INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Occupy's Nathan Schneider on Anarchy and Radical Catholicism

Nathan Schneider, June 17, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Interview with Occupy’s Nathan Schneider:
Anarchy, activism, and radical Catholicism

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2013

"It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. But they also have peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers." -- Nathan Schneider

If Nathan Schneider had a middle name it might be “Contrary” or “Confrontational.” There isn’t a sentence that he writes or speaks that’s not provocative. In that sense, he’s a child of the Sixties, though he wasn’t born until the Reagan 1980s, and more precisely in 1984, the year that George Orwell warned us against.

“Half Jewish,” as he calls himself, he grew up in the free-floating spiritual environment that characterized the end of the twentieth century in America, which meant that he was touched by secular Judaism, secular Christianity, and “a strong dose of Eastern Spirituality” -- through his mother. Not surprisingly, given his family and background and the force of his own quest for a spiritual matrix, he converted to Catholicism at the age of 18.

After he graduated from public schools in Virginia, he attended Brown and then the University of California at Santa Barbara, but gave up on academia to pursue his “education through journalism.” Schneider has been connected, as an observer and a participant, to the Occupy Movement for two years, beginning in 2011 and continuing until the present.

He tells the story of his conversion to Catholicism in God in Proof, and the story of his engagement with Occupy in Thank You, Anarchy which Rebecca Solnit calls, in her introduction, a “superb book.” It’s not the first book about Occupy but perhaps it’s the most comprehensive.

On the cusp of 30, Schneider has quickly become one of the “best and the brightest” -- to borrow a phrase from the 1960s -- in a generation of intellectuals and activists who are reinventing the American radical tradition. In the under-30 crowd, there’s probably no one with a deeper affinity for the Sixties than Schneider, and no one more eager to question the legacies of the Sixties than he — all of which makes his books and articles provocative and entertaining.

Nathan Schneider, March 19, 2012. Photo from Occupy.

Jonah Raskin: An Old Left friend of mine -- Alexander Saxton -- used to say that there was a gene for utopia. Do you think that there’s a gene for anarchy?

Nathan Schneider: Maybe it's the same gene. Or maybe it's a mood or a moment. Many people who were talking the anarchist talk during Occupy are now more or less back to doing the same-old-same-old. The Occupy mood or moment was caused partly by a failure -- from the Democratic Party of Obama to radical left organizations -- to bring young folks into the fold. A few years after Obama's election - - with no limits on Wall Street or the security state -- there were no viable alternatives. So, there was a craving to do away with everything, take over a square and start from scratch.

My Catholic friends tell me that I’m a closet Catholic. I’m motivated by guilt and by the need to confess. There’s more to Catholicism than guilt and confession isn’t there?

Guilt motivates me, too, but I don't attribute that to Catholicism. Despite evidence to the contrary, thanks to 2,000 years of baggage, the Catholic Church is supposed to be a durable institution that helps people live out the gospel of faith, hope, and love. I've found a great deal of inspiration and support in communities of radical Catholics such as the Catholic Worker. But my faith is enlivened just as much by acts of witness that aren't done by Catholics -- and Occupy was chock full of them.

Do you wish you had been alive in 1968? If so what might you have done?

I might have kept to the sidelines. My mother was in France that year and my father in Southern California, yet their proximity to rebellion didn't seem to impact them appreciably. Occupy could just as well have passed me by if I hadn't happened to be in on it from the beginning. I had time on my hands.

What if you were alive in Paris in, say, 1789?

I would have liked to be a pamphleteer.

Or in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944?

I probably would have died, as members of my family did.

I remember Tom Hayden popularizing the notion that repression leads to resistance. In Chile, for example, repression lead to the death of a movement that had culminated in the election of Salvador Allende. Is there a more nuanced view of repression and resistance in Hayden’s?

In Occupy, repression inspired wider resistance only for the first few weeks. Occupiers, especially in early 2012, got addicted to repression and couldn't understand why their arrests stopped inspiring the public. Movements in far more repressive regimes tend to understand this dynamic instinctively. Activists need to be strategic about how much to invite the repression of the state and how much to circumvent it.

What you attribute to Hayden is related to the horrible notion that "things have to get worse before they get better." No Thanks!

When you say in Thank You, Anarchy that the revolution isn’t far off, what are you actually saying? What do you mean by “far off” and what do you mean by “revolution”?

I was thinking of a conversation I had with an Egyptian activist. I asked whether, she expected that Mubarak would be out of power. She said, "Not in a million years." Social transformation is hard; when it happens it can seem so easy and inevitable, until it gets really hard again. In the passage you're quoting from, I'm trying to play with the dialectic. As for what we mean by revolution, take your pick. I'm trying to talk about the way in which revolution can't be talked about.

You have published two books this year? What other books do you have in the works?

My goodness, two's not enough? They've got me plenty busy. But I am also working on an essay about dispensationalism, a popular form of apocalyptic theology.

What political writers have taught you the most about writing about politics?

Jeff Sharlet -- who also writes at the intersection of politics and religion -- has long been a mentor, though I can't come close to imitating him. He introduced me to JoAnn Wypijewski who guided me at a formative time. As the initial occupation approached, I was reading Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night -- about the 1967 anti-war march on Washington -- which I loved and hated, because all that seems to matter to Mailer is what he’s thinking. At times his thoughts are brilliant. Lastly, I've learned a lot from Joan Didion, especially how her thinking is less important than what she reveals.

How white was Occupy Wall Street?

Schneider on Occupy.

It started out pretty white, and then became less white and then white again. We saw some of the wrinkles in our supposedly post-racial society when it turned out that people didn't know how to relate to each other across racial lines.

The other day, I saw a young black man in my neighborhood wearing one of Jay Z's "Occupy All Streets" T-shirts. The movement forced Jay Z to discontinue those shirts. In Occupy Atlanta, John Lewis, a civil rights hero, was denied a chance to speak. A lot of the beauty in us and in our society that’s normally hidden under a bushel was allowed to shine in Occupy. So was a lot of ugliness.

Can you say more about Jay Z and the T-shirts?

People were very sensitive to rip-offs and co-optation. It was a tough decision because if the shirts had been around they might have led to more connections to communities of color.

Is there a revolution from the past that inspires you more than any other?

It's hard to pick a revolution about which one doesn't have major misgivings. Every revolution betrays. But they also have their peak moments: the nuns kneeling before Marcos' tanks in the Philippines; the queer crusaders emerging out of the Sixties; the cacophonous assemblies at the Paris Commune; the pockets of anarchist rule in Catalonia; the Christians and Muslims in Tahrir guarding one another's prayers. Still, it's hard to pick one that I'd be willing to wish on anyone.

The Left used to have a monopoly on the word “contradictions.” Now it’s everywhere. What would you say were the main contradictions, in the Marxist/Maoist sense, of Occupy?

So many: autonomy and accountability, sanity and madness, order and mischief, creativity and frustration, occupation and colonization, relief and recovery, grievance and self-sufficiency, ecstasy and failure. The moment these contradictions resolved themselves, and one element in them came to dominate over the other, the dynamism went away.

Why do you think it is that every generation in America over the past 60 years or so has wanted to define itself in opposition to an earlier and an older generation? Why not emphasize continuities between generations?

Occupy had the potential to be powerfully cross-generational. From the outset, young folks were driving it, but they were very eager to hear from elders. They wanted advice, support and help. Many leading organizers had grown up in political families, and, while they viewed their parents as more moderate than themselves, they credited their upbringing for their politics.

Sounds like you have a theory on this. 

I think that the Sixties generation of radicals had to rebel so hard against their parents that, when they became the new establishment in left wing groups, they had an Oedipal fear that later generations would do the same to them. So they didn't make a priority of raising young leaders.

If you look around at the established radical organizations, especially in New York City, you'll be hard-pressed to find more than a tiny minority of young people involved. But as those who turned out for Occupy showed, it's not for lack of young activists. Before and after Occupy, young folks eager to get involved in radical politics had to hustle to find mentors and material support. Friends of mine affiliated with the political right don’t seem to have this problem.

Are you calling for defiance against older generations?

I’m trying to bridge the gaps between generations. I tend to get along with older people.

My favorite political quotation is from Gramsci about the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. What’s yours?

Mine is the entirety of the commencement speech that the poet-priest (and friend) Daniel Berrigan once gave at a Catholic prep school in Manhattan: "Know where you stand and stand there." Not that I follow it, really -- I just like it.

What’s your connection to Berrigan?

We met about five years ago. I started going to his monthly community suppers. We talked and saw that we had common interests. I see him regularly now, but his health is deteriorating rapidly. I don’t know how much longer he’ll be around.

In a nutshell what does anarchy mean to you?

A society in which some people don't wield unnecessary power over others, and one in which the needs of all are put before the privileges of a few. "Anarchy" has so many connotations, and in the book I like to play off of several of them at once. It's a very ambidextrous word: chaos, freedom, organization, and structurelessness. I want them all.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Van Gosse : What Would an American Left Look Like?

Radical reconstruction: root and branch. Image from en.academic.ru.

Begin the walk:
What would an American Left look like?

I propose that a consequential Left can only proceed as a project for reconstructing American democracy, root and branch.

By Van Gosse / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2013

Begin with what could be, ask what has been, and finish with what should be done now, to move forward.

What could be is relatively simple. The term “an American Left” should mean a convergence of movements and institutions capable of generating permanent change, rather than the current de facto Left, a hodge-podge of defensive, issue-focused groups, focused on immediate problems, with little unity.

What has been is evident. There is ample precedent for revolutionary change in this country. At decisive points, powerful movements generated the institutions that won a “transformative egalitarian order,” in the words of the political scientists Rogers Smith and Desmond King, describing the antislavery movement that birthed the Republican Party.

After decades of defeat, in the 1930s the radicalized labor movement took advantage of the New Deal to organize the industrial working classes, then at the center of our political economy, altering the balance of power in U.S. politics.

Most recently, between the 1930s and the 1970s, what the historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall calls “the long civil rights movement” broke up the South’s white supremacist oligarchy, and ushered in a new democratic order which has spread out to include every caste, ethnicity, sex, or gender formerly denied equal citizenship.

What is to be done? We are not finished with making this country a real democracy. We need to complete the process of Radical Reconstruction that began after the Civil War, and stalled until the Second Reconstruction of the mid-twentieth century. A Third Reconstruction is required to sweep away the power of deeply-entrenched racial and regional minorities, which sharply skews the U.S.’s political system in their favor.

As these references suggest, a strong dose of history is called for, to escape the trap of “presentism,” the fixation with our own time. Since the 1970s, American radicals have been plagued by two tendencies -- either despair about the thuggish, backwards nature of this country, or a pollyanna-ish optimism presuming the nation needs only to be returned to its true self -- the Popular Front delusion.

Both are versions of romanticism, the opposite of historical consciousness. Instead of these romantic illusions, a real American Left will proceed from a grounded historical understanding that is neither dystopian, as in “this is the worst of all possible countries,” nor subject to the utopian fantasy that American Democracy was always just about to be perfected.

To remove a perennial sticking point, we should dispense with the old debate over parliamentary versus extra-parliamentary strategies. To be viable, an American Left needs a long-term electoral strategy, not occasional gambits focused on charismatic leaders, but a plan to compete at all levels: town and city; county and state; finally, the federal and national.

Whether that option is in or out of the Democratic Party is a secondary question, because the Tea Party’s rise has made it evident that our “parties” are vessels waiting to be filled, and what you put in will determine what you can get out.

But however necessary, electoral power never will be sufficient. We must be inside the state, making “the long march through the institutions,” as Italian communists proposed back in the 1970s, but at the same time, working outside and even against the state.

A permanent Left will consistently mobilize non-electoral pressure, moving back and forth with agility rather than fetishizing particular tactics, whether nonviolent action, mass demonstrations, lobbying, or occupying and “sitting-in.” Keeping one leg outside will avoid the snare of submergence in parliamentarianism, where what matters is holding onto office, although this danger will never go away as long as we are serious about taking and maintaining governance.

A coherent electoral strategy and a multi-pronged swarm of tactics for popular mobilization will be nothing, however, without a long-term project. So what is it? Where to start?

I propose that a consequential Left can only proceed as a project for reconstructing American democracy, root and branch. What we have right now are the seductive shreds of cultural and political democracy, bits and pieces of power without actually threatening the core structures of political and economic authority.

We need to focus on how to turn this vast, polyglot nation-of-sorts into a genuine social, economic, and popular democracy based on majority rule, a free and fair ballot available to every citizen (a profoundly radical move in America’s historical context), and the application of the one-person, one-vote principle at all levels of government.

The latter alone would immediately overturn the main anti-democratic feature of our constitutional order: the composition of the Senate and, in turn, the Electoral College.

Why should democracy be the focus for making revolutionary change, rather than the depredations of corporate capitalism? Because until we deal with the former, we’ll never be able to tackle the latter. Despite the “Rights Revolution” extending from “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall,” in Obama’s evocative phrase, this is still a halfway-democratic state pockmarked by anti-popular legal structures and anti-majoritarian exceptions and exclusions, many of them dating from the nineteenth century, if not before.

The problem is and always has been federalism, so-called, or “states’ rights,” which is to say, a license for local oligarchies to maintain their control. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a federally-guaranteed uniform right to vote in this country, other than the negative prescriptions of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and the Nineteenth Amendment exactly 50 years later, which barred the explicit use of race or gender (or previous condition of servitude) to prevent someone from voting.

From the republic’s founding, state legislatures have tinkered with their own state’s voting regulations, and county and township officials have interpreted those regulations as they see fit, ignoring the ones they don’t like, based on which construction of state law will serve partisan interests.

We justly celebrate Brown v. Board of Education, but the Supreme Court’s 1962 Baker v. Carr decision, invalidating imbalanced legislative districting in the states (to minimize the potential black or city vote) and insist on “one-person, one-vote” proportionality of representation was, in its own way, just as radical. Along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it’s one of the few instances where the national government has intervened to invalidate the mechanisms used to block the popular democratic will.

A perfect contemporary example of how to trump basic democratic rights is the summary refusal of students’ right to vote where they attend school. Even though the Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1979, in Symm v. United States, that local or state officials could not use student status to deny someone’s right to vote, massive evidence from many states demonstrates that this right is largely dependent on the whim of whichever of the three thousand county boards of elections supervises the local process.

Just as some secretaries of state (the chief elections officials in most states) proclaim, as did Maine’s in 2012, that they did not consider students to be legal residents of their state, others issue new regulations about which forms of identification will be accepted at the polls, or where the polls will be located, or when they will open and close.

A different case in point: this is a twenty-first century nation-state with more technological and material resources than any government in history. It can find and kill with surgical precision anywhere in the world. Yet it still finds it either difficult or unnecessary to count votes quickly and accurately.

President Obama’s victory margin in the popular vote has grown substantially since election night, when it was reckoned at 2.3%, or about three million votes. As of now, it is almost 3.9%, about five million votes. Imagine if the election had been really close, what it would mean to somehow not get around to counting two million ballots: Mitt Romney declared the winner of the popular vote, and based on extremely incomplete returns, of the Electoral College. Does anyone imagine he or any other “conservative” would truly abide by the law, if two million votes were duly counted for their opponent in the weeks after Election Day?

Arizona is even more to the point. Long after Election Day, 600,000 ballots were still being processed in that state, enough to change many local and state races, and only militant mobilization by the state’s Latino citizens got those votes tabulated.

In these instances, as in so many other ways, ours is a deeply, consciously undemocratic system, since the failure to count votes immediately and transparently is the oldest trick in the book of electoral manipulation -- “counting them out,” whether in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1890s, or Mexico City in 1988, control of the official tabulation and how it is reported is ultimately decisive.

To get to a true, deep democracy, so that the whole people participate in making a new society together, we need to focus sharply on how state power is articulated in our particular state, with its origins in the late eighteenth century, and its archaic system of gerrymandering in favor of small rural areas and states, so that a citizen residing in North Dakota or Vermont has effectively 50 times the electoral and legislative weight of a Californian.

At every point in our history, the net effect of this arrangement has been to protect various forms of racial and ethnic privilege. The United States was organized as a racial state, and despite the massive changes and the effective democratization of much of that state, it remains one today, because of the bulkheads of white privilege guaranteed by federalism. Until we overcome that problem, everything else we try will be hamstrung, stymied and defeated by the white super-minority using the tools of our antiquated state system.

Embodying the SNCC imperative of “move on over or we will move on over you,” we must confront the federal character of the American state order, and either reform its profoundly undemocratic features, or wall-off and disempower those polities (e.g. the Deep South states) which we cannot control and which, much of the time, rule over us.

Our majorities, when we achieve them, must not be blocked by arbitrary devices. “One-person, one-vote” must be fully extended in all respects, to guarantee equality of power between all citizens. Systematic electoral reform mandating a universal, binding processes, and the banning of the many forms of quasi-legal voter suppression, is an imperative demand.

At the most basic level, to trump the ability of reactionaries to set up roadblocks to democracy, we should start with a constitutional amendment specifying that “the absolute right to vote of all citizens, born or naturalized in the United States, 18 years of age or older on the day of election, shall not be abridged on any grounds, including but not limited to residency, student status, employment, proof of age or identity, or any previous conviction for a crime.”

In addition, a new Voting Rights Act should guarantee early voting procedures and a uniform national voter registration process, incorporating portability.

Moving beyond that premise is the biggest boulder in the road: the Senate. Remember that for the majority of our history, this was an openly undemocratic body, insulated from any form of popular control. Party caucuses made deals with each other in state legislatures, and sent a grab bag of hacks and genuine leaders to Washington, including many who never could have won an actual election.

Finally, exactly 100 years ago, progressives in both parties pushed through the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators. What we need now is an amendment guaranteeing each state representation (one senator) and additional seats on a proportional basis, by expanding the body and dividing up the seats.

For those who say it is impossible to imagine such a constitutional reform achieving sufficient support to pass, consider how far we have come on the question of the Electoral College, once considered sacrosanct. After a series of elections whose results (as in 2000), and process (ever since then) have made a mockery of popular democracy, we are moving steadily towards a consensus that, in one way or another, it must be abolished or reformed into irrelevance, such as by a compact between a majority of the states to instruct their Electors to vote for the candidate who has received the highest number of votes nationally.


What is keeping us from getting there?

Our own ignorance or arrogance, functionally the same thing. What the glum, dystopian liberal intelligentsia and impatiently radical, often anarchistic youth have in common in the Obama era is an impatience with the challenge of understanding their country, the notion that it is too provincial to be worth really studying, coupled to the well-founded sense that as citizens of a profoundly chauvinistic world empire, we have an obligation to learn about the world.

But study the U.S. we must, the way people like Karl Rove have done in their diligent exploitation of its dark side, its fears, if we want to bend it towards the arc of justice.

Never mind loving “America” or feeling patriotic, we had better get a handle on what is effectively not one but five or six nations defined by specific geographies, political economies, and regional cultures, tied together mainly by power and self-interest.

Right now, the level of uninformed distance on the Left from this political and cultural complexity is profound. Few progressives get further than wondering. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” If they are serious, they might read about “America in the King Years,” but that still only addresses the second half of the last century. Anything before that is treated as the dead hand of the past.

That Lincoln is the only real revolutionary to hold power in our history; that the high tide of American radicalism came before the Civil War, not after; that for most of its history, the Democratic Party existed to defend white men’s privilege -- this makes no sense to people who think that “the Left” can only be seen through the prism of a European-style Marxist party (or a Third World-style national liberation front).

A big caveat: among people of color, these strictures do not hold, at least not to the same degree. African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Asian Americans -- they can’t afford to live in a fantasy world where history either doesn’t exist or is made up to justify unearned privilege. Adopting the stance of “I’m not really an American, I just live here,” so proudly articulated by white progressives, doesn’t work for peoples who have had to fight every inch of the way to enjoy some of the basic rights of Americans.

Sooner or later, refusing to acknowledge one’s membership in this polity looks like just another species of privilege, the political equivalent of being a tax exile.

Which of these problems are self-inflicted and subject to our agency? What strengths do we have to call upon?

1. We, as leftists, liberals, and progressives, can educate ourselves politically and historically; we can find a common ground about what’s deeply wrong with the United States, and what is worth building upon, celebrating, or reviving. We lack the will, not the means.
2. We have, collectively, the active or passive affiliation of tens of millions of people, in local community and environmental organizations, public sector institutions like libraries, hospitals, schools, colleges and universities, unions and cooperatives, and a vast array of issue-based lobbies.
3. We raise and spend billions of dollars, and have the capacity to raise and spend far more, entirely apart from the multi-billion dollar major donors like George Soros, and their philanthropic apparatuses.
4. We are the legatees of extraordinary movements, not just for abolition and civil or union rights, but feminism’s second wave that began in the 1960s and continues unabated today, the remarkable movement for gay and lesbian equality which has generated a revolution in gender and sexuality in just the past ten years, and the post-Vietnam campaigns for solidarity and global justice in South Africa, Central America, and now Israel-Palestine.

What are those factors for which we must account but which are out of our control?

1. We will have no capacity to shape the international political economy for a long time to come; all we can do, for now, is to (like the rest of our fellow citizens) seek to weather its storms, and lobby for the least punitive response globally and at home, and equally shared burdens via sharply progressive taxation policies.
2. There will be massive demographic changes in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, akin in their scope to the suburbanization of the post-1945 era, and later, the transfer of populations, production, and wealth to the Sunbelt. It is impossible to predict what these shifts, premised on increasing multi-racialization of the U.S. population, will mean politically, and it would be optimistic in the extreme to think that a new non-ethnic right, premised on the mystique of “free markets” and entrepreneurialism, was impossible.
3. Finally, unlike much of Europe, most of Latin America, and parts of Asia, we do not have deeply-rooted traditions of a “statist” provision of public goods, transcending divisions between left and right. So let’s stop pretending that the New Deal and the Great Society, a thirty-year lurch in that direction, is the equivalent of those traditions. What we do have are the legacy of the Declaration of Independence, the egalitarian implications of birthright citizenship and due process built into the Fourteenth Amendment, and the world’s oldest systems of free public schools.

What, therefore, should be our program?

That is entirely the wrong question to be asking, if a radical reconstruction of American democracy is the task ahead. Yet it’s the question we on the Left keep mistakenly answering, proposing lists of substantive or even revolutionary reforms.

Instead of demanding this or that, we should focus on empowering the great mass of citizens -- both the 40 percent who never vote, and the 60 percent who only vote in presidential elections -- to think for themselves what this country needs, what they need.

Do we trust the alienated, desperate, disfranchised poor and working-classes of the United States to work out their own revolution? We had better trust them, because their solutions will probably be less orthodox and more radical than any of us can imagine right now.

So rather than invoking any of our genuine radical heroes, whether Dr. King, Ella Baker, Frederick Douglass, Eugene V. Debs, or Dorothy Day, I will conclude by quoting a revolutionary thinker from a different part of America, the Brazilian Paolo Freire, who urged us to “make the road by walking,” by engaging in the struggle itself rather than laying out a plan for revolution.

That is really what we need to do -- begin the walk.

[Van Gosse is an Associate Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College and author of numerous books and articles on U.S. politics. He has been active in antiwar and solidarity politics since 1982. His historical and political writing can be found at his website, www.vangosse.com. He is co-founder of the Post-Capitalist Project, a cooperative, nonsectarian venture of Left journals, popular education centers, and electronic media, and blogs on The Huffington Post.]

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BOOKS / Alan Wieder : Thai Jones Draws 'A Radical Line'

Generations in the struggle:
A 'retro-review' of 
Thai Jones' A Radical Line

Throughout A Radical Line the progressive fights of Thai Jones’ extended families, Weather Underground and earlier, are connected to the collective struggle against class disparity, racism, and the Viet Nam War.

By Alan Wieder / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2013

[A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience by Thai Jones (2004: Free Press); Hardcover; 336 pp; $26.]

Reading Neil Gordon’s novel and then viewing Robert Redford’s film, The Company You Keep, a fictitious portrayal of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), led me to re-read Thai Jones’ book on his family -- his mom and dad, WUO people Eleanor Stein and Jeff Jones, as well as their parents, Albert Jones a Quaker and WWII conscientious objector and Annie and Arthur Stein, labor movement people and both members of the Communist Party.

While I actually liked Redford’s film, and the book even more, A Radical Line is much more encompassing as it portrays generations and real lives in the continuing struggle for a democratic, socialist America -- yes, Eleanor and Jeff and I think Thai, as well as many of their WUO comrades and their children, continue the fight today.

I had no intention of writing a review as I began to re-read A Radical Line. The story, though, is so engrossing, and Thai Jones’ combination of detail, thoughtfulness, and drama pull you in as words bring depth to his extended family as well as the collective, progressive struggle in the United States.

Jones’ craft as a writer shows in the book's poignant beginning, as Jones describes his parents being arrested -- reflecting on his own memories of the event as a four year old child.

There had to be something I could do to help my parents. I made a fast survey of my possessions: a cowboy outfit, a coloring book, a stuffed Tyrannosaurus. I opened the drawer of my little desk and picked up my child’s scissors. The ends were rounded, and the blades were covered by blue plastic guards. Bouncing them in my hand and snipping at the air, I considered putting on the cowboy hat and charging into the hallway with scissors blazing to defeat these men who had come to hurt our family. Even then, I knew it was a battle against long odds. But I didn’t realize it was a question that many in my family had already faced. They had chosen to fight.

Throughout A Radical Line the progressive fights of Thai Jones’ extended families, Weather Underground and earlier, are connected to the collective struggle against class disparity, racism, and the Viet Nam War. Jeff Jones was raised in Southern California and his father worked for Walt Disney Corporation. But as already noted, Albert Jones was a pacifist, and his experience working as a conscientious objector at Civilian Public Service Camp #37 in Coleville, California, during WWII is itself a story.

 His path was not easy as his father disapproved and church people at the Methodist congregation that nurtured his views abandoned him -- Camp #37 became home:

He was surrounded by pacifists. Each Sunday they held a silent Quaker meeting, and that was the only time in the week that the men were not in heated discussions about their faith. Coming here, Albert finally felt welcome.

Jeff Jones’ early lessons were pacifism and peace and not a long leap to the civil rights movement and opposing the Viet Nam War.

Eleanor Stein’s parents were much more political. Annie was introduced to socialism in high school and was politicized even further as a student at Hunter College. Thai Jones describes her early participation in the National Student League and the Communist Party.

It was Annie who politicized Arthur. Initially she was disheartened because her husband was apolitical, but she began leaving copies of The Daily Worker around their apartment and soon Arthur was attending meetings and demonstrations.

Like Albert Jones’s lifelong commitment to nonviolence, Annie and Arthur Stein never stopped fighting class disparity and racism. In the book, Thai remembers Albert’s assertion to Jeff before the Days of Rage: “Son, I believe very strongly in your goals. But if you set out to hurt somebody, I would hope and pray that you are hurt first.”

Concurrently, Eleanor was clearly nurtured by Annie’s work with civil rights stalwart Mary Church Terrell and her political work on education in New York City. She was also nurtured by her father’s labor activism, his founding of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter in Brooklyn, and his appearance before HUAC, where he was represented by Victor Rabinowitz, the attorney who also represented Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.

Annie and Arthur sent Eleanor to Camp Lakeside, a "red diaper" summer camp. Eleanor recalled her mother’s expulsion from the CP over China and mother continued to lecture daughter throughout Eleanor’s WUO years:

“Look,” Annie would tell Eleanor, “I lived through the 1930s when the capitalist system was on the ropes. Labor unions were strong and men were out of work, on breadlines.” Pausing for effect, she would light a cigarette, sip her scotch and soda, and go to the bookshelf for her copy of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? "It was obvious in 1917,” she would say, waving the book in her daughter’s face. “The workers were in the streets. Who is going to run the means of production in your revolution? The hippies? You’ve got to be kidding.”

The heart of A Radical Line, however, is Jeff and Eleanor’s lives in SDS and the Weather Underground and their coming together as a couple. There are rich photographs in the center of the book -- especially one of Eleanor wearing her lambswool jacket with a raised fist salute in front of Columbia University Law School. Most endearing is a page with portraits of both Thai, as a very young child, and Jeff in running gear.

We learn about Eleanor quitting law school after participating in the Columbia University student takeover in 1968 and of Jeff joining SDS while a student at Antioch. There are other events that have been written about by Mark Rudd, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, and others; but Thai Jones presents a different take, new insights, and of course issues that still leave us with questions about the Weather Underground and the struggle in general.

We learn a great deal about WUO life underground but for the purpose of this review I would like to address one particular issue.

It begins in early July 1969, when Eleanor was part of a delegation that went to Cuba to meet with representatives of the National Liberation Front and of the North Vietnamese government. Others on the trip included Bernardine Dohrn and Diana Oughton.

The North Vietnamese had invited Eleanor and her comrades so that they could interact and learn how the anti-war movement in the United States might help to end the War in Vietnam. One of the first lessons was on the lack of focus of American activism. The teacher pointed out that day that anti-war slogans and chants, like

"No More Vietnams" vs. "Two, Three, Many Vietnams"
"No More Wars" vs "Bring the War Home"
"Long Live the Victory of the People’s War" vs. "Make Love not War"

were contradictory. What was the goal?

The Americans traveled Cuba with their Vietnamese mentors and one man, Nguyen Thai, stood out -- the man from whom Thai Jones inherited his name. There were hours and hours of discussions and Eleanor and the other Americans became focused on taking one message to the masses back home: “End the War Now.”

When they returned to the U.S., however, they were informed that their leadership had decided to form small collectives; their job was not to organize the masses. Thai Jones writes, “Before Eleanor had even clanked down the gangway to the shore, Nguyen Thai’s plan for an all-encompassing mass movement was sunk.”

And I would argue, that it was at this point, before the forming of the Weather Underground, before the Townhouse bombing, before the manifestos and armed propaganda, before freeing and then being betrayed by Timothy Leary, and before the breakup of WUO, the youth movement for social justice and equality in the United States was doomed. That is, doomed as a movement.

While the Vietnamese spoke of -- and represented -- a people’s movement, people on the ground weren’t included in the United States. The people of WUO and the anti-war movement in general were young -- we didn’t take the lessons that others taught us. We didn’t pay attention to how different Fidel and Che’s revolution in Cuba was from Che’s adventurist foray into Bolivia. We didn’t know how to organize a people’s war.

My analysis, of course, is only about a small part of Thai Jones’s book. And the people that he writes about, particularly his parents Eleanor Stein and Jeff Jones, as well as their WUO comrades, have continued, maybe not as a movement, but nevertheless continued, the fight to end class disparity and racism in the United States and throughout the World.

Their mistakes as well as their continuing commitment and passion offer important lessons. As does Thai Jones’ book, A Radical Line.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His new book, from Monthly Review Books is titled Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid.]

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PHOTO ESSAY / Judy Gumbo Albert : Visiting Viet Nam, 1970-2013

From left: Genie Plamondon, Nancy Kurshan, and Judy Gumbo Albert in Viet Nam, 1970.

A photo essay:
Visiting Viet Nam, 1970-2013

Everywhere we traveled we were warmly welcomed. The Vietnamese still feel grateful to the U.S. peace movement. I came to understand that while my trip in 1970 was life changing, this trip was life affirming.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2013

Rag Blog contributor Judy Gumbo Albert was an original member of the Youth International Party (YIPPIES), founded in 1967. See Jonah Raskin's April 17, 2012, interview with Judy Gumbo Albert in The Rag Blog -- and see Raskin's current Rag Blog interview with Nancy Kurshan, a prison activist and fellow Yippie founder who recently traveled with Judy to Viet Nam. Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan will be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, Friday, April 12, 2013, from 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet -- so mark your calendars!

In 1970, during the American War, I visited what was then North Viet Nam. It was a Yippie trip. I’m the one on the right above. Next to me is Nancy Kurshan, next to her is Genie Plamondon of the White Panther Party. This year I returned to Viet Nam. What follows are some of my impressions.

In Ha Noi and the surrounding countryside, I photographed the devastation wrought by the war:

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

And felt inspired by Viet Nam’s resistance fighters:

Forty years later, in January 2013, Nancy and I were invited back as part of a delegation of activists who had visited Viet Nam during the war. We were there to help celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords:

I met former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and filmmaker Jay Craven:

And my favorite hero of all time, Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh, a member of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam, a leader of the Viet Nam Women’s movement, and a negotiator and signer of the Paris Peace Accords. I told her, "Thank you for what you have done." She replied, “We will continue to do it," and squeezed my hand:

Everywhere we traveled we were warmly welcomed. The Vietnamese still feel grateful to the U.S. peace movement. I came to understand that while my trip in 1970 was life changing, this trip was life affirming.

At the same time, it was apparent that the outcomes of the American war continue to devastate the country.

With unexploded ordnance

that to this day kills and maims:

Agent Orange/dioxin, has remained in the soil and water of Viet Nam for 40 years, poisoning a third and fourth generation of children:

I was heartbroken when I met these kids. All I could think was, “We are responsible.”

Nor could I ignore the remnants of Diem and Thieu’s tiger cages:

Survivors of the tiger cages have managed to make a new life for themselves. “In order to close the past, we must be open to the future,” is what I heard them say. (The older woman in the center was imprisoned in a tiger cage for 15 years.)

Today Viet Nam integrates the new with the old. They are on the road to prosperity by means of what they call a “socialist-oriented market economy.”

I came home from Viet Nam understanding that every one of us can -- and should -- feel proud of what we did and continue to do to end all wars.

© Judy Gumbo Albert. See more of Judy's photos here.

Thanks to The Rag Blog's James Retherford for assistance with graphics on this article.

[Judy Gumbo Albert is an original Yippie, along with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Nancy Kurshan, Paul Krassner, and Judy’s late husband Stew Albert. Judy has remarried, lives in Berkeley, California, and is currently writing her memoir, Yippie Girl. She can be found at www.yippiegirl.com. You can contact her at judygumboalbert@gmail.com or on Facebook at Judy Gumbo Albert or Yippie Girl. Read more articles by Judy Gumbo Albert on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Rick Ayers : Gilbert's Memoir Helps Us Understand Our History

Love and Struggle:
David Gilbert’s memoir helps us
understand our history and the world today

By Rick Ayers / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2012

[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]

This is the third review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle published on The Rag Blog. We have run multiple reviews of the same book in the past, when the articles have covered different territory and when we have considered the material to be of special interest to our readers. And we consider this to be a very important book. Also see the Rag Blog reviews of Love and Struggle by Ron Jacobs and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

As I write this, four presidents in Latin America are veterans of revolutionary guerrilla struggles of the 1960’s. Pepe Mujica of Uruguay was a member of the Tupamaros and among those political prisoners who escaped from Punta Carretas Prison in 1971; Mauricio Funes of El Salvador is a member of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) and his brother was killed fighting in the Salvadoran civil war; Daniel Ortega was a leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front which fought an 18-year guerrilla war; and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil was a member of the urban guerrilla group National Liberation Command (COLINA) which carried out armed attacks and bank robberies in the late 60’s.

David Gilbert, who is of the same aspirational generation, is living a dramatically contrasting life -- presently doing life in a New York prison. His recently released memoir, Love and Struggle, My life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, opens the door onto a world that mostly exists as some distorted corner of the political imagination of the U.S. in 2012.

But it’s a world and a story that is vivid and compelling -- and one worth paying attention to at precisely this moment as a young generation of activists is generating its own stories on Wall Street and beyond.

Like Mujica, Funes, and Rousseff, Gilbert was a militant fighter in the 60s and 70s -- but he found himself at war from within what Che Guevara called the “belly of the beast.”

The actor and activist Peter Coyote had this to say about the memoir: "Like many of his contemporaries, David Gilbert gambled his life on a vision of a more just and generous world. His particular bet cost him the last three decades in prison and, whether or not you agree with his youthful decision, you can be the beneficiary of his years of deep thought, reflection, and analysis on the reality we all share. I urge you to read it."

Written under the appalling conditions of imprisonment in the massive U.S. prison-industrial complex -- under the endless dangers, harassments, and frustrations of life in various New York prisons -- the existence of this volume is itself an amazing accomplishment.

Gilbert explores crucial issues of the 60’s and today: racism, imperialism, the oppression of women, and the crisis of capitalism. The fact that it is self-critical without being maudlin or self-pitying, the fact that he has crafted a reflective, modest, and ultimately hopeful picture of his life and times, makes Love and Struggle particularly welcome.

We were, as a generation, born into war. After the “good war” to defeat fascism in the 1940’s, the U.S. continued a series of military engagements designed to defeat liberation movements and assure its economic dominance in the world. While most everyone today agrees that the war on Vietnam was at best a mistake and more accurately a genocidal horror, it is curious how the American narrative has twisted even that memory.

Those who seek to draw the U.S. into more military adventures cynically extol the veterans of the war as heroes while leaving a record number of homeless vets to fend for themselves on the streets or to populate the prisons. At the same time, they denigrate the veterans of the resistance. Those who were right, in other words, are never honored in the corporate media -- they are erased and disappeared

While David Gilbert represents an extreme of the resistance movement, and while the Brinks robbery which landed him in prison was thoughtless and harmful, Gilbert reminds us that it is essential to confront the many war crimes the U.S. committed in Vietnam -- and continues to commit here and around the world -- with no consequences.

David’s life sentence does not square with Lt. William Calley’s sentence of three years house arrest for the massacre of 104 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1971 or John McCain’s record of bombing civilians from the air, wanton crimes against humanity; and it does not make sense against the other My Lai’s that occurred on a weekly basis.

Beyond the actions of troops on the ground, a just society would have prepared war crimes trials for top military and political leaders who ordered carpet bombing of civilian areas, the vast deployment of napalm and Agent Orange, the CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” assassination program, the decade-long, “secret” aerial bombardment of Laos, as well as the Cointelpro attacks against African American and Native American activists in the U.S. that resulted in hundreds being killed and imprisoned.

David Gilbert does not ask us to forget the costly human consequences of the 1981 Brinks robbery in which three people were killed and which landed him in prison. But his memoir forces us to encounter and understand much more about the struggles of the 60s and 70s.

Since the release of Sam Greene and Bill Siegel’s film Weather Underground in 2002, there has been a resurgence of interest in those in the U.S. who went from protest to resistance and from resistance to clandestine actions. Five or six “Weather” memoirs have come out in the past decade -- each with a different approach or take on the history.

Two excerpts will perhaps capture some of the intensity of his insight and analysis. In discussing the work of the Weather Underground to build a clandestine movement against U.S. international wars, he reminds us of the example of Portugal:

"1974 brought an unanticipated but exhilarating boost to the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism. On April 25, the dictatorship that had ruled Portugal with an iron hand since 1932 was overthrown. Popular discontent had been central and radicals, including socialists and communists, were major forces in the new constellation of power. The new government soon ceded independence to all of Portugal’s remaining colonies. The series of colonial wars in Africa had drained Portugal’s resources and economy, and that created the conditions for radical internal changes.

We saw the relatively poor imperial nation of Portugal as a possible small-scale model of what could happen to the far more powerful U.S. after a protracted period of economic losses and strains brought on by "two, three, many Vietnams." The costs of a series of imperial wars could crack open the potential of radical change within the home country."

And he often counters narrow and stupid characterizations of the 60s and 70s, reminding us of the human faces behind the mythology of the radical movements.

In discussing the death of Teddy Gold, his old friend from Columbia University, he seeks to set the record straight:

"When Teddy and two other comrades were killed in the tragic townhouse explosion, J. Kirkpatrick Sale immediately published a piece in The Nation defining Teddy as the epitome of "guilt politics." I don’t think Sale ever met Teddy; he certainly didn’t know him. Sale’s rush to judgment probably came from his urgency to discredit any political push toward armed struggle. The "guilt politics" mantra just didn’t fit the deep level of identification we felt with Third World people; and far from feeling guilt, with its condescending sense that we are so much better off than they are, we were responding to their leadership.

The national liberation movements were providing the tangible hope that a better world was possible. Those who caricatured him never saw Teddy on his return from Cuba -- the very picture of inspiration, energy, and hope. The word that captures Teddy’s psyche as he built the New York collective was not guilt but exuberance."

Whether you agree with much that David says or very little, Love and Struggle is a book you won’t soon forget.

[Rick Ayers was co-founder of and lead teacher at the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and is currently Adjunct Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He is author, with his brother William Ayers, of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, published by Teachers College Press. He can be reached at rayers@berkeley.edu. Read more articles by Rick Ayers on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : David Gilbert's 'Love and Struggle'

David Gibert's Love and Struggle:
A brother with a furious mind

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2012

Also see Mumia Abu-Jamal's review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle on The Rag Blog.

[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]

In 1981, a group of revolutionaries robbed a Brink’s armored truck near Nyack, New York. In the ensuing confusion and attempt to flee, three people died from gunfire. A couple days later, one of the revolutionaries was killed by law enforcement.

The robbery itself was planned and carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army: a group of former Black Panthers who had chosen armed struggle, and the May 19 Communist organization, which was founded by white revolutionaries also dedicated to armed struggle. One of those members was former Weather Underground member David Gilbert.

Gilbert is currently serving a sentence of 75 years to life in the New York State prison system. Other May 19th members arrested in relation to the robbery have been paroled or pardoned.

This month PM Press, the Oakland, California, publisher founded by AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan and others, is publishing Gilbert’s memoirs. The book, titled Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, is certain to be included in the top tier of books having to do with the period of U.S. history known as the Sixties.

There is no self-pity within these pages, but lots of self-reflection. In what can only be considered a refreshing approach, Gilbert takes full responsibility for the path he has chosen and explains that path in an intelligently political manner and with a decidedly leftist understanding. Love and Struggle combines objective history, personal memory, and a critical perspective into a narrative that is at once an adventuresome tale and a political guide through the past 50 years.

Gilbert begins his story by describing his youth and his developing awareness that the United States was not what he had been led to believe it was. An Eagle Scout who believed the myths inherent in American exceptionalism, he was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance he underwent while watching the attacks by law enforcement on civil rights marchers in the U.S. South.

That sense of conflict deepened when he headed off to Columbia University. By 1965, angered by the U.S. war on the Vietnamese and armed with a well-researched understanding of why the U.S. was really involved there, Gilbert was organizing Columbia students to join antiwar protests. Like many of his contemporaries, by 1968 he was an anti-imperialist and working full-time against the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. By 1969, he was one of the original members of Weatherman and by April 1970 he was underground.

Gilbert tells his story with a hard-learned humility. Occasionally interjecting his personal life -- his loves and failures, his relationship with his family -- with his political journey, it is the politics which are foremost in this memoir. A true revolutionary, every other aspect of Gilbert’s life is subsumed to the revolution.

This kind of life is not an easy one. Indeed, it arguably makes the life of an ascetic monk look easy by comparison. After all, the monk is only trying to change himself, while the committed revolutionary wants to change the world into one where justice prevails; a world that by its very structure resists such change.

Love and Struggle carefully examines the history of the periods Gilbert has lived in. From the early days of the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the public street-fighting arrogance of early Weatherman; from Weatherman’s transition to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and its growing isolation from the New Left it was a part of; and from the post-Vietnam war U.S. left to the Brinks robbery and its aftermath, Gilbert keeps the politics front and center in his text.

In his discussion of the period between Weather’s publication of its essential work Prairie Fire and its immediate aftermath, Gilbert provides an insight into the debates inside WUO and among its supporters in the years after the peace treaty was signed with northern Vietnam. His portrayal of the differences around theory being debated in the WUO serve as a broader description of the debates raging throughout the New Left as the U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle neared its end.

For those of us who were politically involved at the time, the debates ring with familiarity: national liberation over class; the interaction between race and class in the U.S.; the oppression of women and white male privilege. In a testimony to his writing abilities, Gilbert’s discussion of the issues makes them as alive in this book as those arguments actually were in the mid-1970s. His keen political sense reveals the interplay between different political perspectives, understandings of history, and the always present contests of ego.

The political arguments outlined by Gilbert (especially when describing the battle inside WUO) are still relevant today. Their echoes are present in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in forums more specific and less specific across the nation. Gilbert’s presentation of the essential WUO arguments that challenges the overriding role of class in the nature of oppression is not only reasoned and impassioned, it is worth studying and makes points useful to the future of anti-imperialist struggle in the United States.

Furthermore, the book includes an ongoing and excellent discussion of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege. For anyone who has spent time involved in the Occupy movement the past few months, the relevance of this latter discussion is all too familiar.

For those looking for a sensationalist account of life as a revolutionary or a confession, they should look elsewhere. David Gilbert’s memoir is a political account of a political life. Every action undertaken, every decision made is examined via the eye of a leftist revolutionary.

his does not mean there are no page-turning moments in the book, however. Indeed, the sections describing Weather’s move underground and Gilbert’s daily life off the grid are interesting and revealing, as are those describing the attempts by WUO members to evade capture. The descriptions of Gilbert’s clandestine life and his subsequent moving back aboveground and then back under are also riveting.

Underlying the entire narrative is a current of what is best described as self-criticism; of Weather, the New Left, armed struggle and, ultimately, of Gilbert himself. As anyone who has experienced something akin to a self-criticism session can attest, such sessions can be emotionally wrenching episodes of retribution and petty anger. They can also be tremendously useful when conducted humanely.

Gilbert’s written attempts at this exercise in Love and Struggle lean toward the latter expression while also proving interesting and useful considerations to the aforementioned issues (along with issues related to those criticisms). Gilbert’s realization that his ego occasionally caused him to make decisions that weren’t based on politically sound rationales is something any radical leader should take into account. In fact, Gilbert’s continuing struggle with his ego and it’s place in the decisions he made while free reminded me of a maxim relayed to me a couple times in my life; once by an organizer for the Revolutionary Union in Maryland and once by a friend from the Hog Farm commune.

That maxim is simply: if you start believing that the revolution can’t exist without you, then it’s time to leave center stage and go back to doing grunt work where nobody knows (or cares) who you are. In other words, you are not the revolution so take your ego out of it

In the well-considered catalog of books dealing honestly with the period of history known as the Sixties in the United States, Love and Struggle is an important addition. Borrowing his technique from memoir, confession, and objective history-telling, David Gilbert has provided the reader of history with the tale of a person and a time. Simultaneously, he has given the reader inclined to political activism a useful, interesting, and well-told example of one human’s revolutionary commitment to social change no matter what the cost.

[Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. This article was also published at CounterPunch and Dissident Voice. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com.]

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BOOKS / Mumia Abu-Jamal : Days of Rage and Revolution

Author and former member of the Weather Underground, David Gilbert, is a prisoner at the Auburn Correctional Facility, Auburn, N.Y. Photo from Indybay.com.
David Gilbert's Love and Struggle:
Days of rage, rebellion, and revolution

By Mumia Abu-Jamal / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2012

Also see Ron Jacobs' review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle on The Rag Blog.

[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]

Perhaps it is the times: the election of a Black president. The renewal of the right wing, or even something so prosaic as the press of age, but there has been a resurgence of Weather Underground material of late.

David Gilbert, a published author (No Surrender), a long time prison AIDS prevention activist, and a founding member of the Weather Underground has joined that number.

Without commenting on the nature and/or motivations of many of the other works, Gilbert’s reason for writing this volume, which he has strongly resisted in the past, is clear.

First, he pens it because his adult son, Chesa, requested he do so, announcing his previous work “almost all analytical.” Like many men and women of this new Twitter-age, what seems most important is the personal, rather than the political.

Secondly, hundreds of activists in various movements have written to him, and while they seemed to be looking back at Weather as an almost mythical organization, Gilbert felt the need to demythologize both the movement and the era, and speak openly of the mistakes made as well.

This is not Glory Days. It is a reflective, critical (and self-critical), gripping, and, yes, tragic account of an important and pivotal movement in the 20th century. How it came to be, the forces which brought it into being, as well as the internal and external forces which ripped it asunder, are here for all to see -- naked as a newborn.

What theory should we follow? What principles should drive our working inter-organizational relationships? Should we adopt Maoism? Marxism-Leninism? How do we fight the State? These questions and more are hashed out; some more thoroughly than others.

Gilbert is a fine writer, and despite the understandable reluctance to write this kind of movement memoir (many in the movement looked down on such things as individualistic), he does so with remarkable honesty, sensitivity, and insight.

What makes this work shine, however, is its forthright take on an issue that, even today is regarded with alarm -- race.

Race -- that is, the reality of race as lived by real people, in Vietnam, and in Harlem, opened an idealistic Jewish boy’s eyes into the dangerous knowledge that things weren’t as his teachers -- or even his parents (not to mention his rabbi) -- said.

Inquisitive, intellectually curious, questioning by culture and training, he sought his own answers of why the world was the way it was -- and thus, albeit unknowingly, he began his trek towards the revolutionary road.

We learn, as was is the case with many of his generation, that the powerful, uncompromising orations of Malcolm X stirred him from his slumber. While a student at Columbia, Gilbert attends a speech by Malcolm -- three days later the Muslim minister was assassinated. He also recounts the hypnotic and captivating power of Black music (rhythm and blues) that opened up a young, sensitive soul to the humanity and beauty of Black people. (We can only wonder what message lies encoded in today’s Black music, and what resonates in the minds of today’s white youth who listen.)

Gilbert has trod this ground before (of shortcomings of the white radical movement of the era) in some of his essays in No Surrender, but here, he recounts the missteps, the supremacist attitudes, and yes, the betrayals that occurred on that long, red road, one which has substantial echoes in American history whenever whites and Blacks opted to join hands against the rulers.

With Love and Struggle, David Gilbert adds heart and bone to the stuff of distant (mid-20th century?) history. He, in a sense, explains why we are where we are, in this schizophrenic nation, where our stated claims of equality fall lifeless and as dead as turned leaves before they hit the ground. In a sense, this work is a testament to the road not taken -- against racism (in fact and not merely in symbol) and anti-imperialism (as the nation grapples in a slew of imperial wars).

To illustrate by way of example and pure serendipity, this very day, when I have completed the manuscript, a news report interrupts from a tinny whining local radio station. A 60-ish prison guard at SCI-Pittsburgh has just been indicted for over 90 counts of sexual abuse of prisoners, many of whom are themselves in prison on sexual abuse charges (usually of children).

The reporter, reading a wire service account, quotes the Allegheny County DA as saying “at least” 11 other guards will be arrested shortly for similar charges stemming from the rapes of imprisoned men -- or their activities in forcing other men to sexually assault other prisoners. Now, one wonders, why is this even remotely relevant to the review of Gilbert’s book, a trek through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s?

Because Gilbert and his cohorts, idealists all, sought to transform American society, in part because 40 years ago, they saw the savagery the State unleashed at Attica, the upstate New York prison, where 43 people -- prisoners and guards alike -- were slaughtered by state troopers on orders of then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Gilbert and his comrades sought to wipe that kind of racist violence from the nation’s history.

Forty years later, we have rape prisons -- unofficial, yes, but no less real. And for millions of Americans who pride themselves as reasonable, good, Christian folks (well, white folks), they could not care less.

They fought, imperfectly, to be sure, to bring forth another future -- certainly not this.

For that, they should be studied.

For that, they should be taken seriously.

For that, Struggle should be read.

For that, they should be remembered.

[Celebrated political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is an African-American writer and journalist, author of six books and hundreds of columns and articles, who has spent the last 29 years on Pennsylvania’s death row. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s book -- Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the USA -- is available from City Lights Books. This review was first published at SocialistViewpoint.]

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Ulysses : The Hip Hop Revolution of the Arab Spring

El Général performing at the first meeting of Tunisia's main PDP opposition party on Jan. 29, 2011 in Tunis. Photo by Fethi Belaid / AFP / Getty.
The hip hop revolution
of the Arab Spring

By Ulysses / openDemocracy / December 28, 2011

See videos of Arabic hip hop artists, Below.

[In the midst of the Arab Spring there is a group of dedicated young hip hop artists who are using their medium to disseminate revolutionary ideas. This piece documents how hip hop has impacted the way young people interact with the revolution in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere.]

Hip hop is a fundamentally subversive genre. It has become a universal medium of social and political expression for young, dissident, and marginalized people everywhere. What Arabic hip hop has given the Arab world is a widely-accessible and unfiltered medium for disseminating revolutionary ideas.

It's important not to overstate the influence of Arabic hip hop on the Arab uprisings, though. Arabic hip hop is an underground phenomenon. Since there's no real Arabic hip hop industry to speak of, Arabic-language rap artists must distribute their music online or sign with western labels.

Despite this, the genre's popularity and influence are growing remarkably fast because Arabic hip hop powerfully speaks to our desire for dignity, human rights, and a brighter future.


The Internet and the revolution

Social media and expanded internet access weren't the cause of the Arab uprisings, but they were crucial to their success.

In 2008, massive protests erupted in the southern Tunisian mining town of Redeyef. For six months, 3,000 police besieged this city of 25,000 people while its citizens bravely demonstrated against corruption and chronic unemployment. Because of the state's violent repression and its stranglehold on media outlets, the protests failed to spread or gain much attention.

Without developed social networks, the thousands of Redeyef's citizens who obtained protest footage on CDs or computers had no way to let most Tunisians see it. Fahem Boukaddous, a Tunisian journalist who covered the protests, said, "In 2008, Facebook wasn't at all well-known, especially in poor cities like here."

In fact, fewer than 30,000 Tunisians were on Facebook when Redeyef exploded in early 2008.

By the end of 2010, Tunisia's Internet landscape had been transformed. A January 2011 survey found that Tunisia, a country of 10 million, had 1.97 million Facebook users -- 18.6% of Tunisia's entire population and 54.73% of its online population. By this time, Facebook, along with YouTube and sites such as ReverbNation.com, had become the primary medium for distributing Arabic hip hop.

The Internet's great gift was that it allowed Tunisians and Arabs, for the first time, to effortlessly share their testimony with each other and with the world.


The aura of hip hop

You can legally download almost any revolutionary Arabic hip hop song for free online -- that's exactly what the artists want. As Mark Levine argues, the uncommodified, do-it-yourself character of this hip hop gives it “the aura” that pre-modernity artistic expression enjoyed. This aura, which "previously had given art such aesthetic, and thus social power by highlighting its singularity, irreplaceable and incommensurable value, was for all practical purposes lost" because of the commercialization of the music industry in the twentieth century.

That's a really complicated way of saying, "Arabic rap is awesome because its rappers aren't sell-outs." Commercialization inevitably leads artists to compromise their politics and their message because every music industry is run by rich, powerful people with a huge investment in the status quo.

The Arabic music industry is especially reactionary and patriarchal. "A lot of the music that comes from here, from the region, is pop," El Général told Lauren Bohn. "It's all the same and it isn't art. They're making harmful inroads into the arts, actually. There's no engagement. And music without engagement isn't art."

Many Arab artists, including El Deeb and Arabian Knightz, have lamented how foreign media supports and promotes Arabic hip hop more than Arabic media does. The reason is simple. Arabic hip hop scares Arab elites because it's profoundly subversive, while western elites like Arabic hip hop because it makes the revolutions seem non-radical and friendly to the west.

To understand Arabic hip hop, though, you need to approach it on its own terms, not on yours.


El Général and the Tunisian Revolution

On November 7, 2010, Hamada Ben-Amor, a young rapper from Sfax known as "El Général," posted this jeremiad against the regime of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on Youtube and Facebook. (Full lyrics here.)





"Rais Lebled" became an immediate underground sensation. The secret police bugged El Général's phone, blocked his Facebook page, and tailed him wherever he went.

On December 17, Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation sparked pro-democracy demonstrations across Tunisia. The world media hardly noticed. Then, on January 6, state security, allegedly acting on the orders of the president himself, arrested El Général. The arrest brought Tunisia far more international attention than it had witnessed on any single day since the trouble began.

For a few days, the voice of a 21 year-old rapper from Sfax was more powerful than the voice of the dictator of Tunisia. The regime released El Général a few days later. It didn't matter. On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia after the Tunisian military refused to guarantee his safety. In his place, a caretaker government promising a transition to full democracy came to power.

There's a delicious irony in Tunisian rap music's role in the events that led to Ben Ali's overthrow. In 2006, the Tunisian and French governments sponsored a (bad) film that promotes hip hop as a counter to jihadi ideology . Much as it used "state feminism" to co-opt women's movements, the regime appropriated Tunisian hip hop for its own ends.

The government controlled song lyrics, concert licenses, CD distribution, and all TV and radio access. Tunisia's rappers had a choice: make apolitical, commercial rap and have the chance to earn a livelihood or go underground, rap freely, and face poverty, imprisonment, torture, and death. Most Tunisian rappers chose the first option.

Before the revolution, El Général wasn't well-known even within Tunisia's small underground community. Now, he's an international celebrity and hip hop enjoys wide respect throughout Tunisian society. Even al-Nahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi enjoys it.

El Général was interviewed on Al-Jazeera and named one of TIME's 100 most influential people in the world. Demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Bahrain's capital of 
Manama chanted "Rais lebled" in the street. Today, the only person who's a bigger icon of the Tunisian Revolution is Mohamed Bouazizi himself. As El Général told Lauren Bohn, "Arab rap is finally on the map, and we're blowing up the world."

(For more on El Général, click here.)


Algeria and Morocco: the cradle of Arabic hip hop

Francophone hip-hop's influence helped make Morocco and Algeria the first real Arabic hip hop scenes in the early 1990s. Lotfi Double Kanon, Arabic hop hop's most influential MC, hails from Algeria. Born in 1974 into a modest family from Annaba, Lotfi started his rap career while earning his Master's in engineering in the late 1990s during the height of Algeria's horrific civil war.

His music attacks le pouvoir ("the elite") and speaks for the voiceless youth of his dispossessed generation. The Algerian government hates him, of course, but it generally leaves him unhindered. (Full lyrics here.)





The Moroccan rap scene's size, longevity, commercial sophistication, and Arabic dialect set it apart from other Arab rap scenes to a certain degree. Moroccan hip hop is deeply commercialized and closely integrated into the Arabic music industry, which reflects both the genuine success of Moroccan hip hop and the compromises with power that it's made.

Moroccan hip hop gets numbers of hits on YouTube -- as many as several million per video -- that dwarf those of other Arabic hip hop scenes. Yet, as Zahir Rahman pointed out on Twitter, "The problem with Moroccan hip hop is that the big namers get co-opted by the government."

Fnaire's "Mat9drsh bladi" was used as a national unity theme song by the Moroccan government. Don Bigg is a reactionary who performed at the outlandish, government-sponsored Mawazine festival that outraged February 20 activists.

At the same time, Morocco has some of the bravest revolutionary hip hop anywhere. The pro-February 20 rapper L7a9ed (Haked) has been imprisoned by the government on trumped-up assault charges. Soultana, a young MC from Rabat, is an incredibly brave woman -- just check out her video "Sawt Nssa" and you'll see what I mean.


Malikah: Revolutionary Arabic hip hop ventures into the mainstream

Lebanese hip hop started taking shape in the mid-1990s. Artists such as Rayess Bek, Fareeq el Atrach, and Malikah 961 make up a vibrant Lebanese scene today. Malikah is an absolutely fearless MC who vies with Palestine's Shadia Mansour for the title of "The First Lady of Arabic Hip Hop." Like Soultana, Malikah infuses her music with revolutionary themes and powerful advocacy for Arab women. Here's "Ya imra2a" ("O woman!") (Full lyrics here.)





The Saudi rapper Qusai, the first host of MTV's Hip HopNa, makes some conscious hip hop but nonetheless fully represents the Arab music industry and the powerful more generally (he made a video for, of all things, Mastercard). Fredwreck, the other host, is an American who produces for Snoop Dogg and other stalwarts of the American music industry.

By working with people like them, Malikah has become successful and famous. The industry, however, will use every tool it has to dilute the politically and socially revolutionary message of her music. In the rap game, materialism is the enemy of the subversive. Malikah needs to be very careful about this.

In this video, she shows AFP her new Mercedes and says, "This is my car. I've dreamed of buying a car for years. You understand? It must have class because I am Malikah and Malikah must have the car she deserves."

Malikah is a true revolutionary, but she will always have to fight the industry ferociously to maintain her authenticity and her artistic freedom. She's such a strong woman, though, that I think she's up to the challenge.


Ibn Thabit and the Libyan Revolution

Although he's largely unknown in the western press, Ibn Thabit, Libya's leading rapper, enjoys almost universal recognition among the Libyan diaspora and a huge fan base in Libya itself. His pseudonym comes from Hassan Ibn Thabit, the favorite poet of the Prophet Muhammad.

Over the past four years, Ibn Thabit routinely took astonishing risks by releasing his music while moving between living abroad and in Libya itself. His obsession with toppling Gaddafi and his indifference towards fame, money, or other topics give his music as pure a revolutionary ethos as you'll find anywhere. This song came out just days before the Libyan Revolution began. (Full lyrics here.)





Ibn Thabit's music ranges all the way from love songs (Tripoli is Calling, Libya: A Love Song) to diss (Shukrun, Shayateen Al Ins) to celebration (Misrata, Mabruk el Horria, Benghazi, Ms. Revolution) to mourning (Martyrs, Shohada2na) to Arabic (Western Mountains) to R&B (Tassa 7amra, La Shek) to gangsta (Temla, Lookin for Freedom) to whimsical (Hallucination Pills, Warrior Song).

His songs tear down Gaddafi's regime, celebrate Libya's society, culture, and people, and explore how to build a new, free Libya. He promotes reconciliation by giving shout-outs to all elements of Libyan society and by arguing that vigilantism and revenge killing have no place in the new Libya.

A few weeks ago, Ibn Thabit shocked his fans by announcing his retirement from hip hop (video here). Now, he says, he wants to help build a new Libya in a new way.

[For more on Ibn Thabit, click here.]


Egypt and January 25

In Mubarak's Egypt, unlike Libya, Syria, or Bahrain (check out "Athletes of Bahrain"), artists could manage to attach their real names to revolutionary forms of expression while keeping themselves out of jail. Artists such as El Deeb, Ramy Donjewan, Zap Tharwat, MC Amin, Revolutionary Records), and Ismailia Soldiers created a vibrant revolutionary underground scene in the years preceding the revolution. Arabian Knightz even managed to get a little play on Egyptian satellite channels.

By being a direct forum for revolutionary expression, Egyptian Hip hop played a small but key role in the decade-long buildup of the movements, organizational infrastructure, and political consciousness that led to the January 25 Revolution. Now, as the massive recent anti-SCAF protests demonstrate, hip hop is an established part of Egypt's political discourse. (Full lyrics here.)




[Ulysses examines social and political change in the Middle East and North Africa through the lens of Arabic hip hop. Ulysses blogs at Revolutionary Arab Rap. This article was published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons License. It was distributed by Portside. Go to the original posting for dozens of source and background links and links to additional videos.]

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