Naked Slip ’N Slide for Peace.org

The story from Sustainablog on August 5, 2008 is entitled World Naked Bike Ride: Is Anything Gained By Protesting Oil Dependency In The Buff?

Well, no.

Which is ultimately the conclusion that the Sustaina-bloggers lean towards. But the fact that anyone would even think that the question needs to be asked ought to tell you something about sustainability types, and contemporary Leftist protest culture. And unfortunately demonstrates the crying need for Naked Slip ‘N Slide For Peace.org.

This is from Stephanie McMillan’s comic strip, Minimum Security (18 February 2008).

Bananabelle (meditating): Cheney be nice… Cheney be nice…

Bunnista (meditating): Bananabelle wise up… Bananabelle wise up…

Bananabelle: Is the war over yet?

Bunnista (reading the newspaper): Nope.

Bananabelle: My meditation doesn’t seem to be working.

Bunnista: Mine did! Now you know that useless actions don’t affect world events.

Bananabelle: You’re right! I’ll write a strongly worded letter to Cheney!

Bunnista: Sigh… Bananabelle wise up… Bananabelle wise up….

Meanwhile, among the state Leftists….

At Common Dreams, Progressives discover that party politics has mechanisms to favor insiders, and to make it difficult for candidates to get a nomination without the approval of the party aparat. Most react with horror, and decide to change this stifling state of affairs—by committing themselves even more fervently to partisan politicking. This time in the name of strengthening our democracy, which requires wresting control of the Party out of the hands of the very people who write the rules of engagement. See, if you can win, then you can change things so that the party establishment can’t keep you from winning anymore.

Elsewhere, Stanley Fish discovers that the government-appointed directors of politically-run Universities sometimes put partisanship and political cronyism above academics in appointing senior administrators. The way he reckons it, a good result, if there is one, will not justify a bad practice, and putting someone with no academic experience in charge of an academic institution is just that. Nor is it necessary, even in the straitened circumstances (hardly unique to Colorado) the university faces. There is another way, and Michael Carrigan, one of the three (Democratic) regents to vote against Benson, pointed to it when he told me, I can’t believe that there are no candidates out there with both business acumen and academic credentials. He is right. Those candidates were out there and they still are. Perhaps the next university tempted to go this route will take the trouble to look for them.

Mister Buckles is taking back our democracy from the party establishment!

Playing the government game and taking the government’s patronage means playing by the government’s rules. The longer you keep walloping at it, the more stuck in it you get. Primary goals — like solidarity and social justice, or intellectual discovery and creation — have already been replaced by secondary goals — like winning elections or tugging on legislative purse-strings. Soon the secondary goals are swallowed up by tertiary goals — spending four-year election cycle after four-year election cycle bashing yourself against the hardened barricades of the Party establishment, or wrangling with political factions over the best process to find and bring in a boss combining the right balance of academic chops with the political connections needed to keep the university mainlining politically appropriated funds. This is no way to make a revolution. It’s not even a way to make small change.

In anarchy, there is another way. When the things that matter most in our lives are the things that we make for ourselves, each of us singly, or with many of us choosing to work together in voluntary associations, there will be no need to waste years of our lives and millions of dollars fighting wars of attrition with back-room king-makers—because we will not need to get any of the things that they are trying to hoard. There will be no need to fight battles between academic senates and Boards of Trustees over the right balance of academic competence and political savvy in a university President —because when universities’ funding rises from the people who participate in, or care about, the academic community, rather than being handed down by the State, the university has no need for political bodies like Boards of Trustees or smooth-operator self-styled Chief Executive Officers. We will not need to get any of the favors that they might be able to grant. When we go after the State’s patronage, politics makes prisoners of us all. But freedom means that when the powers that be try to rope you along for something stupid, or try to snuff out something brilliant, we can turn around, walk away, and do things for ourselves—whether they like it or not.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action and GT 2006-07-06: Direct Action comix #2
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical healthcare reform and GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading
• GT 2005-06-25: Shut up and put up and GT 2006-06-16: And around we go…
• GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!
• Randolph Bourne (1918): The State, Part II, on the structure and role of the party system

Meanwhile, among the state Leftists….

At Common Dreams, Progressives discover that party politics has mechanisms to favor insiders, and to make it difficult for candidates to get a nomination without the approval of the party aparat. Most react with horror, and decide to change this stifling state of affairs—by committing themselves even more fervently to partisan politicking. This time in the name of strengthening our democracy, which requires wresting control of the Party out of the hands of the very people who write the rules of engagement. See, if you can win, then you can change things so that the party establishment can’t keep you from winning anymore.

Elsewhere, Stanley Fish discovers that the government-appointed directors of politically-run Universities sometimes put partisanship and political cronyism above academics in appointing senior administrators. The way he reckons it, a good result, if there is one, will not justify a bad practice, and putting someone with no academic experience in charge of an academic institution is just that. Nor is it necessary, even in the straitened circumstances (hardly unique to Colorado) the university faces. There is another way, and Michael Carrigan, one of the three (Democratic) regents to vote against Benson, pointed to it when he told me, I can’t believe that there are no candidates out there with both business acumen and academic credentials. He is right. Those candidates were out there and they still are. Perhaps the next university tempted to go this route will take the trouble to look for them.

Mister Buckles is taking back our democracy from the party establishment!

Playing the government game and taking the government’s patronage means playing by the government’s rules. The longer you keep walloping at it, the more stuck in it you get. Primary goals — like solidarity and social justice, or intellectual discovery and creation — have already been replaced by secondary goals — like winning elections or tugging on legislative purse-strings. Soon the secondary goals are swallowed up by tertiary goals — spending four-year election cycle after four-year election cycle bashing yourself against the hardened barricades of the Party establishment, or wrangling with political factions over the best process to find and bring in a boss combining the right balance of academic chops with the political connections needed to keep the university mainlining politically appropriated funds. This is no way to make a revolution. It’s not even a way to make small change.

In anarchy, there is another way. When the things that matter most in our lives are the things that we make for ourselves, each of us singly, or with many of us choosing to work together in voluntary associations, there will be no need to waste years of our lives and millions of dollars fighting wars of attrition with back-room king-makers—because we will not need to get any of the things that they are trying to hoard. There will be no need to fight battles between academic senates and Boards of Trustees over the right balance of academic competence and political savvy in a university President —because when universities’ funding rises from the people who participate in, or care about, the academic community, rather than being handed down by the State, the university has no need for political bodies like Boards of Trustees or smooth-operator self-styled Chief Executive Officers. We will not need to get any of the favors that they might be able to grant. When we go after the State’s patronage, politics makes prisoners of us all. But freedom means that when the powers that be try to rope you along for something stupid, or try to snuff out something brilliant, we can turn around, walk away, and do things for ourselves—whether they like it or not.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action and GT 2006-07-06: Direct Action comix #2
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical healthcare reform and GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading
• GT 2005-06-25: Shut up and put up and GT 2006-06-16: And around we go…
• GT 2004-05-01: Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!
• Randolph Bourne (1918): The State, Part II, on the structure and role of the party system

From a recent MoveOn update/fundraiser on the importance of intervening in Democratic Party primaries:

From: Adam Ruben, MoveOn.org Political Action
To: Rad Geek
Subject: Victory! Progressives defeat a right-wing Dem in Congress
Date: 2/13/2008 9:50 AM

We’ve been working together for years to make sure Democrats hold to progressive values and stand up to President Bush. It hasn’t always been easy. But yesterday, something amazing happened.

In what the Washington Post called a stunning victory, progressive underdog Donna Edwards triumphed in her primary against right-wing Democrat Al Wynn. That’s one more vote for ending the war, for affordable health care, for ending global warming. And thousands of MoveOn members pitched in time, money, and shoe leather to make it possible.

[…]

In 2006, we helped Democrats take back Congress from the Republicans. And while many Democrats have stood up against the war and corporate interests, […]

Oh, yeah? Name some.

That damned war isn’t funding itself.

From a recent MoveOn update/fundraiser on the importance of intervening in Democratic Party primaries:

From: Adam Ruben, MoveOn.org Political Action
To: Rad Geek
Subject: Victory! Progressives defeat a right-wing Dem in Congress
Date: 2/13/2008 9:50 AM

We’ve been working together for years to make sure Democrats hold to progressive values and stand up to President Bush. It hasn’t always been easy. But yesterday, something amazing happened.

In what the Washington Post called a stunning victory, progressive underdog Donna Edwards triumphed in her primary against right-wing Democrat Al Wynn. That’s one more vote for ending the war, for affordable health care, for ending global warming. And thousands of MoveOn members pitched in time, money, and shoe leather to make it possible.

[…]

In 2006, we helped Democrats take back Congress from the Republicans. And while many Democrats have stood up against the war and corporate interests, […]

Oh, yeah? Name some.

That damned war isn’t funding itself.

Those of you who watch the front page may have noticed a new epigraph added to the rotation. It’s from Peter Kropotkin’s book on the French Revolution; I encountered it recently thanks to a post at The Picket Line. Thus:

After the night of August 4, these urban insurrections spread still more. Indications of them are seen everywhere. The taxes, the town-dues, the levies and excise were no longer paid. The collectors of the taille are at their last shift, said Necker, in his report of August 7. The price of salt has been compulsorily reduced one-half in two of the revolted localities, the collection of taxes is no longer made, and so forth. An infinity of places was in revolt against the treasury clerks. … In this way the people, long before the Assembly, were making the Revolution on the spot; they gave themselves, by revolutionary means, a new municipal administration, they made a distinction between the taxes that they accepted and those which they refused to pay, and they prescribed the mode of equal division of the taxes that they agreed to pay to the State or to the Commune.

It is chiefly by studying this method of action among the people, and not by devoting oneself to the study of the Assembly’s legislative work, that one grasps the genius of the Great Revolution — the Genius, in the main, of all revolutions, past and to come.

—Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1909) The Great French Revolution 1789–1793, p. 108. Trans. by N. F. Dryhurst.

Besides being good on its own merits, the quotation is also a natural complement to one of my other epigraphs, a quotation from Proudhon on parliamentarism and social economy.

Those of you who watch the front page may have noticed a new epigraph added to the rotation. It’s from Peter Kropotkin’s book on the French Revolution; I encountered it recently thanks to a post at The Picket Line. Thus:

After the night of August 4, these urban insurrections spread still more. Indications of them are seen everywhere. The taxes, the town-dues, the levies and excise were no longer paid. The collectors of the taille are at their last shift, said Necker, in his report of August 7. The price of salt has been compulsorily reduced one-half in two of the revolted localities, the collection of taxes is no longer made, and so forth. An infinity of places was in revolt against the treasury clerks. … In this way the people, long before the Assembly, were making the Revolution on the spot; they gave themselves, by revolutionary means, a new municipal administration, they made a distinction between the taxes that they accepted and those which they refused to pay, and they prescribed the mode of equal division of the taxes that they agreed to pay to the State or to the Commune.

It is chiefly by studying this method of action among the people, and not by devoting oneself to the study of the Assembly’s legislative work, that one grasps the genius of the Great Revolution — the Genius, in the main, of all revolutions, past and to come.

—Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1909) The Great French Revolution 1789–1793, p. 108. Trans. by N. F. Dryhurst.

Besides being good on its own merits, the quotation is also a natural complement to one of my other epigraphs, a quotation from Proudhon on parliamentarism and social economy.

This is from a conversation between Hakim Bey and Sasha Miltsov. Miltsov posted the interview on his blog; it was recently excerpted by arthur magazine (2007-12-10) and by Jeremy at Social Memory Complex (2007-12-13).

AM: There is a popular and rather naïve belief that when the whole system, the Spectacle, will start to run out of energy–oil, gas and other resources–it will gradually loosen its grip on people’s minds and throats. The Media may still be there, the Capital will be there but they will be weak and disintegrated, and so society will inevitably break down into small autonomous collectives, not controlled by the outside world.

HB: Well, the attitudes are changing but the problem is–and now I can speak about the situation here locally–since I have been living here for 6–7 years, I have some insights–and that is that these attitudes are informed by reformism. They are not informed by a critique of capitalism or even of technology. The Green Party is a good example; basically, it’s a hobby group for losers. Here, by strange circumstances, we have a Green Party village government. I am still glad for that, I guess, but so far they haven’t accomplished anything here, except for some symbolic stuff. And the reason for this, I think, is that people of this reformist tendency are not really interested in building real alternative institutions.

For example, this movement is not taking place through labor unions, or food-cooperatives, or producers-cooperatives; it’s not taking place through free schools or alternative schools. It’s not taking place through autonomous action!

Look at the organic food situation: the big companies have already discovered that the organic food is a market and they’re in it, they’re marketing it. And for most of the consumers of organic food this is not a political issue. It’s a health issue. So they don’t care; if Monsanto is going to sell them health food–they’ll buy it from Monsanto. In other words, these nice impulses, these changing attitudes–some of which are forced on people by economic difficulties, as you pointed out, and some of which are voluntary, assumed out of a lifestyle or even out of consumerist attitude towards the authentic and the organic and the alternative, which after all is a market–it all runs into the sand, all the energy runs into the sand.

People with wonderful attitudes and desires that are good desires; but since there is no comprehensive movement, there’s nothing other than these positive attitudes and there’s no way to focus them.

I went to a Peace March yesterday–it was the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. I swear it was like being back in the 60s again: same clothes, same slogans:

–What do we want?
–Peace!
–When do we want it?
–Now!

We’ve been saying this for 40 years and we still haven’t realized that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action!

And this is even better: there was a counter-demonstration, and the anti-demonstrators were yelling at us that we were communists! This is like a civil war reenactment; it’s like people in medieval costumes pretending to be knights and ladies. Totally bizarre. I haven’t been going to demonstrations lately, so I thought maybe a few things have changed. But no! It’s just a blast from the past–for everybody, including the fascists who thought that they were still living in 1979. Very strange.

And this is it! You go, you have a march, you say: Not in my name! And then you go home and watch TV. You don’t then go out and start an alternative institution: a church, a farm, a commune….

AM: A pleasure club.

HB: Or even a pleasure club! Instead, they just go home and watch TV.

AM: And then they go to work and get their salaries from the same people who are waging the war. And the taxes go to war, of course.

HB: Exactly! And of course, you NEED your SUV; you NEED your cellular phone. These are real needs. So all these so-called green people around here are sucking up gasoline and cement…. Just not in my backyard–that’s what they say. They are not going to swear off using cement. They will say: Move the cement plant to Mexico. I can’t participate in this pseudo-politics; there is no entry-point for me here.

There are good reasons to believe that efforts to focus on individual or collective withdrawal from consumer culture would be just as pointless and self-stultifying as the magical thinking implicit in treating protest marches as an end-in-themselves. But Bey is right on when it comes to emphasizing the need to build countervailing institutions and move from symbolic protest to concrete actions of resistance.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Naked Slip ’N Slide for Peace.org, a satirical journal of ineffectual dissent.

As a journal, we are deeply sympathetic with the humane goals of the Left: freedom, peace, environmental sustainability, anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, and an economy based on solidarity and mutual aid. But the protest culture of the Left — whether liberal, Progressive, or radical — has frittered away far too much of its time, energy, and organizational resources on efforts that are self-indulgent, self-destructive, soft-headed, strategically short-sighted, pointless, ineffectual, or just plain goofy.

The primary aim of this journal is to ridicule and satirize ineffectual Leftist protest in order to help direct the broader Left towards more rational strategies and more useful tactics. Failing that, our secondary aim is to keep ourselves and our comrades amused while the world careens straight into hell.

Here’s to a Left that won’t lose, and a Left that won’t deserve to.

–Rad Geek, founder and editor