Not that blog

Readers,

An article on truth-out.org has mistakenly linked to this blog as that of Taylor Hall, recently arrested in Chicago under some dubious ‘terrorism’ charges. This blog fully defends those under state repression and extends its solidarity to all those arrested around the Chicago demos, none more than the Chicago Three. However, this blog is not in anyway affiliated with any of the arrestees, nor does it know any of the arrestees, nor was this author in Chicago for the demos (unfortunately). It’s a simple mix up in names. I have contacted the author and he has promised to change the article. 

Rustbelt

The Music of Occupy

In James Connolly’s  introduction to his 1907 collection ‘Songs of Freedom’, he wrote:

‘No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses, they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and hopes, the loves and hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement; it si a dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.’

The Rustbelt is super pleased to post this musical tribute to Occupy from two communist DJs whose tastes he trusts. With idiosyncratically large musical knowledge and keen activist ears, they take you on a journey in song over this last, remarkable, year. I’m with Connolly; defiantly and joyously, the revolution will be welcomed by song. Take it away DJ D and Detroit Red:

—
With May Day upon us and the semi-official Occupy! Spring Offensive starting. the two of us–Detroit Red and DJ D–have teamed up to crank out this overview of the music of OWS! Occupy! has no single anthem, no “We Shall Overcome”, no defining musical voice of the movement. Instead there has been a flowering of DIY music videos, Joe Hill-esque re-writing of pop songs, spontaneous rap battles in the encampments, and a parade of established musicians showing up at protests unannounced to lend their songs and support. Hell, even Miley Cyrus made a music video for Occupy Wall Street!

The two of us are stone revolutionaries–and deep-fried music geeks. We are both longtime activists, though from different generations— DJ D is 62, Detroit Red 34. Both of us have been totally jazzed by the transformation that the eruption of Occupy Wall Street! has already wrought in the political life of this country and in the tired, aging US left. Each of us took five songs (with a bit of dickering to avoid duplication) from among scores of worthy possibilities, five which we found particularly deserving of attention and comment. Then we wrote a short introduction and made some comment on each.

This list also appeared over at Fire on the Mountain, DJ D’s blog.

[Note: for those unfamiliar with current musical culture, that "versus" in DJ D vs. Detroit Red doesn’t mean we are enemies—it is used to label collaborative projects and mash-ups as well as musical throw-downs.]

DJ D drops his five

One of the things that has most pissed me off about the movement against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was all the folks, admittedly mainly ‘60s types like myself, always grousing about where are the anti-war songs. Damn, Neil Young started a page on his website which now has well over 3400 posted! (At, let’s call it 4 minutes per song, that’s more’n two weeks of listening 24/7, just to hear ‘em all once.)

At least anyone with the faintest actual acquaintance with Occupy Wall Street! and the Occupy! movement isn’t about to make that complaint! Even leaving aside the notorious drum circles, OWS! has been awash in music, with visits from famous artists and all kinds of playing and singing, planned and impromptu, at every encampment I know about.

A few days before Crispness, I went to fenced-in, rent-a-cop-ridden Zucotti Park in the middle of the night to show the flag, and of the dozen or so people there holding the fort, one was a guy–Jim, I think his name was–strumming a guitar and working out the lyrics to a song about the struggle. It was he who first inspired me to do a little writing about the music of the occupations.

With that, here are my five.

Rhiannon Giddins—”The Bottom 99″

A remarkable a capella performance by Giddins, who is part of the stellar Carolina Chocolate Drops, a key force in the ongoing revival of the nearly lost tradition of the Black string band. This, however, is based directly on a tune credited to the late Ewan MacColl, and it clearly derives from the old Scots/English folk tradition which constitutes the taproot of country music.

The unaccompanied vocals are reminiscent of Appalachian singers like Almeda Riddle, and the lyrics are sharp as a tack. YouTube also has a video of Giddins doing one called “We Are The 99” in Zucotti Park via the People’s Megaphone, which is well suited to the unaccompanied voice, of course. Still I find this to be richer and easier to follow—and that voice! Note the early date, October 13. She composed and was performing this within weeks of the initial occupation there.

Jasiri X—”Occupy (We The 99)”

Hip Hop has been an integral part of the Occupy! movement from the start. Lupe Fiasco donated fifty tents during the first week and wrote a poem “Hey Moneyman” about his visits to the encampment before it seized national attention. Immortal Technique, too, came down to Zucotti Park early on and denounced police attacks on the occupiers. Mayor Bloomberg, IT pointed out, “is closer to Wall Street than America is to Israel.” Boots Riley from The Coup has been a day-to-day leader in the militant Occupy Oakland movement (though my bud Mirk notes that media attention on him has tended to eclipse the central role of other (female) core activists in the struggle there).

I picked this cut by a less well-known conscious rapper, Jasiri X, because he is based in Pittsburgh and has been an active supporter of Occupy Pittsburgh!, because he has stood up to efforts to censor this song out of his paid performances, and because it has a nice anthemic quality to it, with an eminently chantable tagline/chorus. Plus which, his video is one of the best of the collage-of-video-clips style that’s so prevalent here, with a sharp focus on police brutality and the national and global breadth of the Occupy! eruption.
Garfunkel And Oates—”Save The Rich”

This comedy duo has one of the best band names evah and their rip on Pat Robertson–”Sex With Ducks”,” in case you missed it–may never be topped. A sense of humor is a vital part of any real social movement. Some of the best-known protest songs of the Vietnam era were saturated in this kind of mirthful irony. Phil Ochs’ “Draft Dodger Rag” and Tom Paxton’s “Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation” leap to mind (and that’s not counting the unintentional humor in, say, “Eve Of Destruction.”)

And don’t dismiss this tune and its nifty new video as merely an obvious joke. In two short minutes, Kate “Oates” Miucci and Riki “Garfunkel” Lindhome savage the greed of the 1%, mock their self-identification as ‘job creators,’ vent some genuine anger at their crimes and close by reminding us what the Occupy movement broke with:

Save the rich

By doing nothing at all

Deny all sense and logic

And just think really small

You should think really small

Or just don’t think at all

And save the rich

Dave Lipmann—”Occupation Is On”

Sorry, the live and unplugged at Zuccotti Park version of this seems to have vanished from YouTube, but click right here and a nice folk-rock version’ll play for you. This is in many ways a typical—better, archetypal—OWS! song.

First I’ll deal with the typical part. The legal ban on amplification at Zuccotti Park (and elsewhere) combined with what has long been the cultural norm for protest movements in the US, means that folk-type songs like this, performed on guitar and perhaps other acoustic instruments make up, along with hip hop, the majority of OWS!-related music.

That said, this, like the Rhiannon Giddins number above, is a reworking of an older song. Fittingly, Dave climbs under the hood of an obscure but brilliant Depression-era tune, “The Panic Is On” by Hezekiah Jenkins (“All the landlords done raised the rents/ Folks that ain’t broke is badly bent”) to do his tinkering. In keeping with the more optimistic theme, he hits the beat a little harder and a little faster. The folk process at work, 70 years after Woody retooled “Wildwood Flower” into “The Sinking Of The Reuben James.”

Besides its great rhythm and easy-to-yell-when-it-comes-along tag line, “Doggone, occupation is on,” a striking thing about this one is its good humor. Some of this may derive from Jenkins’ amusing record, but it also reflects Dave’s professional role as an lefty singing entertainer—he currently performs his parodies and originals in the character of bankster Wild Bill Bailout. Lastly, the lyrics are both witty and broad in scope:

We communed in Paris in ’68

Teamsters and turtles had a fine blind date

Now the bankers are trying to grab it all

After the Arab Spring comes the American Fall

Doggone, autumn is on

Chloe Cornelius—”I’ll Occupy”

This is my own personal favorite Occupy! song. This week, anyhow. Chloe Cornelius is a young woman who has recorded her own songs and song parodies and posted them on YouTube over the last year or so, something untold hundreds of thousands around the world have done, Like most of them, her following has been, shall we say, modest, despite a voice which is as good as those of a number of current pop stars I could name.

This number, which she bills as a “recruitment song” for the movement, has grabbed her widest audience by orders of magnitude, and deservedly so. Cornelius’s master stroke was to rework Gloria Gaynor’s disco era smash “I Will Survive,” which rapidly became a feminist anthem upon its 1978 release. Its attitude of gritty determination transfers perfectly into the OWS! setting.

In place of the historical context offered by, say, Dave Lipmann, Cornelius is plugged right into the cultural moment, and thus the features which distinguish OWS! from any movement that’s gone before, as when she defies the po-po:

You think that your batons are going to get us to go home

Go on and hit me, I’ll just upload it from my phone.

In fact, right in the lyrics she’s singing, Cornelius appeals to her listeners/viewers, “and it wouldn’t hurt to take/ a minute to repost this song.” Damn skippy, I say. Get with the meta, listen and spread it!

Detroit Red rocks his picks

Many folks my age or younger (I’m 34) have barely even heard of unions or seen a protest on the streets of their town. I’m probably not alone when I turn on the TV, see images of general strikes and bubbling class anger from Athens to Seoul, and think, “I wish I lived in a real country.”

That was before 2011. That was before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—backed to the hilt by billionaire financiers—tried to liquidate Wisconsin public workers’ right to bargain collectively and in doing so filled Wisconsin’s capitol city—and the State Capitol building itself!–with union members, students and their teachers, farmers with picket signs on their tractors, and thousands of supporters from across the Midwest. Labor and its friends occupied Wisconsin.

Come Fall, we occupied Wall Street.

No one saw it coming. Not even your most ear-to-the-ground, deep-in-the-movements, finger-on-the-pulse lefty activist friends thought that a vague-sounding, open-ended protest in a tiny park, initiated mostly by internet institutions was going to spark a prairie fire against “the 1%”. But the dry brush was all in place—three years of the Great Recession, record profits reaped by bailed-out “job creators” while unemployment stayed sky high, public outrage against the racist state murder of Troy Davis after years of struggle to free him, and no “hope” or “change” in sight.

Before the media set out to discredit Occupy Wall Street!, it tried to ignore it. But the idea of The 99% versus The 1% traveled across the U.S. faster than a Youtube video of cute cats. However rough and problematic, this meme is class consciousness for beginners, in soundbite form. And thanks to the slogan’s elegant simplicity it can be easily gasped and reshaped: homemade signs, pop songs, viral videos, dancing flash mobs. “99%” has made class consciousness culturally contagious.

Here are my 5 favorite Occupy Wall Street songs, although frankly the sound of hundreds of thousands of people voicing their anger at the 1% is in itself music to my ears.

Ry Cooder–”The Wall Street Part of Town”

Divide and rule, that’s always been their plan

We’re in trouble again, but this time we got friends

Ry Cooder has been a widely respected guitar wunderkind and pan-roots music alchemist since the 1960′s. In recent decades his progressive, pro-working class politics have increasingly come to the fore. He bought his guitar magic and production skills to Mavis Staples’ reworking on Civil Rights Movement songs on her LP We’ll Never Turn Back (2007), recorded a concept record about the demolishing of a Chicano neighborhood in LA in the 1950′s (Chavez Ravine, 2006), and wrote a song cycle from the point of view of a house cat who is also a union organizer (My Name Is Buddy, 2007). So it should surprise no one that Ry Cooder sides with the 99%.

Recorded at the height of the occupation of Zuccotti Park in NYC, “The Wall Street Part of Town” absolutely brims with optimism and resolve. The songs narrative brings to mind sun breaking through a rain storm, with rays of solidarity and defiance warming your face. You’ve been waiting you whole life to stand up to the banksters and CEOs, you’ve been waiting your whole life to link arms with people in the same sinking boat as you, and now–finally!– if you can just navigate the canyons of New York’s financial district–you’ll get your chance. The act of walking to Wall Street with butterflies in your stomach and your fists clenched is both literal and a fitting metaphor.

Cooder sounds relieved and energized. Relieved that corporate rule is finally being challenged in the streets and energized because, well, taking over the streets with the 99% feels pretty good. And of course the song has a loose, country-fried groove with a subtle but infectious guitar riff…because that’s what Ry Cooder does.

Ten Ton Shoes–”One Percent”

When it comes to protest songs these days we have come to expect folk and hip hop to lead the pack. Folk music because it’s easy to play and is already associated with social change, based on the role it played in the radicalizations of the 1930′s and 1960′s, hip hop because it is the lingua franca of working class youth and of course has a political tradition all its own. But Occupy Wall Street! has produced such a flowering of protest songs that nearly all genres are represented.

So it is with great delight that I discovered this alt.country/rockabilly screed against the 1%. In the spirit of Mojo Nixon, Dead Kennedys’ twangy side, and psychobilly, Ten Ton Shoes gives us a snarling, jacked-up, countrified take on class rage circa 2011. They’ve watched the rich get richer while their neighbors lost their homes and jobs and, frankly, they’re sick of it. So pissed they can barely sing, in fact the vocals here sound more like a laid off worker loosing his cool at a shareholders meeting than those of a Country singer. “Some say tax the rich, I say jail the rich,” all sung to a scuzzy rockabilly guitar line that would make The Meteors proud. If you ever wondered what it would sound like if caustic comedian Bill Hicks fronted 1980′s cowpunk pioneers Jason & The Scorchers, this song comes wonderfully close.

Rebel Diaz–”We Are The 99%”

For the people, for the teachers, for the students

If we knew that just 1% of these dudes own 2/3rds of the US of A

American way, they lock our youth away

Practice the same crimes, tell the rest to eat cake

In France they burn cars, in London they set it off

Well over here it’s time we start building a mass consensus

Your daddy lost his pension, your daughter’s school needs fixin, your brother’s back in prison

The message here ain’t “Kumbaya,” like overnight the change gonna come, nah

But what they got?? We got 99, they got 1…problem, and it’s us

If we wake up that number makes more sense to us all

Some small group of bankers whose wealth goes back ages

Stage one is enslave us, divide and contain us,

Make us strangers with anger, divide us against our neighbors

But in the face of hatred we’re showin’ love to change things

The 99, the 99, the 99%

We’re here, we’ve arrived, and we came to represent

For the 99, the 99, the 99%

This song is the perfect snapshot of the energy and spirit of resistance that pulsed through the Occupy Wall Street! encampment and through the dozens of spin-off mobilizations that rocked New York last fall. Rebel Diaz are an incendiary activist hip hop group from the Bronx. The entire reason they formed as a group was to use music to energize and organize radical social justice movements. This is what they live for. So you can expect to see them down at Zucotti Park, in the mix with everyone from unemployed youth to union militants, doing impromptu performances of topical songs that are so new they probably wrote them on the train ride downtown.

“We Are The 99%” was captured live on the street in the financial district. The song itself ties together so many of the themes of Occupy! and the bridges Occupy! could potentially build: class disparity, unemployment, bank bailouts, incarceration of youth of color, and beyond. The song also connects an analysis of white supremacy to the Occupy! message better than Occupy! ever has. It mentions Troy Davis, whose execution generated immense popular disgust and despair, the still-living rebel spirit of Malcolm X, the recent rebellion against police abuse and austerity in Britain, and the urgent need to “de-colonize.” The song is fresh as hell, in both uses of the word. You can feel the excitement of a movement being born.

Talib Kweli–“Distractions”

Brooklyn’s Talib Kweli was been a political voice in Hip Hop since the mid-1990′s. His group with Mos Def, Black Star, helped kick off “conscious” rap. His song for Occupy Wall Street! takes aim at the plethora of ways that our corporate rulers keep us distracted. Celebrity gossip, fashion, status, pop music—anything to keep us from seeing that the 1% are robbing us blind. The aspect of Occupy! that seems to inspire Kweli the most is its ability to tear through the facade of the media and pop culture and present a more true picture of what’s actually happening in our society: wars fought for the rich, poor people in prison, opulence for those at the top while the ‘hood crumbles. That’s what’s really happening. All this talk about which sunglasses are hot and what Kim Kardashian is up to is designed to keep you blind and immobile. Distractions.

Like many of the artists profiled here, Kweli shot a video for his song at Zuccotti Park. As he breaks down capitalism’s elaborate smoke-and-mirrors tricknology, we see footage of thousands of everyday people with homemade signs that offer proof that the 99% is waking up. Not only is the music video captivating, but readers should search Youtube for amateur footage of Talib Kweli’s live performances at Occupy’s General Assembly.

Makana–”We Are The Many”

Poor One Percenters. They just couldn’t get a break in 2011. When heads of state and CEOs gathered in Hawaii for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation confab in November they were likely expecting a nice weekend of discussing the exploitation of the working class with their fellow kleptocrats. There was even a gala banquet planned with all the fixings, including a Hawaiian folk musician hired to give this thieves’ ball a touch of local color.

But that musician had something else in mind. When he took the stage to sing and play his guitar he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a message. “Occupy Honolulu” it read, but his statement has just begun. Instead of softly singing a Hawaiian folk song, Makana sang a song he had written specifically for the Occupy Wall Street movement, “We Are The Many.” Like every other artist on this list Makana took the basic concept of the inherent antagonism between the 99% and the 1% and put it in a song. “We Are The Many” is simple, powerful song about the needs of the many being sacrificed for the needs of the few.

The time has come for us to voice our rage

Against the one who trapped us in a cage

To steal from us the value of our wage.

His voice has a sweet timbre, the guitar riff is airy, but his message is as stark as a clenched fist. Don’t let Makana’s smooth, acoustic aesthetic fool you. This song is more Rage Against the Machine than it is James Taylor. Like so many of the best protest songs, “We Are The Many” contains both a seething contempt for oppression as well as a steadfast insistence that justice is on it’s way.

In a sense, Makana used music to pull a political stunt that made Obama & Co. cringe in their seats. But his real audience was the 99%. With his guitar, his homemade t-shirt, and his unassuming self-penned song, Makana mic-checked the 1%. And if you think that the songs message might have been lost over the clamor of corporate palm-greasing, arm-twisting, and back-slapping, you’d be wrong. Makana sang the song over and over and over, for 45 minutes.

May Day in Detroit

Here are a bunch of photos from yesterday’s kick off of Detroit’s May Day events at Clark Park in southwest Detroit.
‘We have been naught, we shall be all!’

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Turning Forty; Looking Back

If age confers a special knowledge, I haven’t found it. If growing older mellows young revolutionaries and leaves their radicalism behind in a mire of pragmatism, then I am not growing any older. Although forty is hardly a venerable summit from which to survey the world from, it is the highest peak I have climbed and one that I never planned to reach. I ask readers indulgence for the personal nature as I take a little stock looking back at some formative years; forty seems as good a time as any to do so and you never know if you’ll see your next birthday. This will be a little disjointed and not meant to be anything more than a partial look at some past moments.

I came of age politically as part of the anti-racist punk scene in Cincinnati in the mid-80s. As I have written before, Cincinnati was and is an intensely segregated city. Racial codes and politics were learned young, often painfully and sometimes violently. The formations of our identities were first and foremost determined by racial identity; it was impossible to ‘not see color’ as the blind liberal wish was asserted even then. I haven’t been able to shake those racial lessons of my youth. They have informed everything else in my political life. I remember when the city’s schools desegregated in the early 80s. Not only did it change the complexion of my school, it changed the class character. The intersection of race and class: it’s the American praxis.

A single benign example (and I could give a thousand others less benign): around twelve years old a group of us youngsters, maybe a half-dozen, were hanging out near the neighborhood square (a white neighborhood) drinking Jolt cola, skateboarding and smoking cigarettes. In Cincinnati, neighborhoods are clearly defined (by race, class and inertia - if you were born there, you stay there) and you stayed in your own or ventured out only into what was acknowledged neutral space (often areas around bus stops that everyone had to use).  A black kid just about our age walked past us a little anxious when one of our group, a little shit with perpetual Kool-Aid stains around his mouth, said something like “you’re in the wrong place”. The black kid was scared to begin with being in the wrong neighborhood and all, but the terror, and it was real terror, that came over his face makes me shiver to this day. The consequences for breaking the racial code in Cincinnati could be swift and violent and remorseless.

One of the many things I stew about, one of the million things I wish I could change is that. If I could go back to that moment I would lay that little shit out. That would come. If not that particular kid, then others. Always better at starting fights than winning them, I took more back. I still have the scars to prove it.

On every block in every town in this country, from the largest to the smallest, even in a reactionary backwater like Cincinnati, is at least one potential revolutionary. It’s being exposed to the possibility through others that matters. Around fourteen or fifteen an older kid in the neighborhood turned me on to hardcore with a Squirrel Bait tape. Hardcore may be the most limited style in all of music, but it opened up doors for me as it did for so many others in those Reagan years where the Cold War was at its height (I think that this is often overlooked when thinking about the 80s now; the neo-liberal Thatcher/Reagan assault was in the context of a Cold War increasingly hot as in Central America).

The left was dead, or at least invisible to me, and though I was already intensely interested in politics they were limited by what I was exposed to. Punk led me to things happening in Britain, like the Anti-Nazi League, which was, in some ways, where I first came became aware of the existence of a revolutionary politics that spoke to me. The punk scene I came up in was genuinely counter-cultural. As a way to emphasize this: no punk band that I followed or that were started by friends was ever started with the intention of ‘making it’ commercially or even of selling records.

On the contrary, it was fidelity to your community and their embrace that were the mark of success. The ethos of a band like Fugazi is only emblematic of that culture, it was widespread and real.  As limited in its way as it was, the hardcore scene (and the punk scene more generally) attracted all kinds of people to it; art school kids, runaways, the rebellious and the angry, more than a few psychopaths, but mainly just alienated working class young people.

I was at least three of those things.

It was overwhelmingly, but not entirely, white which meant necessarily that it also involved racial politics. By the mid-80s scenes around the country, but especially in the Midwest, were at war around those racial politics as neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists made conscious efforts to intervene in all that anger and alienation. In places the organized left did too, most notably for me the ISO. But, by and large, the left was absent and the right energized even as the movements of the 60s and 70s still made it feel threatened.

At 15, in 1987, I went to my first anti-fascist demonstration. It was in Corryville, a black and student neighborhood near the University of Cincinnati. A group of neo-Nazi skinheads was rallying (I can’t for the life of me remember what they called themselves) and included some kids from my high school. Other kids from my high school came to the counter demo. We would see each other again at school on Monday where whatever happened would be sure to play out in the halls. Going into that demo I was a confused, but committed pacifist. That would change. I dropped acid on the way to the demo and by the time I got there was tripping pretty hard. In retrospect, fifteen may be little too young for rioting on acid. Fights started breaking out and the cops lost a handle on it. The fighting, shouting and shoving moved up Vine Street and the sign in my hand became a stick. We beat them out of that neighborhood that day. Over the next ten years I would go to many hundreds more anti-fascist demonstrations throughout the Midwest and many more street fights too.

A proper history needs to be compiled of what would become Anti-Racist Action (ARA). It had a couple of roots, but the one that sprung on my soil was the Syndicate. Mainly anti-racist skinheads, the Syndicate brought together a bunch of crews from Minneapolis to Cincinnati to New York City to counter racists in the scene. This wasn’t black bloc stuff, this was street fighting. Your clubs, venues and street corners, your school and your neighborhood- all these were contested territory between increasingly organized racists and anti-racists. A fight could not be avoided.

I had to make myself fight. I always disliked it and was horrified by those around me I saw get pleasure from it. But I did fight. I had to go to the emergency room a few times, like a lot of us did. I got arrested a few times, like a lot of us did. I hurt people too, like a lot of us did. I was way more scared than I ever let on, but I was in it and I was not going to back down.

Some crews were based around bands, others around schools and geography; some were based on something like ideology. Mine was. I had called myself a socialist since about sixteen, for whatever it was worth. I grew up in a family with strong union traditions, my grandfather’s family being seven generations of coal miners. I spent formative summers climbing around the hollers of southeast Ohio coal country and grew up with stories from the depression and of immigration. My parents were public service workers; as baby boomers the first of their families to go to college. Class was apparent to me always. 

The scene I was in was rebellious, but not particularly left-wing. As we began to organize against the racists and the right some of us started making connections, looking further and got serious. As the sun was setting on the Soviet Union and the age of ‘No Alternative’ was commencing we were looking to the working class and to socialism.

In the spring of 1990 the Klan marched on Oxford, Ohio (where Miami University is). It was a helluva day. This was before the cops had learned to deal with us by creating static situations. Back then anything could happen. The Klan marched that day, after that they would only stage rallies. We were able to maneuver around there march as hundreds more, students, people from the neighborhood, joined in. As the march passed over railroad tracks the stones started flying from every direction. You could actually pick your target and we dropped the Grand Dragon types first. We fucked them up. Some of us got hit by rocks as well; a case of friendly fire. Jacked up by our success, we were able to besiege the city jail and retrieve our comrades from arrest. A glorious day.

In the organizing that proceeded we met a bunch of folks that would become ARA; the folks from Columbus around Jim McNamara being the most important. I and others in my crew got attracted to the Revolutionary Workers League out of Detroit. That summer I would join my first Marxist (sort of) organization. I would leave the next year after the increasingly cultish RWL unveiled their ‘Avenge Iraq’ slogan in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The RWL was already when I joined a sectarian, cultish caricature of revolutionary organization where Freud played a bigger role in its politics than Marx. I’m glad it didn’t ruin me politiclly. I could tell some stories.

It wasn’t the best way to be introduced into a life in the left perhaps, but we all come from somewhere and travel paths we don’t have any maps for.

About a dozen of us, all under 22 or 23, made up the branch of a small Trotskyist organization that formed in the aftermath of leaving the RWL. We were passionate and committed and we burned out in a few years. We had a party the entire time too. I remember one night of the rolling party where we had to be at a Planned Parenthood clinic defense at 6am the next morning. The idea of six in the morning seemed so shocking to us that we decided to just party straight through the night and show up to the gates however we were. We did just that and didn’t miss a beat picking it up the very next evening. Ahhh, youth. 

That group of people are those I still identify most closely with. There were complicated relationships, of course (a dozen young people making revolution in close proximity is bound to have layers of ‘complication’), but we swam against a tide of reaction and we were all made better people for it. Some of us drifted from organized politics, some of us have remained doggedly engaged, and others are no longer with us. Comrades: there is no more powerful relationship. Comradeship when you are young and full of yearning for a future not yet arrived; well, it is as special a thing as I can think of.

I have changed a lot, including my politics, over the years and the person I am now would probably not like the person I was then very much. But I would be prepared to say that my main beliefs remain unchanged since I first developed them from the things around me. My revolutionism, my sense of alienation, the detest I feel for capitalism and its ‘culture’, my belief in the centrality of class and the pivot of race, all these things have only been strengthened by a life lived in the world of Marxism and of political action.

What does any of this have with turning 40 today? Nothing in particular, I suppose. Sitting here drinking coffee on this rainy Ypsilanti (a place I didn’t even know of twenty years ago) morning I turn forty; it is a moment where I have to wonder how the hell I got here. Like any other day where we are reminded of our own past, just a moment to look back and try to trace a route made by a million variables.

‎’The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations…a unity of the diverse.’ Marx, Grundrisse.

The Rustbelt has been on semi-hiatus these last few months as a new job competes with continuing school in taking my time and leaving me knackered at the end of the day. I apologize. I am growing increasingly resentful that I can’t read what I want and that my writing is confined to things I am uninterested in, but compelled to do. It is preventing me from taking full breaths and looking at the world around me. As I get used to my schedule I hope to be back at it semi-regularly.

MLK Day Detroit 2012: March for Justice!

Here is a slide show of photos I took at Monday’s MLK Day rally and march in Detroit. Veteran women SNCC freedom fighters were honored at the rally held at the historic Central United Methodist church. Occupy Detroit also received recognition and a standing ovation. A march followed which included a well attended socialist contingent. Later in the day folks from Detroit and around the state marched on Governor Snyder’s mansion in the hills above Ann Arbor to protest the states assault on local black government through corporate ‘Emergency Managers’ . That part of the county has probably never seen so many people of color. Despite the gloomy January skies, the weather was surprisingly warm for a Michigan winter. It was a joy to bring a little of the class war to the doorsteps of white, ruling class power in Michigan. A good day.

It is suggested that readers hum along to Joe McPhee’s 1970 fire storm ‘Nation Time’ as a musical accompaniment to the photos below. ‘What time is it?’

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‘Be patient and never to give up the struggle’: an Interview with Tommy McKearney

January 3, 2012

Tommy McKearney was born in 1952 to family with a long tradition in the Irish republican movement and raised in Moy, County Tyrone in the north of Ireland. When the insurrection against the Orange State and British rule broke out in the early 1970s Tommy, like so many of his generation and background, joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Tommy became a leading member of the IRA in his native Tyrone in the 1970s. The McKearney family paid a terrible price in the war; three of Tommy’s brothers, Sean, Padraig and Kevin, were killed in the course of the Troubles.

Imprisoned in 1977 for alleged IRA activities Tommy participated in the H-Block prison struggle including the blanket and dirty protests. In 1980, Tommy went fifty-three days without food as part of the first hunger strike led by Brendan Hughes. While in Long Kesh Tommy and other prisoners developed a left-wing critique of the Republican movement and, leaving the Provisionals in 1986, formed the League of Communist Republicans with like-mided prisoners (those interested are encouraged to read Liam O’Ruairc’s history of the League for a fascinating look at this oft over-looked episode from the Troubles).

Released from prison after serving sixteen years in 1993, Tommy became one of the most principled and far-sighted critics of the Peace Process and the Good Friday (1998) and Saint Andrew’s Agreements (2006). Rejecting any return to war and advocating a strategy of working class mobilization, Tommy was a founding member of the Irish Republican Writers Group which sought to foster debate within the Republican movement over course of the Peace Process and the future of Irish republicanism.

To help foster that debate, Tommy helped to found and co-edited the highly respected journal Fourthwrite (now an online publication). A socialist and an internationalist, Tommy has since become an organizer of the Independent Workers Union, which seeks to organize Irish workers north and south, native-born and immigrant, outside of the duplicitous ‘Social Partnership’ arrangements between the mainstream trade unions and the capitalist Irish government. In 2011 Tommy published a highly regarded book, The Provisional IRA From Insurrection to Parliament, on Pluto Press. In the book Tommy follows the path of the Provisional movement, analyzes its strengths and weaknesses, its history and aims all the while seeking to promote a working class alternative to the current cul-de-sac republicanism in Ireland has found itself in. Unfortunately, reactionary visa restrictions prevent Tommy from visiting the United States, so a book launch here has not been possible. However, all those involved or interested in the Irish revolution and the Irish solidarity movement in the US would do well to read Tommy’s work. The book is now available in shops in the United States and online.

Following is an interview with Tommy (the links are the editors, not Tommy’s, and meant to provide useful background to the issues, organizations and events raised in the discussion). Following the interview is a fascinating and very worthwhile talk Tommy gave in 2009 to a gathering of young Irish revolutionaries around the group eirigi on the working class, James Connolly, Irish republicanism and the 1916 Easter Rising. In the talk he firmly places the working class, in Ireland and internationally, into the context of the struggle for Irish national liberation and socialism. Many thanks to Tommy for his time and generosity in making this interview possible.

Interview with Tommy McKearney

Q: In your book you write of the ending of the recent conflict: ‘However, as the Orange state was being buried, it was, by degrees, giving way to a sectarian state.’ Given the sectarian nature of the Northern state how should socialists and democrats approach such a state? How does our political hostility to sectarianism relate to a state built on such sectarianism?

TM: The new sectarian state is, nevertheless, an improvement on the old ‘Orange state’ if only because there is now no longer any material advantage in being a member of what once was the privileged Protestant working class. Speaking objectively – admittedly a difficult thing to do in Northern Ireland – this means that there is no barrier of self-interest preventing the promotion of class based left-wing politics in this region.

Of course, just as civil rights legislation in the 1960s didn’t lead to class based politics in Mississippi, an end to Orange domination will not lead inevitably to socialist politics in N. Ireland. Socialists and progressives have to continue to point out the democratic deficit that is in N. Ireland and support demands for a transformation of the state.

Q: As a former prisoner and hunger striker, what are your thoughts on the situation republicans face in prison right now?

TM: For a start, all prisoners – political or non-political – deserve decent and humane treatment from their gaolers. There is little doubt that the Northern Ireland prison regime is a flawed and outdated service that is clinging on to perks and privileges that depend on the existence of a state of high alert in the prison.

As always, it is the ruling political authority that must take ultimate responsibility for prison conditions and irony of ironies; with policing and justice powers devolved to the Sinn Fein/DUP led local government coalition, the Sinn Fein party shares responsibility for conditions in Maghaberry prison.

Prisons everywhere are a barometer of a society’s level of development and the huge prison population in the US is a sad reflection on that country’s lack of well-being. Most recent swift increases in US prisoner numbers coincided with the enormous transfer of wealth from middle to top that came from the Reagan led neo-liberal agenda. The privileged elite found it necessary to contain the inevitable unrest and discontent by criminalising and imprisoning it and thus the increase in numbers.

The answer – as the cause – lies outside the prisons. An old gaol maxim is that the only real victory a prisoner wins is when he walks through the gate or gets over the wall. Hunger strikes and other prison protests have no impact if not supported by those outside the prison. Decent, progressive America must loudly identify the excessive use of imprisonment for what it is, and campaign against it as it has against imperialist adventures abroad and legalised robbery at home.

Q: The hunger strikes of 1980-81 were a seminal moment in the history of the Irish liberation movement. You yourself spent 53 days on hunger strike in 1980; what did that era teach you about political organizing?

TM: The biggest lesson from the hunger-strike period has to be the risk of having a mass movement captured by bureaucrats and apparatchiks. This is always a problem in the absence of a well-informed and radical cadre willing to challenge the drift towards centrism.

There is also the need to be clear about the nature of the core demands of a popular upsurge. If the core demand/s are not inherently radical and can be monopolised by a centrist tendency, the original mass movement may ultimately reinforce the status quo ante. The hunger-strike was about prisoners and those who controlled the loyalty of the prisoners were able to exert control over the mass movement.

Q: What are your thoughts on Ed Moloney’s ‘Voices from the Grave’? And the Boston College controversy?

TM: I believe that the research project led by Anthony McIntyre was a good and useful piece of work and something that Anthony carried out diligently and with integrity. On reflection, it may have been better if the embargo had been for something like 50 years instead of the life of the interviewee but it’s easy to be wise after an event.

I thought the book ‘Voices from the Grave’ was an interesting work but its overall message was a little spoiled by the obsessing with Brendan Hughes’ critique of Gerry Adams.

The Boston college controversy is a shame on both the British and US authorities. It is highly unlikely that the contents would ever stand up in court as evidence in the first instance. Moreover, what on earth is the US government trying to do risking unpicking a settlement that they have boasted about brokering?

Q: For many years Ireland was a country that workers emigrated from, since the late 1990s the trend was in the opposite direction with immigrants coming to Ireland. Recently, with Ireland’s severe economic crisis, emigration in again plaguing Ireland’s young. What’s happening with immigrant rights in Ireland? What has the return of emigration meant?

TM: Most immigrants to Ireland are citizens of the European Union and therefore have, in theory at any rate, equal rights with people born in Ireland. There is a difficult to measure undercurrent of resentment against ‘foreigners’ but it has not often manifested itself in the open. What really we are missing are workers’ rights that would protect migrant and indigenous alike and help prevent the exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers in low paid ‘sweat-shop’ jobs and this is all the more important at a time of high emigration.

Emigration from Ireland has a deeply corrosive impact on society. For the most part it is the young and energetic that emigrates from any country and this is also the case in Ireland. Losing a significant percentage of a generation deprives that country of a crucial amount of aggregate social and material product and accelerates the downward economic cycle. Emigration removes the age cohort most likely to disrupt the status quo (hence the emphasis by Irish Governments and right-wing Irish Americans to promote Morrison visa initiatives – contemporary equivalent of 19th century ‘assisted passages’). Emigration leaves a country old, tired and demoralised and that is where we are heading in Ireland if we can’t change the current drift.

Q: You write that after the 2011 general election in the south there was a debate in Sinn Fein over whether to ‘concentrate on a left-wing strategy, or whether to move on to the space formerly occupied by Fianna Fail.’ What has been the progress of this debate? How did the campaign of Martin McGuinness for Irish President reflect that debate?

TM: As far as I can see, the debate never went beyond a few rhetorical questions that led back to the pre-ordained decision to displace Fiann Fail. No party with its economy spokesperson talking about building an economy on small and medium enterprises and condemning any suggestion of raising corporation taxation can genuinely claim to be socialist.

Q: In late 2010 the United Left Alliance came together to contest the February 2011 general elections in Ireland, winning five seats. What is you assessment of the ULA?

TM: The ULA is a positive and progressive development. The fact that organizations of the left have come together at any time is good and that these groups are doing so at this time of capitalist crisis is heartening and encouraging. The ULA has also given some needed visibility to the left through its articulate and high-profile spokespersons such as Richard Boyd Barrett and Joe Higgins.

Q: The United Left Alliance has continued to debate its future role in Irish politics; whether to become a party, etc. Can the ULA become political alternative for the Irish working class?

TM: There remain some significant working class elements outside of the ULA. The working class Irish republican constituency, the Labour left and Communist Party influenced groups (much larger than CPI membership) would need to be involved in order to make a really potent alternative. There is a history of suspicion and rivalry between these groups and it would not be easy to bring them together but objectively speaking – that is a task demanding addressing and resolving. The ULA is well placed to act as a focus or catalyst to assist this development. At the same time, any move made by the ULA in this direction has to be reciprocated and that is a task for us all.

Q: As you know, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement has captured the imagination of many, not just here in the United States, but around the world including in Ireland. In Dublin activists are continuing Occupy Dame Street. What do you think of the Occupy movement?

TM: The Occupy movement is something of immense significance. It may or may not achieve immediate success and indeed it may falter and dissipate completely in its current form. The real importance of this movement is that it has signaled a change of mood in the mind of multitudes across the globe. If the Occupy movement stumbles in the short term, it will, nevertheless, have helped launch a new phase in the struggle against capitalism.

Q: How did you come to identify as a socialist? Has your definition of socialism changed over the years?

TM: I can’t really remember when first began to believe in socialism. I was a teenager in the 1960s when it was a reasonably fashionable thing to be a leftist. This was helped in my case by the reality of being a Catholic in N. Ireland where the resistance to the state was being organized by left republicans and socialists. The real change came for me in prison when I had time to reflect on socialism and began to grasp the difference between Utopian and Scientific socialism.

Apart from my early juvenile infatuation with Utopian socialism, my definition of the principles has changed little. What has changed though is my view of the means for bringing socialism into being. I’m much more skeptical of the ‘Leninist’ party organization than I once was but that’s an organizational matter not a definition of the meaning which to me remains control by the working class of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Q: For several years now you have been an organizer for the Independent Workers Union (IWU); what has the IWU taught you about organizing?

TM: To be patient and never to give up the struggle. Perhaps the biggest lesson is not to try and replicate the role of other conservative unions just because they are large and apparently well resourced. There is huge need to look beyond the established norm and persist with building what is needed rather than what appears convenient.

Also, be tough on membership criteria. Be careful about allowing people abuse your ideological commitment and your desire to recruit at all costs. Some folk who have no loyalty or regard to organized labour, try to use a new union to settle their immediate issue and thereafter don’t even take out a year’s subscription. This is very unfair to other loyal members and ultimately is very counter productive.

Ireland’s mainstream unions and members have had two decades of social partnership (i.e. a corporatist deal between state, employers and unions) that ultimately only benefited capital but gave some short-term advantages to skilled workers and public sector employees. As a result, both union leaderships and members grew used to a cosy arrangement that required little militancy and/or grass roots organization. This has led to a situation where the unions, leaderships and members, are ill prepared both mentally and organizationally for struggle. They now know that they are in difficulty but are sitting helplessly on their hands, waiting for someone else to help them.

Q: What Irish activists of the 60′s/70′s generation do you admire most? What activists of the 00′s generation do you most admire?

TM: Undoubtedly the activists from the 1960s/70s that I most admire are Bernadette McAliskey and Eamonn McCann. I’m not including my IRA comrades in this list since I feel that they were part of an insurrectionary organization rather than individual activists. Those I admire most at the moment are the young people of the eirigi and Irish Occupy movements. They have a leftist outlook and are active in promoting their cause.

Q: You have been involved in the struggle for socialism and democracy in Ireland for over 40 years. The war you and your comrades fought resulted in far less than many had hoped. You, your family and comrades have paid a tremendous price for your activism; when you look to the future with hindsight are you optimistic or pessimistic (or both) when, surveying the current realities, you look to the future.

TM: Capitalism is in systemic crisis and young people from Oakland to Athens to Moscow to Damascus are on the streets. How could one be pessimistic? All the powers of the old world are in alliance – IMF, Yankee presidents, German chancellors, French bankers and British ministers are again fearful of the spectre awaiting them.

 

Class War!

Some days, like this one, are only got through by humming this tune throughout…the Dils 1977 punk masterpiece ‘Class War’…’I want a war, between the rich and the poor, I wanna fight and know what I’m fighting for…’ standing in lines, at demos, walking down the street, at school, sitting in too long political meetings, waiting for the bus, listening to the news, at work- it’s comforting in nearly every situation I find myself in. Do not fear the class war, comrades; it can make us free.

In a class war, class war, class war, class war, class war, class war, class war. In New York and LA, city halls are falling down.

There’s no escape, when a class war comes to town. In a class war, class war, class war, class war, class war, class war.

If I’m told to kill, in Beirut or Salvador, there will be a class war, right here in America.