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Great Peace
by conchita
I have been writing various versions of this post in my mind for some time. Now a confluence of events and influences have made it time for the words to reach the screen. In making this post i will be borrowing from other commenters here, in particular from citizen’s thread "Revolutionary" and "Scarcity" written in response to b real’s recommendation to read Bookchin’s Listen Marxist!. To be truthful, i am feeling a bit disingenuous doing this because i have not been able to make the time yet to read the entire thread or "Listen Marxist!". However, what citizen wrote resonated strongly and provoked extended discussion – the thread here is well over 48 printed pages and it extends to LeSpeakeasy.
The essence of citizen’s look at Bookchin’s definition of revolutionary is captured in his closing:
I support the people who actually build communities. My sense is that Bookchin is saying to first revolutionize the hearts around you, and demand to have a say in how your community plans and directs itself. Then, as a community, decide which other communities to support. My sense is that the Bookchin answer for most is to build community assemblies, and lobby to have them support other communities in the world.
This seems more demanding to me, and so perhaps revolutionary because it would demand that we first revolutionize oneselves. Rather than talking first about whom we support, better we should work to understand the point of working to create local assemblies, then actually create general support for local assemblies, then to create actual local assemblies, THEN to work to get that popular assembly to speak in the voice of popular sovereignty, and it could say – "stop bombing mothers."
That’s revolutionary.
I believe that to an extent what we are doing here at Moon is revolutionary. Perhaps it is not revolutionary in the way that some would like to hear a call to action in the more conventional sense of tearing down barricades, nor do I believe it is a substitute, but I do believe it is an essential beginning. As many have said here, it is about the humanity that exists at Moon. For me it has been more: it has been about engaging. And I have to say that I have been very fortunate in engaging the community. In addition to the posts here I have exchanged personal emails with many, have developed what is now a two-year friendship with annie – born out of mutual despair after the 2004 "election" and activism to confront it – and from that more recently grew a lively email correspondence with her, beq, fauxreal, and to an extent bernhard and groucho. I have had
occasion to write to monolycus, malooga, b real, citizen, debsisdead, and amurra for various and sundry reasons.
However, there is one correspondence that has been particularly meaningful – the one I have shared with rememberinggiap. I wrote to him originally to say how much i appreciated both his words and his writing. I’m not sure how many remember, but in the past he has shared his poetry with us and it is very powerful, very moving, beautiful work. Last January before I started what was guaranteed to be a miserable job i splurged on a trip to France and visited him in Nantes. Starting with the fact that my train, arriving nearly three hours late into nantes, was met by a very patient host who had waited those hours, then carried my heaviest bag, got me settled into my hotel, and graciously shared his life and friends in Nantes with me over the following week. The trip taught me the importance of reaching out and engaging – as citizen says – of building communities.
From all of this something truly extraordinary, indeed revolutionary, has grown. Over the
last several weeks a number of us here at Moon have communicated directly and in posts about our concern for rememberinggiap’s health and his now non-functioning computer. Many who write here have shown heartfelt generosity, offering both emotional succor and financial contributions to resolving his computer problem. But in the last week two angels have stepped forward and a 17” monitor
has found its way to rememberinggiap’s doorstep in Nantes and a new Macbook is close behind. These angels have acted anonymously – to quote one "I think generosity should be as silent as possible". (To clarify, I am not one of these angels.) I had intended to send rememberinggiap my ibook this coming week after replacing it, but now he will have a much more reliable new Macbook! That this
has happened is the result of collaboration across countries and time zones, collaboration born of humanity. Some here have already sent checks to contribute and others plan to donate via a PayPal account bernhard has created. If you would like to join those who gave to, as b real phrased it last night, restore
rememberinggiap’s transmissions, please feel free to contact me for the address to send your check or use the Donations button on the main-page for credit card transfers.
Before I close I would like to 1) share a little of my trip to Nantes and 2) explain who that
beautiful baby is and why his photo is posted here. While in Nantes I was given the special privilege of attending/participating in (as best my French would allow) the ateliers rememberinggiap conducts. The first evening was with the group of women with whom he meets each week to write and discuss what each has written. It is clear when each enters the room how fond she is of rememberinggiap and the group. What isn’t clear is that each of these women is processing abuse of some kind in their writing. After writing together and making jokes at the table, each reads aloud what she has written – her interpretation of the words and phrases he has suggested to open minds and imaginations. The writing was exquisite and original and the trust and connection between these women and their appreciation of rememberinggiap was palpable. The next morning was a session with conservatory students, another was with a group of psychiatric patients, and another with a group of very gifted artists. In each atelier, rememberinggiap’s mandate is to teach, encourage process through writing, and share creativity. The most powerful for
me was the atelier at the auberge, the men’s homeless center in Nantes. While rememberinggiap, Marxist that he is, might not agree, my memory of this atelier is that it embodied Bookchin’s revolutionary. We shared dinner with the shelter residents and after dinner those who chose to participate remained in the dining room where we listened to music, wrote, read aloud, and shared our thoughts and experiences. As with the women, each brought his soul to the table, rememberinggiap not excluded. There was no hierarchy, only respect, trust and creativity. As a group we talked of past experiences, likes, dislikes, and each person’s writing. Later we returned to rememberinggiap’s home where we companionably read the day’s posts on Moon and he composed posts/rants? of his own while I indulged myself in the time to read print for a change. When rememberinggiap writes he is hunched over the keyboard intently and types
rhythmically, much like i would imagine Keith Jarrett at the piano. Very soon he will have a new instrument and hopefully he will share his views about Bookchin’s revolutionary – could be an interesting dialogue will develop.
And now, who is this beautiful baby? This is Taihei, citizen’s newborn son. Citizen generously shared this photo with me and rememberinggiap early on in this collaborative process. Citizen sent it at a time when rememberinggiap was having trouble with his diabetes. Taihei means great peace and seeing the photo has more than once restored a sense of calm to my life. I include it now for that and also because it solidifies for me what we are trying to do here – to bring peace to a very troubled world. Taihei may be the youngest revolutionary among us, but he is clearly not alone.
Earlier today, rememberinggiap, who has been alerted to watch for fedex shipments wrote a note of humble and incredulous appreciation which concluded with "a little note compañero to say – that always the educator needs to be educated". This evening when responding to my request to include Taihei, citizen wrote about his new experience parenting:
… a friend just lent me a book on how babies communicate before they can speak. It seems to be based on the nine basic expressions of human faces and on encouraging parents to read these expressions, verbalize the kids experience, and help kids learn to understand their own emotions and how to deal with them. Made me realize how much quiet I have built into my communication skills. Guess I have to grow too.
Both bring me full circle to citizen’s words in "Revolutionary" and "Scarcity":
For Bookchin, nothing was to be idolized, and especially not one’s politics. Politics are to be worked out in dialog, and that can never be done honestly when one wants to appear to know all the answers.
Here, hopefully, we are all revolutionaries – learning
through dialogue and building community.
Many thanks to citizen for allowing me to share his words and his son. Many thanks to bernhard for hosting this community. Many thanks to all who good-heartedly wish rememberinggiap well
in whatever way they choose and are able.
To rememberingiap. Hope you enjoy it. Or you’ve already read it a hundred times and well this was my first time through. I enjoy the intensity and clarity.
Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs
or
Independence Day Manifesto
By Allen Ginsberg.
Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator.
(Mankind are humans. Men are women and his is her and her is his and -er is -ess and)
The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete.
The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.
(We means they means you means we means I means)
These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.
At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousnesss of America–sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems, drugs that open the door to God, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical terrors, evil dreams at hand.
Because systems of mass communication can communicate onlyh oficially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the sercret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown. Poetry is the record of individual insights into the secret soul of the individual and because all individuals are one in th eyes of their creator, into the soul of the world. The world has a soul. America is having a nervous breakdown. San Francisco is one of many places where a few individuals, poets, have had the luck and courage and fate to glimpse something new through the crack in mass consciousness; they have been exposed to some insight into their own nature, the nature of the governments, and the nature of God.
Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy and public gaiety among the poets of the city. Those of the general populace whose individual perception is sufficiently weak to be formed by stereotypes of mass communication disapprove and deny the insight. The police and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manunfacturers from Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene.
The poets and those who share their activities, or exhibit some sign of dress, hair, or demeanor of understanding, of hipness, are ridiculed. Those of us who have used certain benevolent drugs (marijuana) to alter our consciousness in order to gain insight are hunted down in the street by police. Peyote, an historic vision-producing agent, is prohibited on pain of arrest. Those who have used opiates and junk are threatened with permanent jail and death. To be a junky in America is like having been a Jew in Nazi Germany.
A huge sadistic police bureaucracy has risen in every state, encouraged by the central government, to persecute the illuminati, to brainwash the public with official lies about the drugs, and to terrify and destroy those addicts whose spiritual search has made them sick.
Deviants from the mass sexual stereotype, quietists, those who will not work for money, or fib and make arms for hire, or join armies in murder and threat, those who wish to loaf, think, rest in visions, act beautifully on their own, speak truthfully in public, inspired by Democrcay–what is their psychic fate in America? An America, the greater portion of whose economy is yoked to mental and mechanical preparations for war?
Literature expressing these insights has been mocked, misinterpreted, and suppressed by a horde of middlemen whose fearful allegiance to the organisation of mass stereotype communication prevents them from sympathy (not only with their own inner nature but) with any manifestation of individuality.
(For middlemen read middlewomen no read men read women read men)
I mean journalists, commercial publishers, book-review fellows, multitudes of professors of literature, etc., etc. Poetry is hated. Whole schools of academic criticism have risen to prove that human consciousness of unconditioned spiriti is a myth. A poetic renaissance glimpsed in San Francisco has been responded to with ugliness, anger, jealousy, vitriol, sullen protestations of superiority.
And violence. By police, by customs officials, post-office employees, by trustees of great universities. By anyone whose love of power has led him to the position where he can push other people around over a difference of opinion–or vision.
(S/he)
The stakes are too great–an America gone mad with materialism, a police-state America, a sexless and soulless America prepared to battle the world in defense of a false image of its authority. Not the wild and beautiful America of the comrades of Walt Whitman, nor the historic America of William Blake and Henry David Thoreau where the spiritual independence of each individual was an America, a universe, more huge and awesome than all the abstract bureaucracies and authoritative officialdoms of the world combined.
Only those who have entered the world of spirit know what a vast laugh there is in the illusory appearance of worldy authority. And all men at one time or another enter that Spirit, whether in life or death.
How many hypocrites are there in America? How many trembling lambs, fearful of discovery? What authority have we set up over ourselves, that we are not as we are? Who shall prohibit an art from being published to the world? What conspirators have power to determine our mode of consciousness, our sexual enjoyments, our different labours and our loves? What fiends determine our wars?
When will we discover an America that will not deny its own God? Who takes up arms, money, police, and a million hands to murder the consciousness of God? Who spits in the beautiful face of poetry which sings the glory of God and weeps in the dust of the world?
Written: ca. July 4, 1959
Posted by: Argh | Sep 1 2006 23:06 utc | 20
On History
I’ve been touched by the warmth here, and especially by conchita’s warm energy and boldness. Surprisingly, however, I’ve been feeling very sad when I come to the page with Taihei’s picture atop it. Why?
Then I remember what my mother has told me about the history just prior to my birth. Then, the Cuban Missile Crisis was recent history, the man in the White House who’d been smart enough not to make it a war had already been killed, and likewise Martin Luther King, Jr.. My mother wondered what she had done bringing children into such a world. Raising children changed her politics entirely, but before the thousand moments of local politics, she had to steel herself to make a place for her children in the world, and for the children of others. Which she did.
I realize that seeing Taihei on the page has forced me to imagine where he will fit in the world and what sort of history it offers. So I was sad. But like my parents before me, I can’t luxuriate in sadness, because time moves.
So, about that Bookchin thread – let me say that Conchita reminds me of the best of what we’re trying to do with that thread, which is to find a way to give left politics a new history. I imagine the key is to do it the way my mother did, one person at a time. She changed herself. She found a way to teach one child who was considered only partially teachable. And then she taught scores of people every year, and has left the world full of more than a thousand young people who all have the foundations of excellent, confident thought, and who all have the experience of being loved by a teacher. They, with all their extra confidence and inner security are all changing history – that was her revolution. For ourselves, I think we will also have to change ourselves if we want to change what happens for others.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. But how?
What often seems the weakest link in Bookchin’s politics is the idea that little communities of people could actually change the way things are done in the vicious world we live in. For slothrop, localist politics defies the power of globalization and the historical dialectic. For others, it may seem highly innocent of the sort of leadership-assassination and legal tar pits that happen to all groups too poor or soft headed to smash back. Maybe so, I have similar concerns. But when Bookchin talks about hierarchy and domination as historical issues, he’s not just whistling Dixie to rally the crazies. I believe he’s talking about the possibilities of a left that can coordinate itself without charismatic leaders, and so a left that cannot be beheaded. Birds fly in formations and so do fish, but as it turns out they do not have set leaders. Rather, they know how to read each other and shift off the lead as necessary. History – Bookchin has identified history as the means by which people can communicate with each other and fly in formation – is how people can actually navigate politics wisely, democratically.
People navigate by history, often by bad history
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people believe in history today, and here a Marxian analysis along the lines that rememberinggiap sees is extremely useful. People believe in economics and “the self interested satisfaction-pursuing individual” because capitalism constantly does revolutionize the ways to earning a profit, and so the world is in constant upheaval. Ask a capitalist, they will not disagree. Why learn history in a world where nothing stays the same? Ask people trying to get history research grants for times prior to the 20th century – they’re disappearing. History is dead.
But then ask what has real prestige in the world, and it is antiques, heritage, nations, and a whole world of historically grounded values. People are dying for history even as they lose faith in it. This is what citizen k has referred to as the propaganda industry, and it is also all the identity politics of the last century. If history and its separation from political economy has been whittling down the left for the last century, then history may be the way to bring ourselves back too.
I see Bookchin’s social ecology as an effort to revolutionize self and others by explaining the history of the concept of “control”. I think this is excellent, and perhaps the most important single history. But to fly in formation as human beings in a capitalist (fine “modern” if you prefer) world, I think we have a few other histories to grasp. For example, we need to know the histories of “money”, of “history” itself, of what it means to “serve”, and of “compassionate rule”. Without these and a few other histories, we will always be susceptible to the propaganda and we will try to fly off on our own. These are histories that are various by country and area, and so can ground citizens in dynamics essential to their own locale, but these histories all converge into a single shared modern world, and so they also all teach the same lessons. Because they all navigate the modern world, they are abel to provide a consistent knowledge base for navigating into the future with other citizen assemblies.
Knowledge + United Action = Power
I realize I am covering too much ground too fast, but i want to sketch it out in a single post, and this seems to be the moment. I chose the above topics because they focus history the way it should be focused, on topics that attend to how the world works. For Bookchin, the idea of “control” or “dominate” that allows humans to imagine we can “dominate” nature (against all scientific knowledge of chemistry, but with all political rhetoric) pulls the curtains on Oz, and shows the tawdry game being played. Men dominate women and other men. Never nature. This particular illusion is promising to destroy human survivability. And it offers excellent guidance against “gee whiz!” projects such as the Green Revolution, or genetically modified crops that will never cross breed with extant lines, or depleted uranium.
“Currency” is another example of a magical history topic. This one can show us the elementary fact that when nations create fiat currency, then someone somewhere always gets a free profit. But the currencies are all set up under the illusion that they are mere neutral stores of value, and these dollars (or whatever) only accrue to those who’ve earned them. Not so. And knowing how this “not so” works and has worked is precisely the sort of thing citizens must face to keep themselves free. Because. . . once we study history, we can see the punches coming from the princes.
What Bookchin is arguing for, is a citizens’ education that is not just for princes anymore. And we can provide it to ourselves, no need for it to be given us. In a future post, I’ll show how Bookchin himself actually teaches such a “free citizen’s history”.
Posted by: citizen | Sep 4 2006 5:01 utc | 33
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