A wide coalition of housing activists, clergy, leftists, unionists, anarchists, and others in San Francisco staged an “Occupy Wall Street West” day of action in downtown San Francisco on Friday, January 20. (The Committee for Full Enjoyment was out too, including yours truly.) It was a cold and soggy day, but a couple of thousand people blockaded, sat in, and protested in front of more than a dozen corporate and government offices, notably Wells Fargo Bank headquarters,

Bank of America’s west coast main office, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Then on Saturday, January 28, Occupy Oakland staged their “Move-In Day” and marched on the long-empty, publicly-owned Kaiser Auditorium, intending to make it their new social center. Famously now, the Oakland police used teargas and flashbang grenades to repel and disperse the Oakland occupiers. By the time the long day was over, over 400 people had been arrested, many of them in a blatantly illegal round-up of 200 people when police trapped them on Telegraph Avenue in front of the YMCA.

On both sides of the Bay the political confrontations sought to break the ice on the new year by reaching new stages for the local Occupy movement. A day of horizontal direct action and disruption in San Francisco; a dramatic attempt to claim an empty public building in Oakland., followed by a day of police violence. In local circles, while some participants are publicly confident that both efforts in SF and Oakland were “successful” in basic ways, many private conversations I’ve been in have wondered whether or not the local movements are losing broad support. Some people accept the mass media framing of the violence in Oakland as caused by the demonstrators, or at least blame protesters for answering police brutality with anything other passivity or evasion. Others find the tried-and-true sit-ins and blockades staged in San Francisco as ineffective symbolism or even as boring theater, and question the preponderance of left organizations, nonprofits, and unions.

Since the eviction of the Occupy camps late last year, thousands of people have been talking, planning, and wondering what would 2012 bring? How could the best of the past months’ experiences be carried forward and even expanded upon? How could we top the November 2 “General Strike” and Port protest that drew tens of thousands of people into a daylong festival that occupied a good part of Oakland’s downtown before heading over to the Port and stopping shipping for several shifts? Fewer people turned out for the December 12 Port Shutdown in Oakland, though it was still effective for part of the day, along with allied actions in a half dozen other cities. Still fewer came out in the January 20th rain in San Francisco, or a week later to “move in” to the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland. Signs of trouble? or just to be expected, given the time of year, the nature of the events, etc.?

Maybe, maybe not, only time will tell for sure. But it’s possible that a concerted media campaign to amplify the militant self-defense actions of Oakland protesters has scared away some people and dismayed others. I saw a defender of militant action quoted on a Facebook post that said it was probably a good thing if it scared some people away, since “he couldn’t trust a lot of people politically anyway.” I wonder how prevalent this kind of vanguardist delusion is? What’s been interesting up until now is just how many people have been ready enthusiastically to embrace overtly anti-capitalist rhetoric, albeit amidst a great deal of traditional populism too.

The horizontalist San Francisco Day of Action found itself trapped in what one friend recently dubbed “Big Government Anarchism.” Dozens of self-organized affinity groups, committees, nonprofit activists, and some trade unionists staged their own interventions all over town. In seeking to “crack the corporate piggybank” the Wall Street West occupiers demanded an end to bank evictions and foreclosures, and to put an end to corporate personhood. Targeting threatened homes is practical and as real as it gets. But in the clamor for justice and fairness, there lurks an unspoken faith that social priorities can be changed by a change in government policy. If the government would radically reduce its spending on wars, overseas military bases, corrupt weapons systems, an ever-expanding spook bureaucracy, and a growing prison system, we’d be safer and we’d have money to spend on all kinds of social needs, from housing to health care and food security for all. Take away corporate personhood and an electoral democracy of over 300 million people can become genuinely representative. Really?

Isn’t this the kind of wishful thinking that leftism has crashed on for the past few decades? We already know how uninspiring existing left-wing politics has been for a long time, with repetitive demands for “Jobs” and “Peace” inevitably falling on deaf ears and dwindling turnouts. The Occupy Wall Street West effort took place alongside the remnants of Occupy SF and had some cross-participation, but broke no new ground. January 20 repeated a combination of techniques that stretch back to the Hall of Shame and Warchest Tours of the early 1980s combined with some of the blockading and protest styles from that same era that have traveled through history by way of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and the shutdown of San Francisco at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. These anarchistic interventions can effectively paralyze business as usual for some hours or even days, but fail to connect with a transformative politics. The direct action tactics are used to voice moral disapproval of speculation, profiting, war-mongering, ecological damage, now adding corporate personhood to the list.  But taken as a whole, the tone of these protests combine to suggest that in a different government we might find the answers, hence “big government anarchism.”

Occupy Oakland, by contrast, is populated with the self-proclaimed radical wing of the Occupy movement, and consists of many anarchists and small-c communists who avoid making demands that would reinforce the government/nonprofit paradigm of social change. They set out to get a building to have a new home for the Oakland occupation. Organizers hoped that they’d be able to gain entry to the Kaiser Auditorium and hold it for at least a few days to show what they could do with such a space. The authorities and especially the Oakland Police had no intention of allowing any autonomous space to get started. Occupiers had prepared for the now expected police violence by bringing shields and developing a high degree of internal solidarity among themselves. This served them well throughout the day, pulling people back from arrest from time to time, and managing several mass escapes from police encirclement. A lot of teargas and flashbang grenades were thrown by police that day, and hundreds of constitution-busting, pre-emptive mass arrests were made, most of which will never lead to any criminal charges being filed.

Earlier this week pundit Chris Hedges published an essay called “The Cancer in Occupy” that has rocketed around the internet and is generating a huge backlash. The best response I saw so far is at the AK Press blog, written by Don Gato, which he wrote for his own blog.

Chris Hedges launches into a frontal attack on the “Black Bloc movement” and its supposed chief theoretician John Zerzan of Eugene, Oregon. Hedges apparently thinks that the violence in Oakland last week, and in various occupy evictions during the past months is deliberately provoked by “Black Bloc” demonstrators. There is no doubt that the Occupy movement is struggling now with tactics and strategy after its brutal evictions late last year, and has not yet found a winning formula to begin thriving and growing again.

I’d have to say that Zerzan and the “Black bloc” are pretty irrelevant to Occupy Oakland. I personally know many people who have been deeply involved the whole time and on the front lines in many of these police attacks, and Hedges’ weird editorial is nonsense. The diverse people behind masks and shields are far from homogenous or hegemonic, but they are trying to push beyond the acceptable tactical limits of the past.

Don Gato makes the intelligent points that “black bloc” is a tactic not a movement, and that hardly anyone—anarchist, communist, or otherwise inclined—is a follower of John Zerzan. (Zerzan and I go way back, to the early days of Processed World when he was getting ready to decamp San Francisco for Oregon and was still obsessively posting flyers in the neighborhood glorifying lone gunmen (who went berserk and shot dozens of people on campuses, malls, or wherever it was happening) as exemplars of an unmediated revolt against the unfolding collapse of industrial society.) Zerzan is one of the main people who have pushed neo-primitivist politics, arguing against the category of “technology” in its entirety, objecting to any use of tools in a future free society as an inevitable reinforcement of capitalism. His thinking has been absolutist and absurd for decades and while he’s had a few moments of influence and fame (notably by inspiring the Unabomber’s rantings), he’s never aspired to be anyone’s leader, and never has been.

Hedges, who invoked Zerzan in a narrative where he really doesn’t belong, had developed a certain credibility over the past months, in part because of his bashing of Obama and the pusillanimous Democrats, and his unbridled enthusiasm for the riots in Greece against austerity and the financial dictators there. Don Gato does away with most of his worst stupidities, but there’s a good “postcolonial reading” of him too.

It’s not like there hasn’t been a lot of thoughtful analysis from many participants in local movements. Josh Healey writes in “Occupy Oakland at a Crossroads: Rebirth or Self-Destruction?”:

The problem on January 28 was not the general principles, but the very real issues of goals, strategy, and tactics. Given OPD’s aggressive history, I was skeptical of our ability to take and hold any building for any serious length of time. I was angry at the pre-action press conference where the event spokesperson made empty, impossible threats to “shut down the airport” if the city did not give in to our demands. And I was worried that most people in Oakland would see this as yet another Occupy action whose message was nothing more than “Fuck the Police.” Despite these fears, I made my way to the protest, hoping against hope to be proven wrong.

I joined the crowd of over 1,000 people around noon at Occupy Oakland’s regular meeting place, Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of city hall. We soon began marching, and thus began the first problem of the day — 99% of the people in the crowd (yes, our 99%) had no idea where we marching to. The organizers for the action had kept the exact building they planned to take over a secret in hopes of outsmarting the cops. What that meant, of course, was that the cops knew exactly where we were heading. (Undercover agents are a cop’s best friend.) So when we finally arrived at the intended target, the massive Kaiser Auditorium, it was surrounded on all sides by cops in riot gear. As many of us expected, it was clear that we had no hope of taking the actual building.

In another thoughtful essay, “Santa Rita, I Hate Every Inch of You”, Jeb Purucker writes about the experience of being in the nearby county jail with hundreds of others later that night:

Twenty-four hours into my incarceration in Santa Rita Jail, I found myself in yet another tactical conversation, dissecting the numerous failures that had led to the kettling and mass arrests of about 400 Occupy Oakland demonstrators. This is one of the few upsides of a mass arrest. After getting the rowdy activists off the streets, the police find themselves hosting a three-day strategy conference inside the jail. Whenever a conversation begins to get stale, the guards show up and shuffle people into new discussion groups, and the debate begins afresh.

For the most part, the atmosphere in my cell was not one of defeat, but rather of rigorous self-criticism. This is a necessary moment in the growth of any movement – coming up against the limits of the premises that underlie a practice – and it seemed to be getting underway just hours after that practice had collapsed on the streets of Oakland. This was decidedly not the unreflecting group of militants that Chris Hedges has recently accused of a pathological aversion to strategic thought.

Later he gets into his real point:

I don’t want to normalize or apologize for the brutality of the system, nor do I want to lapse into a debate over what constitutes an “authentic” experience of this brutality. Nevertheless, we as a movement have to stop and ask ourselves what conversations are being displaced by this exclusive focus on police brutality. More than that, we have to look at this focus as itself a symptom of deep contradictions in our practice, which we have been unable to come to terms with.

… Saturday’s action marked an advance insofar as there was clearly a tremendous amount of work that had gone into “planning for success.” A schedule of events was made, materials were gathered, and it seemed like there were the numbers to sustain an indefinite occupation. But at a more fundamental level, success was not the point. It was more or less a contingency plan for what to do in case we accidentally succeeded. The romanticized confrontation was still the unconscious premise of our actions, no matter how many people outwardly believed we would win the day.

In the holding tanks of Santa Rita, we discussed these questions. Many of us were coming to grips with the recognition that we went into Saturday thinking that there was a crew of radicals in Oakland who had it all figured out. All we had to do was show up at their event and things would go off without a hitch, which is how it had worked at the general strike and the port shutdown.

This logic broke down on Oak Street. Saturday clearly demonstrated the limits of a mode of organizing that has thus far been successful. Up until now, Occupy has involved a contradictory and unstable mixture of liberal and more radical elements held together by a thin tissue of stories of injustice and violated “rights.” This fact has led to endless unproductive disputes about the role of “violence” in our movement, of which Chris Hedges is just the most recent and banal example.

Sure, there are some hotheads who like fighting cops. We have the same problem in Critical Mass, going on for years now. But they are extremely few. The framing in the mass media is always to blame those few and to discredit the whole movement and all its myriad perspectives because somehow the violent few are given the power to represent all others. We just have to push back against that misframing and insist that there is a whole other narrative that looks at the same events very differently, and primarily in terms of the mindboggling waste of public resources by Oakland officials (who have been laying off thousands of city employees, closing public schools, etc., while spending $2-3 million on policing Occupy Oak). Now they got their money’s worth by using hundreds of police in an all-day assault on peaceful demonstrators whose primary goal at the outset was to occupy an empty public building and use it for something tangible during the next weeks and months.

Everyone knows that if Occupy gets a foothold in a publicly-owned building it will indeed be a launching pad for a whole series of aggressive demonstrations and further assertions of public rights, public commons, etc. More or less what we hope for, eh? And that’s the primary reason why Oakland will spend any amount to stop them from re-establishing a permanent or semi-permanent base. Scattered and dispersed, Occupiers are much easier to control and keep on the defensive. Moreover, they have to work five times as hard just to converse with each other, let alone do anything beyond that. Much of the community of homeless and protesters that grew together during those heady autumn days is dispersed. Without a place to meet, eat, get basic medical attention, sleep, etc., it’s really hard to create the synergies that helped Occupy escape the boundaries of typical leftist protest. Now it’s kind of stuck replicating old forms, like marches, protests, cat-and-mouse evasion of police efforts, or in San Francisco on Jan 20, a panoply of decentralized “direct action” blockades and sit-ins in front of banks and other corporations and government offices.

The theater of protest is beginning to take it toll. Quite deliberately framed as a spectacle of violence, it plays in mass media and suburban living rooms as proof that the police are needed, even when they are the prime instigators of violence. For those far from the immediate scene, it’s easy to blame protesters for “causing” violence, since the police aren’t riotously shooting off teargas and grenades on a daily basis… something must be triggering them. And voila! Masked anarchists are tearing down fences, running through streets, sometimes hurling teargas canisters or bottles at lines of approaching riot police, proving a postieriori the need for riot police! It’s all very frustrating for people who set out with the intention to nonviolently occupy a wasted public resource and use it for genuine community needs, who are now spending a lot of time backpedaling and trying to clarify that it was a police riot against legitimate dissent, as opposed to the widely disseminated lies.

Another note rising from the cacophony of post-event analysis and criticism is the oddly macho pride emanating from some of the Oakland comrades. The words “ferocity” and “ferocious” are used to proudly describe the demonstrators on January 28 who withstood the police assaults. Echoing the romanticized portraits of the Durruti Column in Spain’s Civil War, or any of a number of other glorified revolutionary moments in the past, this kind of pride is understandable, inevitable, and part of the problem because it starts to promote street fighting as an arena in which to achieve standing in the community, to earn one’s stripes, so to speak.

I think the problem is how to derail this whole trajectory? What tactics can we use that are based on a strategy of outflanking and eroding police and state violence? Marc Salomon’s piece “Occupy Reality” makes a number of interest points too, but I was especially glad he quoted Sun Tzu, “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” Salomon offers a strong critique of both San Francisco’s J20 actions and Oakland’s J28:

So when the J20 day of action rolls around, the nonprofit corporate activists and organized labor jump on it, rebrand OSF as Occupy Wall Street West (OWSW) and proceed to graft their failed agendas and narrow pet priorities onto OSF with the intent to shut down the financial district. There were some creative actions during the rainy day, but there was no strategic plan to crimp profit accumulation and cause real pain to the 1%. At best it served as a placeholder to signal that Occupy is still here. … As on J20, J28 was not aimed to grow the movement, it was aimed to privilege tactics over strategy in a way that ended up like the Monty Python peasant sketch: “come see the violence inherent in the system, help, help I’m being repressed.”

I’m not a pacifist, and I don’t advocate sticking to legal behaviors necessarily. But to walk into frontal confrontations with the heavily armed and highly motivated authorities, who can then count on a tidal wave of press mischaracterizations to back them up, is just strategically flawed, and tactically hopeless. I think many people are coming to grips with this, but the lingering euphoria of a well-placed rock, or a mass breakout, or a dearrested comrade, feeds militaristic fantasies that ultimately will be suicidal.

Hit-and-run, high mobility, surprise—all of these are strong weapons for the current movement, and hard for the police to handle, since they are large, lumbering bureaucracies. Trying to take and hold space, though a surprisingly effective tactic during the early months of Occupy, is going to be very difficult now. Instead of fixating on that, why not start thinking about other ways to meet people’s needs? Robin Hood comes to mind, the self-reduction movement of Italian women in the 1970s comes to mind (where they’d go in and take what they needed at local supermarkets en masse, leaving what they felt they could pay, or nothing at all), even something as simple as pelting politicians and corporate heads with rotten vegetables when they appear in public!

Perhaps more important is to refocus our efforts on the original impetus for this moment: the system is broken. Democracy is a complete sham (and shame) at national and state levels, and is barely alive at the local level. “Representation” is a hollow claim and the surge towards General Assemblies and other forms of consultative, consensual directly democratic processes is palpable. Economic life is increasingly precarious, and most work is a waste of time if not actually making the world worse! The ecology of the planet is being wrecked in large and small ways EVERY DAY, and the work we do collectively is the main cause of it! We have to change what we do, and how we do it, and it’s urgent that we get on with that transformation. And of course, we’re all atomized and divided in ways that make it hard to build social solidarity and engage in mutual aid. The beauty of the Occupy camps was the space they made for those kinds of new relationships to flourish.

So we need to create space where everyone is invited in, yes all 99%, and everyone is expected and encouraged to contribute to figuring out how to get out of this mess. The November 2 “General Strike” in Oakland was a space that invited tens of thousands to be part of the conversation, and that’s the only way this potentially revolutionary movement can really grow. If the movement becomes a weird urban chess match between motivated protesters and heavily armed police, it will increasingly be reduced to a spectacle with an all-too-predictable outcome.

Woke up yesterday to a glorious sunny, warm day, unusual for San Francisco in the summer, and after a cold fog last night, it’s beautiful again today. In the news yesterday I read a cyclist was killed by an SUV jockeying for position on a Los Angeles street, and in downtown SF a woman cyclist was run over (she died today) by a truck after she turned left in front of it. The dull routinization of slaughter that our transit choices depend on…

A few days ago SF police shot a guy ten times when he ran away from them after apparently evading his $2 bus fare in Bayview (there are conflicting claims about whether or not he was armed and whether or not he shot at the police, and now the police are claiming he shot himself!). Two nights ago a spirited anti-cop demo went roaring through the streets, leading to 35 arrests and a smattering of property damage. Some people produced a flyer (art below). I loved the banner in front of the march: “You can’t shoot all of us: Fuck the Police!” It is a deep insult to the social fabric of our daily lives that people are getting murdered by police for any reason, let alone something as petty as avoiding a bus fare.

This is a flyer distributed at the march July 20 in San Francisco.

I’m reminded of Peter Linebaugh’s magisterial “The London Hanged,” an incredible book in which he profiles several hundred individuals who were hung (by the neck) at Tyburn Gate in London between the mid-1600s and mid-1700s, the vast majority for stealing rather small amounts of “property” (often food). As Linebaugh shows, this was the time in capitalist and British history when the basic idea of the inviolability of property rights was being established, and it took a good deal of state-sanctioned murder to reinforce that new logic. Could it be that we’re living through an analogous process in which refusing to pay for small things like bus rides, or even petty shoplifting, is going to face much more severe punishment, even random death?

This, in turn, dovetails interestingly with an article I just read in the latest Mute called “Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback, and Culture” by Benedict Seymour. It’s a complicated essay that is making a difficult comparison between culture and finance. One of his arguments is that we’re living through an era in which capitalism is abandoning its historic role in supporting the cost of reproducing the working class (and the society that facilitates the accumulation of capital).

“Today we see expanding forms of ‘non-reproduction’, including: the annexation of labor-power outside the advanced capitalist countries through globalization; the bolstering of profits by paying workers less than the cost of their reproduction; the non-maintenance of infrastructure; the non-replacement of natural resources, etc.”

Seymour importantly brings the inquiry to the question of social media and networked economies, because these new forms (increasingly ubiquitous) generate huge amounts of free work by users, which then become monetized by online sites like Google, Facebook, etc. Finance capital, which expanded at a dizzying pace during the past decade or two, depends on promises of future production and future profits to justify the value of bonds, stocks, derivatives, and the whole fictional mess of “financial instruments.” But capitalist production has long depended on acquiring free inputs—environmental, infrastructural, and reproductive—and in that way presages the supposedly cutting edge co-optation of unpaid labor via the precarious labor processes of online and immaterial production. Culture and finance both depend on the current form of capitalist exploitation, annexing unpaid inputs from any and all sources, and importantly, refusing to pay for the costs of producing or maintaining those inputs (whether the natural environment or the cultural environment of a rich artistic scene). As Seymour cleverly puts it: “Culture and finance are increasingly interchangeable; finance is aestheticized as its claims become absurdly fictitious; culture is reduced to finance as its fictions become absurdly monetized.”

He hits an important point when he brings in the kinds of activities that I wrote about in Nowtopia, but sharply underlining the common failure to target value itself as the problem. (I wrote about this extensively too, as the problem of cooptation when interesting projects that seem to escape the logic of wage-labor and commodification eventually get absorbed as they become small businesses and/or dependent on nonprofit grants.) Seymour claims the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and after saw “a route to a more autonomous and egalitarian cultural and social existence, a way of dissolving the hierarchical structures of a bureaucratized mass society, [but] the pioneers of cybernetic and network culture generally failed to target the Ur-form of feedback, that is, the value form per se.” Touting the gift economy and the cooperative, liberatory advantages of freely chosen activities outside of wage-labor is one path towards a kind of escape, but only a temporary and geographically limited one so far. Crucially, the enthusiastic embrace of coops, collectives, free DIY projects, etc., without a critical understanding of the role of “free” in the restructuring of the global economy leaves one open to reinforcing some of the worst dynamics we originally set out to overturn.

“An ethos of self-limited and self-sustaining activity, freed from the hubris of modernist teleologies of growth, linked to a notion of ‘generosity,’ ‘gift economy,’ and ‘DIY’ emancipation may (still) seem appealing. Yet, however militant the refusal of instrumental reason, linear time, progression, etc., this ethos predominantly operates by bracketing out the dull compulsion of the value form. This leaves it hostage to the kind of reappropriation now being conducted by the capitalism of the Big Society.”

This reappropriation is probably a bit more starkly visible in Britain, where municipalities and art bureaucracies are everywhere coopting artists and the “new creatives” into their schemes for urban renewal. But it has been super clear too in the realm of biofuels, a push from below against petroleum oil as the exclusive fuel for engines, but then rapidly co-opted by big agribusiness, government subsidies for ethanol, and the oil industry itself. Still, on this side of the pond it’s more about subtraction than absorption. Seymour again: “Capitalism as an open system is increasingly dependent on the annexation of the ‘outside’ in all its forms, and where this outside is definitively assimilated it must be recreated endogenously by the subtraction of existing social reproduction.” Can shooting fare evaders be seen as a particularly harsh version of a ‘subtraction of existing social reproduction’? Maybe that’s a bit of a reach… but if options for survival in the interstices of this culture’s vast wealth are being squeezed and shut down, that is a version of eliminating existing channels of social reproduction.

The harshness of state violence has grown in the past decade. The Patriot Act and its invasive provisions for state surveillance have given enormous powers to the spook bureaucracies. The Drug War, recognized as an abject failure in terms of any of its ostensible goals, is actually maintained not to stop drugs but to keep them coming, and the many lucrative businesses that depend on them—from the actual drug cartels and their bankers, to the police and spy agencies, to the hardware manufacturers servicing the prison-industrial complex. Inmates went on hunger strike in the California prisons in early July, generating a certain amount of support, but mostly ignored in the mainstream press. The radical expansion of incarceration at any public cost shows no real signs of abating yet. The fiscal crisis is being used as a blunt weapon to further degrade the lives of those who already suffer the most; no discussion of bloated military, police, and prison budgets is allowed in the frenzy to cut spending, only the services that poor people depend on, and the workers who provide those services.

It’s a dark period, no doubt. But the sun is out, and it’s remarkably easy for many people to go on living as though none of the darkness on which their lives depend really existed. Declinist narratives that see the current global crisis as the stage from which the U.S. finally exits its post-WWII hegemonic role are no comfort when you consider how the destruction of a social commitment to general well-being has succeeded ideologically—but even more harshly, materially. That Obama is the enthusiastic author of the coming round of cuts and reductions in the social wage is no surprise. Imagine the wrath of African Americans if a white president was pushing these attacks! Obama is the perfect guy to carry out the neoliberal, structural adjustments in the United States, given the demobilized, depoliticized working and poorer classes, and the guilty paralysis that besets white pwogwessives when it’s time to combat the war-mongering, torturing policies of the administration, not to mention its brazen catering to the agenda as set by the ultra-right. We’re actually going to have to put up with the sickening spectacle of a year-long frenzy of liberal imploring, urging us to vote for Obama because of how awful it would be if a Republican won… really? How different would it be? Wars have been expanded, CIA torture and kidnapping continue apace, and the military budget grows and grows… And now there’s Obama’s enthusiastic support for attacking Social Security and Medicare… what Republican president could’ve gotten away with that?

The (un)funhouse mirror world of U.S. politics is well demonstrated in the emergence of the latest Alice-in-Wonderland Talking Point by the Republicans, when representative after representative appeared in the media last week talking about the ultra-rich with one term only: “job creators”!! I’ve railed against jobs before (see “Jobs Don’t Work!” in The Political Edge), so I was pleased when I came across a link to this essay “Work, Production and The Common: A Provocation” on a South African blog. One of the recurrent problems with attacking the tired leftist demands for “jobs” or “work” is the inevitable rejoinder by sanctimonious leftists: “You can only say that because you have money, you’re privileged, you’re not hungry… etc. etc.” Not far behind those kinds of assertions quickly comes the racist argument that “It’s racist to be against jobs, because people of color are the most unemployed…” or some variation on that theme.

I hope that these arguments appearing in the context of post-apartheid, neoliberal South Africa will give them more credibility with the U.S. leftists who are so quick to resort to their tired clichés and old 20th century paradigms. The essay begins by recounting how the hopes of South Africans for a better life after the overthrow of apartheid have gone unmet. Mbeki’s administration did little to redistribute wealth and certainly did nothing to meet popular demands for “decent work.” The Jacob Zuma government continues the African National Congress’ ongoing embrace of neoliberal capitalism, with its commitment to private ownership, capitalist development, and trickle-down economics. Here are some choice excerpts from the essay:

“Labor struggles have constantly reminded the country’s rulers of how democratisation is supposed to be not just a procedural and constitutional matter, but also the fulfillment of popular demands of redemption of work, which past racial domination turned into a largely oppressive reality but unions tried to rescue as a condition of solidarity and empowerment. Social movements have, finally, made the “dignity of work”, and even the “right to work” a central ethical-political component in their demands for redistribution and recognition…

 

“Once “job creation” becomes the pinnacle of emancipative imagination, it becomes easy for [employers, liberal reformers, and assorted free marketers] to argue that a bad job is better than no job at. In this way, the labor market is naturalised as an objective law of social advancement, redistributive claims become pathological symptoms of “dependency”, and social conflicts are threats to prosperity and the expansion of employment. As the definition of “decency” ceases thus to be a matter of political contestation, the subsequent, consequential step is to assert that it is up to market conditions and the characteristics of the job itself to determine how “decent” it is allowed to be…

 

“Confronted with this impressive discursive slide, where the dignity of work is upheld to reinforce the centrality of the labor market in determining the measure and reward of life, indeed the very meaning of being human, the left’s concerns with “decent work” have fallen quite short of a convincing alternative narrative or a radically oppositional recasting of desire. Having failed to contest the multitudes’ meanings and values on the terrain of work and production, traditional left forces have rather fallen back on the state as the ultimate guarantor of fairness, development, and decency. And from the state the left has received further injunctions to rely on employment, and employment only, for any meaningful social inclusion and security, with no other considerations attached as to the conditions and remunerations of work, or the measures that can at least limit a complete domination of employment over life…

 

“We cannot think of the global decline of the twentieth century socialist and nationalist left(s), themselves a major factor in the neoliberal hegemony of the past forty years, without questioning the ways in which they have idealised employment and unquestioningly associated it with progress. Within this broader devastation in the terrain of political power relations and public discourse, the left’s attachment to “decent jobs” only reveals a comprehensive failure of imagination, of which the acceptance by progressive forces of a subordinate role in a game of which capital is writing the rules is consequential…

 

“It is time to ask, is “decent work” still a valid tool to criticise capitalism and oppose the disciplining of multitudes by market forces? Or is it time to finally realise that today employment-based claims and identity lead not to emancipation, but to renewed subjugation, repression, and reaction? Should we start placing liberation from, and not through capitalist work at the core of new languages and grammars of politics, which uncompromisingly break with the legacy of the twentieth century left(s)?”

Yes! Let’s get on with it! And not to turn to the right, or the miserable chimera of the ‘center’ as endlessly trumpted by (the often very funny) Jon Stewart. Who are the mysterious “centrist” voters who now find themselves between the palpable, frothing insanity of the ultra-Right and the head-in-the-sand, business-as-usual Right, where all discussion of human liberation and social transformation are dismissed out of hand as the ravings of unrealistic loonies? Why is the Left in the U.S. so completely irrelevant and incapable of articulating anything that actually addresses the multiple crises of economy, ecology and social anomie? I’d say its fixation on “Jobs” is one of the main reasons.

Let’s end today with a last paragraph from The Tribe of Moles in South Africa:

“…another question: does the irrelevance of employment to a politics of liberation mean that production-related struggles are no longer worth fighting for? Our response is an emphatic “no”, but on condition of profoundly redefining what we mean by “production”. In other words, “production-related” can no longer simply mean “workplace-based”. Workplace struggles are, for sure, still important in affirming the autonomy of life and the common from the dictates of the market, for example through demands for wages and benefits that are impossible to meet in terms of productivity, therefore subverting wage labor from within. But struggles for production especially imply for us the production of social relations and political possibilities that emanate from the power of the common as it manifests itself across the social and the everyday. They hint, in other words, at the production of subjectivity and the refusal of the modalities of subjection along which capital and government want to align conducts and values. We are referring here not only to subjectivities premised on waged employment and the consumption of commodities but also to their correlates in the institutional sphere: liberal democracy and the idea of the individual rooted in property and market relations as the only legitimate carrier of socio-political agency.”

Continuing my slow progress through our trip (Feb-March) to Ecuador and Peru. This entry covers the trip out of the Andes across the border to Peru, and then arriving in Cuzco… but first, a couple of things to reference.

First, the new book is out! “Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78” is available now here. We’ve also created a free audio walking tour through 24 points of interest in San Francisco, mostly in the Mission District, which you can check out from afar, here.

Secondly, not to anyone’s surprise, but let me say how intensely I detest Obama and his pusillanimous hypocrisy. Now that the presidential madness is already starting, we’ll have to endure endless reproaches from apologists and the unclear, demanding that we hold our noses and objections and support Obama because the alternative would be so much worse… really?!? Let me quote Jane Mayer’s excellent piece in the New Yorker this week, who is here quoting Jack Balkin, a Yale law professor:

“We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a re-interpretation of the law  in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”

Combine this observation with the reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s police-state policies, it’s just another super obvious example of how we live in a one-party state. Sure, there are some minor differences between the two factions, but they agree on war, imperialist militarism, the dictatorship of business and property, reinforcing the widening maldistribution of wealth, etc.  So don’t wring your hands in my direction about keeping the Democrats in power… they are disgusting!

Back to travels… These photos are from our journey from Cuenca, Ecuador to Piura, Peru, crossing the border after a fantastic ridge-top bus ride that took several hours to descend from the high Andes to the hot tropical climate near the border. Before we arrived in Piura we crossed sandy desert, and the entire 3 hour bus ride from Piura to Chiclayo on the coast was through harsh desert.

As we rode along ridgetops on a small twisting road, the views were amazing.

We stayed on top of one ridge after another for hours as we drove along towards Peru.

As we came down from the mountains, the flora changed to a more tropical one.

That's our bus crossing the bridge at the Macara River which is the border between Ecuador and Peru.

Standing on the border/bridge, still in Ecuador.

In Piura, Peru, the most common vehicles were moto-tricycles.

After Piura we continued to Chiclayo where we stayed overnight before taking a very early a.m. flight to Cuzco, back to 12,000 feet altitude!

Cuzco from our hotel balcony... the original capital of the Incas, still a magical city, though super tourism-oriented.

We went to Mexico during the week of Thanksgiving to celebrate Adriana’s 40th birthday. It was mostly a pleasure-oriented journey, with a lot of family visiting and recreating… but of course we can’t go anywhere without noticing things that often go unnoticed.

In the center of Colima's Jardin Nuñez sits a classic fountain, couples strolling, and public outdoor wifi booths for anyone to sit and browse!

Here's another view of the Wifi booths in the park, the next day.

I wrote about the new Freeway Revolt underway in Guadalajara over on Streetsblog, but even in sweet, sleepy Colima we found a Paseo Nocturno that happens every Tuesday night at 9 pm.

It's basically a Critical Mass, though not named as such--a weekly bike ride in Colima that started only in April 2010 and has already reached over 100 riders every week.

I gave out a few signs to the locals and we all made fast friends...

Night photography only catches a glimpse of the whizzing bikes.

We didn’t know about the Paseo Nocturno until Adriana’s sister Ale told us about it when we woke up on Tuesday morning. We knew we had to go!

Adriana’s sister and her family live in Colima, the capital of the state with the same name, one of Mexico’s smallest states. It’s a beautiful small city, one that people who live there like to keep secret. If you ask them about Colima many of them will quickly tell you, “Ah, it’s nothing special!” but that’s just because they don’t want everyone to start moving there and turn it into a city like any other. The day before we arrived the former governor was assassinated, so there was a bit of a tense cloud hanging over the town, as many expected reprisals and didn’t want to catch a stray bullet. It’s no wonder that the drug wars would have found their way to Colima, since Mexico’s largest port is in Manzanillo, just a couple of hours away at the coast.

Colima sits in the heart of a super productive agricultural region (if you’re a regular papaya eater in San Francisco, probably they’re coming from Colima), and even the city streets are full of fruit trees.

Lime and orange trees abound on Colima's streets. Note also the cobblestones with the car tracks in the middle of the street.

Apparently Colima covered their cobblestones with asphalt at one point, and then a few years later decided to tear it out again, because the heat caused by asphalt was too great. Also, by keeping the streets mostly in cobblestones, rainwater seeps into the aquifer instead of being channeled into the stormwater/sewage system.

One of the oddest things we saw in Colima as we strolled around was several places specializing in stem cell therapy. Here’s a couple of them:

It seemed like a booming business in Colima, though we didn't meet anyone who could tell us about its extent.

Just a block from where we stayed.

This car went by in Guadalajara a week later, same company, apparently determined to scare as many customers as possible into storing stem cells with them in the event of future illness.

One of the great pleasures of Mexico is walking around and finding surprises. We walked into the city center on our first night and heard there was a party going on to honor St. Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians, over in an old neighborhood called the barrio of health (Barrio del Salud). We found it after a bit of wandering and were delighted to sample the local specialty, Dry Pozole, before a big band came out and performed a lengthy set that got the whole neighborhood up and dancing.

A big spoonful of Dry Pozole, a local specialty sold in the street at the festival.

The band lives in the neighborhood but often tours on this bus.

It could've been 1948 again!

Eventually we hit the dance floor too, for a rendition of "Brazil".

Water is always a drama in Mexico. We had a fascinating Talk on November 17 at the Shaping San Francisco Talks series on “Watersheds Lost and Found” which included a presentation by Adapting to Scarcity on the dire situation with polluted rivers and excessive dam building along the Rio Santiago outside of Guadalajara. While walking around in Colima I kept seeing this “Faro de Agua” stores:

Someday these water stores will be architectural treasures!

Mexico is full of fantasticallly beautiful natural areas of course. Not far from Colima is the gorgeous village of Nogueras, which happens to have an “Eco-park” in it, a one-time sugar mill converted into a park and museum after being the home of Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo, a famous painter, for several decades. You may recognize his kitschy children which were often used for UNICEF Christmas cards in the 1960s.

Adriana approaches across the central plaza in the beautiful village of Nogueras.

On the grounds of the Eco-park, a lush tropical paradise.

And a turtle sanctuary and breeding center!

A majestic bamboo forest lines one edge of the park.

Inside the old sugar mill's production center, old arches no longer serve their original purpose, but sure look good!

One of the best small museums I ever visited! Rangel benefited from the enormous number of pre-Columbian sculptures that abound in Colima. Workers in the area would constantly bring him items dug up during local building projects. The museum has one room dedicated to a modest display of local sculptures, following a trajectory through time. These water carriers were among my favorites.

Adriana is here once again advertising her love for telephones, between old and new!

Our stab at a self-portrait, a la Diego and Frieda... not quite!

After a couple of days we decided to indulge ourselves by visiting the Hacienda San Antonio, a place much closer to the Colima Volcano, a once-abandoned Hacienda that had been purchased and turned into a luxury hotel by Teddy Goldsmith and his wealth. The online site advised us that when it came to their dress code, we should think “indolent aristocrat,” so we had a lot of laughs through the hours we spent lounging around this spectacular spot, imagining that we were pulling that off!

The Colima Volcano, finally visible to us after being shrouded in clouds during the rest of our visit, as it would be again only an hour or two later.

We overshot the Hacienda and ended up on this road with yet another great view of the volcano!

This is a historic aerial view of the place, before restoration. Note the aqueduct bringing water from the upper right-hand corner.

It's still bringing water in today, but wait til you see what they do with it now!

It's running over the top of one wing of the hotel.

Then out into the extensive, manicured gardens...

...Where they do all kind of pretty things with it in geometric patterns.

Converging on this pool a couple of tiers away from the main house.

We got to sit languidly on the porch, eating our overpriced breakfast, enjoying this view:

We had to admit, this 'indolent aristocrat' thing wasn't too bad!

Later we had the grand tour... here's the roof deck just above where had breakfast.

Working on indolence!

The interiors were just as impressive... that's me in that mirror way back there.

One of the interior courtyards.

Love this kind of arched courtyard!

Yes, we had a sweet morning... Indolent Aristocrats--I think we missed our calling!

At 23rd and Mission fans whoop it up on all the corners.

Catharsis and ecstasy coursed through the streets of San Francisco after the climactic ending of the Giants-Phillies playoff game Saturday night. We headed out to 24th Street and immediately found ourselves surrounded by jubilant fans, mostly dressed in Giants hats and jerseys, all screaming with joy, waving and yelling and jumping around. Cars streamed by with delirious fans leaning out, waving flags, honking horns, even while the rain fell steadily on all of us. Walking towards Mission Street we high-fived dozens of friendly fans, strangers all, as we shared the excitement of the moment. An obese African American man, probably a few sheets to the wind, staggered by us shaking his head while talking to himself: “The Giants! The Fuckin’ Giants Won!…” Kids ran excitedly back and forth, hollering in triumph.

24th and Mission, once Plaza Sandino, now a Giants party!

At the corner of 24th and Mission, the erstwhile Plaza Sandino was claimed by partisans of the Gigantes! Down Mission to 23rd and 22nd, more and more people filled the sidewalks, slapping hands, hugging, yelling and cheering. Fans jammed into SUVs and old Chevrolets cruised by, re-creating for a few hours the long lost days when low-riders would cruise back and forth on Mission for hours on Friday and Saturday nights. At the old “Live at Leeds” corner of 22nd and Mission, a cohort of frenzied teens clad in the inevitable baggy pants along with some random Giants gear, would pulse into the street with each light change, vigorously slapping hands with fans hanging from their cars. The SFPD in serious crowd-control mode began to appear in squad cars and along the sidewalks, but the tense balance of power between the celebrating fans and the uniformed soldiers of law and order was not breached, at least while we were out there for about 90 minutes.

22nd and Mission: Giants fan standing in his sunroof greets teens who dance through intersection at every light change.

At 22nd Street and Mission the kids ran so fast in and out of the intersection that they turned ghostlike in this shot.

Sports victories bring people together in a way that few other events in our times do (I wrote about this back in 1984 in “We’re #1!” in Processed World #12, pp. 46-53). We can lament the apathy and obliviousness that generally accompany the political and social crises of our era. But the atomized, fragmented lives we mostly lead in our everyday existence are transcended by the sudden unity we experience in rooting for a local team who miraculously overcomes all odds to win the championship. The streets of the city are immediately transformed too. Warm greetings and camaraderie replace indifference, suspicion, and hostility. We share the streets of OUR city, and we are for a brief time a WE. It’s short-lived to be sure. How could it be otherwise? A bunch of millionaire athletes who shift from team to team with each passing season is hardly a “home team,” except for their briefly shared uniform and temporary “residence” at our local ballyard.

I know a lot of people could care less about baseball, or sports in general. But the Giants winning the National League championship in Philadelphia was a true classic, an incredible game of high suspense with a delightful ending wherein the good guys won! After an excruciating 3+ hours of the most unlikely twists and turns, Giants fans finally got their long-awaited reward when the Bearded One, closer par excellence Brian Wilson struck out Philly slugger Ryan Howard on a vicious slider that caught the bottom of the strike zone.

As we wandered further down Mission Street we found ourselves strolling behind a couple of guys, both wearing Giants hats, jackets and jerseys, bedecked in pins, indicating their long-time status as die-hard fans. We shared a few comments with them, noticing that they were puffing on triumphant cigars as they kept up the steady but luxurious pace of winners. Turns out they were season ticket holders and were going to walk all the way to the ballpark to join the celebration, but here they were on Mission, both born in SF, enjoying their neighborhood and the City in full-throated pleasure. They identified themselves as “Le Cat and Le Pieu” and we eventually said goodbye to them at 16th, but not before one of them started talking to me about the 56 years it’s been since “we” last won a World Series. The reference was to the New York Giants who last won it in 1954, four years before the franchise was moved to San Francisco to play in long-forgotten Seals Stadium at 16th and Bryant. He reminisced about the fateful line drive hit by the rookie Willie McCovey with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th, Game 7, of the 1962 World Series against the Yankees when the Giants were down a run. It was snagged by Bobby Richardson at shortstop, abruptly ending that dramatic World Series in despair for Giants fans. He also spoke eloquently of the painful collapse of the Giants in the 2002 World Series in Game 6, where they had a 5-1 lead in the 7th inning, seemingly coasting to the clinching win of that fall classic, only to have the bullpen give it up, and then lose Game 7 too to the despised Anaheim Angels.

It reminded me of the odd relationship we have to history. Most Americans can tell you a bit about WWII, maybe something about the Civil War, but that’s as far as most people’s sense of history goes. They might say something about “the Sixties” but it’s usually dismissive and trivializing. But ask any sports fan about their baseball team, or about who was a great pitcher years ago, or who was the greatest hitter of all time, and they’ll most likely have a lengthy explanation of their preference, fully backed up with dozens of factoids and statistical details, quoted from memory. The sheer quantity of historical memory associated with baseball can be staggering. Here I was walking down Mission Street, exchanging high-fives and hoots and hollers with other pedestrians as well as the dozens of passing cars, when I suddenly found myself in an earnest conversation about the history of the Giants, a history that the speaker clearly identified with as his own!

What a night!

We walked up 16th to Valencia, wondering if the excitement was pulsing on that busy corner too, but found it strangely dead. Seems the hipster capital of San Francisco wasn’t too identified with the big win. No one was out celebrating, and the usual “too cool for school” crowd was busy with their drinking and eating. We wandered up to 17th and realized that the “action” was all back where we started, in the heart of the “real” Mission at the 24th street BART plaza. Sure enough, when we got back about 15 minutes later the energy was still crackling, and even more cars were rolling up and down the street honking and celebrating. One particular cream-colored sedan with a big orange Giants SF logo on its side managed to look as much like a Giants jersey as a car could!

The kids went crazy over this cream-colored car with orange trim, a Giants SF logo made it look like a rolling jersey!

The Giants Jersey car!

Unlike many baseball games, the Giants-Phillies finale had the rhythm of a great soccer match. From the beginning the Giants pitcher, Jonathan Sanchez, was out of control, both mentally and in terms of his ability to throw strikes. One might make the analogy with a sloppy goaltender in soccer, who gives up two quick goals before the game has even passed the 10-minute mark. So it was with Sanchez, who somehow managed to yield only two runs in the first chaotic inning, a frame that had all the earmarks of a full-blown collapse by the Giants. Watching at home on TV, the old familiar failure that has characterized local teams during the past decade was raising its unmistakeable head. Somehow though, the Phillies made three outs.

The Giants didn’t look particularly baffled by Philly starter Roy Oswalt, but they failed to score in the first two innings, losing a great chance in the 2nd after having hit into yet another of their endless double-plays. Forgotten in the craziness that was about to take place, Sanchez had a relatively easy 1-2-3 2nd inning before the Giants came up in the 3rd. Sanchez himself started it off with a single, and by the time it was over, two runs had scored and one had been thrown out at home in an exciting but somewhat frustrating inning. At least the score was now tied!

In the bottom of the third, Sanchez went off the rails entirely. He walked the first guy and then drilled Chase Utley in the back with an errant pitch. Runners on 1st and 2nd and nobody out. He didn’t like Utley flipping him the ball that was lying near the first-base line, and apparently called him a schoolyard name. Utley, fully macho in his own right, returned the gesture and even took two small steps towards Sanchez. Instantly, the benches emptied and the hilarious ritual mislabeled the “baseball brawl” took place as 40-some players milled about in the infield with a few of them jawing at each other, maybe one or two actually grabbing at each other in anger. Meanwhile, in the Giants bullpen Jeremy Affeldt continued his warm-ups and after the brouhaha was settled, Giants manager Bruce Bochy yanked Sanchez and turned to his bullpen for a 7-inning effort. Affeldt came through by retiring three of the most feared Phillies hitters, preventing either runner from scoring, and shutting them down again in the 4th inning too.

The game took on a surreal quality as each side kept mounting threats, putting one or two guys on base, but never able to bring them home. Here the soccer rhythm came fully into play. Just as in a soccer game, each team rushes down to the other’s end and gets off a dramatic shot or two, but no one can score. The tension builds and builds. By the end of the 7th inning there had been so many scoring chances for both sides, but still the score was 2-2 (when it was all over each side had left 11 men on base). In the top of the 8th, Juan Uribe came up with two outs and nobody on. On the first pitch he belted it just over the right field fence for a home run and a 3-2 Giants lead! Delirium for Giants fans! The incredible catharsis of a goal finally scored after so much waiting and disappointment…

In the bottom of the inning, the Phillies had to face Giants ace Tim Lincecum, who was brought in as a relief pitcher in an unusual move by the manager, and he got the big first out, retiring slugger Jason Werth who had tormented the Giants all series. But the next two hitters got singles and with two on and one out Bochy brought in Brian Wilson, the best closer in the National League this season. But not infallible! Under the circumstances, it was a high-stress moment. I climbed up on the back of my couch, literally climbing my wall in anxious anticipation. After a couple of pitches to Phillies catcher Carlos Ruiz (a guy who has been a clutch contributor in the past two post-seasons), he hits a screaming line drive. Everyone in San Francisco gasped, but before we could let the agony sink in, the ball disappeared into first baseman Aubrey Huff’s glove who then calmly flipped it to shortstop Edgar Renteria at 2nd to double off the runner, end of inning!! The Baseball Gods were definitely on the Giants side, and if that double play line drive didn’t prove it, what would?

The Giants failed to score in the 9th, and now it was all on Brian Wilson to finish the victory. He did his usual job, pure torture! (Giants announcers Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow dubbed Giants baseball “torture” around August, as the wins started coming but always after excruciatingly tense endings.) Two on and two out and the best hitter, Ryan Howard, at bat. The count went full, 3-2, as it had for the previous batters… a foul ball, and then, incredibly, Howard stands looking as a perfect slider curves over the plate at the bottom of the strike zone. Strike 3! He’s out! Game over! Giants win the pennant! Giants win the pennant!

Giants win the pennant! Out of our houses and into the Streets!

Everyone into the streets!

Now the World Series looms. San Francisco vs. Texas! Talk about your symbolic match-ups. My pal Rebecca Solnit has just written about the David and Goliath struggle of citizens vs. corporations through the prism of California’s Proposition 23, wherein Texas oil companies (with the help of the Koch Brothers and other right-wing financiers) are attempting to reverse the measly climate change legislation we have in California to enhance their profits and ongoing destruction of the environment. The initiative is called the California Jobs Initiative or some such funhouse mirror of a title, but so far it’s losing in the polls… Let’s hope the voters of California defeat the Texas oilmen just like the Giants will defeat the Texas Rangers in the World Series!

Vamos Gigantes!

Yes, even your humble author was cheering on Mission Street Saturday night!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena for all the great photos!

California poppies in foreground, then a sweep of Goldfields on Bernal Heights, taken two days ago.

It’s that time of the year, but this is a particularly spectacular year. Heavy rains until just a couple of weeks ago, and even a sprinkle or two since then. The hills around the city and the surrounding area are brilliantly green, filled with wildflowers to delight even the most jaded observer… and let me tell you, I am NOT jaded about wildflowers! Here’s a bunch taken from Twin Peaks on Feb. 28, Bernal Heights during several different walks in the past two weeks of March, and a spectacular walk we took with a bunch of friends on the west slopes of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin last weekend. It had been at least 20 years since I hiked Steep Ravine trail and it was just as beautiful as ever. But more remarkable was seeing all the blooming Mt. Tam wild orchids all over the place! What a treat!

Mt. Tam wild orchid.

The wild orchids are very small and easy to miss if you're not looking.

We’re crazy lucky in the Bay Area to have so much open space. I just read in the latest issue of Bay Nature that only 16% of the land in the Bay Area is urbanized. Remarkable! Those kinds of facts, confirmed by paying attention as one walks around here, is part of what drove my curiosity to start doing oral histories with local ecological activists. That in turn led to our series, Ecology Emerges, which is having its 2nd of 4 public discussion/presentations this coming Wednesday March 31, at 6 pm at San Francisco’s Main Library.

I'm no botanist, so if anyone wants to send me names of all these flowers, I'd be grateful. This is on Bernal Heights.

Brilliant blue-purple ceonothus, a local native, are in bloom all over the hills... this on the south side of Bernal near the new Gates stairs. Bayview Hill and Candlestick park in distance.

Goldfields closeup on Bernal Heights.

The greens are breathtaking as spring comes into its own... everything will turn brown in a month or so. This is a northerly view due east of Stinson Beach on the slopes of Mt. Tam.

These were everywhere in the shaded forests of Steep Ravine on Mt. Tam.

On a bright sunny grassy slope of Mt. Tam.

Douglas Irises, one of my favorite local native plants, always popping up this time of year, these on a Mt. Tam pasture, but lots on Twin Peaks too.

This is on Twin Peaks, a fantastic wildflower zone that awaits the climber, the bicyclist, or yes, even the driver who is willing to leave the parking lot and actually climb one of the peaks.

Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks.

Purple lupine on Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks, approaching dusk at end of February.

Creek on slopes of Mt. Tam.

January 29, 2010, 5 pm, San Francisco City Hall.

I spent three weeks in Scandinavia in late 2009. I’ve been to Denmark several times before (my mother hails from there), so I wasn’t expecting to have any revelations about how different life is there than here. To a great extent, things are quite similar. But there are deep and important differences that I experienced with greater clarity than during any previous visits.

In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, public transit systems are extremely modern, efficient, frequent and very comfortable, whether inner city subways or intracity train systems. In Sweden we saw no one living on the street and learned that the government was obliged to house each and every Swedish resident, citizen or not. Moreover, if you did not have a job, you qualified for a decent monthly income provided by the state. In Denmark everyone is eligible for practically free higher education, and like Sweden, housing and income are considered social rights. In Norway, a young group of radicals had squatted an abandoned house near the port in Oslo a few years ago, moved out during negotiations with the city government, and eventually reoccupied the building towards the end of their protracted negotiations. The city government finally authorized their presence in the building and set the rent well below market rate in the painfully expensive Norwegian capital. Minimum public-financed income was also the norm there.

How is this all paid for? Taxes! Individuals and corporations pay more than 50% of their income in taxes. But in exchange for these higher taxes, they get free top-notch health care, free university educations, a solid social safety net that includes guaranteed rights to housing and income, and a well-financed and sustainable public transit system.

Americans are notoriously uninformed about the wider political spectrum that exists outside of our borders. In our two-party system, we are regaled with a political spectrum that runs from left (“liberal,” Democrat) to right (“conservative,” Republican) and seems to spend most of its time at the center (“moderate”). But go to Sweden, for example, and you find that none of the dozen or so political parties represented in their national parliament are as far to the right as the liberal Democratic Party of the United States. Our politics has been sliding steadily to the right since Franklin Roosevelt died in 1944, and in spite of much nostalgic enthusiasm for the New Deal, even FDR’s government wasn’t as progressive and lefty as today’s European social democratic regimes.

During the Cold War, Americans were taught to be terrified of anything that might be “socialism,” because that was the first step on an inexorable slide into totalitarian Communism. In spite of a powerful working class movement that gained Social Security through the New Deal, and later got Medicare and Medicaid in the “Great Society” programs of Kennedy/Johnson, a backlash rooted in anti-communism, xenophobia, and white racism has managed to unravel many of the social assumptions that underpinned those gains.

Starting with Richard Nixon in 1969, and going on steadily since then, American politics has shifted further and further to the right. Now we have President Obama, a pro-corporate, pro-military leader, who is doing nothing for the lower classes in society, but somehow represents what “progressive” politics has become. In a European or a Latin American context, Obama would be a clear right-wing figure.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, European social historian Tony Judt takes up the question of what is living and what is dead in Social Democracy?

Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.” This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story.

With the anti-tax revolt in California in 1978, and the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, the rightward tilt of U.S. society gained momentum. This tilt was built on Nixon’s earlier shift towards a “southern strategy,” a more-or-less overt embrace of southern white racism in an effort to pry the long-term white Democratic vote loose and shift it to the Republicans. By the time George Bush the Lesser is appointed president by the Supreme Court in 2000, the blue/red split in America mirrors pretty closely the old North/South split from the Civil War. The Republican strategy to exacerbate racial fears to gain political power has had the additional effect of further eroding support for public services, and a culture of mutual aid or sharing.

And indeed, it is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.

So as we begin the arduous process of rebuilding a culture of mutual aid and solidarity, the racialized mistrust that underlies so much of our politics has to be clearly targeted. The fact that we actually live in a multicultural society, one that is more often tolerant and inclusive than not, is important to remember. But while our eyes have been on status, de facto tolerance, and multicultural diversity, we’ve also allowed the government to shred the safety net, and to facilitate the impoverishment of millions of fellow citizens of all races, while criminalizing and incarcerating over two million of us.

This is not to say that the welfare state was problem-free. But from the point of view of a society that takes care of its own, that shares an ethical approach to the wealth created by everyone working together, providing housing and income as a matter of social right is vital. It’s not charity, a degrading and humiliating social relationship. It’s a right to live with a minimum of decency. In such a society people are inherently “in it together” in a way that people in our dog-eat-dog society aren’t.

Tony Judt succinctly reminds us what Social Democracy means historically, even if it’s largely absent from the U.S. frame of reference. In a more humane future, this history is a crucially important antecedent.

The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

That these accomplishments were no more than partial should not trouble us. If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

I think we can do a lot better than “imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances,” but it’s true that the grand schemes of revolutionaries have rarely produced utopias. Grand schemes and utopias are in short supply these days. Instead, we have marginal political parties like the Green Party of California. This sorry political formation emerged during the early 1990s to reinvigorate a progressive social agenda:

“It was in direct response to the right-wing shift of the Democrats during the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. It was so obvious that there had been an evacuation of the left-of-center values and policies that needed attention. So the era was just crying out woefully for a third party,” [San Francisco Supervisor and Green Party star Ross] Mirkarimi said of the Green Party of California and its feminist, antiwar, ecological, and social justice belief system.

Now it is on the verge of collapse, having never articulated much of an agenda, certainly not an ecological one! The Green Party of California was just a slightly leftier split off from the Democrats, and these days their former leading lights are all jumping ship, usually to go back to the Democratic Mothership.

Thinking about the trajectory of Social Democracy in the 20th century, and the rather urgent need for a full-blown transition to an ecologically reconfigured daily life in the 21st century, it’s astonishing at how completely the Green Party has failed to address this. Its members prefer to squabble over electoral strategies for this or that local office. Meanwhile, a legitimate agenda of social transformation is beginning to emerge in such fledgling efforts as the Wigg Party and StreetUtopia North Beach.

The Transition Town movement informs some of these new efforts, but what’s still missing is a political party or group of candidates who aren’t just running for office, but represent a specific, articulated agenda based on Transition ideas, and ultimately permacultural principles. I don’t think such an effort would succeed right away, but after an election cycle or two, with the usual array of empty, advertising-driven candidates who serve power, I think it could eventually win. But such a win would be empty itself if there isn’t a pretty thorough-going agenda that challenges economic power, ecological crises, and the technologies of daily life. I’ll come back to this in a later post, but I wanted to throw it out there. Political power cannot be ignored forever, and if we’re serious about overthrowing the social system that oppresses us, we’ll have to show that we have a better way to organize it. Reinforcing a system that is based on celebrity-manufacturing-to-win-elections is clearly a bad idea. What else might be done? Some of it is already visible in efforts underway, but none of those efforts express themselves in electoral parties or with enough specificity to really challenge the power structure. Somehow we have to leap across that chasm, even if you are, like me, antipathetical towards electoralism and government, not to mention capitalism!

Been way too busy with the book project (Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978) and a fascinating oral history project (“Ecology Emerges”) that has had me doing sixteen interviews in the past few weeks… sorry for my poor blog here, which has lost out in the tussle for my time… anyway, wah wah wah.

These are now available from me via my personal website... perfect for hanging on your bike as the oceans rise!

I’m planning to be in Copenhagen at the Climate Conference (not inside, but outside) in December, and along with a whole lot of other folks on the planet, I’m thinking more and more about the dire facts piling up… We’ll be riding this Saturday in San Francisco along one possible future shoreline, as part of the thousands of actions across the country clamoring for meaningful policy change on Climate Change. We’re hosting a Talk next Wednesday at CounterPULSE on “Climate Change/Climate Justice” and I hope a lot of folks will come out for it.

I’ve been expecting to see a major rise in ocean levels in my life time, in spite of the commonly cited figures of a meter rise by 2100 or even less. I think it’s all going a lot faster than anyone can measure, and the synergistic reactions among different factors, like melting ice sheets, thawing arctic tundra, etc., are coalescing into a perfect storm. Inundation of coastal areas seems like it could happen rather suddenly, like within 10-20 years. Here’s a piece I came upon today that drives it home with a bit more science:

And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there?

The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world’s potential ice melt – the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland – simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the issue by suggesting that current knowledge is inadequate to estimate confidently the contribution that ice sheets might make to sea-level rise in coming centuries. While technology makes sea-level rise easier to observe, and we can predict some contributions to future sea-level rise with increasing certainty, we cannot yet fully predict the ice sheets’ contribution. There is thus a risk that sea-level rise could be higher than the (incomplete) estimates provided by the IPCC.

Thus, the most peer-reviewed piece of climate science ever written turns out to be completely inadequate when it comes to estimating the level of disruption associated with a very important aspect of climate change: the rising seas. If Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s land ice (sea ice, like that in the Arctic, does not directly cause the oceans to rise when it melts) and Greenland contains most of the rest, then what’s going to happen when they start to melt with a vengeance, and when are they going to start melting? Official science is mute on the subject.

Our logo for Saturday's ride.

It’s hard to figure out how to address this and what to do… I wrote this up today, to be distributed as a handbill on Saturday:

We are bicycling along one of many future shorelines of San Francisco to dramatize the inevitable rise in oceans and the subsequent inundation most coastal cities will face due to catastrophic human-induced climate change. As we approach the December global climate summit in Copenhagen, we ride today in solidarity with thousands of others around the planet, demanding real action—not bogus market-oriented, cap-and-trade, smoke-and-mirrors inaction. Drastic reductions in carbon emissions are a straightforward and urgent necessity, and will not be achieved by auctioning off the last true commons, our skies.

We bicycle, too, to demonstrate one of the many ways we can change our daily lives towards a just world that provides a good life to everyone as a matter of right. Addressing the climate involves the way we live as much as it does planet-wide agreements on technology and public policy. The failure of the U.S. to enact strict federal rules to promote clean, green technologies and restrict, reduce and eliminate dinosaurs like coal, oil and nuclear is paralleled by a failure of imagination among activists here. Too many of us think we can solve the ecological crisis by recycling more, or shopping responsibly, while continuing to rely on fossil fuels in other areas of our lives.

Join us in raising the temperature of public pressure. Industrialized food production, a auto-centric transit system, oil dependency, and a long list of bad technological choices cannot be solved by simply committing to good shopping. They require a sudden, dramatic, and forceful shift at the national and state levels. This inevitable shift cannot be made at the expense of those who have already been left behind or left out, subjected to polluting factories, toxic waste dumps, power plants, and incinerators. We can create a healthy, prosperous life for everyone—not just in the Bay Area—but across the country, and crucially, across the world. You can start changing how you live by using less energy, water, and resources. But we also can’t leave power in the hands of the same business and government leaders who have profited so handsomely from the mess they’ve already made.

Committee for Full Enjoyment, Oct. 24, 2009
Get active!:   ActForClimateJustice.org/West

Our route.

Join us at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24 on the lawn just south of PeeWee Herman Plaza in San Francisco (more or less the end of the red line that leaves on Market Street).

Lastly, the oceans rising are only one part of a larger problem of our inability to live intelligently on earth. One of the ongoing dramas that is way out of sight and out of mind is the mid-Pacific gyre, the immense pile of plastic soup that fills a space said to be twice the size of Texas, where countless millions of pounds of plastic are slowly decaying in the sea. A friend just sent me this link to some really stunning photos of dead Albatross chicks on Midway Island, 2000 miles from any continent. They more than eloquently speak for themselves. Brace yourself and have a look…

Since I’m planning to go to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December, it seems only appropriate that I should show up to local efforts to address the topic. After an intense flurry of dozens of messages sent via Facebook (and Twitter, were I using it, which I won’t) I thought the “Mobilization for Climate Justice” yesterday in Richmond would attract a couple of thousand people or so… But no, there weren’t even 300 people at the rally near the end of the BART line in Richmond. It wasn’t entirely the same old people, but it was one of those political experiences that reward the patient and frustrate anyone who thinks something as difficult as this is easy.

The march starts, led by Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition (in the black hat).

I have friends who have doggedly organized against Chevron for years now, trying their best to connect to the local efforts against toxic emissions and pollution and for environmental justice, so I was surprised at how few locals attended the rally. I joked with Robert as we got back to SF that at least we felt better for having gone, and had to acknowledge that it wasn’t much different than the people who feel better for having gone to church. Leftist demonstrations seem to have fully collapsed as meaningful political forms now, and only the true believers can maintain any sense of efficacy in participation in them.

Richmond elected a Green mayor last time around, and there's definitely a growing vision of a new life growing here.

Some years ago Chevron and the other local oil companies painted their many storage tanks a dun brown to make them blend in with the landscape better. I wondered if they'd consulted with the brilliant painters of Victorians in San Francisco?

We marched through Richmond, passing a busy church of Pentacostals who watched us pass without hostility but without much curiosity either. The gulf between our lefty march and the daily lives of the mostly black community seemed pretty cavernous.

It’s August and in the U.S. there’s always a weird “news gap” that gets filled with one hysterical campaign or another. This year we have the frightened white patriots who have latched on to the (practically useless) health care reform plan as their current bete noire. The bizarre shift in the public “debate” on health care has been astonishing to watch. Somehow, a bad pro-corporate, pro-insurance industry “reform” that will basically force everyone to buy private insurance (with—hopefully—at least a guarantee that they’ll actually cover you when you’re injured or ill) to be “responsible” citizens has been framed as a Socialist or even Fascist takeover of America!  (Currently insurance companies employ thousands of clerks whose basic function is to deny coverage on small print technical grounds to as many paid up insured as possible. It’s a huge criminal racket, to put it mildly, and they’ve enjoyed double digit profit increases for the past half dozen years, raking it in before the inevitable “reform.” But under Obama, the reform will hardly touch their profitability or power… Hope Fulfilled!) The 60%+ of the population who prefer a national health care system like in Canada or the UK (“single-payer” is the dumb name they’ve embraced… like “single-payer” military procurements I guess!) have been systematically eliminated from public debate on television and in the papers. Thanks to self-organizing and huge efforts by nurses unions, lefty doctors, pwogwessive NGOs and others, the politicians have had to repeatedly declare that they “do not favor a single-payer system.” So it’s out there, even if it’s denied before the debate began.

Then you have the amazing ideologically driven hypocrisy of buffoons like Glen Beck on Fox, who Jon Stewart did a nice job of skewering the other night. Apparently, Beck had a bad medical experience a couple of years ago and spent many hours on air decrying the failure of the U.S. medical system. Now, he’s singing in the chorus with all the right-wing blowhards who see this as Obama’s Waterloo, crowing about the U.S. medical system as the best in the world! A sad joke to say the least.

So we need a political climate change here in the U.S. The corporate media is so skewed to the right that corrupt corporations are always framed as on the side of individual freedom and the government’s efforts to improve public services are framed as restricting individual well-being. It’s an upside down world here and hard to grasp if you’re not living in the middle of this Alice in Wonderland madhouse. Nothing new, really, but you see the effects of it in the paltry turnout for a well organized demonstration against the multinational Chevron on multiple important grounds: to slow climate change, in favor of environmental justice in Richmond, in Burma, in Nigeria, anti-war in Iraq, etc. Multinationals have no trouble engaging on multiple fronts and multiple issues, and if we’re to oppose them meaningfully we need to ally across multiple issues and frameworks too. I thought the Richmond demo yesterday was a good try, and it depressed me that so few people turned out.

It’s the form of demonstrating that’s dead, and no amount of twittering or social networking seems to dent that truth. Reinventing how we organize involves a change of climate, a change of behavior, and a change of luck!

On a separate note, I’ve enjoyed my daughter visiting this past week, and we took a trip to Santa Cruz the other day. It was a spectacularly beautiful August day, crystal clear, and we drove up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to get down there. At a viewpoint on Skyline Blvd we got these great photos of the view north and east, and then we came upon the billowing clouds of the big “Lockheed” forest fire in the mountains.

I'm pointing north to San Francisco, hard to see in the distance.

San Bruno Mountain, Mt. Tam and San Francisco from far south.

Northeast view across Bay. Good to remember that plans were thwarted to fill most of this with debris from San Bruno Mountain and make hundreds of square miles of more freeways and suburbia, turning the Bay into a brackish river in the middle!

Amazingly clear day in the South Bay.

The "Lockheed" forest fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Aug. 14, 2009.

Funny to get a news feed indicating that “nowtopia” had popped up in an essay over on Counterpunch, written by a Torontoan… it’s a lovely essay, and flattering to see nowtopia becoming a useful noun already!

In May 2008 Nowtopia was published. It’s been a year and a quarter and I’ve had the great fortune to travel to many places and present the book, meeting incredible people, reconnecting with old friends, and it looks like I’m not finished yet! There is a good chance I’ll be making a trip to Buffalo this fall, and to Scandinavia for a mini-tour prior to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The questions that I try to prepare myself for are the inevitable queries a couple of years from now: Was the analysis in Nowtopia wrong? Is this argument about a transition to a new way of knowing life really happening? What’s the evidence? And what about the notion that this is a process driven by a working class recomposing itself in terms of useful work?

I don’t actually think I’ll be able to answer those questions in two or three years. Part of my analysis gets me off the hook, because it doesn’t have to show up in a given amount of time to be “true.” On the other hand, if there is nothing happening that corresponds to my analysis, that might serve to debunk it, of course.

A bit of Potrero Hill on Kansas, hidden from through traffic.

One way I try to figure this out for myself is during my various walks around town, to see how the physical landscape is changing (it always is) and whether or not this matches up with some of my prognostications. If you’re a regular on this blog, you know I often put up photos of community gardens, and other visions of “nature in the city.” Yesterday I took a long walk with an old friend, up and over Potrero Hill (two peaks) to the edge of the I-280 freeway separating the “hill” from its former 3rd peak (Irish Hill) where Dogpatch and the abandoned shipyards are now. Then we went down into the UCSF campus at Mission Bay, which my friend, a guy who grew up here and lived in SF for 30 years, had never seen. That campus is one of the jarring and discouraging developments in the city these days, a sprawling campus of modern labs and offices, parking lots, and impersonal windswept lawns and wide sidewalks. Along the way we took some of my favorite hidden paths and stairways (one starts at 22nd and Kansas, another at 19th and Carolina), and lo and behold, we discovered a brand new community garden project in surplus Caltrans land at 18th and Connecticut at the freeway offramp. Here are some photos:

Near the 22nd Street overpass, where Kansas apparently dead-ends, a driveway goes up past flourishing trumpetvine bushes. Just 20 yards up the driveway this public path leaves to the east.

Kansas Street, for pedestrians only!

As you climb the stairs become more regular, and at the top you ascend a cement flight and emerge from behind a fence. This path is well hidden!

The big political discussion in the U.S. these days is about the health care proposals, with a lingering concern for the multi-billion giveaway to the banks. The health insurance companies are shaping the current debate, and it looks like they’ll have their way, perpetuating this wholly inadequate and insane for-profit sickness industry for some time to come. Walking through Mission Bay and its suddenly numerous buildings, several apparently dedicated to cancer research, and it’s difficult not to think that the real goal of all this public investment is to create the professional workers to fill the industry that profits from not curing cancer (or much of anything else) but the stabilizing of disease in such a way that the patients are permanently dependent on expensive drugs and machines and professionals. A great business, the frail but resilient human body!

A brand new community garden has appeared at 18th and Connecticut on what I think is surplus Caltrans land.

Another view of the new garden.

Not more than a 15 minute stroll from the heart of this heartless campus is “Channel Street,” the remnant of the real Mission Bay on which this campus has been precariously built (I marvel that San Franciscans are so trusting of modern engineering that there’s been nary a peep about building hazardous biotech laboratories on landfill, terrain notorious for liquefaction and collapse in major earthquakes). The creek is turning into an ecological treasure these days thanks to a lot of effort to replant native species along its banks. You can now see fish swimming in the erstwhile “Shit Creek,” which a few decades ago was an eye-watering pestilential sewer, along with dozens of birds species, all coexisting with the new condos and the splashing of baseballs at the mouth of the inlet. I got a few shots of the lovely community garden that has been maintained for many years by the houseboat dwellers along Mission Creek too:

Freeways swoop incongruously over Mission Creek community garden, the creek itself, and its dozens of houseboat residents.

Considering this is all landfill, sitting next to a sewage outflow, in what were abandoned railyards, a tree this big seems downright majestic!

Much as I detest Gavin Newsom and his empty branding and endless co-opting of other people’s energy, superficially associating himself with as many new ideas as he can without ever doing anything to reallocate city resources in meaningful directions, he did recently publicly ask his department heads to analyze surplus lands for the possibility of converting said lands to urban agriculture. This would indicate something of the Nowtopian sensibility percolating outwards from the practical efforts of thousands of city horticulturists and small-time agriculturists, people actually creating the basis for imagining that growing a lot more food in San Francisco is not so far-fetched. Another surprising example of new thinking popping up in an unexpected place is the SF Chronicle’s sponsorship of a contest (with no mandate or money) to imagine other, temporary uses for the many approved buildings in the city, where vacant lots will now stand empty for years until credit and capitalist real estate investments start up again. I particularly loved the proposal from friends at REBAR, to create a People’s Public Works Department in the sprawling lots a block from CounterPULSE at 10th and Mission.

One of the areas identified for a new, temporary pocket park, finally starting to reclaim uses from the pointless expanses of asphalt. This is 8th, Wisconsin and 16th Streets in the former Mission Bay landfill, north of Potrero Hill.

Another example came from another old friend visiting from Davis the other day. Out there where it’s over 100 degrees all summer, his neighbors have mostly let their lawns dry out and go brown, but in their backyards, apparently it’s become quite the trendy norm to have chickens, vegetable gardens, and even beehives. With the recent publication of the hilarious and brilliant Novella Carpenter’s Farm City, a whole new “crop” of city dwellers are sure to be inspired towards urban animal husbandry. City codes and zoning rules will have to change in response to this grassroots surge.

Nowtopia is emerging in new daily life behaviors with genuinely radical implications; politicians try to co-opt such grassroots efforts, which at least indicates that something bigger is happening than a few hobbyists tinkering in the margins. But we cannot see any sign yet that people are starting to connect the work they do outside of wage-labor with a political agenda that might challenge the dominance of the money-based society. On September 26th, the local co-op networks are holding a “JAS Economy” conference (JAS = Just, Alternative, Sustainable, pronounced Jazz) which will showcase many efforts based on workers collectives and co-ops, as well as some of the growing efforts to embrace free and uncoerced work outside of monetary exchange. It’s a long way to shift our sensibilities from a world system that associates “worthwhile” and “value” with money and financial reward, but we’re probably a good deal closer to it today than we’ve been in a long time. Who knows how fast this new way of framing our daily activities can supplant the crumbling old order? Maybe faster than we think!