“Now there’s a blank check,” Greg closed his book and slipped it into his backpack.
“Rumor has it that he’s also considering declaring a state of emergency and martial law in the Bay Area.” Beth frowned. She did not support the perverse equation that more repression would produce insurrection that much sooner.
“How likely is that?” Greg asked.
“Not very,” Beth admitted, sighing, “Some folks were talking about it on KPFA is all. Anyway, I have a couple more things to ask you. The community peace group, the Alabaster Coalition for Peace in Southern Mexico has called a demo downtown on Friday at 2 p.m. I’ve been calling all morning, and ASP consensus so far is to do some CD. Blockade the Post Office to dramatize registration and the draft. Are you down for that?”
“Sure,” he said, automatically.
“Good. There’ll be a non-violence training tomorrow at 7 a.m. at the Zapata Cafe. Now, we need a couple of ASP reps to meet with the Coalition tonight, to discuss our CD. We sorta told them that we’d already planned to do it. Feelings are running high that we should keep our independence on this action. The Coalition was blown away by this building occupation. But they also want to channel us into their agenda.”
“When’s the meeting?
“Seven.”
“Okay, I’ll go.”
“Great,” Beth looked relieved. “A lot of the rest of us are busy. It’ll be at the Gondwana, upstairs. Lori’s also going.”
Suddenly a representative for Alabaster Students for Peace, Greg reviewed his own patchwork politics. The word “eclectic” entailed too much choice. Greg’s politics had been grafted onto him from his limited life experiences.
To begin with, he admired the vision and courage of a certain type of action-oriented pacifist, though he himself was not one. He had come to appreciate the pacifist point of view while struggling with his decision not to register for the draft. His decision had been made easier by his father’s ability to subsidize his education, and a civil libertarian opposition to any form of national ID still extant in society. Greg knew his own limits however, and so knew that there were certain situations in which he would not remain pacifist. He methodically rolled up his sleeping bag before restuffing his backpack with his school work.
In turn, his interest in the practical side to science, in the mechanical and engineering aspects to things, gave him a disdain for PC’s extreme subjectivism still rife on most college and university campuses. The equation that, say, a remark was sexist just because a woman said it was (there being no objectivity and the oppressed always being right about their own oppression), made him cringe. He tended to believe that objective reality possessed objective standards. Even when that was not the case, people always defined standards for themselves with each other in a social context. Neither could be as easily dismissed as the PC line might have it.
Greg strolled across the sun soaked Plaza, pack on his back and sleeping bag under his arm. His predisposition toward objective, scientific criteria gave him little sympathy for Marxism however. He particularly abhorred the vile ideological permutations of Leninism. There was a type of reverse romanticism in the latter to which he felt not the slightest sympathy. ML’s often took great pride in a clinical, “revolutionary” ruthlessness that to Greg bordered on pathology. History’s judgment was all that mattered, and history was not a particularly sentimental or humane force. Millions had died for history to pass its judgment against Nazism for instance. What is more, ML’s often took a perverse carnivore’s pride in being agents of history, capable of doing whatever was necessary to bring their communist society into being. Born too late to know of the Khmer Rouge’s Kampuchean blood bath, except as history, Greg had followed the Shining Path’s Peruvian holocaust as it unfolded to the world via the media.
By the same token, he did not redbait. He had no desire to live in the squalid, repressive “workers’ paradise” that was Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Peru, or any of the other leftover ML regimes reconstituted as the remnant socialist block. But, unlike even a good many anarchists and anti-authoritarians these days, he refused to out-anti-communist the anti-communists. Instead, he preferred to point out the wrongs perpetrated by the US. The anti-communist vehemence of this ultra-Left was a waste of time, according to Greg. The broad concrete steps that he climbed up to the central library’s hive-like arcologies, now dotted with casual lounging students, always reminded him of a 20th century sci-fi movie.
He agreed that decentralization was a more humane and creative way to run things; after all, ecologies were most stable when most diverse and variegated. And the new hologramic computers were contrived as decentralized hardware and software webs. But he was not at all sure about decentralized Hooligan revelry in street fighting and violence. This too seemed to be born of a romantic love of violence that used catharsis as an excuse to perpetrate general mayhem. In sum, he described himself as a decentralized, democratic socialist.
He spent the remainder of his time before the meeting studying in the library. He had wanted to drop by home to see if Andre was there. But he met Larry on the way off campus, smoked a joint of dynamite Humboldt, and wound up driving to the Cafe, arriving on time.
Gondwana had been one of his and Janet’s hangouts. They had liked the window tables on the ground floor, but were not old enough or important enough to have, de facto, their own table on their own night as did the regulars. At the same time, they had never been intimidated by the Bohemian/intelligentsia types who got irritated when they stayed over at any of the unofficially reserved tables. He felt a little awkward going in solo, a feeling enhanced by being high. He ordered an herbal tea and a toasted buttered bagel with a side of cream cheese, paid and waited, then took them upstairs.
The Cafe had been started by a couple of ASU graduates. They had appropriated the cliched Geology department joke, a favorite of t-shirts, to “Reunite Gondwanaland, as the ultimate expression of the human condition. A “Myth of Sisyphus” to the hundredth power. Perhaps it also had a little to do with their graduating as Liberal Arts majors from a cow-town, agi-college. The service stations on the Cafe floor, in turn, were divided continentally; South America, Africa and Antarctica, with India and Australia combined. Fronds and ferns cooled the raw wood decor with lush greens. The upstairs had been an afterthought, built over the kitchen and toilet areas when the cafe became popular, and crowded. It was more like a loft, an internal balcony with a view of the rest of the cafe and its show. It had the nickname of the Pterodactyl Roost. Once up in the roost, he had no trouble identifying the Coalition folks, even though Lori had not yet managed to make her appearance yet.
Intelligentsia or Bohemian, student or community, the Cafe’s patrons were uniformly “in style.” By contrast, the Coalition members were downright frumpy; the males mostly bearded, the females without makeup, and both dressed in baggy labor/lumberjack garb. Greg strolled up, introduced himself, and deferred any serious conversation until Lori’s arrival. The meeting’s context resided in international political developments; events he was familiar with only as history.
The collapse of ML style communism in eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union’s subsequent disintegration into its second civil war, had different political consequences for the rest of the world’s Left than it did for the domestic, U.S. Left. The concrete manifestations—shattering of the socialist bloc, ML retrenchment, facilitation of regional and world capitalist consolidation, increased exploitation and ongoing fragmentation of the Third World—were rarely disputed. But the consequences to ideological configurations were in dispute precisely because they differed inside and outside of the United States.
Internationally, Marxism-Leninism fell into disrepute. There existed little in the way of a second world, socialist alternative for the Third World to follow as a model for economic development. Those Third World movements which remained loyal to ML orthodoxy, such as Peru’s Communist Party, the infamous Sendero Luminoso, committed mass atrocitie
s once in power to further discredit that ideology. But in a Third World wracked by continuous, generalized civil war, little of the Left remained relevant. Strains of authoritarian capitalism predominated.
Certain revolutionary Marxist strains in Europe—councilism, Marxist Humanism, and some post-Trotskyist sects—managed to hold onto and even modestly expand their memberships. But what benefited most were European social democracy and Left liberalism, when the Left did not lose to capitalist hegemony altogether. European anarchism, autonomism, situationism/post-situationism; that is the anti-authoritarian Left, diminished with the rise of practical and pragmatic political thinking, particularly in a Europe faced with incorporating a devastated eastern Europe into western economic prosperity.
As he spread cream cheese on his bagel, Greg noticed the social dynamics around him. The tableful of politicos and the surrounding “au courant” each considered themselves the exclusive avant garde, of politics and culture respectively. Clearly, each disdained the other; each group huddling in among themselves as if the other had leprosy. The resulting gap was manifested as a physical space, a no-man’s-land the traversing of which had markedly changed Greg’s status in the eyes of both camps. Greg had no inkling that his present company, representative of the US Left, was out-of-step with the Left internationally.
Of course the progressive landscape in the US also changed with the socialist bloc’s partial collapse, but in ways that reflected the Left’s privileged position in the center of empire and North America’s modest economic prosperity. Marxism-Leninism declined, but not as markedly as would have been expected. US ML’s had often been Third-Worldist in outlook. They could still point to the Third World ML regimes which maintained the remaining fragments of the socialist bloc, as well as the national liberation struggles they supported. Of course US ML’s dismissed international events as a turning away from “true socialism.” Social democracy lost some ground, but again, not much. Social democratic governments were still being voted in and out of power in the capitalist west. The resurgent north American labor movement of the late 1990’s kept both Leninism and social democracy as viable options into the twenty-first century.
The big loser proved to be Democratic Party style liberalism and its overlap with more Leftist politics, as the war drove much of organized labor back into the Party’s center, if not further right. US conservatives effectively used international events to decimate the ranks of FDR New Deal liberals. The big winner was the ultra-Left: the youthful, Hooligan amalgam of revolutionary Marxism, anarchism and sundry anti-authoritarian tendencies without the burden of ML socialism’s failures, or its successes. With no apparent alternative between capitalist hegemony and Third World immiseration, all manner of utopianism flourished. Outside of this strictly linear spectrum, the numerous branched side movements—pacifism, radical environmentalism, internal nationalism, women’s liberation, etc.—also flourished. These peripheral movements grew more widely in the US than in the rest of the world, but not as precipitously as did the ultra-Left.
Lori arrived with a smile for Greg and a cool hard gaze for the Coalition, a Raspie of Amazonian proportions named Mary in tow. Raspie was short for Rasputain or Rasputanic, a youth subculture devoted to Monk Rasputan’s notion that in order to be blissfully redeemed, one had to first sin, and sin excessively. Raspie drug, sex and blood orgies were the flip side of an equally crazed mysticism. The Raspie style was black clothes and capes, if not actually caked in blood, then portions dyed blood red, and hung with industrial detritus, hunks of raw meat, embalmed fetuses and the like. The cafe management had banned such costumery as a health hazard, and so Mary wore her earrings of decapitated baby dolls as a Raspie reminder. One positive thing about Raspie was that it had defined the first truly creative musical style after punk; using as its base the hard industrial sound of the early 1990’s (Tit Wrench, Lard) while combining elements of glam, worldbeat, funk, hiphop and kayo into a dynamic, aggressive, original gestalt. Raspie combined the sounds of instruments, samplings and synthesizers with the induced vibrational sounds of metal tools, ceramic toilets, glass alcohol bottles, and other common household items into hard, fast music characterized by walking bass lines, quirky rhythms, and occasional stunning melodies pushed forward by unpretentious lead guitars. On the whole, it did not use the new Emo-Sound technologies, though a few bands toyed with some of the audio-neural systems currently on the market. Most Raspie musicians preferred power and originality to what they considered “cheap tricks.”
“Let’s get started,” Lori said, brusquely, as she and Mary took chairs, Lori with beer in hand. Introductions were made around the table.
“The Coalition for Peace in Southern Mexico has permits for a march down Main Street tomorrow at 1 p.m. with a picket at the courthouse.” A man called Dannie, sporting a Lenin/Trotsky goatee, delineated the Coalitions plans. Greg remembered him from early ASP meetings, one of the “representatives from the community” who had attended to try and “guide” the student organization’s direction in the guise of getting ASP to “work with the community more.” He was a member of the Socialist Labor Organization, as Greg recalled. “This is the local response to the Peace Mobilization’s national call. Now, its our understanding that Alabaster Students for Peace would like to participate in Friday’s activities. Exactly what would ASP like to do?”
“We’re planning on a little civil disobedience,” Lori grinned. She ordered another beer from a passing waitress, then looked at Greg and ordered two.
“What type of CD?” asked a Coalition woman named Karen who wore a War Resisters League broken rifle pin, “When do you plan to do it, and where? Do you need non-violence training?”
“We have our own training scheduled,” Lori smirked, “But as for the rest, that I’m afraid is information we can’t provide at this time.”
“That doesn’t allow for you to get any critical input on your plans,” said a man named Dustin, wearing a Committee In Solidarity with the People Of Southern Mexico t-shirt. “Such input might improve what you plan to do, maybe even keep you from making stupid mistakes.”
“It also doesn’t allow information about our action to reach the cops,” Lori accepted the two beers, handed one to Greg, took a gulp of her beer, then handed it to Mary. “This way, the police aren’t waiting for us, anticipating our CD and able to stop it before it starts.”
Lori’s response floored the Coalition, stunning them into a long moment of silence.
“You’re not saying that telling the Coalition about your plans will let the police in on them?” Daniel was incredulous.
“Or maybe you’re saying that the Coalition wants to try to police you!” A woman named Paula, from Educators for Social Responsibility, cut in.
“ASP is an autonomous organization,” Lori condescended to answer. “Your coalition can suggest. But it can’t order. As for our CD’s security, well, the fewer who know about it’s details, the better. There’s a lot of police infiltration, especially these days.”
“It’s our event Friday.” Dustin warned.
“Hold it,” Greg spoke, nervously tracing a finger across the graffiti someone had carved into the table top; Tir na n-Oc. “The Coalition’s doing this because ifs a Mobe national call. You can’t own a national call. So on Friday, that’s your response to the national call. Other people can respond to the call in their own ways. You can’t stop that.”
“And whether or not that’s true,” Mary growled, “The Coalition doesn’t own the peace movement in Alabaster. And you fucking can’t own a peace march or rally.”
Damn, she could be intimidating.
“We do have the permits,” Paula managed a smile in the face of Mary’s smoldering wrath.
“Yah, right,” Lori was smug. “And we’re doing CD. We’re not going to the cops and saying ‘Hey, can we get a civil disobedience permit.’ By definition CD’s outside the law. And if push-comes-to-shove it’ll be outside your Coalition’s rules as well. We don’t need a
permit from you either.”
“Hold on here,” Karen held up a hand for calm, “There’s no need to get into a fight over this. CD is not a legal activity, and its perfectly reasonable for your group to have security concerns.”
“Especially with the President unleashing the FBI over that stolen riemanium,” Lori said, winking at Greg. She’d ordered another beer, as did Greg.
“At the same time, the Coalition also has concerns,” Karen continued.
“Yes,” Dustin underscored her remark, “You talk about ‘autonomy” and ASP doing what it wants, damn the law and the Coalition’s rules too. That sounds to me like Hooligans talking. If you’re planning to riot and street fight, then our Coalition is going to insist that you find another time and place for your action.”
“We’re going to do civil disobedience,” Greg was emphatic, “Traditional, tried and true, Quaker inspired, Gandhi approved, ML King endorsed civil disobedience. We’re having a nonviolence training tomorrow morning to prepare for it.”
“That’s good to hear,” Paula said.
“So why do I get this feeling,” Lori leaned into the discussion, her voice loitering into a sarcastic drawl. “That even good old CD is too radical for your Coalition.”
“That’s not fair.” Dannie protested.
“Isn’t it?” Lori was obviously enjoying the provocation as she ordered another beer, handing her second half empty bottle to Mary.
“The Coalition is a broad alliance of many community organizations.” Dustin explained, “Yes, there are groups in the Coalition that would see CD as ‘going too far.’ By the same token, there are Coalition groups that, say, believe in socialist revolution. The idea behind the coalition is to get all these different groups to work together around achieving peace in southern Mexico. Our activities are intended to gain the broadest public support possible.”
“Which leaves you with a lowest-common-denominator politics,” Mary laughed, thick and ugly.
End Time Page 19