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.

Comments

I'm getting really sick of this infatuation with trying to relive the 60s.

I'd rather relive 1917 than 1967.

[srogouski]

I'd rather relive the Renaissance.

But if 1968 is the "same terrain" we find ourselves on now, is 1917?

The renaissance wasn't that great if you were just some illiterate peasant...

1968 isn't the same terrain. That's why it's stupid to try to recreate it. But on top of that how can you compare the Bolsheviks with any of these silly sex and drugs groups that had their glory days in the 60s?

[JB]

You can compare any two things. Difference is one of the ways we understand things. Discrimination, in that sense, is important.

Anyone who doesn't think free love and casting off religious morality wasn't an issue in the Russian revolution is quite mad. Absurdity was made possible on a whole new level by the threat of nuclear holocaust, a threat the Bolsheviks could not have imagined – and that entirely unexpected results along with other breakthroughs like mass birth control.

I don't know if this is about recreating anything. Learning history, including the depth of thought and moral commitment of previous generations has always helped me understood the responsibilities attendent with mortality. We will all die, so it really matters how we live and what changes we have made.

A friend send me a "verse read at an atheist's funeral", from the words of Emerson:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false
friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

[srogouski]

The renaissance wasn't that great if you were just some illiterate peasant...

Considering the fact that I'd be capable of time travel I don't think I'd be just any illiterate peasant.

But in reality, the condition of an illiterate peasant now in 2007 isn't much better than it was during the Renaissance. In fact, considering the amount of environmental devestation, considering the fact that the oppressors have F18s and nuclear submarines instead of cross bows and horses, their lot in life may even be worse.

Now I guess we can start talking about the Cultural Revolution. Bob Avakian assures me that Mao took illiterate peasants and liberated them in the space of a decade.

The corporate media tells me Mao was worse than Hitler.

Help. I don't speak Chinese. I'm not a Chinese scholar. I don't have a clue about who's right.

[srogouski]

But on top of that how can you compare the Bolsheviks with any of these silly sex and drugs groups that had their glory days in the 60s?

Were the 60s about silly things like drugs and free love?

Or were they about the assassination of every American political figure capable of any good and the destruction of a small country in Southeast Asia that dared to resist?

[zerohour]

The 60s can hardly be characterized by "silly sex and drugs groups that had their glory days in the 60s" You had the Black Panthers, SDS, the women's liberation movement, the ongoing Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, not to mention the resurgence of Marxism-Leninism.

If you want to make the case that a Leninist formation was possible in the 1960s based on the historical conditions, please do so. Otherwise it's not helpful to erase a powerful history that was not only broad, but experimenting with revolutionary and utopian visions and actions in the midst of an empire carrying out a massive war. In another thread, someone mentioned reds underestimating the political value of humor, in contrast to anarchists. I think this is because anarchists have over-emphasized the one thing Marxists have unfairly denigrated for too long: utopian desire. Our socialism cannot just be "Soviets + electricity." This slogan reflected a pressing issue for the Bolsheviks but is inappropriate for the 20th/21st century US.

The Russian Revolution was an incredible step forward for humanity but it emerged in conditions radically different from ours. In the time since, our methods of understanding the world have become more complex, particularly in the ways we interrogate class, gender, race, politics, ideology, culture.

Re-living the past isn't the issue, unless you're a Trotskyist, but learning from it is; seeing where the breaks and continuities are, making our present into a useful past for new generations.

What the video shows, and I'd like to hear what others thought of it, is that the names might have changed but the empire fundamentally does not. The speech was both articulate and appropriate.

If the 60s were only the way you remembered it, you weren't there.

[zerohour]

An addendum.

I said: "The Russian Revolution was an incredible step forward for humanity but it emerged in conditions radically different from ours. In the time since, our methods of understanding the world have become more complex, particularly in the ways we interrogate class, gender, race, politics, ideology, culture."

I also wanted to add that we've had many more revolutions to learn from, at least one, the Chinese Revolution that moved forward from the Bolsheviks.

[Hey!]

At the top of your Hot Shots column, you placed a link to a blog entry that talks about the recent 'outing' of cops trying to infiltrate a black bloc in Quebec.

One of the ways these cops were identified, apparently, is that they were 'twice as buff' as your average black blocker.

Now, as a revolutionary communist who is physically fit and goes to the gym twice a week as well as engaging in a variety of outdoor activities, I have to imagine that I also am twice as buff as 'your average Black Blocker' (who, it should be said, is probably a 'Ruffles vegan' or some other such physically robust specimen).

Isn't there something wrong with identifying physical fitness with being a cop?

[Whities Advocate]

It was boring. Standard doodoo we've all heard a million times.

[srogouski]

Isn't there something wrong with identifying physical fitness with being a cop?

As a "white ethnic" native of the NYC region with a vowel at the end of his name who's probably a bit larger physically than the typical anarchist or anti-war protester and as someone who takes photos of anti-war protests, I might just fit the profile of an undercover cop.

But in the case of the three undercovers in Canada there were other factors.

1.) Not one but three guys in their thirties who were all a bit too well-built for the typical anarchist.

2.) Matching bandanas and boots.

3.) Carrying themselves in a swaggering/menacing way.

4.) Trying to provoke violence.

5.) Gruff, uncommunicative and angry when they were confronted.

Not every 35 year old who can bench his weight at an anti-war rally is a cop but in this case it seemed pretty obvious and all it really took was someone with the balls to call them out.

[srogouski]

It was boring. Standard doodoo we've all heard a million times.

In a way that's the point. But the problem isn't Paul Potter's speach.

It's the fact that we are still on the "same terrain" that they were in the 1960s.

So people tend to model their protests/analysis off of what SDS did 40 years ago. It's still relevent but we've seen it so many times it seems dull.

Go back to newspaper archives of anti-Vietnam-war protests.

What do you see? "Support the Troops Bring them Home" signs. Even I was surprised by that one.

In a way a lot of the 1990s anti-globilization stuff seemed new because Clinton wasn't using the old Cold War openly thuggish tacticts. A lot of what the ruling class was doing was modeled around economic, not military domination.

But boom, come 9/11 and the Arabs set up to be the new Cold War enemy and everything begins to look like the Vietnam era again.

[r. john]

"But on top of that how can you compare the Bolsheviks with any of these silly sex and drugs groups that had their glory days in the 60s?"

As someone pointed out, that is a pretty crude misrepresentation of the 60s -- but it is also a misrepresentation of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Like all great revolutionary movements -- the Russian revolution had waves of silliness, social experiment, wacky ideas that seemed reasonable at the time, people who thought revolution means "anything goes" and so on.

And, in fact, you can HAVE a decent revolution without all that being unleashed and sorted through.

There were huge currents of "free love" (including within the bolsheviks themselves - leading Lenin to make his "glass of water" polemics), there were nudists (though not in the depths of winter), there were ecstatic new religious movements (did you know that the imported baptist bornagain movement had a great growth in the 1920s, some say there were more baptist recruits in the countryside than Komsomol!), there were movements against smoking and other social "vices" among communist youth (which were a conservative element distracted from their real revolutionary tasks),

And there were wacky artists. One story: in the wake of the revolution, there was an art project in MOscow to put statues of famous revolutionaries on public display through out the city. However the radical artists were so influenced by anti-realist trends that the statues and busts were (uh...) wildly creative, and you couldn't really tell who the person was unless you read the plaque. Lenin wrote a cautious, loving note about this where he said (and I"m paraphrasing)): "I don't like to inject myself in matters of art, where I know little, and I don't want to set standards. But I would like to make a request: when this art project makes its statues of Marx and Engels I would like enough realism employed that you can discern their hair and beards, and more or less tell who it is."

Anyone who things that sex and drugs in the 60s was simply silly, or that it was not part of breaking out of the straitjacket of reactionary america, or that it was not tied (in complex and contradictory ways) to breaking with old sex roles and old ways of thinking, or that it was not part of a mood of communal experimentation, or that a youth counterculture is not needed...

well, you get my point.

One final example:

There has never been a real revolution that did not have accompanying radical hairstyles and clothes.

The rebels in France were called "sans cullotte" after their pants style (MOdern trousers were the radical new dress that came in then.)

The British revolutionaries were called "round heads" because they refused to wear the long flowing locks required of decadent aristocratic fops.

The Chinese revolution involved the "cutting of the queues (pigtail)" -- which since the Manchu dynasty (17th century) had been required, and was supposedly "how you were pulled into heaven." Starting with the great 1911 disturbances cutting the queues was a great act of rebellion -- and a "crossing of the Rubicon" (since you couldn't hide later what you had done). It was a visible fuck you to theestablished order. And in particular the short hair on both men and women was associated with the Communists, and was one of the celebrations people made when they arrived in liberated areas like Yenan.

In russia, the Bolsheviks had an intense fashion style: shaved heads and black leathers. Very cool.

In Peru, the Shining Path was so associated with a look that police would go through buses looking for young women with short bobbed hair, sneakers, book backs, and the courage to look you in the eye.

And of course in the U.S. during the 60s, the revolutionary mood was inseparable from long hair (and unstraightened Afros), jeans, sandals, sneakers, emboridered clothes, homemade bell bottoms, the return of beards and mustaches. Wearing long hair was so infmammatory to reactionaries that people were confronted on the street "what are you a boy or a girl?" -- you had to be careful when you traveled with hair and beards -- some were killed in rural areas by the same kinds of forces that attacked Black people.

You can't invent or impose such countercultural trends. They are something the people invent and adopt as the new arises to challenge and indict the old.

The fact that we don't currently have any radical style or counterculture or art movements on the horizon (since early punk and hiphop!) is one of the disturbing signs of the still subterranean nature of resistance.

[srogouski]

The fact that we don't currently have any radical style or counterculture or art movements on the horizon (since early punk and hiphop!) is one of the disturbing signs of the still subterranean nature of resistance.

You do have people getting arrested on the Staten Island Ferry or being prevented from flying for wearing "We Shall not Be Silent" in Arabic on black t-shirts.

[zerohour]

Standard doodoo we've all heard a million times.

Who's this "we"? If you're referring to experienced activists who have been doing work and research for years, you're right, it's not new to us.

The more important point is that not enough of the US population, that other "we", has adopted enough of a critical stance towards the US empire - it has not become common sense for them. How do we get it out to them? By demanding novelty as a condition for radical taking political speech seriously?

I am glad that imperialism has made its way back into mainstream discourse, but it threatens to become the "new normal" because of the US's powerful ideological mechanisms of recuperation.

Part of these mechanisms do is revise the past ["dope smoking hippies"] and encourage a world-weary cynicism ["tell me something new"], both of which have effects on the left. If we concede these things, we will have allowed them to maintain the ideological initiative, forcing us onto their terrain, on their terms, making our organizing that much harder.

[r. john]

"You do have people getting arrested on the Staten Island Ferry or being prevented from flying for wearing "We Shall not Be Silent" in Arabic on black t-shirts."

Sure Stan -- but political theater (including wearing the orange of Guantanamo) is not the kind of cultural earthquake i'm talking about.

Where your parents say "get a hair cut or leave." Or twenty kids get expelled from high school cuz their hair touches their shirt collars, or their kneecaps show beneath their skirts. Or when Black soldiers have growing afros peeking out under their helments, and officers worry that demanding haircuts will get them shot. Or where kids huddle under covers listening to "forbidden music" from unknown corners and strata of their own society.

Part of the scene today is that it is hard to shock. And the dynamics of commercial cooptation are very highly honed. (Twenty minutes after a radical new style appear, it will be sold in NYC boutiques. Thirty minutes later it will have a small corner at the Gap.) Look at the "Spring Break-ization" of tatts. piercing and body mods. Or the eager stampede of hip-hop toward "getting paid" (i.e. getting in).

And part of the problem is that the (highly fragmented different) countercultures have rarely been as distanced from a really radical critique of society.

The moment any cultural and fashion trend IS associated with radicalism -- then it WILL have potency (both for the kids waking up, and for the pigs clamping down). Any trend of unpolitical alienation can be relatively easily mainstreamed.

[srogouski]

Part of the scene today is that it is hard to shock. And the dynamics of commercial cooptation are very highly honed.

Thomas Frank of The Baffler wrote about this extenisively in the 1990s.

LINK

Also, Matt Taibbi used the idea to attack the anti-Iraq-war movement.

LINK

In the Sixties, the anti-war movement was part of a cultural revolution: If you opposed Vietnam, you were also rejecting the whole rigid worldview that said life meant going to war, fighting the Commies, then coming back to work for the man, buying two cars and dying with plenty of insurance. That life blueprint was the inflexible expectation of the time, and so ending the war of that era required a visionary movement.

Iraq isn't like that. Iraq is an insane blunder committed by a bunch of criminal incompetents who have managed so far to avoid the lash and the rack only because the machinery for avoiding reality is so advanced in this country. We don't watch the fighting, we don't see the bodies come home and we don't hear anyone screaming when a house in Baghdad burns down or a child steps on a mine.

The only movement we're going to need to end this fiasco is a more regular exposure to consequence. It needs to feel its own pain. Cindy Sheehan didn't bring us folk songs, but she did put pain on the front pages. And along a lonely Texas road late at night, I saw it spread.

Note how liberals like Taibbi turned on Cindy Sheehan when she connected Iraq and Israel and visited Hugo Chavez.

Looking back at it it's clear how Sheehan's image as the "anti-war protester" as "every mom" was an attempt to confine the anti-war movement inside a conservative protest pen (support the troops bring them home etc.)

When Sheehan defied the boundaries set up for her, liberals went ballistic.

[srogouski]

The moment any cultural and fashion trend IS associated with radicalism

You could always use the Karl Dix solution and wear a shirt that says "Revolutionary".

LINK

[Whities Advocate]

"Part of these mechanisms do is revise the past ["dope smoking hippies"] and encourage a world-weary cynicism ["tell me something new"], both of which have effects on the left."

Or maybe part of these mechanisms are to get politically minded people to romanticize and try to recreate some mythologized movement that failed to create revolution.

"Well we know they can't win with that so let them just keep reveling in it. It is harmless to us."

It's too bad the Paris Commune didn't have any big rock concerts that could get replayed on VH1 twice a week...

[srogouski]

It's too bad the Paris Commune didn't have any big rock concerts that could get replayed on VH1 twice a week...

Of course this ignores the fact that SNCC and SDS (where they get the above speech) weren't about big rock concerts at all.

In fact they were highly critical even of Martin Luther King and the mainstream civil rights movement for being too commerial, too mainstream, too rock star/leader friendly.

Read up on Robert Moses (the leader of SNCC not the NYC bridge builder).

He changed his name to Robert Paris *because* he didn't want to be a movement rock star.

[Henry Miller]

as interviewed in the movie Reds, on the topic of the Bolsheviks...

"They were all fucking."

[JB]

Bob Moses was probably the first genuine casualty of Camusian, anti-authoritarian conservatism in the American left; certainly the most important one. He's also the only man who ever changed his name to "Paris" for less notoriety.

[r. john]

"Of course this ignores the fact that SNCC and SDS (where they get the above speech) weren't about big rock concerts at all. In fact they were highly critical even of Martin Luther King and the mainstream civil rights movement for being too commerial, too mainstream, too rock star/leader friendly."

I think this is somewhat one-sided.

Robert Moses may have had this view... but the revolutionary movement of the 60s was quite "rock star friendly" and did not at all have the current small-minded punk hostility to those who are popular.

The panthers had fund raising concerts by the Grateful Dead (who were hardly the "icons" they became, but were certainly rockers and emerging stars.)

And the panthers were really pathbreaking in their alliance with major cultural figures (Marlon Brando and Leonard Bernstein of course come to mind). And in fact the ruling class unleashed a whole vicious and organized offensive (under the banner of mocking "radical chic") to disrupt such unity and attack such figures. (One major element of Cointelpro was its targeting of actors and actresses and musicians aligned with the revolutionaries.)

SDS at various levels was close to different singers: Virtually every SDS document I ever read started with a quote from Dylan -- who was hardly a nobody. (As the very name "weatherman" confirms -- but not just them. There were radical papers like "Maggie's farm" etc.)

The White Panthers were centered around the MC5, the detroit revolutoinary proto-speed metal band. And, of course, you are leaving out the whole role of John Lennon, who at his most revolutionary was openly aligned with John Sinclair and the Panthers (and ATTICA!).

In some ways, the culture was more "ours" at that time -- i.e. rock was new, and the jaded, pathetic status of "rock star" or "superstar" had not yet emerged. To be a rocker or folkie was not yet acceptable, even if it had become (shockingly for the powers) the music of a generation.

I remember personally going to see a Jefferson Airplane concert in Boston, and hundreds of us bring helmets because of the expectation that the night would include long street fights through the downtown with police. Or coming out of a Janis Joplin concert in a college statium and finding that the state governor had literally lines the streets all the way back to campus with national guardsmen, armed with rifles and bayonets.

Your summation sees the 60s through the current prejudices against "rock stars" (who were hardly mainstream then, when they were spearheading a counterculture! a COUNTER culture that was actually feared and hated.)

In other words, i think you just get it wrong. And that this snarky view of cultural figures (which is a whole climate, not your alone!) is really (imho) just wrong, self-defeating and quite sectarian on many levels.

I want revolutionary rock concerts that could get played on VH1! Don't you?

[JB]

R. John – you're reminding me of my formative concert riot, after Public Enemy and Sonic Youth played a show at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom during the first Gulf War. I was around 18 and the show's crowd had largely been at the antiwar protests in the Loop during the day.

It was a turning point. Sonic Youth opened the show, but halfway through their gig the crowd was just chanting PE! PE! and heckled Thurston Moore's repeated destruction of guitars. When Chuck D came out with the S1Ws and Flav in tow we went wild. Banners hung from the balconies and a good third of the concert was Chuck doing some mass agitation and PE (political eduction) about the war. There were a ton of sailors in the house on leave from Great Lakes Naval and he encouraged them to not go, and for people in the crowd to house soldiers who refused to fight.

Outside, a member of the RCYB was flyering the crowd as we left. A few beefy white guys started harassing him and he told the them to fuck off, as I heard. What I did see was them vamping on him, beating him down onto the ground. Now, Chicago's a rough town and brawls weren't all that uncommon – certainly not when you opposed shit like that war.

Anyway, the crowd "intervened" and started whooping the ass of the middle-aged guys... who turned out to be undercover cops. They called in a general riot order and within 15 minutes there were hundreds of cops fighting back-and-forth with the crowd.

One thing I really remembered was that nobody was in the mood to take shit from the police, but when dogs showed up – the black people went insane. The site of police dogs trained on the crowd brought out an immediate ferocity. No "Selma" after the PE show!

I don't remember anyone "hating" on Chuck D for being a "movement rock star" even when he talked stupid Nation of Islam shit. In fact, we were bored, to use the idiom, with the sullen, depressed punk energy that constantly accused everyone of being poseurs, not the true, real authentic whatever.

Thanks Chuck (and Flav) for a great night, and Thurston Moore who had the magnanimous decency to cede the stage. Punk is fucking dead, though it has a permanent half-life just like deadheads and other subcultural moments.

Rumor has it that Outernational is cutting their new album...

I love movement rock stars. I loved Joe Strummer like and uncle, and what can I say, I love anyone who gets out there and does it.

[JB]

Regarding the power of counter-culture, R. John says: Where your parents say "get a hair cut or leave." Or twenty kids get expelled from high school cuz their hair touches their shirt collars, or their kneecaps show beneath their skirts. Or when Black soldiers have growing afros peeking out under their helments, and officers worry that demanding haircuts will get them shot. Or where kids huddle under covers listening to "forbidden music" from unknown corners and strata of their own society.

First off, I just know there are millions of kids growing up in kooky Christian fundamentalist families who are most certainly listening to the devil's music "under covers" or... over on MySpace.

Whole towns have criminalized sagging pants, which is then enforced on black youth or, I'm also sure, white kids who cross those lines.

The culture is fractal. There is no "bandstand of hits" that puts us all on one page or another. This is not the age of Top 40 radio. It's the iPod, the playlist, the teenagers listening to punk, hiphop and Billie Holliday. And so it will continue to be.

The best radical bands these days, like Outernational, Ozomatli, RATM, and the whole Rock en Español scene are syncretic and willfully ecclectic. The crisis of the music industry and prevalence of p2p technology means we don't have to eat all the shit they serve... and if anyone really knows this, it's the kids coming up today.

The cynicism of punk is the atrophy of defeat. It stinks – but blaming punk (or the half-life of hiphop) for that deflated feeling misses the point. I see affirming culture all around.

Maybe I missed the 60s so I'm not waiting for some replay. Cause if I'm sure of anything, it's not coming like that again.

I believe, quite truly, we are at the end of the American empire – and that doesn't mean something better is coming. But they can't rule in the old ways... so it remains to be seen if we'll continue to let ourselves be ruled.