Nowtopian

The Springtime of Peoples Redux

The plum blossoms outside my window are stunning in the faux summer of early February, but a nice complement to the springtime emerging in Egypt, Tunisia, across North Africa and the Middle East.

The Egyptian Revolution is continuing. Today on Democracy Now’s ongoing fantastic coverage from the ground in Tahrir Square, they interviewed a man who with an almost devilish look on his face, smiling while he acknowledged that the slowness of the government’s response was greatly helping the movement to become deeper and more creative. It was just the latest in a long list of incredible moments sparkling out of the uprising. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the two-hour special Democracy Now had on Saturday. In the midst of it is the incredible video that went viral all over Egypt in the week before January 25, showing Asmaa Mahfouz’s Jan. 18th message which some are calling “the video that started the revolution.” We were brought to tears by the intensity of her appeal, the urgency and dignity of her address. Don’t miss it!

The Springtime of Peoples originally was applied as a label to the rapidly spreading revolutionary tide across Europe in 1848. I was reading up on it to contextualize the origins of San Francisco, a city which has only been a city in any sense of the word since 1849-1850. I came upon this passage about the sudden collapse of the Hapsburg Imperial center in Vienna, March 15 1848, quoted in Mike Rapport’s “1848: Year of Revolution” which I thought remarkable for how closely it resembled the events in Cairo:

In Vienna, the whole aspect of things seemed changed, as it were, by a magician’s wand… The secret police had entirely disappeared from the streets; the windows of book-stores were now crowded with forbidden works, which, like condemned criminals, had long been withdrawn from the light of day; boys hawked throughout the city addresses, poems, and engravings, illustrative of the Revolution—the first issues of an unshackled press; while the newly-armed citizens formed into a National Guard, marched shoulder to shoulder with the regular military, and maintained in unison with them, the public tranquillity.

Similar stories are pouring in from many sources now. A fantastic essay appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal by Mohammed A. Bamyeh, which he datelined Al-Qahira, The City Victorious, February 6, 2011.

…in every sense the revolution maintained throughout a character of spontaneity, in the sense that it had no permanent organization. Rather, organizational needs—for example governing how to communicate, what to do the next day, what to call that day, how to evacuate the injured, how to repulse baltagiyya assaults, and even how to formulate demands—emerged in the field directly and continued to develop in response to new situations. Further, the revolution lacked recognized leadership from beginning to end, a fact that seemed to matter greatly to observers but not to participants. I saw several debates in which participants strongly resisted being represented by any existing group or leader, just as they resisted demands that they produce “representatives” that someone, such as al-Azhar or the government, could talk to. When the government asked that someone be designated as a spokesperson for this revolt, many participants flippantly designated one of the disappeared, in the hope that being so designated might hasten his reappearance. A common statement I heard was that it was “the people” who decide. It appeared that the idea of peoplehood was now assumed to be either too grand to be representable by any concrete authority or leadership, or that such representation would dilute the profound, almost spiritual, implication of the notion of “the people” as a whole being on the move.

I was watching Aljazeera on Friday and at one point there was the anchor querying a guy in Tahrir Square. “Isn’t it a problem that you don’t have a leader? Someone who can speak for the movement?’ or something like that. The guy in the square was beautiful, totally eloquent, and said without hesitation. “No, absolutely not! We don’t need any leaders. We speak for ourselves. We’re very well organized and we don’t need anyone to represent us!”… wow!

Continue reading The Springtime of Peoples Redux

Egypt Stands Up!

Wow! I’ve been brought nearly to tears over and over again during these past days. It’s so inspiring! It’s such a relief! Finally, the ossified world is cracking up, the old order is crumbling. It’s hard to believe the resilience and beauty of the Egyptian revolution. Everyone knows Mubarak is going to go, either on a plane within a few more days, or maybe he’ll be dragged out and hung in Tahrir Square like Mussolini was in Italy in 1945. The role of the “street” is particularly exciting. In this era of numb isolation, clicking and petitioning and online voting, the Egyptian “Internet generation” has turned that isolation on its head, provoking a mass uprising in the streets. By retaking public space and thereby opening a much larger public sphere, long suppressed by the Egyptian police state, they’ve made an incredible breakthrough for the whole world!

But the most inspiring reports are about the direct democracy that has emerged on the barricades all over Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. When the government facilitated prison breaks and sent their police and secret service in to loot and terrorize people, they inadvertantly inspired an intense, block-by-block self-organization that was so natural that it took only a few hours or a day to spread throughout the city. In today’s New York Times an unusually clear report corroborated the incredible footage showing on Aljazeera in which people from all walks of life are fully engaged in defending their revolution from the attacks of the paid thugs and coerced employees of the Egyptian state. So moving!

In Tahrir Square, Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Democracy Now! has been providing fantastic on-the-spot reports. Today he showed how the self-organization of the people in the Square has even led to a massive garbage recycling system, something very unusual in Egypt (or many countries of the global South), but indicating a level of self-regard, a commitment to a new kind of self-care. We might scoff at recycling as a bourgeois distraction (sure, it’s probably quite inefficient in terms of energy usage), but as a symbol of a transformed public life, it’s pretty compelling. It points to a different way of life that has the potential to go much further than any prior revolution.

Could this be the beginning of the 21st century at last? Could it be the beginning of a truly new path out of the cul-de-sacs of bourgeois democracy, brutal dictatorship, and ossified state capitalism masquerading as socialism? Probably too much to hope for, since “socialism in one country” is as impossible now as it ever was. But that’s the beauty of Egypt’s location in the heart of the transnational Arab world. Imagine if this bottom-up grassroots revolution erects new democratic forms of networked power, based on self-management and rigorous respect for individual and social rights? They’ve practically put it in motion already! And from Tunisia to Yemen, Jordan to Saudi Arabia, the people are rising. How far can it go… on Fox News they’re freaking out that it could make it to the United States! Well, of course it could! It’s the new world struggling to emerge from the dying old world… Yeah, I’m excited! Let’s go!

Protest or Celebration? Or Something Deeper Still?

Had a nice ride out to the Sunset last weekend, in our typical weird week of summer weather in January. Standing at the edge of the Sunset reservoir looking eastward I took this shot through the fence, over the acres of solar panels sitting on the reservoir roof.

I’m posting a text I distributed at last night’s Critical Mass here in San Francisco, reflecting some of the discussions I’ve been part of during the past months. The ride last night was lovely, about 1000 riders, a good spontaneous route that took us winding through South of Market and into the Mission before heading back north and then west into Golden Gate Park. I bailed after about 2 hours at Fell and Masonic where I took these photos. There were at least five “circle-ups” last night, in lieu of stops at red lights, which I don’t much like, but it served the purpose of getting the ride regrouped, while also pointlessly blocking traffic in all directions at the intersections where it happened.

I like the way the guy in the foreground is a blur while the woman seems to be holding the peace/US flag (an oxymoron if I ever saw one!), but actually it was another guy behind her. Fun with digital photography...

A bike lift is starting at Fell and Masonic, January 28, 2011 Critical Mass.

Anyway, here’s the text I wrote and distributed as a flyer last night:

Protest or Celebration? Or Something Deeper Still?

As long as you have a bike to ride, you don’t have to buy anything to participate in Critical Mass, neither object nor service, nor an ideology beyond a desire to partake in public life on two wheels. When hundreds and thousands of cyclists seize the streets for a convivial and celebratory use of public space, many of the expectations and rules of modern capitalism are challenged. Individual behaviors escape the logic of buying and selling, if only for a few hours. Once in the street together, unexpected connections emerge, unplanned events occur, and serendipitous relationships begin. Unlike a trip to the mall or the market, the conversations are unburdened by the logic of transactions, of prices and measurements. It’s a free exchange among free people. The experience alters one’s sense of city life immediately, and more importantly, shifts our collective imaginations in ways we have only begun to learn about.

Critical Mass cyclists are among the most visible practitioners of a new kind of social conflict. The “assertive desertion” embodied in bicycling erodes the system of social exploitation organized through private car ownership and the oil industry. And by cycling in urban centers in the Empire, we join a growing movement around the world that is repudiating the social and economic models controlled by multinational capital and imposed on us without any form of democratic consent. This mass seizure of the streets by a swarming mob of bicyclists “without leaders” is precisely the kind of self-directing, networking logic that is transforming our economic lives and threatening the structure of government, business, and (as more imaginative military strategists are coming to understand) policing and war-making too.

Critical Mass has a new cousin in town: the San Francisco Bike Party (SFBP). The party-like qualities of Critical Mass have always been present, but the Bike Party model as developed in San Jose and other cities first involves an organizing (and monitoring) crew of volunteers who direct the fun. The first official SFBP happened a few weeks ago on January 7 and drew around 1000 riders on a bitterly cold night. It was a lot like Critical Mass in some ways—I enjoyed dozens of conversations with people I found myself next to in the ride, there were music machines, and friendly vibes from riders and passersby alike. We were dozens and hundreds of bicyclists filling the streets and displacing cars, just as we’d dreamed back in the first months of Critical Mass in 1992.

Continue reading Protest or Celebration? Or Something Deeper Still?