redFlags

Labor Day: Which side are you on?

Labor Day in my neck of the woods is the biggest carnival in America. About a million people have gathered in Central Brooklyn for the West Indian Day Parade, known to West Indians as the Labor Day Parade. This year, it's the only one NYC gets because the Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO has canceled the usual flag-waving exercise for the first time in a century (from what I heard). So... it's worth remembering today that "labor", conceived of and enforced as the skilled, pensioned and professionalized workers of the core industries is just one section of the international working class. Our struggle is a freedom struggle, as sloppy and hopeful as that's bound to be. Today is carnival in Brooklyn, May Day is our international workers day. Video by Rebel Diaz.

Politics in an age of fantasy

Stephen Duncombe writes in the premier issue of Turbulence, a new theoretical journal-cum-newspaper that:

The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush’s people believe in creating it. The left and right have switched roles – the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. The political progeny of the protestors who proclaimed, “Take your desires for reality” in May of 1968, were now counseling the reversal: take reality for your desires. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”

I have to say I know what he's talking about. From defending the evaporating, fetid gains of the welfare state or the ongoing acceptance by people who should know better of the Clintonian urge to do the Bushie thing right, large sectors of the "left" have become more conservative than those they ostensibly oppose. The fault of this, if where it lies is so simple, may reside less in a lack of the urge to dream than in the inculcated, now naturalized habits of American anti-communism – those who refuse to even say the world socialism shouldn't be shocked when the movements they lead and participate in settle for a refracted politics of fear and permanent, if glorious, resistance. After all, isn't "yelling from the mountaintop" just another word for vanguardism? Or, is it only a dread vanguard when there's the expectation that people will listen, be transformed and themselves take responsibility for others?

I only ask these questions because it seems like the stalemate in the movement of movements has settled into a discomforting middle age. One quick note: Turbulence makes it's entire issues immediately available as a PDF. In other words, they write so that people read! Here's to hoping more publications see the wisdom in this. Click on the cover to get the entire issue as a PDF formatted for letter-size paper.

We must name the system

This dramatic reading of Paul Potter's rightly famous speech is part of a wonderful series of public performances called the Port Huron Project re-enacting the signal flares of the American New Left. It's striking how contemporary they sound, and why, really, 1968 neither failed nor won. It is in more ways than one would wish the terrain of the battle we are still fighting. It's easier than you think to engage in free speech. You just have to do it. Read an interview with project creator Mark Tribe.