We went to see the Giant Forest because I’d been itching to for a few years, since I started telling the story of Burnette Haskell and the radical labor movement in San Francisco in the 1880s. Haskell and his comrades had burned out after a fevered period of organizing (he was one of the founders of the Coastal Seaman’s Union in 1885) and decided to move to the country, in this case the southern Sierra Nevada, and start a commune. Like countless radicals of the 1960s and ’70s, these guys were following a similar trajectory but far earlier. There is a good book on their story called “Cooperative Dreams” that I read some years ago, that tells the remarkable story of how their attempts to homestead in the Giant Forest thousands of feet above the Kaweah River were thwarted first by a recalcitrant Federal Land Office that wouldn’t approve their claims, and then in the dark of night in 1890, Southern Pacific Railroad inserted language into the federal bill that was going to create Yosemite National Park that also established Kings Canyon National Park, thereby divesting the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth of its land.

The Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth colonists pose in front of the Karl Marx tree in the Giant Forest.

Reputed to be the largest tree in the world, in terms of sheer square footage of wood, is now known as the General Sherman Tree, but when the Kaweah folks had the land, they called it the Karl Marx tree. So of course I had to go and see it in person!

The tree is in fact unbelievably huge. And what was so remarkable was that there are dozens and dozens of massive trees, and after a while, it was the whole forest that left us amazed again and again. Towards the end of our hiking around we came up on a tree called the Lincoln tree (annoyingly a lot of the trees in the Giant Forest are named after U.S. presidents and famous people, one huge closely-packed grove was dubbed “Congress” by… the Congress!). Here I am at the left-hand base of the Lincoln tree–can you see me?

Where's Waldo? I mean me?

This is the Lincoln tree from beneath it, but you really can't grasp the sensation of standing under such giants unless you're there in person.

I don’t love camping. Basically it’s cooking and doing dishes in the woods, very inconvenient to say the least!

Not to mention that nature is trying to kill me! All those beasts, bugs, snakes, etc…. I never fully relax in nature, always expecting something awful to happen… still, when we were hiking in Kings Canyon we passed a bear 100 feet away, and later a rattlesnake was just off the trail. In both cases I was delighted to see them! (go figure…)

It was really beautiful up there. The hiking was great, the weather near perfect. Here’s a bunch of shots of us from our hikes:

This was the view east from Eagle View after we emerged from the Giant Forest.

Here's Adriana at Eagle View with the westerly view towards the Central Valley behind her.

Before we came out to that view, we had a long walk along a largely deserted path called Trail of the Sequoias. It was funny because there were so many tourists around the Sherman/Marx tree and its near environs. But as soon as you walk for 15 minutes, nobody! So we wandered in delightful weather along a 5-mile up and down trail around 7,500 feet up, past dozens and dozens of massive, incredible trees.

Adriana amidst the grove called "Congress."

The Congress trees from below.

Adriana draped on the "President" tree.

After we had a nice picnic lunch overlooking the Kaweah canyon from near Eagle’s View, we went to see what John Muir called the “Jewel of the Sierra.” Others have said you can’t really appreciate the Giant Forest without visiting the gorgeous meadows that were the first areas coveted by American settlers for cattle grazing.

"Jewel of the Sierra" by John Muir's reckoning.

That big stump there is the same one as the next photo.

Giant, indeed!

You can only get into the middle of these meadows on fallen trees since they are boggy wetlands.

The day before we went through the Giant Forest we went over the mountains into Kings Canyon and hiked up to Mist Falls. Here’s a few shots from that walk:

The view from the road as we drove to the Mist Falls walk.

Sierra granite is continually breathtaking!

We had a refreshing picnic along the creek.

Spider webs were giants of their own...

The last two photos from here: two of the most impressive big trees, the Chief Sequoia and the General Grant… amazing how much personality each ancient tree has… these are all 2,000 years old or older!

General Grant tree.

Chief Sequoia tree.

So this past Saturday I went with some friends to Point Pinole park, a place that was for the late 19th and early 20th centuries an isolated place where black powder and dynamite were produced. Here’s a shot from the one of the plaques showing a hard-working donkey there:

It’s a tiny peninsula north of Richmond and well west of Pinole and Hercules. Today it’s a charming, rather isolated park with fantastic views across the north bay towards Mt. Tamalpais, Novato, and the Carquinez Straits.

This is what's left of the original dock serving the Giant Powder dynamite factory.

View across San Pablo bay towards northern Marin County.

An unusual angle on Mt. Tamalpais from Pt. Pinole.

Scott, Eddie, Cindy, Gareth, Susanne, and Tami, my cycling friends.

Uphill on Potrero crossing 16th Street, August 2010 Critical Mass in San Francisco.

So I’ve been piling up all the photos from my various trips the past month. Before I go into a long sequence of photos in the next post, we had an incredible Critical Mass last Friday night. It was led on an unprecedented route–my congratulations to the folks who made the effort to get the ride out of its rut for a 2nd consecutive month (I rode in the back and had no idea who was out front doing such a good job!). We went south, weaving through the South of Market to pop out on to Potrero and then much to everyone’s surprise, after a long cruise south past General Hospital we did a short jog right and left on 25th, Hampshire, 26th and Bryant to make a big left on Cesar Chavez.

You get a sense of how huge our rides are from this shot, looking south on Potrero.

One minute we're taking up the whole of Cesar Chavez right near the freeway entrance...

...But after a siren indicates an approaching emergency vehicle, Critical Mass riders easily clear the road in seconds.

We went south into the Bayview. One of the occasional obnoxious comments hurled at Critical Mass over on our blog or in the always-insufferable SFGate comments is something along the lines of “why don’t you take your ride into the Bayview instead of going through North Beach, the Mission and/or the Haight every month?”  Well we had a fantastic ride down there, first taking Bayshore Blvd and Oakdale, turning on Palou, south on 3rd Street for a while, and then a big westerly turn on Williams.

A pause eastbound on Palou.

Westbound on Williams, well into the Bayview district.

Happy neighbors marvel as we pass by.

With all the online blather about how much people hate Critical Mass and bicyclists, if you rode along on most of our rides what you actually see are hundreds of bystanders smiling, waving, and cheering. Whenever we go through residential neighborhoods we always get a ton of enthusiastic support from people hanging out of windows, clapping and cheering, and little kids get really excited. Imagine how it changes their imaginations to see thousands of cyclists streaming by laughing, talking, playing music, having a rolling party!

Justin just got back from a summer in Central America... the dad and daughter behind him were enjoying the ride as it rolled by.

Don't think we've ever been in to the Portola neighborhood, long bisected by the 101 freeway, but here we crossed San Bruno Avenue at Bacon.

Bit of a climb but everyone just went on up the hill...

After a couple of turns we ended up on Silver Avenue and rode past that weird massive Evangelical College (what’s that doing in San Francisco anyway?) and made the turn back to the center city on Mission.

Westerly on Silver Ave.

Heading north on Mission crossing I-280 not far from where there was once a trestle carrying a steam railroad across a creek. Check out the kid in the foreground! He rode all the way, as he did last month when we made it up to Twin Peaks!

After going up and over the flank of Bernal on Mission we bombed down the hill and made the turn onto Valencia. I was near home and thinking about peeling off since I figured the ride was heading up to Masonic where that German bicycling tourist was killed a week ago by a drunk driver. I couldn’t quite leave so found myself going down Valencia and suddenly as we passed the Elbo Room and Sycamore Alley, there was some gorgeous brass jazz filling the air. A threesome, probably getting ready to play inside the Elbo Room, was out on the balcony serenading Critical Mass! What a great end to a great ride… one of the best in a long time…

The last notes from the last musician...

The blog is fixed! All the beautiful photos are back! All the writing is complete! Check it out! (If you’re especially fond of photo-rich entries, they really get going in 2006 and keep gaining ground from then.)

Second day of our first heat wave all summer. It says it’s 90 degrees out there! I went up to the top of Twin Peaks yesterday around 5 pm, first time in weeks that I could even see it for more than a half hour at midday. The fog has been relentless (on the bright side, it’s free air conditioning all summer!). Here’s a few shots, two from Twin Peaks, and one from the freeway as we returned from a trip to Kings Canyon a week ago, with the big fog hanging over the City.

The late afternoon light really makes San Bruno Mountain look great, and it was so clear that Montara Mountain behind it in the distance stood out too!

The fog has hung over us all summer! This view from east of the Bay Bridge, across the Port of Oakland towards SF.

I’ve mostly been at home all summer, working on FoundSF and also the new book that’ll come out next spring with City Lights. Here’s the cover:

I’ve also been having a blast working on the 2nd edition of Vanished Waters for the Mission Creek Conservancy. I got to meet a lot of stakeholders for an updated chapter at the end of the book that they commissioned me to write, and my sense of that part of town and the larger dynamics of urban growth, redevelopment, planning, etc., have all gained greater nuance from these discussions.

I’m going to do separate posts on a couple of fun things we did this month, one was going to Kings Canyon and the other was taking a ride on the Alma down the southeastern shoreline of San Francisco. Tons of great photos from both of those trips…

But here in town there are a couple of things that went down during the past few weeks to comment on. One, the “Fix Fell” protests, are ongoing. The 2nd annual Street Cart Food Festival happened, right outside my front door!

First, Fell Street:

A new group emerged in the wake of the Gulf oil spill to mount a protest at the hazardous spot by the BP/ARCO cheap gas station at Fell and Divisadero where the bike lane connecting the Wiggle to the Panhandle passes by. Over two months they’ve showed up every Friday to block the entry driveways that cause motorists to double park in the bike lane while they wait to buy gas. Very symbolic and a logical place to register outrage at the nightmare of the Gulf Oil Spill while also insisting on changing local transit patterns to promote cycling at the expense of auto-driving. Weekly protests, arrests, and a slowly growing campaign have already produced a new green-painted lane which has made it somewhat better. But the demands have grown now, and the protesters insist on closing the curb cuts permanently on Fell, and putting in a dedicated, separate bikeway (on Fell, which is basically the surface freeway going from east to west) to connect the heavily used Wiggle route through the lower Haight with the delightfully safe and green Panhandle. Here’s a few shots from last Friday’s action:

Seems like no problem with there's no cars...

I turned out at the beginning of this and had to leave after about an hour. As you can tell if you sit through the 10-minute video, it took many hours to complete this particular protest, ending with a bunch of fire department personnel sawing off u-locks from protesters necks. I’m not personally attracted to this kind of tactic. The time it takes, the legal bills, the burnout, all seem like major impediments to me. And that’s the larger message of this culture. If it’s not convenient, fuggeddaboutit… So these guys are engaged in a series of actions that are inconvenient for all concerned, the participants as well as the city’s resources. Raising the costs this way has historically brought a response, so time will tell if the more thorough-going vision of a transformed Fell Street will be achieved under this pressure. I hope so!

Me and Hugh doing our duty!

Here is the just released minimum program by Fix Fell:

In the short term, the minimum the city must do is the following:

-close motor vehicle access to/ from Scott St. at Fell to eliminate danger from speeding cars down the hill and left turning conflict.   Allow full permeability for people on foot and bicycle.

-remove approx 36 parking spaces along the south side of Fell St. between Scott and Baker to provide safe, separated space for bicycle circulation.  If local n’hood opposition is an issue, investigate use of DMV lot for residents in evenings to compensate.

-DPW take action to revoke Fell St. driveway permits to both the 76 and Arco stations based on documented safety impacts- both businesses would retain an ingress and egress on Divisadero

-prohibit left turns from Fell St. onto Divisadero or provide separate signal phase

-Undertake turn volume and safety studies to determine potential conflicts between tow company and supermarket parking entrances and bicycle circulation.  Shut these entrances if minimum safety standards are not met

-Prohibit left turns onto Baker, or install separate phase

-construct an attractive, two way bikeway on the south side of Fell St. between Scott and Baker, with possible extension along Panhandle to GGP, buffered with landscaping.

We hope you will give us feedback on this platform, and support these efforts by contacting the Mayor and your supervisor, and getting involved with our ongoing protests!

Ride safe out there and take the lane!

I’m in discussion with some of these guys, and others, and want to figure out some other tactical approach. Not just for this issue of one gas station at one intersection, but as a way of attacking a culture that chooses to murder 40,000-50,000 people annually as a “natural” and “normal” outcome of the transportation choices made by planners, bureaucrats and Americans who are religiously and fanatically attached to their cars. To say nothing of the cancer epidemic that we’re living in, mostly resulting from environmental pollution and toxic exposures, often also related to the auto and oil industries. The strategic goal of altering the streetscape of this near-freeway is a fine target. It’s a crucial piece of the de facto east-west bike corridor and we should be able to reorient it to maximize the safety and convenience of bicyclists, which ultimately would not cause any great hardship to motorists anyway!

But as usual, I’m dismayed by this campaign too. I don’t think political efforts driven by moral outrage appeal to people who don’t already share the same values. I don’t share the palpable sense of urgency that these guys put out. As noted above, tens of thousands of people die each year on the highways and streets of North America. Many thousands more planet-wide. The structural imperatives that keep the system running, no matter how many (human) bumps are in the road, are far deeper and more intractable than a moral campaign can excise. So the protesters are not wrong, and their demands are perfectly reasonable. But the larger question of political agency, mobilization, and vision, are not adequately addressed here. One of the participants responded to this line of thinking by arguing that the answer was to have more people participate in the blockades. If 500 or 1000 people did it instead of 5-10 or 20, it would be more effective. Well, sure. But why aren’t these tactics attracting those larger crowds? Just saying they *ought to* doesn’t solve the problem.

In fact, the tactics and style chosen largely reinforce a kind of neo-Christian sacrificialism that I abhor, and cannot participate in. Some might say I’m just chicken, I just don’t want to be arrested, I don’t want to take any risks. Yes and no. I’m not afraid, but I don’t think my getting arrested is an effective tactic for the strategic goals that I have. Besides, it is demonstrably a waste of time and money to get tangled up in the legal system. But my own reticence, as someone who has engaged in many kinds of political action over decades, probably highlights something that other people who are less inclined towards political action feel even more strongly. I don’t feel excited or hopeful by the thought of participating in this. I feel small and powerless and kind of dumb actually. I want to participate in things that are unpredictable, that open space up, that generate excitement because they’re changing life already. That’s a tall order, to be sure. But these kinds of forms, whether picket lines, sit-ins, nonviolent civil disobedience, etc., are all extremely well-known and tired forms that have been used time and again. The system is at ease with them, and has a well established system of managing them.

I’m not claiming to have a box of new tactics to replace them with. For that reason I turned up as a body to hold a sign for a while on Friday night. But I didn’t love doing it, and found myself leaving long before it got “hot.” In any case, I am a strong supporter of a radically redesigned Fell Street. In fact, I’ve been a proponent of a “City of Panhandles” (crisscrossing dedicated bikeways, at least three each going north-south, east-west, and a couple of diagonals) for more than 20 years!

OK, the other topic of today is the Street Food Cart Festival that was held by La Cocina, a neighboring organization a block from where I live on Folsom Street in the Mission. It was fun to step out my front door and find this massive fair going on, with thousands of people gnoshing on all sorts of delectable foods. The festival benefits La Cocina, whose mission is to help poor and unsupported people, mostly women, to start their own food businesses. They incubate the effort, give them training in various aspects of running a small food business, help them with branding and licensing and all that, and they also maintain a beautiful industrial kitchen for all the various start-ups to use while they’re getting going. We used the kitchen for one of our Feasts a few years back.

The view from my front doorstep.

Anyway, it was a madhouse again, even though they expanded the space by a half dozen blocks. Must’ve been 40,000 people during the day, and there was sure a whole lot of eating going on! It’s a lovely re-use of public space. Compared to the struggle over the Fell Street Traffic Sewer, here we had an often busy Folsom Street closed for the day, filled with dozens of booths and thousands of people, hanging out, talking, sharing bites, making a public space out of what’s usually a thoroughfare. What a delightful phenomenon! Why can’t we close some streets and do this permanently? I hope we’re heading in that direction! (Oddly, a lot of the vendors are fancy local restaurants who I guess as a benefit to La Cocina, turn out and kind of “slum it” for a day, selling some of their gourmet goodies for $3-8 as street food…) Here’s a whole bunch of folks hanging out with each other and getting the food into their mouths!

By the end, it all ends up like this:

“We Are All Workers” proclaim the ads in bus shelters, on billboards, and seemingly everywhere all of a sudden. “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” says a neon sign in the window of their Valencia Street workshop (itself a wet dream: free screen-printing, photocopying and art resources for anyone to use). Back in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a quintessential Rust Bowl town abandoned in the early 1980s by the steel industry and verging on total collapse, Levi’s has ridden in as a white knight. After a big nonprofit pulled out, Levi’s agreed to put up $1 million to bolster the efforts of John Fetterman, the youthful and burly 6’8” mayor to bring the city back from the brink of ghost town status, putting their money into a community center, the public library, and an urban farm! On Youtoob there are a dozen videos produced by Levi’s, from one-minute ads to five-minute mini-documentaries on Braddock, designed to evoke a series of complicated emotions and speak to needs and ideas that have been buried during the past twenty years of shrill neoliberal triumphalism.

The first time I saw the “We Are All Workers” ad, featuring a small African American boy in an oversized adult workshirt, I was shocked. Who or what could be sponsoring an ad with that as a title? I felt that typical ripped-off feeling when my own words, sincerely uttered with real meaning on many occasions, were reflected back at me as a vapid advertising slogan. And then the puzzlement. Why Levi’s? What are they getting at? Don’t they want to hide all the sweatshop work that goes in to their products? Isn’t it the point of the modern capitalist economy to disguise the relationship between work and product? Aren’t we supposed to be kept blissfully ignorant of what it takes to produce the common items of our lives? Aren’t the objects supposed to be the lively characters and the people who make them completely invisible? Has Levi’s broken with the playbook of fifty years of capitalist consumer marketing?

Yes and no. I think they spent a lot of time and money with focus groups, testing this whole campaign out, long before it appeared to us publicly. I think they, or at least their advertising agency, realized that something is developing that has so far been out of sight and out of mind in terms of mass culture. There is a deep frustration with the stupidity of work that rarely gets mentioned. But most people live it every day, and have to pretend to like their jobs (if they have one), to pretend to care about the company they work for, to want it to be more profitable (even if they are faced with stagnant wages and shrinking benefits), etc.  The desire to do real work with a sense of its purpose and ultimate utility to our lives, and to do it with a lot of control over the process and its results, including who we do it with and how it affects the natural environment, has led many people to engage more fully with work they do when they’re not “at work.” This is what I wrote about in Nowtopia.

The Levi's Workshop on Valencia Street near 17th, in San Francisco.

Peering in to the energetic scene within.

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri writing in the 3rd volume of their theoretical trilogy Commonwealth argue that there is so much productive activity going on outside of traditional economic measurement that capital is seeking new ways to capture that value. I think this whole Levi’s campaign is a cutting-edge example of this effort. I find it unimaginable that the designers of this campaign haven’t been studying their Hardt and Negri, and who knows, maybe they even read Nowtopia!

Here’s how Hardt/Negri put it on page 140-141: “Capital expropriates cooperation as a central element of exploiting biopolitical labor-power. This expropriation takes place … from the field of social labor, operating on the level of information flows, communication networks, social codes, linguistic innovations, and practices of affects and passions… Capital is predatory, as the analysts of neoliberalism say, insofar as it seeks to capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth.”

The Levi’s workshop is a fascinating experiment in this effort to “capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth.” Dan Connor is labeled as a Levi’s photographer in the online video, “Pre-Print Opening July 1, 2010,” where he describes their strategy: “The point is to come into a town, find a bunch of nonprofits that are in that area, and work with them, to create an environment that is collaborative, an artspace, to kind of talk together, work on projects in a collaborative nature…”

The place opened in July and will close at the end of August. (Locals in the Mission are suspicious that the short time of their renting the place conveniently avoided their having to get a normal business permit and encounter the shitstorm of neighborhood chainstore opposition that their competitor American Apparel ran into when they tried to open a store a few blocks up the street a year ago.) But it’s not a regular store. It’s a community workshop with a beautiful old letterpress, silkscreening tables and screens, a free photocopier for zinesters to help themselves to, and a surprising largesse of resources. Frankly, the workshop is the kind of fantasy place that anyone involved in radical publishing or printmaking and community politics has dreamed of forever. The catch of course is that this is a Levi’s facility. While they’ve been relatively open and uncensorious, encouraging dozens of local artists to come in and do whatever they want, even offering some of them modest amounts of money to produce art there, they are using the place as a showcase to gain brand loyalty and they’re freely using the folks who come in as advertising props. They have a marquee outside bragging about who is going to be there “making art” in coming days, and a lot of the output is connected to various local nonprofits. There’s even a spinning wheel with three local nonprofit groups who get the cash when you buy some jeans or a shirt there (because in spite of everything, they do have a couple of shelves of clothes for sale). It’s as though they’ve hit upon this new strategy for capturing a whole stratum of productive energy in the ultra-hipster Mission, co-opting it to their own purposes while also inserting the corporation into it as the provider of hardware, free space, and endless paper and ink and other resources, but at the last moment they can’t resist also doing what they’ve always done: sell bluejeans!

Few of these were actually created at the workshop, but they had 'em displayed to encourage free use of their copier.

The payoff for Levi's: This guy was shooting while I was taking photos. First he was roaming among the various "workers" and then he went upstairs to get this overview shot...

Hardt and Negri describe the problem of capturing the immeasurable wealth, which maybe this Levi’s workshop is managing to do.

“Furthermore, the results of biopolitical production, including social subjectivities and relations, forms of life, [do generate] value, but it is immeasurable, or rather it constantly exceeds the units of any accounting scheme; it overflows the corporation’s double-entry ledgers and confounds the public balance sheets of the nation-state. How can you measure the value of an idea, an image, or a relationship? The quantitative indicators of professional economists offer little … in particular since production of the common constantly exceeds not only relationships of control but also frameworks of measure. Useful economic indicators instead would have to be qualitative.”

“Join us, roll up your sleeves, and get to work.” They have a half dozen slogans like this. Another one is “Ready to Work” echoing the millions of unemployed who would be glad to get a job rather than being thrown on the discard pile like they were a broken piece of plastic. Yet another version is splashed across big billboards near the Bay Bridge: “Made Strong for the New Work,” with three men wearing the requisite branded clothing while posing among machines and in brick rooms as though waiting for them to come back to life. What is this “new work”? One guy stands in front of an out-of-context motor in an otherwise empty room. The guy on the right is sitting on an old motorcycle in another empty room, probably a former factory work space. The guy in the middle is walking through some kind of archway with a cityscape behind him—is he entering an empty factory or leaving a dying city? These guys aren’t working exactly, they’re waiting. They’re embodying the precariousness of modern worklife, a dangerously accurate portrayal of the lassitude and emptiness that fills all too many lives in an economy with 22% unemployment. Waiting for the New Work that hasn’t yet started, or if it has, only in brief fits and starts, enough to keep you from total penury, maybe even enough to keep the payments going on the credit card where you charged the new Levi’s you bought, or so the ads imply…

But precarity is a permanent state now. The lost world of full-time work for stable employers actually making things that other people can use and will buy, is now reduced to phantom references floating in and around an ad campaign. The images are meant to invoke a (false) sense of nostalgia, but one that has a real yearning in it, a persistent wish for a stability and security that were never available to most of the world and only to a fraction of the American working class during the peak of U.S. global power. That time is definitively over.

But in good old American bootstrapping ideology, Braddock is being showcased as an example of the can-do spirit, the circular fantasy that once you’ve been kicked to the ground by the decisions of a tiny elite who control wealth and power, you can work yourself to the bone to regain your former middle-class comforts. I’m pretty sure Mayor Fetterman, who looks like he was part of Survival Research Laboratories or some equally edgy urban art project (and is an Ivy League grad to boot), knows better. The Braddock website features a stark and gritty urban aesthetic but has a photo of a big urban garden as the first thing you see, with the slogan under it, “Reinvention is the only option.”

So if you were the Mayor of Braddock, or even just someone who moved there to be involved in a radical effort to reinvent the place, how would you respond to the sudden appearance of a major corporation who offers serious money with the only caveat that they can make and use representations of you for their own marketing purposes? Not an easy call. Because anyone facing that level of economic collapse and urban decay knows that they need serious resources to get out of the hole. You can only bootstrap yourself so far, and without serious capital (in this culture) to work with, you’ll probably hit a wall.

Obviously Levi’s is co-opting Braddock and its Mayor. Does that mean he’s lost all autonomy and is now a fully captured entity of Levi’s? I doubt that too. Maybe he thinks he’s playing Levi’s and as long as their money stays in the buildings and facilities they’ve invested in, Braddock comes out way ahead no matter what dumb advertisements Levi’s runs for a few months or even a year or two… Time will tell for Braddock’s gamble.

Here's another weirdly edgy slogan: There's Work to be Done and Undone! Whew! That's putting it mildly... how about we eliminate advertising, insurance, banking, real estate, military production.... for starters?

But here in San Francisco, the naïve young hipsters who are flocking to the Levi’s store are doing what comes natural. They’re playing, they’re making art, they’re finding friends and community in practical projects that are based on their own sense of meaning and purpose. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we always had access to practically unlimited resources to make our zines, our posters, our t-shirts, our creative fantasies? Why don’t we have such workshops as a matter of course? And not limited to printmaking and clothing, but a whole range of tools and machinery so we could begin to make the world we want to live in, a world of our own design? Levi’s is tapping that yearning, but will soon pull it all away, just like Lucy always pulls away the football just as Charlie Brown is really ready to give it the kick of his life.

Hardt and Negri say “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to be the industrial working class… the metropolis primarily generates rent, which is the only means by which capital can capture the wealth created autonomously.” And it isn’t coincidental that during the past two years of economic breakdown, mass foreclosures, and rising unemployment, San Francisco rents have remained in the stratosphere. Aggregate capital is doing a fine job of exploiting the flourishing, unmeasurable creative output of San Francisco’s residents through the harsh regime of rents here. Now we have Levi’s opening a temporary workshop to experiment with a new form of cooptation, simultaneously more overt and more opaque, more insidious and more subtle. How will this play out? Can we turn this inside out? Or does it automatically turn us inside out? Love to hear your thoughts…

Off Cass Avenue, the main cycling corridor between Cobo Hall and Wayne State University, these abandoned buildings were far from unusual.

I went to Detroit for the US Social Forum from June 22-26, 2010. I’m really glad I went! I attended the Klimaforum in Copenhagen last December, and the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil in January 2009; this US Social Forum shared a lot of qualities with those other events. Like those, the Social Forum densely filled time and space. The US Social Forum encompassed over a thousand workshops held in a half dozen different locations around Detroit over its four days, and no matter what, no individual could possibly take in more than a small percentage of all that talking and meeting. It’s another of those “blind man and the elephant” situations.

The Social Forum is structured to facilitate conversations, meetings, networking, and a rich cross-pollination among social activists. As Immanuel Wallerstein put it in front of 500 people while conversing with Grace Boggs, “the panoply of organizations at the World Social Forum (and US Social Forum) come to talk to each other instead of denouncing each other.” The Social Forum’s vitality lies in the unprecedented effort to find arenas for cooperation instead of the historically all too familiar sectarian power struggles that seek victory, submission, and control.

Immanuel Wallerstein (left) and Grace Boggs (center) at the US Social Forum, Thursday, June 24, 2010.

Formal political parties and trade unions are excluded in favor of “social movement organizations,” though participants from many unions and some socialist parties do take part (and dozens of NGOs and nonprofits are well represented). In Detroit a good number of US-based anarchists showed up too (those that weren’t headed to Toronto to protest the G-20 summit) and a “New World From Below” convergence center was established at the Spirit of Hope Church a mile northwest of the Cobo Hall Convention Center where most of the Social Forum was happening.

LisaRuth is taking close-up photos of vegetables in the Spirit of Hope community garden. The anarchist convergence center was in the basement of the building behind.

This looked like it could be in Europe, but it was the same Spirit of Hope church where the anarchists converged.

I went with my colleague LisaRuth Elliott, and together we held a two-hour Shaping San Francisco workshop on June 23, followed by another two-hour workshop based on Nowtopia right afterwards. This was the second day of the Forum, but the first day that workshops were held on topics that weren’t focused on Detroit. We were pleasantly surprised when our Wayne State University classroom filled up with about 30 people for the Shaping SF/FoundSF demo and discussion, and they turned out to be from all over. A couple from Detroit, a guy from Lawrence, Kansas, some people from New York, a person from Kentucky, some Bay Area people, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, people from Florida, Ohio, and Vermont. We didn’t figure out all the points of origin, but it was surprising how widely distributed they were. A pretty good discussion ensued afterwards, though I can’t remember much of it now! The idea of producing community histories as a way of combating amnesia, which is how we titled our workshop, resonated, and a lot of the questions had to do with how we got it all going, how we keep it going, what kinds of participation we get, etc.

The US Social Forum opened with a big march through the city.

Detroit is full of open spaces and abandoned buildings, but the Social Forum put that blasted landscape into an entirely different context.

First demo for these militants?

There was way too many bullhorns and repetitive chants for my taste, but these guys rocked it too, and got one kid to shake his booty in this spontaneous moment.

We promoted the Nowtopia panel with the tag line “Jobs Don’t Work!” since a major reason I came to Detroit was to push against the insipid demand for jobs that seems to still imprison all too many people’s imaginations. Much to my delight, on my way to Detroit I was reading material from Grace Boggs and Rich Feldman, both from the Boggs Center in Detroit, and they are very much on the same wavelength. They too argue against “jobs” in favor of a more thoroughgoing transformation of how we think about work. They say we should be insisting on a right to do useful work, and that given the Depression that is commencing (and has been in full effect in Detroit for almost three decades), our only sensible path is to reclaim our activity from the suicidal and self-defeating tasks that capitalists (sometimes) pay us to do. I saw Feldman at a Tuesday morning workshop introducing the Boggs Center and its vital work in Detroit, and was quite impressed. He and Shea Howell were very articulate about the three decades of experimentation and work on the ground that have been accomplished while the looting and abandonment of Detroit were going on. Urban agriculture, peace zones, micro-enterprises, and more, were anchoring a real renaissance in the city, albeit one still far from dominant or complete.

One of many community gardens flourishing in Detroit.

This is the Earth Works garden in East Detroit.

Milk cartons get a good repurposing at the Spirit of Hope garden, inspected here by LisaRuth.

Anyway, unlike the many Nowtopia talks I’ve done all over the world during the past two years, this one was not just me! I invited Julie Rosier, who lived with Grace Boggs for a year and is a Detroit native currently living in New York (where she recently hosted a public discussion with Michael Hardt of Commonwealth, Multitudes, and Empire, at the Brecht Forum), Emily Ramsey of the Los Angeles Bike Kitchen, Arlen Jones of the new project Bici Digna in Los Angeles, and Azibuike Akaba who came to give an intelligent rebuke to the platitudes about “green jobs.” We were in the same room and somehow another 25 people jammed in for this one, raising our attendance over 50. I was delighted with the different perspectives these comrades brought to the discussion. Julie told a bit about her personal history, and how she’s been trying to come to terms with her day job at the Juilliard Academy of Music in NY, since her “real work” in true Nowtopian style, is outside of what she does for money. Emily gave a brief history of the LA Bike Kitchen, and spoke to the problems of continuity and cultural/ethical transmission when the founders move on and the second generation of activists is trying to keep the spirit alive that once animated the project. Arlen presented an account of Bici Digna, in part by showing this video, which was really powerful.

He explained how the video was made during the meeting two weeks earlier in which the day laborers who have embraced Bici Digna (and are now running a DIY bike shop of their own) debated what message he, Arlen, should bring to us in Detroit. In his account he modeled a super radical concept of delegation and representation unfamiliar to anyone there. I loved it! Azibuike got up last and ran through a bunch of common “green” claims, like driving a Prius, or cleaning houses with “green” products. So is the miner who digs up the metal that goes into a Prius doing a “green job”? Is the domestic worker cleaning a house with citrus based solvents doing a “green job”? Smart questions, which quickly underscored the emptiness of the concept. He finally went all the way out on the limb and just said “Green Jobs are Bullshit!” and looked at me with some trepidation, wondering if he’d gone too far. Of course not! It was great, and he is a funny, engaging speaker.

I was glad to see this in the big opening march, since we all have to pitch in and re-start the anti-nuclear movement again.

The Social Forum was competing with the World Cup, so I didn’t go to as many workshops as I might have if I didn’t have compelling games to go and watch every morning. Still, I made it to a good, pretty open-ended discussion with my pals George Caffentzis and Monty Neil (formerly stalwarts of Midnight Notes) which they called “EduNotes.” It was well attended again, the room jammed full. Nick Dyer-Witheford was there too, as was Peter Linebaugh, among many others, and I thought the discussion of tactics and strategy in the face of the all-out assault on education these days was smart and inspiring. The idea of mass refusal of student debt was put on the table. An African American woman entered the discussion after a while and described her predicament in terms that must be familiar to millions of people. She is already a Ph.D. but saddled with an enormous student debt load, and now she’s trying to save enough money to put her three kids through college some years from now: “How do I save to pay for them when I’m still paying for me? It’s indentured servitude!”

There is growing sentiment for a new, wholly free set of institutions run by students and teachers themselves. This latter idea tends to get co-opted by homeschooling, charter schools and other private schooling ideas, but I know at least a dozen people who have been seriously talking about launching a new popular university. The notion of a free school for folks excluded by the drastic cutbacks and near destruction of public education was starting to pop up too. (A guy from San Francisco’s HOMEY had been quite angrily articulate at the Tuesday morning Boggs Center discussion—which veered into a 15 minute discussion of educational issues—decrying the destruction of public education in San Francisco and Oakland as “cutting off the feet” of the black and latino youth in the Bay Area.) In Vancouver just a week ago I was excited to learn about a public school there with absolutely no curriculum (which after nearly 40 years is on the chopping block in the coming year). Students are free to do whatever they like from kindergarten through high school! Of course it leads to a  lot more self-direction and critical thinking, and flies in the face of the idiotic domination of standardized testing. Underlying a lot of the reforms being pushed by Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a barely concealed hatred for the teachers’ unions, who for all their drawbacks and political myopia, remain a bulwark impeding privatization and the reduction of education entirely to job training. As Shea Howell put it, the one thing public schools still reliably teach is a sense of fairness, and that is exactly what makes people less governable as they reach adulthood and expect any kind of equity in society.

Grace Boggs touched on all this during her wonderfully intelligent discussion on Thursday morning with Immanuel Wallerstein (that night the Forum celebrated her 95th birthday!). “What labor was the 1930s, education activists are to this era. It’s not about making THINGS now, it’s about creating humans.” Nick Dyer-Witheford hit a similar note during the EduNotes discussion when he invoked Beverly Silver’s “Forces of Labor” (a book I’ve been recommending for some years too) and her fascinating account of the rise and fall of class struggle among different sectors of the working class over time. The 19th century saw major conflicts led by textile workers, the 20th century led by autoworkers, and now what will be the arena of major struggle during the 21st century? Education seems quite likely.

No longer an industrial cesspool, Detroit can be wildly beautiful at unexpected moments.

Tons of gorgeous houses stand empty all over town.

A two-block stretch of West Canfield seems to be an island of inexplicable prosperity amidst the ruins.

Several miles east are ruins and vacant lots on East Canfield.

The Social Forum is not without flaws, to be sure. For one thing there were far too many similar workshops scheduled at the same times in different locations. It might have been worthwhile to try to get people to consolidate their presentations somehow. Another notable phenomenon is the way most of us attended topics that interested us and by doing so, tended to reproduce some of the separations that plague oppositional political efforts. It’s a bit like the internet where you can choose what news you want to see and avoid all the competing narratives.

My impression was that a lot of the youth activists fell too easily into clichéd leftist politics, demanding jobs, decrying corporate greed, emphasizing the contest for political power via elections. It’s just an impression, but most of the workshops I was at were mostly white even though there were thousands of youth of color in attendance at the Social Forum, while all of us were ensconced in Detroit, a majority black city. I don’t see this like a lot of white activists do. It’s not evidence of bad politics on our part that we don’t have racially balanced attendance. But it is too bad because it feels like a vital richness is lost. This came up in the last workshop I participated in, the “Radical Research” 4-hour workshop on Friday afternoon, sponsored by the Team Colors Collective. A good 50-60 people were there, all but 3-4 were white. A co-panelist, a woman from AREA Chicago, awkwardly tried to address it but all she did was to make everyone in the room feel the usual pallor that descends when political white people ask themselves why they are once again in a poorly integrated meeting. A latino guy responded well, arguing that it was each person’s responsibility to speak for themselves, to represent themselves, and to choose what was interesting for them. There was no reason for the people who HAD attended to feel bad about themselves or their politics. Later I spoke with a radical librarian friend (who works at the awesome Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan) who was there and she was also quite aggravated by the repetitive racial cul-de-sac white activists keep throwing themselves into. “If you want to be in a meeting with lots of people of color, hey, there were rooms up and down the hall full of them. Instead of expecting them to come to YOUR workshop, why don’t they go to theirs?” she sensibly asked.

At one of the many local demos that took place during the US Social Forum, this one in front of the local utility DTE Energy..

Protesting DTE Energy.

Beyond that, there was a good number of leftists there, from the cultish RCP to the Socialist Party and dozens of smaller local groups. The US Social Forum itself has spawned a dozen or more “People’s Movement Assemblies” that DO attempt to identify social issues and their solutions with an agenda of taking political action. Demonstrations took place around Detroit to address local issues, from a small-ish demo outside DTE Energy, the local utility, to a larger march on Saturday against a massive trash incinerator. Outside the utility, protesters chanted “Gas and Lights are Human Rights! For them we will stand and fight!” Apparently there have been a number of deaths attributed to the cutoff of gas and electricity during the past winter. Incineration of trash instead of a curbside recycling program is a self-defeating industrial process. The utility claims that burning trash to make electricity in a state-of-the-art facility reduces carbon emissions over putting it all in landfill, which is questionable at best. But if you take into account the “externalities” of local health problems, air pollution, etc., not to mention that it takes rather fewer people to collect the garbage and dump it into an incinerator than it does to run a robust recycling program that makes use locally of the materials it recycles, and you are compounding a whole series of social problems. The attendance at the incinerator march was about 150-200 people on Saturday morning and though it looked a bit desultory to my Bay Area eyes, the locals who were there were exultant at the turnout. I learned later that the fight against the incinerator has been going on for over 20 years!

Sunflowers, here at the opening demo, reappeared at the Incinerator protest on Saturday June 26.

Grace Boggs kind of hovered over the whole Social Forum in Detroit, which might be a great thing, depending on whether or not people actually get acquainted with her writing and thinking. During her panel with Wallerstein she said a few things I jotted down:
“Those who capture the state become prisoners of the state… We have not had enough thought and analysis about the changing nature of revolution… How do we get past all the opposition and anger that really bogs us down?… Each revolution is an advance on our concept of what it means to be human… We need to understand the difference between imagination and knowledge. Knowledge is about the past, and imagination projects a future…”

She concluded by quoting Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, in a couple of lines that still ring quite loudly a century and a half later:

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

My only point of disagreement with her was when she said “In our revolution (now) we have to give up things in order to advance our humanity.” I get what she means, but I don’t think we’ll get too far by framing our political advocacy this way. Rather, I’d prefer to start the conversation by saying that we can all have everything we want. (As the Bolivians are saying these days, “there’s enough of everything for everybody, there’s just not enough for some people to have more.”) Once we start trying to identify what that “everything” is, and how much work it would take to produce it, and what the ecological consequences of all that work and production would be, most people would begin to ratchet back what they think they need or want. And even if they don’t, it’s the kind of social conversation about work and its effects that we need to have, as publicly and broadly as possible. The US Social Forum turned out to be a place where that conversation WAS happening in various ways, and I’m cautiously optimistic that interesting initiatives will emerge from the ferment that made Detroit such an inspiring experience.

Here’s a few shots of the Heidelberg Project, a crazily decorated couple of blocks in eastern Detroit:

Sunset over Puget Sound from the train I was on yesterday to Vancouver.

Two books I read in the past month overlap with each other in useful ways. The first, Commonwealth by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, is the third volume of their epic theoretical work that began with Empire and continued through Multitudes. While I’m not a camp follower per se, I did get a lot out of these efforts and was glad to read Commonwealth as the conclusion. It made some parts of their argument clearer, but left some important areas unresolved and even self-contradictory. I suppose that’s to be expected with such an ambitious effort to unravel this moment in history, the rise of new paradigms of both capitalist self-perpetuation and (potentially) revolutionary subversion.

The other book is by my host in Vancouver this week, Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. His book, like Nowtopia, is published by AK Press, and I had the pleasure of hearing him present some of his arguments at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco a few months ago. I like a great deal of his argument, pitting a grounded sociality against the forces of capital that continually render everything that is solid into air, or in the case of his book, turning the solidity of urban space into endlessly liquid flows of capital. As he asks, “how can we imagine commonality and neighborhood in such a relentlessly liquid world?”

The amazing Free Farm Stand in San Francisco, free food gleaned from markets and gardens around the area, every Sunday at 23rd and Treat.

The key for Hern, parallel to the arguments by Negri and Hardt, is a form of exodus, to “actively expand the non-market sectors of the economy and society.” But where Hern’s is practical, based on new forms of trust, friendship, and hospitality, and rooted in specific places (Vancouver is his chosen locale), the Negri/Hardt (N/H) version is largely a theoretical assertion based on their odd and contradictory notion of “biopolitical labor.” Given my own years of helping produce Processed World, a magazine that documented well ahead of its time the rise of precarious labor when it was still in its early, affirmative, assertive form of exiting as much as possible the stupid world of wage-labor, I’m quite sympathetic to analyzing the important emergence of immaterial labor. A sweeping argument of N/H is that biopolitical labor is becoming hegemonic (something that invariably gets yowls of protest from anyone who wants to check on the statistical fact that there are more people working in tightly managed industrial factories today than at any previous time in history). By biopolitical labor they mean the activities that comprise all of our lives; a crucial piece of this line of thought is to assert that a new form of capitalist exploitation is taking shape in the cutting edge industries and geographies of the modern world, and that it is becoming increasingly dominant.

On page 142 of Commonwealth, they provide a conveniently concise summary and in it is the contradictory notion clearly stated:

“In the biopolitical context capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society as a whole, or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced. This relationship between capital and productive social life, however, is no longer organic in the sense that Marx understood the term because capital is increasingly external and has an ever less functional role in the productive process. Rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and the like.”

Is” biopolitical labor” autonomous or is it an example of the real subsumption of labor? Are freelance web designers working precariously “autonomous” or are they an individual who is ALWAYS working, always expanding their commercial contacts (via social life) and their networks in the hope of the next job—in other words, an individual who is fully integrated into capitalist life as a quasi-independent worker/entrepreneur? In this way I think their argument starts to look suspiciously like Richard Florida’s flattering (and sycophantic) portrait of the “creative class” in which anyone working in a bank or insurance company is somehow “creative” because they have to work with computers all day! In N/H they get tagged “autonomous” because so much of the labor process requires a fair amount of self-directed cooperation. Just because you are working on a project that has different teams working on various components stretched across the planet (designers in Manhattan, programmers in New Delhi, graphic artists in San Francisco, packaging and manufacturing in Guangdong China) does not make the work you’re doing autonomous. Granted, there are parts of the work you’re doing that have an autonomously cooperative quality and perhaps in that quality we can see the kernel of something more interesting, a capacity for radical self-management. I want to give N/H the benefit of the doubt here, but if you look at their own quote above, you can see how they first define the biopolitical context as one in which the entirety of society is subsumed under the logic of capital. How then are individuals whose activity is apparently fully subsumed simultaneously becoming autonomous from capital (especially if that autonomy is defined as a quality of the work they’re doing while earning wages)? That’s never satisfactorily explained.

Free lettuce awaits at the Free Farm stand.

On the other hand, I’m a proponent of finding the revolutionary possibilities in our everyday lives. By the time you get to the end of Commonwealth, they unabashedly make a teleological argument, but one not based on any invisible hands or inevitable forces, just that we CAN push the world towards one of our own making, one based on our own self-direction, cooperation, and general happiness.  On page 242 they say “Today, in fact, revolution is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an “exceeding” present that in some sense already contains the future within it.” A little later they continue to argue for the inability of capitalism to adequately capture the value produced in the new realm of biopolitical labor: “…the results of biopolitical production, including social subjectivities and relations, forms of life, have an immediately ontological dimension. Value is generated in this process, but it is immeasurable, or rather it constantly exceeds the units of any accounting scheme; it overflows the corporation’s double-entry ledgers and confounds the public balance sheets of the nation-state. How can you measure the value of an idea, an image, or a relationship?” If only it were only such things that comprised wealth. And perhaps that is one of the points here, that as we reach the self-destructive end of the capitalist mode of production, an important path out is to recognize the enormous value of “not-things,” of aspects of our common life that have gone unmeasured and radically undervalued in this social arrangement.

Snow-capped volcano in background at upper left, white egret in foreground lower right, on Klamath Lake from the train yesterday.

Matt Hern stays resolutely on the ground in addressing the revolutionary qualities of social activity. He is an enthusiastic localist, waxing rhapsodic about Critical Mass as a proving ground for social problem-solving and creating convivial common experiences, while also arguing that if we REALLY cared about reducing violence against teens (as all the gang and drug taskforces claim) we’d be radically reducing the use of autos wherever possible. Way more youth are killed every year on the roads in car crashes than in any other activity, and yet we treat that like it’s a fact of nature or something. He talks about the 130,000 trees in Vancouver and wonders why 10% or even 30% can’t be converted to fruit trees, thereby providing free food to everyone? But he knows why:

…We cannot have global capitalism and embrace localization… Our only alternative is to constrict the economy. We cannot have economic growth and ecological sanity… Maybe the easiest way to think about contracting the economy is getting your hands dirty and growing some food. There’s not much ambiguity there. It’s simple and cheap and convivial. But more than that it represents exactly how we need to be de-commodifying our relationship with the natural world and reconfiguring our cities as common ground.”

Negri and Hardt build on some of the autonomous theorizing that’s been going on during the past couple of years’ rupture of the neoliberal model. Again the two books come together in interesting ways on the question of the city as a locale of exploitation and reinvention.

“The metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to be the industrial working class… metropolis primarily generates rent, which is the only means by which capital can capture the wealth created autonomously… Rent operates through a desocialization of the common, privatizing in the hands of the rich the common wealth produced and consolidated in the metropolis.” (N/H p. 250 and 258)

Earlier in the book they describe the rise of financialization as a mechanism to capture the wealth produced outside the logic of commodities for sale. If it’s true that we’re together producing an ever-richer shared life, and that most of that new richness is unmeasurable, we’re nevertheless seeing a significant part of that wealth siphoned away from us as rent, whether for residential or commercial spaces, to landlords or to banks. They describe this a bit differently:

“… in the contemporary networks of biopolitical production, the extraction of value from the common is increasingly accomplished without the capitalist intervening in its production. This renewed primacy of rent provides us an essential insight into why finance capital, along with the vast stratum that Keynes designates as functionless investors, occupies today a central position in the management of capitalist accumulation, capturing the expropriating the value created at a level far abstracted from the labor process.” (p. 141-42)

Matt Hern offers a definition of urban vitality that in a more vernacular way describes the kind of wealth N/H are talking about too:

“…that’s my definition of urban vitality: constantly running into people who aren’t like you, who don’t think, look, or act like you, people who have fundamentally different values and backgrounds. And in that mix there is always the possibility to reimagine and remake yourself—a world of possibility that is driven by public life and space, that it its best turns into common places and neighborhoods. That’s what makes a great city, not the shopping opportunities.”

A good deal of his book takes us from Vancouver to other cities around the world, but the promise of a comparative study is rarely fulfilled. Mostly he’s interested in and talking about Vancouver with the odd juxtaposition to New York, Montreal, Molokai, Diyarbakir Turkey, Fort Good Hope near the Arctic Circle, and other locales. I understand what he’s up to. As he notes in his introduction, you really see your city most clearly when you are away, in other contexts. He spends a fair amount of time critiquing what I assume are various initiatives in Vancouver of the “New Urbanist” variety, efforts to promote and celebrate a developer-driven vision of urban vitality.

“…there’s more color and nuance to be added in, more than simple capital-labor contestation. There is a shared cultural response to the challenge and value of public space, and in some ways Living First has morphed into another subtle variant on enclosure, delicately displacing the power of public space into private hands…This speaks to a fundamental difference between public spaces and common places, and this is one of the core themes of this book: how can a city, this city, become a city of common places. Public space, lots of it, is crucial but we have to realize that we need more than that. People move through public space—but common space is where they stop, what they learn to inhabit, and make their own.” (p. 58-59)

As an urbanist Hern gets to speak with other planners and bureaucrats, and I assume he’s made the rounds of plenty of those promotional conventions for architects and planners where they are faced with the relentless pressure to “sell” their cities to investors.

“…economic globalization is driving municipalities into direct competition with one another for capital resources, seeking to attract funding with incentive packages promising juicy profits for investors… Running a city in the twenty-first century is all about the hustle.”

This parallels the N/H discussion of rent, because broadly understood, this is precisely what these development schemes and sales campaigns are promising capital: come to OUR city and you’ll make a great return. You don’t have to run factories or offices, or even hotels or restaurants. Just make capital available to the city for its development plans and the rising wealth of a successful urban revitalization effort will handsomely reward the lenders with steady payouts for years to come (this is mostly done through the municipal bond market). At one of the conferences Hern recounts, he captures the emergent conflict quite well:

“Overwhelmingly present, but entirely subsumed was a critical discontinuity between a neoliberal globalization agenda articulated by the World Bank, IMF, and an omnipresent array of private financiers and development companies, and an apparent consensus on the importance of decentralization, local economies, local energy production, local control, and local democracies.” (p. 171)

This is another variation on the argument I made in Nowtopia about an emergent working-class movement with an agenda that escapes the logic of wage-labor and the perpetuation of capitalism. The still mostly invisible presence of an agenda based on local economies and local democracy is bubbling up in many locations. It just hasn’t found its political voice yet.  Negri and Hardt do a nice job of capturing this historical process:

“Capital will not continue to rule forever, and it will create, in pursuing its own rule, the conditions of the mode of production and the society that will eventually succeed it. This is a long process, just as was the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production, and there is no telling when it will cross the crucial threshold, but we can already recognize—in the autonomy of biopolitical production, the centrality of the common, and their growing separation from capitalist exploitation and command—the makings of a new society within the shell of the old.” (p. 301)

Both books offer deeper suggestions about orientation and values too, much more than I can accommodate in this already too-quote-heavy blog entry, but nevertheless here’s a couple more:

Matt Hern:

“…otherness cannot and should not be collapsed into a tolerant multiculturalism, but requires an acknowledgement of, appreciation for, and trust in profoundly different ways of living and social organization. A city of immigrants has to learn to live together, but if it is going to thrive people have to learn to trust each other. Paradoxically, that trust cannot emerge without community, but community needs trust to develop. Perhaps hospitality and friendship are a partial way out of the chicken v. egg thing here.” (p. 104)

Negri/Hardt:

“The refusal of work is a central slogan of this project, which we have explored at length elsewhere. The refusal of work and ultimately the abolition of the worker does not mean the end of production and innovation but rather the invention, beyond capital, of as yet unimagined relations of production that allow and facilitate an expansion of our creative powers……Revolutionary class politics must destroy the structures and institutions of worker subordination and thus abolish the identity of worker itself, setting in motion the production of subjectivities and a process of social and institutional innovation.” (p. 332-33)

My argument is that this process of self-abolition of the category of worker is already visible in the activities many of us are engaged in when we’re NOT at work, when we’re busily appropriating technologies in innovative and artistic ways, when we’re addressing the ecological crisis by using the waste stream in unpredictable ways. Hern gets it too: “…when lots of us start riding bikes everywhere, we stop buying cars and gas and it hurts business. This also occurs when we start closing streets down or living in co-op housing or planting fruit trees all over the city. All of this is all good and fun and ecological and “green,” but really it presents a direct, antagonistic challenge to capitalism. And so it should be. I want planting gardens to be not just an aesthetic activity or an attempt to ameliorate capitalism’s worst excesses but the first punch in a street fight.”

So let’s put up our dukes!

Critical Mass made it to see the sunset at Ocean Beach on May 28.

It’s a bit strange to start writing about the bucolic uses of public space in San Francisco (Critical Mass and Carnaval) while the worst environmental disaster in history is ongoing. Who has not already had days of obsessing about the oil pouring into the Gulf, followed by numbness, distancing, and then another round of intense rage and grief?  The sheer hubris of BP and the venal complicity of the Obama Administration is breathtaking. A person commented on my last entry Technology and Impotence over at Streetsblog, defending Obama and his minions. They are in denial about the overwhelming evidence that has been reported everywhere from Newsweek to local papers that BP and Obama’s general-in-charge have been working in lockstep to deny journalists and photographers access to areas of great damage, to prevent ecologists from getting in to count wildlife casualties, and generally have been running the whole thing like they run the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, putting more time and money into controlling the way the news appears in the media than actually addressing the problems their policies are creating. The Israeli attack on the Gaza Relief Flotilla is another example of bald-faced manipulation in the face of overwhelming evidence (the soldiers who were attacking ships in international waters were “attacked”? Do they think the whole world is crazy?) Increasingly we live in a world of manufactured news and images, in which our ideas and “knowledge” are almost completely dominated by state and corporate propaganda. That’s not new, to be sure, but it’s getting worse all the time. The attempt to black out news and images of the oil spill is being handled exactly like government efforts to hide the casualties of war.

Now we find out that since it’s not working as well as they’d like, BP  has hired Dick Cheney’s former press secretary–a woman who was once the spokesperson for the U.S. Dept. of Energy under the Bush Oil Cabal and apparently knows how to spin and hide the most blatant incompetence and corruption. I just learned about this website “If It Was My Home” where you can see how huge the spill is by placing it in any part of the world you want to (hat-tip to Mona for the link). It’s a handy one-stop website where you can also see the live webcam of the ongoing oil torrent and a running counter of the number of gallons that have poured out (22.5 million and counting as I write this).

Bicyclists are reeling a bit this weekend because a couple of days ago a guy deliberately drove his SUV into 4 different cyclists before crashing and running away. He got caught today when he went to the police to claim that he had been carjacked, but he’d left his wallet, keys, and cellphone in the car when he ran away. Remarkably, they are booking him on murder charges, something that almost never happens when a motorist assaults bicyclists, but this was so aggressive and random, plus he went after four different cyclists on different streets, so maybe they’ll follow this through.

There’s an ongoing low-level roar online from the 101st Fighting Keyboardists against bicycling, most notably on SFGate and a few other local sites, but in real life the supposed overwhelming hostility to cyclists is hard to find. We had a fantastic Critical Mass last week, as usual characterized by hundreds of bystanders, motorists, and pedestrians cheering us as we rolled by. It was the first time in a year or more that a published route was shared ahead of the ride. It was supposed to go to the 7 beaches of San Francisco, but in the end we only made it to about 4.

Critical Massers enjoy sunset at the beach, May 28 2010.

Instead of following the proposed route and looping to South Beach (and joining the protesters who were outside the Giants-Arizona game) the riders in front went straight up Market, then west on Geary in a beeline, north on Van Ness until the irresistable vortex of the Broadway Tunnel got ‘em again. What is it about that damn tunnel these days? Why does Critical Mass have to go back and forth through it EVERY TIME?? Joel P. worked hard in the front, and got some help from a guy he picks apples with (who seemed to have some influence with the testosterone-laden young men who led the ride into the tunnel) who brought the riders back west whereupon we went north on Van Ness, then took the waterfront to Crissy Field.

An inexplicably "militant" moment in the Presidio, May 28, 2010.

I saw at least six different tandems in this Critical Mass... quite unusual!

From there we took a magical ride up through the Presidio during the golden light before sunset, passing Baker Beach, China Beach, and finally going the last leg on Geary to the Cliff House and down to the beach. Wheeeee! What a lovely ride!

A rare trip to the western edge of the City during Critical Mass.

This was before the big Memorial Day weekend, which in San Francisco’s Mission District is also the big Carnaval. And lo and behold, this year, for the first time in a decade, we had fantastic, sunny, warm weather! I enjoyed Carnaval more this year than I have in a long time, probably because I had the great pleasure of hosting Willy Lizarraga’s charming “Birth of Carnaval on the Streets of San Francisco” at our May 19 Shaping San Francisco Talk. I didn’t get out that early, but by 11:30 or so it had been going for an hour and a half and was only about 2/3 done. So I caught a bunch, but at the start my friends were picnicking in the middle of Folsom Street, taking full advantage of the rare closed street.

Mona, Adri, and Carin

Can we start depaving now?

So the rest of this post is a gallery of images from Carnaval, including a number of crowd shots which I found at least as charming as the participants in the parade.

Adriana found us a fresh coconut full of cold juice! yum! and the meat was good too!

NASA satellite image of Gulf oil spill, May 17, 2010.

(This piece was published first at sf.streetsblog.org. I appreciate their consideration for my wanting to republish it here so soon.)

The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalities for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper failsafe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chiu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (5 MB pdf!) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco’s Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. Whaddya think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

Fava beans flourish in terraces on former Central Freeway onramp slope.

“Circle the Food Wagons!” I gave that title to a Shaping San Francisco Talk we had last night at Counterpulse, featuring folks from local small farm/gardening projects and also John Garrone, who is the “mushroom guy” at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market. It was one of those evenings that makes me happy and proud to be hosting this ongoing series of Talks. Smart, engaging speakers presented their histories, politics, and passions, followed by equally compelling questions and comments from the audience that extended and deepened the reach of the discussion. Much to my chagrin, we had a technical failure with our usual digital recording, so while we had a great evening, no one will be able to hear it via our online archive.

Instead, I’m going to try to summarize some of the highlights here. Leading the presentation were Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway who are co-owners of Little City Gardens, a market-garden business in San Francisco. They described their year-long process of deciding that the gap they wanted to fill in the local food ecology was that of the small, self-sufficient producer, a small business that could survive on its own sweat and effort by selling the food it grows. They started on a 16th of an acre plot in a Mission district backyard growing artisanal salad greens, and with success in their first year, decided to seek a larger piece of land on which to expand their efforts. They used the Kickstarter website to launch a fundraising campaign that netted them $20K in small donation startup capital, found a landowner with a ¾ acre plot under the I-280 freeway in the southern part of the City, signed a one-year lease, and began clearing land. Before long they learned that the vague assurances they had gotten at the Dept. of Planning about their compliance with zoning regulations were unfounded. Now they’re trying to gain an exemption from the arduous process of getting a conditional use permit (which could take over a year and cost up to $8,000). They are also planning to seek permission to drill a well directly into the very high water table beneath the land, which is probably either fill or original riparian corridor along Islais Creek, still burbling along beneath the neighborhood on its way to the Bay. Little City Gardens is still taking donations and offers a quarterly magazine, hand-screen prints, and other goodies to their supporters, in addition to abundant fresh produce that they sell to local restaurants.

Making soil at Hayes Valley Farm.

Through this experiment in urban market-gardening, they are interested in publicly asking the question: what does it take to run an economically viable urban farm business? And specific to San Francisco, what are the challenges, and what are the benefits?

The Free Farm at Eddy and Gough, City Hall looming in the distance.

Next up was the Free Farm, represented by Lauren Anderson and Case Garver, which is a new garden farm on an empty sand lot at Eddy and Gough where an old Lutheran Church burned down in 1995. After fifteen years of lying fallow and gathering garbage and debris, the collaborative effort of several non-profit organizations (including Lauren’s Produce to the People), community groups and individuals got permission from the Lutheran Church to begin an organic farm there. One of the stalwarts of this effort is Tree, who also runs the Free Farm Stand at 23rd and Treat every Sunday, just a block from Kaliflower where he has lived off and on. Kaliflower is the venerable commune dating back to the late 1960s that sits on a big corner lot along the old railroad right-of-way at 23rd between Folsom and Shotwell. Tree and Lauren’s group and others are also involved in an effort to more regularly glean local fruit trees and other food sources that are too often neglected around the city’s backyards and sidewalks.

Covered beds a month ago along the Gough Street side of the Free Farm. They've since been opened and are flourishing.

The Free Farm labyrinth, to double as an herb garden.

Case spoke to the community-building aspects of the Free Farm, how they spend a lot of time focused on wellness and checking in with each other, consensing on how the garden is designed and how it will be worked, how its produce will be distributed to folks in the neighborhood, etc. His roots are in a Jesuit religious community, and a spiritual approach is a strong presence in the Free Farm, giving its commitment to free food an almost evangelical feeling. Nevertheless, the day-to-day experience of working together, bringing a food producing garden to life in what was just a long-neglected scrabbly sand lot is a powerful material experience, regardless of what overtones are added.

John Garrone is the current president of the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market where his Far West Fungi has long been a fixture. I’ve been shopping at that fantastically multicultural and multilingual market for twenty years, practically every Wednesday. John is a warm, lovely guy and it turns out he has deep roots in Bay Area agriculture. Though he didn’t imagine he’d become a farmer, his own family were farmers in the Santa Clara valley. He filled in some of the history of the Farmers’ Market going back to the Victory Gardens food surpluses of the WWII era, and told too about his own experience in starting a mushroom growing operation in a Hunters’ Point warehouse soon after the Navy had shut down the Naval shipyard. He later moved his growing operation to Watsonville and then to Moss Landing, though he lives in San Bruno, just south of the City.

He told how the City transferred responsibility for the Farmers’ Markets to the Dept. of Real Estate and how that led to a big fight over the future of the Heart of the City Market. It started in the early 1980s after an effort by the then-North of Market Planning Coalition and other Tenderloin-based groups to establish it, in order to provide fresh food to the inner city residents there who had no local stores with fresh produce. It’s been run for years by a nonprofit and when the City tried to take over, it sparked strong resistance by the farmers and the neighborhood, which fended it off for now.

The oasis between former freeway ramps.

Jay Rosenberg is the Volunteer Coordinator for the San Francisco Permaculture Guild, and is one of the organizers and volunteers at the Hayes Valley Farm, which happens to sit just a few blocks from the Free Farm. Where the Free Farm’s site is a block from the former onramp to the Central Freeway at Turk and Gough, the Hayes Valley Farm is a much larger block of land, a magical mystery smack dab in the middle of the former on and off ramps between Oak, Fell, Octavia, and Laguna streets.

The former freeway ramps are still present and the Hayes Valley farmers have been making good use of them—putting potted fruit trees on the former onramp in a simulated “natural traffic jam” (will it someday be producing real jam?); and using the slopes where cement freeways once went airborne as agricultural terraces, now heavy with flourishing fava bean plants.

The former offramp has yet to be repurposed, but its supporting slope is now supporting a crop of fava beans!

Buildings at Market and Van Ness can be seen in distance. Octavia Blvd. and Oak Street intersection is just past the parking lot in the foreground.

Like the Free Farm, Hayes Valley is also committed to a community-building process, and happily, they seem to have hit the sweet spot with a new generation of aspiring urban agriculturists. Over 1,000 people have already spent time volunteering at the Hayes Valley Farm since their recent beginning at the end of January of this year! Given the history of this land as an anchorage to one of the most heavily trafficked corridors in the City, there has been some real concern about the health of the soil, but Jay told us they had conducted extensive testing and only found one small area that was too contaminated to grow food in. Still, they’ve done some incredible work, having had several tons of cardboard donated by Google (and trucked up the peninsula at their expense) which they are using under several tons of organic mulch as a weed cover. It will biodegrade into the area after some months, and meanwhile, the volunteers are getting a crash course in building soil, turning the old freeways into an inspiring experiment in urban agriculture.

Potted Traffic Jam on old on-ramp... will it one day produce real jam?

Easterly view of same Potted Traffic Jam...

One of the recurring factors facing all the San Francisco farming projects was the temporary nature of their access to the land. From the one-year lease signed by Little City Gardens, to the 2-3 year agreements that both Free Farm and Hayes Valley Farm have made with their respective landowners, a lot of effort is going in to land that may be built in within a few short years. Some in the audience wondered about that, but a common feeling was that this is the time to show what’s possible, and even in temporary farm gardens you can do a lot. The Free Farm has already harvested 80 lbs. of produce in the short time since they planted, for example. No one had any illusions that these efforts alone could achieve urban food self-sufficiency, but at the same time, such a goal is truly impossible without the skills, knowledge, and practical experiences people are gaining in these projects. What’s more, the lasting legacy of these efforts, however long or briefly they last, is the powerful impact on people’s imaginations. They show how radically different it COULD be, and if we persist, WILL be!