ushered in by De Sica and others.  The father and son’s search take them into those parts of the city little seen on movie screens – Boyle Heights, South Central and Pico Rivera.

The story is both a journey across the landscape as well as a journey of the relationship of man and boy.  I saw some of my dad Dikes in Demián Bichir’s Carlos, a father dealt a sorry hand, but doing his best he can to provide for his son and just maybe make a better life for him.  But unlike my dad and those of the Black Migration who could at least be absorbed into a booming industrial sector after WWII and the end of the Great Depression, Carlos’ L.A. is ours as the effects of the Great Recession are not likely to end soon as the gap between us the 99ers and the One percenters widens.

In the Maltese Falcon, the hunt comes up empty for all concerned.  In A Better Life, the hunt results in a Pyrrhic victory, but what’s more important is father and son discover one another.  That the truck is a secondary thing to them becoming closer.  But as Spade and the Occupy Wall Streeters would remind us, you can’t let those greedy bastards just take and take from us – at least not without a fight.

I loved Science Fiction most when I was younger (and still, now that I’m older). I loved monsters and adventures and descriptions of entire new worlds that provoked me to imagine things I had never before imagined. That is my own favourite brand of happiness. I spent a lot of 110 degree summer days in front of a fan imagining things. But I still remember reading The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner when I was 15, and that is the book that first really blew my mind away, made me want to write. The phrase ‘Caddy smelled like trees’ still sings in my head, like Quentin’s never-ending sentences from a mind that just cannot cannot stop thinking and carries you on and on inside of it racing disjointed until it is forced to stop itself. That ride made my heart stop a moment, and then beat faster. It was like language itself opened up to me, the way it could drag you into another point of view, another life. The way it could be every bit as pivotal to a story just by itself, just through the wonder of it, and not simply as a way of describing things.

The next book to really stop my heart like that was Toni Morrison’s Jazz just a couple of years later. Jazz the title and jazz the rhythm and jazz the sensibility, I have never read a novel so much like music. Its phrases were syncopated, points of view like the call and response of different instruments, and she never put a word out of place, ever. It was like inhabiting jazz itself, a music lived and shaped in 1920s Harlem, never forgetting the deep dark places where its roots bled in the South. I loved every second of it, and I love Toni Morrison, because you know the struggle will always go on along with the music, though the here and now may well break your heart, may well break you. College was so alienating in so many ways, reading Morrison there was like a delicious taste of the truths underlying my own reality, though not my reality itself.

To me these two authors seen together also offer up the two sides of our world, a deeply human and political truth about the children of slaves and slave-owners. Toni Morrison’s books are dark and frightening, they flinch from nothing. Beloved is possibly one of the best ghost stories ever, but all of her books are desperately achingly sad, dealing with the horror of a history that never should have been, a racism and oppression that continues on and ever on. But they are deep and they contain a terrible beauty, wisdom and courage are there along with the pain.  Some characters bend and break beneath the onslaught, become oppressors themselves. But some fight on. You love the ones that fight on.

Faulkner writes of the white South, makes visible the enormous costs to mind and soul of exploitation and greed. Everything is is dissolving, decaying, crumbling in upon itself. The horror is not found in what is done to you, but what you and your ancestors have done to others. Oppression is a sickliness passed down through generations, something that squirms inside of you and eats its way out. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if one of Faulkner’s characters had ever dared face it full on, take steps to change the world, seek some kind of reckoning or redemption. Instead they always fled from it the way you do in your nightmares, running in slow motion and never getting anywhere. Me, I believe that though we may be born onto different sides of oppression, ultimately we can stop running and choose where we stand. Reading these together, there is no doubt in my mind where that stand should be taken.

So Happy Holidays! You’ll be relieved to know that I have not been able to support two burning passions, so movies are my release. I love everything by the Coen brothers, I do love the darkness that is able to reflect on itself, and usually still laugh. But the movies I like to watch over and over again are definitely the comedies. So go forth and watch Raising Arizona, or Monty Python’s The Quest for the Holy Grail, or A Christmas Story. I’ll go so far as to recommend Elf for the season, with a large dose of French Toast (the only thing I like as a side with my syrup).

What makes people powerful? Is it the level of resources they wield? The amount of knowledge they possess? Or, perhaps, is it their ability to get lots of different types of people to come to a party they are throwing?

In this interview with Valdis Krebs, founder and chief scientist at orgnet.com. you will learn about the power of informal networks and personal relationships in shaping our world. Through a quick introduction to network analysis, Valdis shares powerful ideas that can help us understand society as well as our ability to change it.

As Gilda explains in the DIT video below, these ideas can lead to serious breakthroughs in everything from neighborhood organizing to global movement building.
 

Valdis, how did you become a social network analyst?
I actually started in human resources, as a systems person. From there I got into technology and began to notice how new technologies were changing society. They were shifting both what and who were important. And as society grew more complex, I saw that we increasingly needed technology to analyze society.
 
The software I developed was originally created for IT project management. Only later did it take on its current use. After working for a series of large corporations, I started my own business in 1995.

What keeps you excited about doing this work?
I really like taking on new and different applications for the work. For example, one day I received a call from a CDC epidemiologist. He thought that the TB data he had could be visualized through my network analysis method. So we worked together to see if that was true. Ultimately, his data was presented at a major public health conference and the room loved it.

Calls like that are the best, where someone says “I’ve got this situation and wonder if your method can help.” This is how I originally met Gilda, aka Dr. Pop. She wanted to map organizations and nonprofits working on housing in LA. Eventually one of her staff members, Andrea, got into the conversation and the original focus changed to understanding how LA slumlords were working. By analyzing slumlords’ connections and networks, Gilda and Andrea got a new research approaches to fuel their organizing.

This points to what I see as the secret of innovation –– taking something that’s known technology in one area, and applying it to another area where it is currently unknown.
 

How does social network analysis work?
My method maps relationships, which can be applied to people, organizations or even data. The goal is always to find our what’s useful about these relationships, what’s interesting about them. The slumlord case is one example. Another example of is the network map I created for the mortgage meltdown, where I started to show the relationships that structure both Main Street and in Wall Street. Not surprisingly, this map was really popular online. These kinds of maps are dependent on strong local data.

How much do networks vary by type?
There are always some basic similarities. Once you get some networks you can understand principles or patterns that appear elsewhere. Take for example the hub and spoke pattern, which Gilda references in her video. The hub that emanates information controls much and the network. The spokes may or may not be connected. This is a basic pattern but is varies between natural networks and computer networks. (natural networks include things like how proteins interact in the body.) Another example of a prominent natural network is the food web, which has conventionally dealt with who eats who within local ecosystems.

What can networks teach us about our world?
Network mapping is now applied to psychology, biology, ecology, business, computer science, in many more disciplines. It is becoming more and more popular. Yet people still see things in a linear fashion, through oversimplified causalities. Part of the beauty of network mapping is that it makes a more complex description of the world accessible. In the example of Saje’s work again slumlords, Andrea went to the city attorney who would also been working on the issue, and she brought her network maps with her. Together they saw what was really happening in the city.

They used the networks to get a picture and to start sense-making sessions. In these sessions they asked basic questions like: Who do you connect with to do this or that? Then they follow those data points. They follow them enough to identify larger patterns.

How connected are we, really?
While its true that everyone is connected by 6°, those more distant connections are really just between complete strangers. They are not really substantive. The real power is in the one and two-step connections. These are what really matter socially.

However on the Internet, and a few other computer science examples, the more distant degrees of connection are very important, because there they have a shared context and language, unlike the social world. Online, everything is running on the same routing protocol.

Meanwhile, even within a single human organization there are weak connections and miscommunications,. One simple reason for this is that people are distracted when they’re talking to each other, there engaged around other thoughts. These types of behavior mean they need shorter pathways to connect, or else they won’t always understand the transmission.

How might network maps influence the ways we relate to others?
I really value connecting on similarities, while benefiting from differences. We need commonality to move forward, we must be able to communicate. Without communication there is no trust. Without trust we have these long dances between people and we end up hiring attorneys to build artificial trust.

I used to work at Toyota, and would witness the Japanese employees building trust through informal conversations and sharing about their lives. The Americans in the company didn’t get it. Americans are used to these high turnover rates and having to find new working environments all the time. Whereas in other cultures, you could be apart of more sustainable team. You may start out building a lawnmower engine, then go into to making motorcycle engines, and eventually create the Honda automobile. This trend was also instinctual to many in Silicon Valley. Sadly it is not applied to our politics, which epitomizes an antitrust environment, where nothing works.

Thanks Valdis, final words of wisdom?
Well, the government and corporations are mapping you, so you might as well figure out how to map them. They understand you better than you think. I say – understand the system that you and they are embedded in. There’s no better way to do that than through network mapping.

Here’s a video interview with Valdis by Angela of Odom Lewis in Cleveland, Ohio at the Java Bean on December 28, 2009.
 

Gene Sharp’s slim volume, From Dictatorship to Democracy, outlines why and how non-violent struggle is the warfare of the 21st century, and builds a template for thinking and acting strategically to remove dictators and build democracy.

The book has been a powerful influence within movements that have toppled dictatorships over the past two decades.

Sharp, is the founder and senior scholar of the Albert Einstein Institution.  He wrote the book (which you can download for free above)  in the 90s for the democracy movement in Burma.  It was first published there with the help of the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Burma.

If you had any doubts about the fact that social change is largely about the battle of ideas, at that time, Burma’s military dictatorship did not.  They renounced the book and people were condemned  to seven-year prison sentences for simply having it in their possession.

The book was translated into Indonesian by Indonesians. It was translated into Serbian by Serbians and became a major touchstone for Otpor, the Serbian student movement organization that led the nonviolent revolution that brought down Milosovec.

That struggle and Otpor’s actions and strategies were studied by the Egyptian student movement.  Online.  On youtube.  Then Otpor leaders came to Egypt to meet with them. And Egyptian student leaders went to Serbia to receive training in non-violent strategy and action from the Serbian students.

And in the process, the book was translated into Egyptian and became a resource for actions that are now known as Arab Spring.

A more much longer volume on non-violent struggle and strategy by Sharp is Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, which briefly describes over 20 nonviolent struggles of the 20th century, including the Russian Revolution of 1905, Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s, School boycotts in South Africa in the 1980s, and the removal of Milosevic in Serbia at the end of the century.

Sharp methodically assesses these events as a foundation for his argument and methodology of strategic thinking, planning, and action to create a more deeply democratic world.

Last Saturday, some 3,000 thousand people gathered around Saint Paul’s cathedral in London to “Occupy the London Stock Exchange” (or LSX). Two days later, the camp is still up, as several hundred people sleep in tents each night and many more gather in the day to decide actions. Yesterday the Cannon of St Paul’s gave the occupiers his blessing to allow them to stay, after the police tried to force them out. I interviewed two of my friends and fellow activists, Mark Boothroyd and Jeremy Dewar, the day after the event.

From GlobalWomenstrike.net

Tell me about the atmosphere. What kinds of people were there? Was it a very mixed crowd? Or were most of the people the regulars we’ve seen over the past year out in the streets?

Mark: The crowd was overwhelmingly young, most in their late teens or twenties. There were older people there in large numbers, but it was a very youthful action. There was not a noticeable union presence, no banners or flags, although I noticed some trade unionists from London who are active in the anti-cuts movement.

There was a contingent from Anonymous with Guy Fawkes masks and several banners. There were lots of homemade banners and signs which people had brought, and as I arrived I saw people making more with bits of cardboard and marker pens, drawing inspiration from what was happening to come up with new slogans and ideas.

The protest was very international with people from all over the world attending. I met activists from Spain, America, Slovakia, Poland and many other countries. Some of the Spanish activists became active around the M15 movement earlier this year and had formed the Real Democracy movement here in the UK, which occupied outside the Spanish embassy for several weeks in solidarity with the protests in Spain. Others were various activists from around the world who lived in London and wanted to take part in the protests in solidarity with all the others protesting around the world.

Jeremy: When Mark and I arrived, an American woman told us the police had blocked the route from St Paul’s to Paternoster Square so we ended up all staying in front of St Paul’s as the square was blocked. Paternoster Square is private, unbelievably. It’s kind of fitting that we were denied that space for this protest.

The police constantly bullied people throughout the day, kettling in few hundred people in, then letting them go, demanding names and taking photographs of people. Then they weren’t letting people in and there were a few arrests.

But despite all that, there was a great atmosphere and I’m very excited about the turnout. The gathering swelled to about 3,000 people and 500 stayed overnight the first night.

Photo by Peter Richards

As I interview you, occupiers at LSX are currently writing demands, so we don’t know them yet (they are now up, you can find them here). But regardless, one of the criticisms from the mainstream media and the ‘left’ has been this movement doesn’t have concrete demands. What do you think about that? Does it matter? Or is the fact that people are coming together just important at this stage, in order to figure out where we go from here?

Jeremy: The fact that we don’t have clear demands is a weakness, but it is not a debilitating weakness, especially at this stage. How could the organizers of this event come up with some pre-prepared demands? They wouldn’t be speaking for the people. But we need do need demands, to win. The clearest demand that we should have, I think, is to cancel the debt. The other question is how do we achieve what we want to achieve? We have start somewhere and St Paul’s good place to do that.

Mark: I do think the movement needs to develop demands, but I want to differentiate between the criticisms of the mainstream media and those of “lefties”. The mainstream media is trying to mock the protestors as naïve and tries to portray them as not dealing with the issues properly, hence the lack of clear slogans. But anyone who attends the protests knows, they are motivated by a number of issues: massive and growing inequality, huge bail outs for the banks and tax cuts for the rich while working people suffer, growing environmental destruction and continuing devastating wars. I think everyone on the protests around the world is united in opposition to these issues.

Those of us on the left who criticize the lack of slogans do so not because we want to belittle the protest movement – we in fact want more than anything for it to grow and develop – rather we do it because we think if it is to keep growing and have a bigger impact, it must develop clear slogans to guide its action and who it is targeting, and so it can clarify its political message for the hundreds of millions of people watching the protests, and draw them into action alongside those already mobilized.

If the movement does not develop clear slogans then the media and the right-wing will be able to distort its message much more easily and implement a divide and rule strategy against the movement. It is understandable that with this protest movement we are seeing many new people join it who have never taken part in protests before, so their lack of experience is understandable, and should not be condemned. I speak as someone who wants to engage with those new layers and assist them developing their consciousness of what is happening and what we need to do to win.

From globalwomenstrike.net

Mark, you’ve been really involved in the student movement, how does this movement compare with that? Were there many students there?

There were hundreds of students at the protest, many people I recognized, and many that I did not. These protests are drawing in hundreds of new people who will be the next generation of activists to take the struggle forward.

I think it is quite different from the student movement as that was a reaction to a specific attack (the raising of fees to £9000), which just affected students. This movement is against the breakdown of the entire system and the fact we are being made to pay for it. This movement can and will involve everyone, whereas the student movement just really involved students although it was supported by lots of people throughout society.

Jeremy, you’re a trade unionist, you were around during the big strikes and protests of the 1980s. After one year of struggle here, leading up to this day, can you talk a bit about where we’re at now and any similarities or differences you can think of.

What’s similar is the Tories’ strategy, and the bosses behind them, which is mass unemployment and inflation to devalue what we’ve got and what labour has; cuts in services, privatization, all of that is very similar to the 1980s. The anger and the hatred are tangible. Also the uprising of the youth in August, whilst people can be distracted by the criminal events, these were youth charging police, stopping stop and search. It was very similar to the 1980s.

What’s different is, the Labour government has done nothing for the bottom third of society. And what it has done for the middle of society has eroded in past few years. The Labour party is very different today than it was in 1980s it was left then, you could vote for Tony Benn, for example. Now they’re lucky if they’d get 3 mps together.

The trade unions have lost a lot of their members. Maybe half sine the early 1980s. They lost some of their key battles in manufacturing and in the mines, so we’re left with weak trade unions, except in the public sector. But they’re not the same kind of workers – they won’t go on all-out strikes.

There used be strong radical youth movements as well that has been banned. If this movement gets people talking about form and content of political protest and alternatives then it’s good. People will always struggle against oppression and injustice. The starting point is learning from the past. I wouldn’t look back to 1970s and 1980s as a time we got it right. We didn’t. We lost. We’re all still learning.

Finally, the fact that some 3,000 people showed up here (vs. 200,000 in Rome for example). how do you interpret that? (I think we didn’t publicize it enough, personally!) But do you think that perhaps we’ve all been involved in so many different struggles for a year now (students, UK uncut, local anti-cuts, etc.), is this like seen as just another thing next to all we’re working on? or can, for example, this occupy LSX broaden the movement, and take us to a place where all of our struggles are linked? how do you see that?

Jeremy: I think 3,000 out of nothing is significant. I think we’re moving back into a phase where people feel the need for generalization and unity across a number of different struggles,  linking the economic crisis to other problems we’re having – democracy, welfare services, pensions, etc. And there’s a rising awareness that you’re struggle is my struggle is our struggle.

Mark: In Rome the economic situation is much worse and has been for a long time. Many young people have been experiencing unemployment and precarity for longer than they have here, and they are much better organized than we are here. Italy has a much strong radical and revolutionary tradition than Britain. The Italian Communist Party received 37% of the national vote in the 1970s, the children and grandchildren of these people are the ones protesting in the streets now.

As well in America the economic crisis has been going on for longer and affecting many more people as they do not have the same welfare system we have in Britain. This means there is a much larger layer of people to draw into the protests than in Britain. That’s not to say things are not bad in Britain, we have over 1 million young people unemployed, 200,000 people denied places at university and the public sector is about to get slashed massively. But those unemployed are not as well organized as on the continent, or as connected to the left as they may be in the US. I think that’s partly why it has not had such a big turn out.

I think actions like LSX have the potential to unite the various forces in the movement if they draw in a critical mass of people, and if they transform themselves into organizing centers for the struggle where not only debates over what to do can take place, but also concrete actions can be planned and decided upon which take the movement forward. My fear is that is the occupations do not become more than occupations where people can discuss and debate, and they do not become focused around organizing further resistance to the crisis then they will peter out. Thankfully they do not appear to be declining anywhere yet so there is still time for this to happen.

 From globalwomenstrike.net

Check out this great video of the first day:

We have been fighting to get something started in Britain, we’ve been looking to the Arabs (in a remarkable and much appreciated change in point of view), to Tahrir Square and beyond. We’ve also been chanting “London, Cairo, Wisconsin! We will fight! We will win!” We’ve looked to Greece, to Madison, and now to Occupy Wall Street for inspiration. No one here knows quite what it is that could spark the wave of reaction and protest, but most of us are sure that’s what we need just to save what our parents and grandparents won from utter destruction, much less improve it.

The Tory conference took place just over a week ago in Manchester. So, I embarked on my first-ever coach journey full of my fellow activists, and however much we disagree about almost everything, I do appreciate the Right to Work folks for arranging a 10 quid ticket up and back. We left at 7 am from Leshisham and and it was a good 5 hours up to Manchester. Awesome. We then marched as we always marched.. Manchester was a beautiful and fascinating city, their firemen were goodlooking, their people turned out in masse as far as I can tell.

Sadly, although the Guardian reported 30 to 35,000 people at the march, I must confess it never felt that there were so many. It is the problem of a march without hills, where you can never be above or below and look upon the great stretch of people who are there on the streets with you. What was most visible was the police presence. I have never seen these mobile CCTV units, nor the metal police ‘cordon’ protecting the art museum from the evil protestors. The snipers training conspicuously large guns on us as we stood at the only place you could actually see the conference centre and yelled for a bit. No one was up for much of anything else, but that was hardly surprising.

We spent three to four hours protesting, we sat in the park where the rally was held for a while, but the speakers were far and it was clear most folks were giving the rally a miss. So we then spent an hour or so in the loveliest little pub I have seen or patronised for ages (known as Peveril of the Plains), and then another 5 hours plus back on the coach. A long long day.

I enjoyed the latest protest a bit more, had a bit of hope that it might prove something of a spark. “Block the Bridge, Block the Bill” it was called, called by UK Uncut to take a stand against what is known as the Lansley Bill and the first step in privatising the NHS. We were all kind of hoping that the masses would come, that we would overflow the bridge, that it would be so amazing we’d stay right there until the House of Lords began their debate on the bill. It was a respectable and enjoyable protest, but small. Still, it was full of creativity and hand-made signs.

For more about the protest, including the Lambeth group’s little theater exercise to involve the crowd in judging Lansley and telling him why the NHS needs to be saved, you can read the Lambeth Save Our Services blog.

So to finish, you can see below an incidental indictment of  America. We shall see if we can manage to prevent it, it’s going to be an exciting fall…

Recently I did a presentation to the staff of the Western Center on Law and Poverty about the search for the narrative.  The idea being that attorneys and support staff, including the folks who raise the money for the organization, could benefit from a discussion about the basics of why and how to tell your good work in stories.  I did ask the gathered who among them wrote outside the context of their work and was pleasantly surprised at the answers.  The people in the room included three ex-reporters, including one for the L.A. Times who’d done an expose about the terrible conditions in some retirement homes.  There was also a woman who with her husband had won money on TV game shows and together they’d written a how-to book on such.

Goes to show you everybody has a story.  That like in fiction where you talk about a character’s backstory, those elements that determine who they are when we come on them in the tale, in real life there are events that have lead us to where we are today as well.  Stories have layers.  There have been studies by neuroscientists attesting to humans being hardwired for stories.  From cave paintings, histories and deeds recounted around the camp fire to hand lettered illuminated manuscripts, storytelling has always been part of us.  Maybe our brains seek order in an otherwise chaotic existence.

Be it reportage or fiction, a good story enthralls us, draws us is and has us wanting to know what happens next.  Today many on the left and right want to know what happens next with the Occupy Wall Street movement – if indeed it is a movement.  Fixed News, as my boy Keith Olbermann refers to Fox News, has got their marching orders straight and either dismisses OWS as a bunch of pot smoking, bongo playing hippies or the precursor to the modern Brown Shirts – or are somehow fantastically both at the same time.  Herman “Black Walnut” Cain said they shouldn’t be blaming Wall Street.  Oh no.  If they’re poor, it’s their own damn fault not financial machinations by hucksters and slicksters.  But those on the other side of the spectrum were, at least initially, also dismissive of OWS.

Dick Meyer, news director for NPR stated in September, “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”  And Lauren Ellis in a early Mother Jones piece entitled, “Is #OccupyWallStreet Working?” blasted them for various reasons from their tools of bourgeois consumerism, Apple laptops and iPhones,  to having a kitchen sink approach.  She critiqued OWS for having no coherent set of demands or strategies for achieving its goals – whatever they are.  Of course as the actions have continued and spread not just here to L.A. but other cities (I love it as David Weigel reported in Slate there’s been Occupy Las Vegas rallies in the number one town for foreclosures where symbolically the protestors marched past the faux Statue of Liberty at the New York-New York casino) big and small and to other countries, with at times police overreaction being the best pr catalyst, the leftie outlets have moderated their tone somewhat in their now daily coverage of OWS.

Currently there are working groups who I gather come together representing broader input to decide actions, media spokespeople to and the like.  But certainly there’s internal and external pressures to shape and direct this energy that’s tapped feelings of frustration and disappointment bridging highly educated college grads, returning Iraq and Afghan vets, the homeless, unemployed skilled workers and those looking for a cause to believe in.   The search for the narrative is an imperative.  It is significant that this nearly month-long series of actions have affected elements of the national discourse.  As has been noted on various media outlets, the discussion now isn’t just about how much to cut to achieve a balanced budget, but what the hell are our elected doing about jobs, the unemployed and the runaway greed of the one percenters?

In L.A., we’ve had teachers and their supporters doing an Occupy LAUSD (the Los Angeles Unified School District) outside the District’s downtown building protesting the cuts and cutbacks that entity has imposed on teachers and staffers.  We’ve also had several affinity groups ally themselves with the Occupy L.A.ers.  These groups seek to have the Occupy effort push more into people of color communities and address issues such as police abuse.  Yet obviously OWS can’t be all things to all people.  The Civil Rights Movement was broad and deep, but had a core of specific issues it was struggling to achieve.  The same holds true for the Anti-War and the Women’s movements as well.

This whatever it is was kicked off by the Canadian-based Adbusters who state: “We are a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society.”  Those are mighty lofty goals.  OWS released a mission statement that reflects those sentiments but organizers know yes you need a vision, but can only keep momentum, keep people engaged, by planning and initiating campaigns that carve out pieces of any such vision.  Marching is a useful tool but eventually has to be tied to a strategy of incremental reforms — tangible wins that can be embraced and built upon.  And as much as OWS is leery of pols on either side of the aisle, and well they should be, and being co-opted say by organized labor, a debt is owed to the fightback kicked off in Wisconsin by beleaguered public workers.  Which has now manifested in a recall effort of the regressive governor, Scott Walker

Lastly what with all the creatives and tech types involved in OWS, I expect to see more than the cool posters that have been produced, not that these are anything to sneeze at as there have been some pretty tasty graphics produced.  But where’s the rabble-rousing tracts to capture the peoples’ imaginations?  More than bongo players, there’s been musicians playing and rapping at OWS, so surely some sort of downloadable Occupy This Mutha soundtrack is coming soon.  As plenty of pundits and commentators are writing about this occurrence that has the potential for moving us forward, the way to control the narrative is to create the narrative.

We are wired for stories and we are hungry for the ones Occupy Wall Street can provide.

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