You may have noticed that there wasn’t a fall 2018 issue of Slingshot. We intended to publish one, but when the article deadline arrived, there weren’t enough quality articles for us to make the paper. Sometimes when that happens we publish a lower-quality issue or scramble to get a few after-deadline, last-minute articles thrown together so the issue isn’t so bad. This time we decided to wait.

During the pause, there were some inspiring meetings with a dozen people, yummy dinner, dessert, candles, and wine to talk about how to reinvigorate the project and improve our internal process.

Most of us feel like it is still worth it to print Slingshot on paper — which is increasingly unusual and has some disadvantages in the internet-world. Right before this issue, long-running punk zine Maximumrocknroll announced they would stop paper publishing. Printing on paper is super expensive and distribution is labor and fossil-fuel-intensive. The idea is that a paper publication may be able to get beyond the internet echo chamber – where computer algorithms feed you familiar ideas and voices.

On the other hand, writing an article for a publication that prints 22,000 copies limits your ideas to those 22,000 copies — or at least that has been the case for Slingshot. It has been years since any Slingshot articles got any meaningful distribution on the internet or through social media, so writing Slingshot articles feels like yelling into a void where only a few people may ever hear you. You do just as much work as if you were writing for an on-line audience, but with much less reach. Slingshot readers are surprised to hear that Slingshot articles are posted on-line at the Slingshot website — and that this has been the case for the last 25 years. Who even knew Slingshot had a website …

Anyhow, at the inspiring Slingshot meeting to discuss the postponed issue, there were a lot of engaging ideas:

• We should do things differently and maybe make different types of of publications like mini-issues, issues with less text, issues just on a single theme, etc.

• We should only print really “good” articles and less filler and embarrassing articles. However, defining what is a “good” article can be hard in a collective with many different voices and ideas. We agreed that we want to still try to include work from a variety of voices emphasizing content, not style.

• Someone suggested publishing a survey in the issue and on-line to see what readers want and where they got the paper, etc. (You can mail in the little survey thingy below.)

• The collective could have more meetings between issues to workshop article ideas and insert group ideas into individual author’s work. Maybe it could be like a writer’s guild. It didn’t happen between October and the issue you hold in your hands.

• The group decided to spend a few meetings to work out a better process to avoid recent problems around decision making, printing articles not everyone agreed with, and people having a big voice without sticking around to do the shit work. As of today, the process discussion is still unfinished.

• We decided we needed to have better established alternatives to publishing an issue after a deadline if the articles that are turned in aren’t good enough.

• We discussed how we could locate really good articles, including maybe putting into print articles that are only published on-line. That didn’t happen for this issue, either. A possible problem is that a lot of authors need to be paid, and Slingshot is an all-volunteer project that doesn’t pay authors…

• Perhaps the paper could have regular columns and regular sections in the paper. This suggestion also didn’t happen in this issue.

• Another good idea was to invite people to speak at Long Haul and then publish the result as an interview.

• Each issue there is a brainstorm for article topics. A comment was to make the brainstorm more than just topics for articles but focus on articles people at the meeting will actually write, and then having a discussion to help them develop their ideas.

• And as the meeting was winding down, we discussed sending the paper to shelters for battered women in addition to prisons. About 10% of Slingshot issues are mailed to prisoners.

Slingshot needs to find decent articles, and that is very difficult. Every article doesn’t have to relate to current events, but the articles turned in for the issue that got postponed were almost all rants that mentioned topics but then quickly went off into confusing tangents. The big issues at the top of everyone’s mind — sexual harassment, climate change, income inequality, police killings, immigration, the recent prison strike — were all missing. It was like the articles that reached us were from a universe far, far away or maybe they were from Russian trolls. They felt like distractions.

The process of making Slingshot is fun which is the main reason it keeps going. Layout weekend is like a lengthy party and community gathering. But if the paper continues having such a hard time finding good articles, the project is organically coming to an end.

The collective could decide to continue publishing the Organizer, but put the paper on extended hibernation until rebellion in the streets or other external events require us to make an issue. In the early years, the paper was infused with the direct actions happening in the streets and maybe it needs that to compensate for the messy layout and rough-written articles.

In an uprising, everyone takes up the tools they have access to, and for better or worse Slingshot collective finds itself with this zine. On the plus side, we have excellent grassroots distribution, some fans, and funding isn’t a problem. It is obvious that there are better publications and doing an all-volunteer collective project imposes limitations. Revolt is messy — so is the Slingshot office.

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By Jesse D. Palmer

During the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California last year, even 160 miles away in Berkeley the smoke was so thick that you could only see 2 blocks and we all had sore throats and watery eyes. A week into the smoke, my 6 year-old’s school was cancelled due to poor air quality and my family decided to flee South to Monterey on the coast, searching for clean air.

Even though our escape was a soft and privileged one — we knew we could come back, we went to a motel with our housemates — our forced migration due to ecological degradation was surprising and disturbing. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to flee — and it felt like a personal wake up call that we no longer have the luxury of time to get serious about climate change. Climate change isn’t about the future — it is now. Yet despite so much evidence, there’s a striking lack of urgency. There’s plenty of fashionable memes, handwringing, denial, despair and grief — but what we really need is mass action.

Running out of time means it is already too late to avoid some of the effects of climate change. The question is whether we will continue mostly doing nothing as things get worse — like the frog in the pot of heating water.

Human life on an individual and collective level is mostly a matter of muddling through — we all do the best we can. But with climate change, that approach isn’t going to cut it. The status quo or anything close to it — really anything other than rapid and dramatic action to decarbonize and reduce other greenhouse gases on a global level — may result in human extinction, to say nothing of the on-going mass extinction of our fellow species — the Sixth mass extinction known as the Anthropocene.

Perhaps it doesn’t feel like there’s anything we can do individually. Personal changes feel meaninglessly inadequate to the global scale of the problem, and as individuals we have little power over the 1% whose investments and political decisions determine how electricity is generated, cars fueled, food grown and goods manufactured.

So the rational personal decision appears to be to do nothing and put un-solvable problems out of our minds, lest they ruin our days. Or if denial or distraction don’t work, another coping mechanism is to blame someone else — people who don’t care, corporations, politicians. Obviously those in charge are to blame for their inaction — yet pointing the finger followed by our own inaction conveniently gets us off the hook, yet changes nothing.

My goal in this article is to describe things we can still do — individually and collectively — to avoid the worst forms of climate catastrophe.

There is a chance to avoid our own extinction. My determination to seize whatever chances we have is driven by joy — not fear or anger at those who’ve gotten us into this mess. Bothering to care about saving the world is based on the love I feel while experiencing the sky, plants, animals, dirt and people. Sure people have done a lot of terrible things, but I still fiercly want to preserve our species and the amazing things we’re capable of conceiving and creating — music, books, bicycles, art, architecture, yummy food.

Both impossible and within reach

Decarbonizing the whole world quickly enough to avoid the worst climate change seems impossible on one level, and frustratingly within reach on another. People lived for thousands of years without burning any fossil fuels at all; our current total dependence is only a century old. Scientists have spent the last 30 years understanding climate change, and they have determined that if we add too many greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we’ll trigger natural feedback loops that will further warm the climate — and the warming will become self-sustaining past a certain tipping point even if humans stop adding more emissions. Ocean acidification as CO2 is absorbed by water is another threat. So it is urgent to stop adding more CO2 and other gases like methane before tipping points are crossed. Scientists believe that there may still be time to avoid a climate catastrophe if emissions are eliminated right away.

Doing so is possible now with current technology — what is missing is the social will. Decarbonization means we need to put the interests of 99% of the population of the world — who don’t own or work for fossil fuel companies — ahead of the 1% who do. Smarter people than me have created detailed plans that describe how each particular fossil fuel dependent social function can be decarbonized — from electricity production to transport to manufacturing to agriculture. It’s worth it to read the details — see the end of this article for some links — but it’s also important that we develop catchy phrases to summarized extremely complex ideas. My current favorite catchy phrase is the Green New Deal, which I’ll discuss later.

In talking about climate change, we urgently need to reverse the mainstream perspective. Those defending the status quo or just doing nothing and living like there’s no problem aren’t realistic, mature or reasonable people — they are delusional lunatics about to wander off a cliff. These people are going to get us all killed and when they say we’re dreamers or radicals, we need to turn the tables and call them out. Changing the climate on a whole planet is reckless — a mad-scientist experiment.

The typical mainstream political divisions between climate-denying Republicans in Red States and supposedly climate change-aware Democrats living in Blue States are hogwash. Climate denial isn’t only denying science. A much more insidious form of climate denial is saying you believe in science and yet not taking dramatic and immediate action that is equal to the scale of the problem.

If you “believe science” then you’re aware that our species may be on the brink of extinction or at least social collapse — so cautious, gradual political policies aimed to avoid disrupting the status quo (while continuing to accept campaign contributions from oil companies) is not going to cut it. When Obama, Al Gore and the rest of them had power, their actions were laughably inadequate to the scale of the problem.

What is to be done?

Because the biggest problem is building social will, we need to start on a psychological and personal level.

Climate change is so global and overwhelming that its easy to fall into all-or-nothing thinking. “If I can’t figure out how to fix the problem, then I guess we’re doomed so it isn’t worth doing anything.” When that feeling moves from a personal level to mass psychology, it is self-fulfilling and means avoiding climate catastrophe will be impossible.

With climate change, it is better to do something than nothing since less emissions are better than more emissions — perhaps we can buy time by putting off climate feedback loop tipping points.

If you are on the freeway and a car in front of you stops in such a way that you know you’re going to hit it, you still put on the brakes and try to swerve because maybe you won’t hit the other car so hard. You certainly don’t hit the gas pedal. Doing something might possibly help and doing nothing because an accident is inevitable is ridiculous.

We’re all in the car together. Climate crisis calls for all-hands on deck and everyone doing whatever they can, knowing that no single action will be enough. On a psychological level, we all have to overcome our sense of powerlessness. It has basis in fact, but it is also encouraged by those who want to hold onto their power.

While many things are out of our control, what we can do is disrupt business as usual. Being disruptive and disorderly is possible even with a single person or a very small group. Elites have proved that they will not meaningfully reduce emissions — certainly not within the time we still have left. The price of inaction can and must be disorder and chaos on a mass scale. The Yellow Vests in France are just the latest example of effective disruption. Through history, uprisings have made continuation of business-as-usual impossible and required change.

When disrupting business as usual, it is great to focus on the social actors who are doing the most harm such as politicians and polluting industries. However, mass disruption on the scale that will be necessary to force rapid change has to go beyond symbolism and it is going to be inconvenient to regular people who are probably on our side. There’s no point in intentionally alienating allies, but this is a crisis, not a popularity contest. While there may be backlash, delay is a greater risk.

Specific disruptive actions and tactics have to be developed by each individual or group based on their own capabilities and local context. We’ve already seen occupations to stop pipeline construction, sit-ins at corporate offices, traffic blockades and tree-sits to stop coal mining. Coal mostly moves by train, so blocking coal trains pops to mind. Even small blockades can stop complex industrial operations or play chaos with urban life. Disruption means gumming up the normal functioning of the machine — making fossil fuel dependence an expensive hassle.

Although there’s been too much emphasis on personal lifestyle-based solutions to climate change because the scale of the climate crisis will require more than individual action, saying that our individual choices are entirely irrelevant is also obviously wrong and harmful. Pointing this out doesn’t mean we should get bogged down in guilt-based judgments about other people’s consumption decisions. It just means that in an all-hands on deck effort to decarbonize our lives, many fossil fuel use decisions are within our hands. A popular meme states that just 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of global emissions, but a lot of those emissions are really consumer emissions that people buy from corporations. Shifting blame to someone else may make you feel better but it won’t cut emissions.

Per capita emissions in the US are about 4 times the world average and this is related to both corporate decisions and individual decisions. People in the US drive more, fly more and use more stuff — and personal consumption is increasing even in the face of the climate crisis. In the EU, with a similar quality of life, greenhouse gas emissions are less than half per capita US emissions. During WWII, personal efforts like driving less and Victory Gardens had meaningful effects because they were mass actions taken on an individual basis. Half of the fresh vegetables grown in the US in 1944 were grown in Victory Gardens.

We need to debunk magical thinking that either our personal actions alone can solve this crisis or that we can keep living just as we do now and rely on government and corporations to reduce our emissions for us. We shouldn’t be driving a mile when we could just as well walk or bike. Now is a terrible time to replace your car with a gas guzzling SUV, which is nevertheless a huge trend now. It is important to select alternatives rather than taking actions that burn fossil fuels.

Inconvenient Talk

An all-hands on deck approach means that we need to hold our collective noses and talk about mainstream politics and government. Talking about these things doesn’t mean we support them or are abandoning a DIY counter-culture orientation. Rather, we need to discuss mainstream politics because they are part of reality. I am tired of walling off particular parts of reality and pretending they don’t exist just because I’m writing for Slingshot.

Capitalism and the industrial revolution are highly aligned with fossil fuel consumption — all three developed in tandem. Nonetheless, insisting that the only way to avert climate catastrophe is to overthrow capitalism or return to a state of nature boxes us in too tightly. One possibility is that the urgency of climate change may require rapid shifts in social organization that will sweep capitalism away.

But replacing capitalism is a complex project. It is hard to see how it can happen in just the few years that may be left to decarbonize before tipping points are crossed. Maintaining a critique of capitalism shouldn’t mean that we wait for the revolution before starting the struggle to decarbonize.

I increasingly think that the path of least resistance may be to use political and social paths within the current system to decarbonize as quickly as we can. Survival has to be the first priority.

It is possible to decarbonize under the current system because the current economy can function just fine with solar power and electric cars. While fossil fuel companies and their politicians are powerful, they are outnumbered, and with enough social pressure, their interests can be overcome. It is painful to admit that while capitalism is harmful and unjust in many ways, it has a proven track record of supporting innovation and rapidly deploying technological advances on a mass scale. This has been particularly true during wars. During WWII the US rapidly converted civilian production to military production and was able to make numerous technological breakthroughs. The activist group Climate Mobilization has proposed a 6 point “Victory Plan” inspired by the US mobilization for WWII.

The idea of the Green New Deal is also to harness capitalism’s productivity to rapidly decarbonize in a worker-friendly fashion. The idea has been kicking around for several years, but it is achieving greater visibility now because of the dynamic efforts of the direct action-oriented Sunrise Movement and NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Obviously capitalism won’t embrace either the Victory Plan or the Green New Deal on its own — far from it. Left on its own, capitalism has no internal values other than growth, efficiency, and concentration of wealth. Generally capitalists control the state to support capitalist priorities and despite the state adopting a democratic form, the state doesn’t operate to serve the people, but rather the state serves and legitimizes capitalism.

Nevertheless, given sufficient pressure, there are historical and geographical examples where government intervened in the market to bend capitalism for particular outcomes.

The obvious problem is achieving sufficient pressure and motivation. Wars are perhaps the only historical situation in which societies have pulled together in the dramatic and rapid fashion that is now necessary to decarbonize the world. There probably isn’t going to be a single global climate change-version of the Pearl Harbor Bombing or the 911 attack, even though Hurricane Maria took more lives than either one.

This gets back to my earlier point about disruption and disorder being the one form of leverage available. Extreme levels of political pressure are necessary to give those in charge a choice between decarbonization, or ungovernability. It is easy to imagine such a strategy failing. Governments are likely to respond to chaos with violence and repression, not decarbonization.

Promoting and helping to organize disruption and pressure is our job — radicals, the counter-culture, civil society, etc. Those within the system — the NGOs, the corporations, the political parties — can’t and won’t disrupt their own system. They are blind as to how their reformist methods are limited and failing. Only people organized collectively can destabilize the status quo sufficiently to bend history. In the UK, Extinction Rebellion has begun organizing widespread disruptive actions to require a rapid government response to climate change.

If we’re serious about creating disruption in the hope of forcing government action, we need to be self-critical about our own past failures and realistic about how power works. During the Occupy Movement, we were extremely successful in building a thriving, grassroots, widespread, decentralized disruptive direct action movement. But we weren’t able to transform pressure and momentum into political power or measurable improvements within the system.

For my part — and I think many people felt this way — we didn’t care. Winning crumbs within a corrupt and doomed capitalist/political system was unattractive, uncool, and uninteresting. We didn’t want to get our hands dirty and with good reason.

But let’s compare our moral purity to the right-wing Tea Party Movement. They created a ruckus, but none of them felt like winning demands within the system was uncool. They encouraged politicians to harness their energy to achieve results within the system. Many ran for office. Arguably US society moved right.

While we’ve been refusing to participate in the system, others have filled the space. It is hard to beat something with nothing.

We can find the courage to rebel when our backs are against the wall but the risk of action is nonetheless our best change of survival. For me, it was the smoke from the fire in Paradise that felt like the last straw and really made me feel a shift within my heart. I always wondered what I would do if I had a terminal disease — and suddenly I realized that the planet has a terminal disease. It means I have nothing to lose, but I also feel free and clear in my mind. Not everyone is going to feel this at the same time — there won’t be a single climate change wake up call — but I think there may be many localized ones that have happened or are about to happen to a lot of people in cities and towns everywhere.

When disasters happen, we need to be prepared to connect them to climate change and use them to build pressure to decarbonize. Perhaps the best radical reaction to the smoke in the Bay Area wasn’t just to organize mask distribution to homeless people — even though that was a very excellent thing to do. At a critical moment when millions of people were searching for solutions and feeling personal distress, that was the moment to very clearly demand action to decarbonize. I’m not sure if we could have had an effective protest in the midst of the smoke, but next time something similar happens I sure hope we try. We need to have the banners and the networks ready.

A climate change revolt — an Extinction Rebellion to go with the British term — is a snowball process where suddenly, you notice people you’ve never met are saying and doing the same things you are. That’s already happening. These moments are inspirational and make it easier to up your own game, and when you do, you’re helping other people act, too.

Part of our problem is a collective feeling of powerlessness. Being in an uprising is the opposite of powerlessness. During an uprising, all our everyday moments are opportunities during which we use whatever means we have — our jobs, our roles, our holiday letters, our conversations with friends, Slingshot articles. It is a political and psychological shift where people re-set priorities. The focus we need now is for climate change to be the top priority. While there are many other ecological crisis like plastics in the oceans, a narrow focus on climate change is necessary because if tipping points are crossed, all current complex life forms are at risk.

During the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980, US news programs started each broadcast by telling you how many days the crisis had continued. What if news programs began to lead with the atmospheric CO2 concentration? What if every conversation and decision referenced climate?

I had a dream that part of the decarbonization uprising would involve everyone greeting each other with a new climate change word — instead of saying “hello” or “goodbye” you would say it to signal that you’re part of the rebellion like people said “Peace” during the Vietnam War. I couldn’t remember the word when I woke up, but we need to find that word and start saying it.

Uncertainty

I don’t know whether decarbonization is possible within capitalism — but we need to pose the question. Obviously relying on — actually seeking out — government action carries extreme risk and can lead to a lot of problems.

When I fled to Monterey to get away from the smoke, after my daughter went to sleep I biked out into the dark and stopped on some rocks above the ocean to start this article. The act of fleeing had rattled me. It felt like a turning point. I’ve been an activist for 35 years, and every year things seem to get worse. It feels like activist malpractice to keep on thinking and doing the same things and expect a better outcome. So I think it is essential that we all — in our own ways — take some time to question our assumptions and look into the abyss.

Conclusion

This article calls for drastic and rapid change that will touch everyone and everything. And that’s a lot of work and stress and bother. Most of us would be much happier to continue with what is familiar and comfortable. That’s not limited to suburbanites or Trump voters — in some ways the most change-averse and conservative people I know are Berkeley radicals who are outraged if a single cafe changes its name.

Decarbonizing the entire economy — especially in just a few years — means the sort of drastic change we haven’t witnessed since World War II. It could end up making WWII look modest by comparison because to decarbonize the world, the front line will be everywhere simultaneously.

We’re all going to have to adapt to new technologies (or less technology?) and new forms of social organization. In urban areas, NIMBYs are going to have to accept more transit and more density and probably other things we can’t even imagine right now. Everyone’s going to have to get rid of their familiar comfortable car and drive an electric one instead, or maybe even ride a bike or take transit. Some comforts like food out of season or air travel may not be worth the ecological costs. We’re used to oil drilling rigs and gas stations, so we don’t notice them — and eventually we won’t notice a few million acres of solar panels and windmills, either, but at first it is going to be shocking and stressful.

I just hope we can all look deeply at the uncomfortable options and agree that accepting a lot of rapid change is our only option and is worth it if it gives life on earth a better chance of continuing in something like its current complex form. It is always easier to continue with the status quo or try to slow down change, but in this case we’re not going to avoid rapid and dramatic change either way. If we don’t decarbonize, the change will be outside our control and will almost certainly be less pleasant. Which brings me back to my experience of fleeing to Monterey.

I want to approach the need to decarbonize with joy and excitement, but the smoke and then fleeing was all about discomfort and fear. After just a week of staying inside to hide from the smoke, I began to lose creativity and feel tired and irritable. Everyone stopped going out and the streets were deserted. It was like living in a dystopian movie — the sun was very dim and I saw smoke blowing out of the BART tubes when a train arrived. People learn to cope, and if the smoke had gone on, it would have become the new normal.

Fleeing was about self-preservation and all about privilege. If we think inequality is bad now, just reduce crop yields by half for a few years due to bad weather. Ecological collapse is the greatest threat to social justice because it will lead directly to mass displacement, migration, war, genocide, fascism and ultimately canibalism. We no longer have the luxury of time and we need to come together and put all our energy into preventing such a grim future.

Further Reading on-line

• Climate Mobilization has a great 6-point Victory plan that I highly recommend: climatemobilization.org

• The Sunrise Movement has exciting direct actions yet seems pragmatic about achieving results: sunrisemovement.org.

• Extinction Rebellion in the UK has the best direct actions and overall has my favorite vision for how this could work: rebellion.earth

• Statistics in this article are mostly from the Center for Climate and Energy Studies c2es.org/content/international-emissions/

• The on-line version of this article includes additional material at the end.

By Finn

The Berkeley Free Clinic, a cooperatively run clinic that’s been providing free health services in Berkeley since 1969, turns 50 on May 25th. With ever worsening gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area, it feels miraculous that we’re still in our decrepit church basement off Telegraph Ave, surviving on salvaged medical supplies and dumpstered pizza. I wrote this article in commemoration of our 50th birthday and in writing this, I’m hoping to accomplish several things. First, I want to let everyone know that we’re (still) here – I sometimes meet folks who are shocked to learn that we still exist or have never heard of us, and I want more folks to know that we exist as a resource and as a rad project to get involved with. I also want to offer a reflection on our history and how we operate so others can use us as inspiration for similar projects. Finally, I hope that our story provides a concrete example of radical alternatives to existing healthcare systems.

Who We Are

If you happen to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might be familiar with the Berkeley Free Clinic and our characteristic red Chinese dragon logo (a holdover from the Maoists who worked in the clinic during the 1970s). You might know that we’re a good place to get a free tuberculosis test or to have your butthole swabbed for gonorrhea, or noticed the oddball mix of UC Berkeley students and older wingnuts who staff the place. We’re not completely in-your-face about our history or politics, though, so it’s possible to enter our space without being totally aware of how it functions.

The Berkeley Free Clinic is an all-volunteer, worker-owned collective that provides free medical care, dental care, peer counseling, vision services, and referrals in Berkeley. We were founded on the beliefs that healthcare is a human right, that much medical knowledge can be learned and practiced by folks with no formal education, and that communities have a ton of power to collectively respond to public health crises.

Although we’re not by any means the only free clinic in the United States (a lot of medical schools have student run free clinics), we’re unique in that we’re non-hierarchical and services are provided by community trained medics instead of professionals. When we provide services, we dismantle the traditional power dynamic where a “professional” holds knowledge about other people’s bodies and tells them what to do. Instead, we work to demystify the process of healthcare and involve clients in learning about their bodies and health. Instead of training in a formal environment, we learn cooperatively from each other and try to blur the barrier between provider and client by recruiting clients to join our collective.

We can’t stress how weird and rare this is in a country where medical services are wrapped in a tangled net of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and liability. Also weird is our autonomy. Our budget mostly comes from donations and grants that we apply for, which means government budget cuts don’t really impact us. Our lack of reliance on government funding (which usually comes with a lot of strings attached) means we don’t have as many regulations to follow as other clinics, and this gives us a lot more freedom to see people who might otherwise not feel safe getting medical care. For example, we aren’t required to report abuse to the police, which means survivors of physical violence and sexual assault can get medical care from us without us being forced to call the cops on them. Similarly, we can provide anonymous HIV testing, even though most clinics are required to report positive HIV tests by name to the State. And because we don’t bill any kind of insurance, we don’t have to check IDs or require proof of eligibility – everything is free without question.

Some notes on our structure

The BFC is made up of small, semi-autonomous collectives that each specialize in a different area of health (like dentistry, peer counseling, general medical, etc.). We make decisions both as these smaller collectives (which can decide if they want to be consensus-based or use a voting process) and as a larger, clinic-wide group (which has a formal voting process). Some of our sections provide direct services and others are strictly logistical. Logistical sections work to preserve institutional knowledge and make sure that all of the little things that need to happen (like updating referrals and maintaining the space) happen. Members who conduct bookkeeping and custodial work receive small stipends, but we do not hire paid staff. In the past, we did have paid members in logistical or administrative positions, but discovered that this created a hierarchy were paid individuals consolidated more power. As a result, these positions were eliminated. Although we no longer “formalize” concentrated power by having paid staff, members who stay in the collective for longer and who get more involved do tend to become more powerful. Whether this is a problem that needs to be solved isn’t totally clear to us, but it is a pattern that’s common in collectives and we try to be self-reflective about it.

Nurturing a culture of accountability is a constant process. In past decades, we held Maoist-style “criticism/self-criticism circles” where individuals would provide “plus and delta” feedback to each other. Eventually, we realized that providing formal criticism in front of a group can create a toxic environment where people feel bullied (indeed, enforcing ideological conformity was why Maoist groups used this form of criticism). Instead, we focus on developing everyone’s communication and de-escalation skills and creating an environment where open discussion is normalized.

Each section is responsible for recruiting and training new members, but we also have clinic-wide trainings that all members take. These trainings focus on institutional history, political education, anti-oppression work, and some safety items like de-escalation and how to intervene in crises without calling the cops.

A brief history of the Berkeley Free Clinic

Our unusual clinic structure is rooted in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam War era. The BFC grew out of an emergency field hospital established by activists during the People’s Park Riots in 1969. During this era, police and soldiers used many of the weapons that we’re familiar with today – like tear gas, pepper spray, and batons – but were also using live ammunition (birdshot and buckshot) and nausea gas (an odorless gas that causes uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting) and protester injuries were both really serious and not safe to treat in hospitals (since the cops would come arrest the person who sought help). In response to this, a group of Vietnam vets who had been trained as combat medics set up a clinic near UC Berkeley’s campus, where they cared for protesters who had been beaten, shot, and gassed by the University of California police and the National Guard.

According to legend, this improvised field hospital was raided by riot cops, a street medic and an x-ray machine were thrown down a flight of stairs, and our anti-authoritarian clinic was born. The BFC was open 24 hours a day, run by volunteers who used pseudonyms, and provided both acute and emergency medical care. When not caring for protestors, the BFC began serving the general needs of the activists and runaway youth who’d flocked to the Bay Area during the 60s. In 1970, a group of feminists joined the clinic to run a women’s reproductive health night. They brought radical theory with them and eventually usurped the largely male, military-trained core of BFC members, resulting in a more horizontal distribution of power. The 70s were arguably the most radical and involved years of the BFC. During this period, we collaborated with the Black Panther Party’s free clinic in South Berkeley, operated a drug information hotline that was known nationwide, and had a psychiatric emergency team that responded to bad trips and overdoses throughout Berkeley. In 1976, the Gay Men’s Health Collective formed to offer queer-friendly sexual health services to men who faced homophobia from doctors. Clinic culture was steeped in the sexual revolution and psychedelic drugs and naked business meetings and orgies were much more common than they are today.

The 1980s were a much rougher decade for the clinic. Prior to the 80s, the clinic actually did receive government funding, but Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts brought on a financial crisis that saw the end of 24-hour services at the clinic (and gave us good reason to be more independent of government funding). At the same time, AIDS began killing clinic members, lovers, clients, and friends, and the BFC responded by offering anonymous HIV testing. Although our financial situation stabilized in the 1990s, staffing of the clinic declined, due in part to the gutting of the welfare state and because fewer activists had the resources to be on-call at odd hours. Daytime and afternoon shifts disappeared, and the clinic shifted to its current evening and weekend schedule. The AIDS epidemic continued, and clinic member John Iverson founded ACT-UP East Bay and began pushing a baby stroller full of clean syringes around People’s Park. Needle Exchange Emergency Distribution, our sister syringe distribution collective, was born. Members were routinely arrested for the first three years of the program but persisted through legal challenges and budget cuts to become a thriving collective.

In the early 2000s, word got out that a lot of BFC volunteers went on to medical and nursing school with a big advantage in the application process, and pre-med UC Berkeley students became much more interested in joining the clinic. Although this gave us the opportunity to corrupt and radicalize young minds before they went off to professional training, volunteer turnover increased as students went off to graduate programs, leading to the loss of institutional memory and more burnout. Despite this, we continued to exist as a clinic that supports marginalized communities and social movements. We were in the streets providing medical care during Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the anti-fascist defense of Berkeley from Nazis. During particularly intense protests, we kept the clinic open all night to care for injured demonstrators and in one case, a medic used her body to prevent riot police from getting through our front door. Between intense periods of street activity, we quietly filled cavities and treated UTIs and taught folks how to reverse overdoses. We provided a warm indoor space with bathrooms and free hygiene supplies and endless cups of donated nettle tea. We also increased our outreach work to growing homeless encampments throughout the East Bay, scrambling to provide medical services to homeless folks while local governments destroyed their tents and bedding and failed to provide any actual help.

The BFC is currently in a dual state of revival and precarity. As often happens when radical political organizations fill in government gaps in social services, we spend so much time trying to meet folks’ basic needs that our ability to organize is limited. As we approach our 50th birthday, there’s talk of finding ways to strengthen our activist and advocacy work on top of the services we already provide. We’re expanding our anti-oppression and radical political training, finding ways to contribute to mutual aid projects in California, and trying to support the fuck out of other radical health projects in the area.

That being said, we’re also fighting to keep our shit together. Several members have died recently, our energy is spread thin from responding to multiple crises in the Bay Area (homelessness, fire, ICE raids, sex worker crackdowns, overdoses), and we need to move out of our current church basement space as the building is condemned. In the middle of a rapidly gentrifying university town, the BFC is a small, funky pocket of difference. However, the reality of existing in that gentrified city is starting to hit us and it’s unclear in what form we’ll exist in the future (though given the creativity and dedication of my co-collective members, it’s highly unlikely that we won’t be here).

Like a satellite that is in constant free-fall without ever hitting the ground, the BFC has spent the past 50 years in a state of managed chaos, without ever actually falling apart. We are a collective made out of human beings, with all the mess and conflict and dysfunction that sometimes goes with that, and our limited skills and resources prevent us from meeting everyone’s medical needs. However, we’re also a proof of concept: lay people can do something tangible for the health of their communities and provide healthcare in a totally transformative way. Knowledge and power in the healthcare system can be horizontalized, and even in the face of police repression and lack of resources, it’s possible to craft little pockets of creative difference.

How to Support the Berkeley Free Clinic

The radical imagination is our most valuable resource. If you live in the Bay Area and are into the idea of joining a radical health collective, please just fucking join. We always need more people, especially people who want to take initiative, make shit happen, and stick around for at least a few years. We have info sessions on the 3rd Monday of every month at 7:30PM at 2339 Durant St. You can also go to our website at www.berkeleyfreeclinic.org to see which sections are taking applications.

Even if you’re not in the Bay Area, you can always give us money.

Do you know of a grungy church basement or warehouse space in Berkeley that could house a clinic? Come find us and let us know.

By Sarang Narasimhaiah

 My personal path to anarchy has been long, winding, and confusing, to say the least—and a strange part of me is grateful for the route I have taken.

I’m admittedly ashamed of my (neo) liberal phase, during which I wholeheartedly embraced every fixture of multicultural representative politics: the façade of diversity, cosmetic modifications to the “free” market and “free” trade, “dialoguing across the aisles,” “getting out the vote,” the works. I’m far less ashamed of my postcolonial phase, although I will concede that I hung on to the above-mentioned liberal fetishes for quite some time—and vestiges of them at the very least later on.

Thankfully, I was surrounded by grounded, brilliant, and endlessly compassionate mentors / comrades / friends who tolerated me and drove me to question my pseudo-leftist faith in prevailing institutions of power. Their anti-racism, anti-fascism, intersectional feminism, radical queerness, Indigenuity, disabled, neurodiverse, and/or disability-focused outlooks, and deep anti-colonialism began to chip away at my self-important Amerocentric, cisheteropatriachal, able-bodied, good middle class immigrant delusions. While my cherished co-agitators didn’t try to convert me to anarchism, the fundamentally anarchistic underpinnings of many of their interventions made a lasting impression on me.

Fast forward through three years filled with direct actions, community presentations, and graduate school frustrations, and I’m having breakfast and talking revolution (as you do) with another cherished fighter-in-arms. As we discuss how we aspire to engage with the communities we care about, I mention—for the first time, to anyone—that I think of myself as a decolonial anarcho-communitarian.

I’m writing this piece because I want to unpack that moment and its significance, both for me and the living beings with whom I strive to operate in solidarity. My self-reflection since that sunny morning has revolved around a question I’ve been asking myself and my peeps for a few months:

What is the color of anarchy?

“Black, maybe with a red accent” is perhaps the most instinctive, common, and commonsensical answer to that question—and this answer isn’t unjustified. Black, above all else, tends to embody anarchy’s negation of all hierarchies. It lends its name to countless black blocs around the world. It may hearken back to piracy’s swashbuckling influence upon early Eurowestern anarchist thinking and writing. It could and, in many quarters, does symbolically unify diverse anarcho-revolutionaries. A lot of anarchists also identify as communists, which is where the red might come in.

And yet, despite all these valid and valuable justifications, I don’t know if my flag is or can be (just) black and red.

Let me begin by addressing the colors I have already mentioned, so I can try to do them justice at the same time as I question them.

Anarchy cannot be black if the Blackradical tradition, in all its various manifestations, is absent from its conceptualizations and operationalizations. Maroon communities were arguably some of the first and most multifarious anarchistic (that is, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-statist) communities consolidated after the colonization of Turtle Island and Abya Yala. Domingo Passos could, did, and does apparently go toe-to-toe with Bakunin. The Black Panthers’ autonomous learning/teaching, feeding/eating, and self-defense/community-building efforts exemplified mutual aid in many respects. Many committed Panthers later became committed, self-described anarchists in order to circumvent what they perceived as the BPP’s (perhaps partially realized) potential for hierarchical macho leadership and personality cults. Today, black folx are some of the first ninjasto shut down white supremacists, rapists, homophones, transphobes, and the other scum of the Earth.

Red, meanwhile, takes on a whole new significance for the Indigenous peoples of the so-called Americas. Notwithstanding their appalling racialization by white Euroamerica, many Native “Americans” entered battle wearing red (and, yes, black) war paint, prepared to fight their displacement, extermination, and assimilation by any means necessary. The Red PowerMovement of the 1960s and ‘70s, like its Black Power counterpart, channeled black-and-red power at several points; for one thing, it lent legitimacy to (re)occupations of Indigenous land in ways that the Occupy movement of movements by and large couldn’t and doesn’t. Indigenous redness further laughs at the United States’ sickening, shameless, futile border imperialism: the Zapotec and Mixtec womyn who blessed, conscientized, and provoked me with their wisdom while I was in southwestern Mexico use the rich red color derived from the cochineal beetle to dye the stunning tapetes (tapestries) that they exchange for economic autonomy.

However, the Black radical tradition and anarcho-Indigeneity are not just black or red—or, for that matter, black-and-red. Like virtually all anarchistic perspectives, communities, and movements, they stem and draw their strength from (if you’ll pardon the pun) a virtual rainbow of intersecting lived experiences and worldviews. The Combahee River Collective’s landmark “Black Feminist Statement”works from the standpoints of its legendary Black lesbian womyn as it calls for total and absolute liberation through “the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” I will not attempt to impose colors on these luminaries or the lived identities, communities, and movements to which they belong; that said, I still feel the need to recognize that they may not have restricted themselves to a black, Black, or black-and-red palette for good reason. In a similar vein–and despite its appropriation by the so-called post-neoliberal Bolivian nation-state–theWiphala, a square emblem that displays all the colors of the visible spectrum, continues to be deployed by equally if not even more multifarious Indigenous grassroots mobilizers across the Andes.

I wonder if one of the most beautiful and important aspects of red-and-blackness—in word and deed, in our communities and on the streets—could be its grounding in or transformation into other colors entirely. Or maybe its ability to disappear so that these other colors can perform the same functions and more, in accordance with their respective lived experiences, viewpoints, and visions.

Back to “rainbow flags.” In recent years, progressives, liberals, moderates, conservatives, and members of the far(ther) righthave all proudly flown rainbow flagsat their militarized, cis- and homonormative, white (supremacist), nationalistic, corporatist Pride parades. These distinct-but-not-really-different luminaries of the hegemonic political machine have also sought to show off their “tolerance”¹ during their “political [non-]revolutions,”their dinners to collect a little sumthin’ sumthin’ extra for Zionist pinkwashing, and their campaigns and rallies to unite the other, rather unaccommodating, and less-than-revolutionary wretched of the Earth. In selling their false sensitivity and savvy to a mostly oppressed captive population while preparing to betray the vast majority of its members, they spit in Miss Major and SylviaRivera’s faces. Against Equality spits back, and then some. The collective’s wide-ranging queer thinkers, writers, and artists boldly go where the Human Rights Campaign has never gone before by challenging one of the state’s plainer but nonetheless sacred cows, marriage.

Is Against Equality, then, reclaiming the QUILTBAG+ rainbow flag? Or is the collective burning that flag and replacing it with its black-and-red superior? Is it flying both flags side by side or combining them into a single flag? Could it throw up some purple and/or pink flags for good measure?

On the other hand, do Against Equality and its movers and shakers have or need to have any flag, color, or color combination at all?

The assignment of colors to perspectives, communities, and movements arguably echoes the iron cages of gender and sexuality. Certainly in the latter cases–and maybe in the former as well–we need to ask ourselves if and why we behave as though we need, are entitled to, and/or can get a singular, straightforward answer. Do our mobilizations depend upon fitting ourselves and each other into one or some other limited number of categories and paradigms? If so, why, and should we maintain this dependency to any extent? And do our mobilizations, then, reflect, reaffirm, and strengthen the complexity, richness, and dynamism of the living beings involved in them?

At the end of the day, a rainbow flag—especially when uncritically accepted and deployed—seems to run the risk of turning a radical movement of movements into Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition instead of Fred Hampton’s. Lumbering, professionalized, compromised and complicit movements-turned-industrial NGOs/NPOs are just one of the many nasty surprises waiting for lapsed anarchists and other radicals at the end of the (neo)liberal multicultural rainbow. We can and must work through and with our and each other’s identities and lived experiences—not around them, to be clear—without resorting to collusive, self-destructive, self-deceiving, and ultimately futile “identity politics².”

Given that many perspectives, communities, and movements seem to operate in liminal spaces, some sort of neutral color (apart from or in addition to black, red, and black-and-red) seems to be in order. Unfortunately, the supposedly neutral alternatives to rainbow flags, flags of other colors, and colors in general don’t bode too well, either. Black, red, and black-and-red are limited and limiting, but they have nothing on white and its widespread signification of the cult of nonviolence, surrender and submission, the illusions of “non-partisanship,” and, well, whiteness. A clear flag, then? But would it then signify the fundamentally ableist and variously problematic notions of blindness—color-blindness, gender-blindness, and so on—that allow for dominant systems of power to prevail behind John Rawls’ ironically named “veil of ignorance?”

Okay, so, back to colors, then? Well, what about green? Many consider it the color of the Earth and, by extension, environmentalism; we know (at least I hope so!) that we can’t fight as and with the Wretched of the Earth if we devalue the ecosystems that make humyn existence possible. Nonetheless, the Earth isn’t just green, to state the obvious; neither are “environmental” movements,for that matter, especially when they resist the ecocide precipitated by ecological racism, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, and ableism. Green is also Black, brown, beige, and every color in-between and beyond, from Standing Rock to the Niger Delta to the Narmada Valley.

Furthermore, “non-white / decolonial greenness” is sacred to many. Numerous anarchist, anarchistic, or otherwise radical ecological interventions made by Indigenous peoples and peasants do not take up “environmentalism” or even deep ecology, diverging from conventionally defined green politics in the process. And they don’t necessarily take up black, red, or black-and-red flags, either, even though their interventions could very well fly under any of these flags. The limitations of hegemonic greenness stand to do quite a bit of damage to Indigenous and peasant persyns and peoples. “Environmentalism,” especially as it has been articulated at the centers and semi-peripheries of the world system, tends to presume a sharp division between human beings and their surroundings that simply does not resonate with many Indigenous and peasant worldviews.

“The environment” does not exist apart from “the economy,” “the polity,” “culture,” and/or “religion”—as well as the mind, body, heart, and soul—as far as innumerable Indigenous peoples across the world are concerned³. Living spirit or energy, also conceived simply as “livingness”—Sa’ah Naaghaii Bik’eh Hozho for the Diné, sumak kawsay for Andean Indigenous peoples, shakthi and prakriti for many South Asian adivasis and peasants—runs through and binds all of these existential spheres. Securing and creating conditions for the regeneration of this livingness—with the Earth and non-human living beings, not for them, and certainly not against them—is thus the goal of many radical Indigenous and peasant interventions. In my opinion, these holistic interventions provide a much surer footing for autonomous, just, equitable, and resilient ecological communities than “environmentalism” ever could. Non-Indigenous anarchists and radicals cannot and should not, of course, appropriate the worldviews that inform these interventions, but they nonetheless have much to teach us—much that we must know—as we do our parts to decolonize all colonized Indigenous land. We should be as unwilling to buy into the cult of Eurowestern scientific “greenness” as we are to put our faith in green partiesand their candidates.

The oversights and failures of Eurowestern greenness and environmentalism and the sacred power at the heart of Indigenuity bring what I would consider contemporary, (by no means exclusively) Eurowestern anarchism’s biggest areas of improvement into sharp relief:

First of all, we must recognize productivism, industrialization, commodification, economic growth, and the urban-rural divide in and of themselves as oppressions begging for abolition. Diverse contemporary anarchists typically recognize the misery induced by capitalist consumerism and overproduction but, in mapping and realizing anti-capitalist alternatives, they overlook the past and present violence involved in stripping “raw materials” from the Earth and converting them into monetized products. Worker-owned-and-operated maquiladoras—and worldwide factories in general—might eliminate the rampant gendered, racialized, and class-based exploitation and abuse that define these modern-day Victorian workhouses; however, they run the risk of continuing and even worsening the metabolic rift between the never-ending demands of productivism and the life cycles of the Earth. If you want my two cents, factories can only exist in a world in which many worlds fit if they operate as locally grounded, ecologically resilient and autonomous cottage industries, for all intents and purposes.

We need to grow interconnected living communities, not insulated economies or the “industrial sector” and definitely not the GDP, GNP, or any other P. Similarly, cities—which are indispensable to civilizational modernities around the globe—can only persist if they cease to be metropoles, colonial or imperial, industrial or post-industrial. As long as “global cities” like Mumbai, Nairobi, New York City, and Mexico City are distinguished from their respective rural regions and the rest of the world by the accumulation of “resources” from near and far, neither can survive. Steel grey, brick red, and tinted blue could be important to a global anarcho-society’s subsistence, but their predominant applications as of now have got to go.

Secondly, institutionalized religion may well be the opiate of the masses now as much as it was in Marx and Kropotkin’s day, but secularism is an equally, though differently, dangerous drug, even when it is adopted by well-meaning anarchists. Hindu nationalists have been able to build a stronghold in India’s chambers of power since the late 1980s precisely because they could and still can ride the tide of popular discontent with Nehruvian / Congress Party secularism. Authoritarian fundamentalist factions, organizations, movements, and regimes across the world—from Amerikkka to the Middle East and North Africa to Western and Eastern Europe—have provided the likes of Prime Murderer Modi with ample company over the years for comparable reasons. If anarchists are not careful, we could reproduce the very failures of the nation-state system we claim to oppose by failing to oppose its secular dogmatism. We must do everything in our power to (solidariously) decolonize a number of major (and minor) religious and spiritual traditionsand communities across the world; however, religious/spiritual decolonization is not, cannot, and should not be synonymous with rash, headlong disassemblage and disposal, nor accountability with pseudo-anarchist (re)missionization.

“No gods, no masters!” chant anarchists everywhere; perhaps we need to revise that well-heeled battle cry to, “Many and/or no gods, but no masters!” That revision needs to be revised for catchiness and practicality for sure but—in a world with billions of devotees of all stripes as well as agnostics, atheists, and everyone in between and beyond—an “and/or” clause may not be a terrible idea. By inspiring the horizontalization of and voluntary participation in religious and spiritual praxis, radical but not fundamentalist or exclusionary responses to Orientalismand other cultural imperialisms, and inter-faith dialogue that moves well beyond liberal CoeXisTence, this reformulation could prove invaluable. Global anarcho-communities and societies do not need to be secular to embrace, respect, celebrate, harmonize, and draw strength from conceptualizations of autonomy, dignity, equity, justice, and sustainability rooted in diverse beliefs and lifeways (sorry, not sorry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali). In fact, they may want to avoid secularism like the plagues of yore.

***

When I began thinking about addressing the question that serves as this essay’s title in writing, I was concerned that I would end up producing cheap, obnoxious, tedious Sesame Street anarcho-fan-fiction—an asinine commentary on colors of little use to any of the comrades I have yet to meet. If that is what I ended up doing, I apologize for wasting your time, and I hope that Elmo gives you what I didn’t.

I decided to write this article in no small part because I believe that discursive materiality and material discursivity lie at the heart of anarchist, anarchistic, and otherwise radical thinking and action. The symbols that we choose and use have a profound influence upon the ideas that we realize, and vice-versa. This reciprocal relationship runs through the plurality of perspectives that I strive to engage, and it seems to inform the plurality of actions that these perspectives inspire. The burning limo from the #DisruptJ20 protests is more than just an image or a symbol. This pigmobile was material in and of itself, it produced wide-ranging material impacts inseparable from its symbolic resonances, and it is part of a long history of symbolic-material anarchist counter-inaugural action.

I chose to analyze the color—or, as I might as well say at this juncture, colors–of anarchy because colors are among the most noticeable, influential, and, in my view, telling symbols that we deploy as budding co-creators of another world. Our deepest convictions shape the colors we brandish as we make some noise, take back our streets, lock horns with our adversaries, and commune with each other and the oppressed peoples we love. These colors, in turn showcase and shape how we think of ourselves and our roles in the struggles we carry out. I will never forget the first and subsequent times I saw the anarchy symbol on a black and red background—the mixture of curiosity and inexplicable exhilaration that spiked me the first time and the hope, courage, and warmth that flooded me when I understood a little more a little later. I still feel the reverberations of those moments when I read, hear, or meet one of us—one of you, if I may be so bold.

All that said, I think that a black-and-red world would be rather drab. Such a world would also betray anarchism’s core commitments to learning from the failures of other leftist and radical frameworks and movements, to complementing the negation of all hierarchies with the cultivation of lasting horizontality, and, more than anything, to hosting the otherness of many “Others” as they define it themselves.

Anarchy is—anarchy must be—brown, beige, pink, purple, rainbow-colored, red, invisible, striped, translucent, polka-dotted, yellow ochre, grey, all shades of green (though not Green), black, Black, and black-and-red (though never white) all at the same time. As a bipolar depressive whose mental condition has molded my personal-intellectual-political positionality in important ways, I guess the anarchy I practice is blue as well—maybe yours is, too.⁴

The beauty of anarchy is that it is not contingent upon doctrinal knowledge of anarchism as an explicit critical/radical philosophy. You can be anarchistic—and innumerable individuals, communities, and societies have been and continue to be—without calling yourself an anarchist, just as you can be an intersectional feminist or a queer revolutionary without calling yourself either. Anarchy’s potential for transformative beauty hinges, in a sense, upon its compatibility with all other possible color combinations—and the embodied viewpoints and daring futures that underpin these combinations.

Black, red, and black-and-red have served and continue to serve anarchists (myself included) well. But the time has come for us to move them away from anarchy’s global centerstages to make way for other colors that are just as vital, if not more so.

All power to the Earth and to the Wretched of the Earth. May our revolutions be colorful as hell.⁵

By the Reverend Eggking

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” ~Not Plato

Disclaimer: I have been homeless multiple times. I know what it’s like to see a tasty slice of pizza on the filthy pavement and break out in remorse as I walk away from it. I have also begged for food and change all over this beautiful continent. The best hustle my main road dog ever showed me was to take all our change, spell out an “L” , part of an “O”, and surround it with flowers. Then as folks walked by, we would ask them to “Help us make love on the sidewalk!” I can plainly recall nights of wolfing down rich folk’s half eaten leftovers, as well as their backwash laced near empty glasses of alcohol, both in this country and abroad. By comparison, the story below about going deep into debt for things that cause suffering for those involved in their production, is a quite fucking luxurious problem to have. I fully understand that. But that doesn’t make it any less real for me. I have never had access to credit before the last few years. I am now 42 (Don’t Panic!) and this past year alone I went into $60,000+ of credit debt. That is more than every preceding year combined. The following is a somewhat brutal self examination of this ridiculous way to live. Also, as an added bonus, fresh sarcasm has been sprinkled liberally throughout the piece. Enjoy……

Every time I inadvertently start to fantasize about the latest “must have” commodity, there is a section of my brain that feels an abnormal sense of loss. There is also actual physical pain. I can only equate this pain with someone trying to bail out water on a ship that is sinking faster than the speed of Disney buying up every hero that I have ever turned to. Next, my mind uses a significant portion of itself to figure out how best to manipulate the Rubik’s Cube of my current finances. Then, and only then, can this “must have” product find it’s way into the gaping hole of debt that I have dug for myself over this past year. Looking back, it seems that I had no choice but to pimp out my future paychecks for both my third iPhone in the past 4 years and my second Samsung Galaxy (it came with a magic pen, damnit!) in less than a year. Apparently, I also couldn’t sleep at night until I finally got my grimy fingerprints all over the largest iPad screen known to man. In 2015, I went massively into debt to get my first Prius, but snagging the new 2017 model was worth it! By plunging deeper into this particular indentured servitude, I am able to continue enjoying the honor of celebrating my uniqueness with the other 5,287,317,842 Prius drivers in the Bay Area.

As you can plainly see, generic awareness of the world wide suffering that goes into these “must haves” was not enough to stave off my perfect storm of consumerism these past 11 months. I know that children all over the world are an indentured labor force for the many products that I have purchased. I know that cobalt is a key component in the lithium-ion batteries that power so many of our “must haves”, and that child labor is heavily utilized for the cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I know that there is currently well over a trillion dollars worth of lithium found within the borders of Afghanistan. I know about the estimates of over 360,000 human beings whose lives have been cut short in Afghanistan, due to indirect causes related with our “War on Terror”. I know that our country’s collective murderous impulses have been raining down upon them without mercy since 2001. But guess what else I know? Slaughtered innocent civilians and lithium are not all that is found there. Trillions of dollars of other minerals and natural gas are also found in Afghanistan. I am certain that my lack of acting upon awareness supports the world wide suffering for those hit hardest by humanity’s relentless greed for these supplies. And last, and certainly not fracking least, we have 90% of the world’s current opium supply found in this fabled land.

That is just a few of the reasons why the “Owners of All Things” are willing to spend so many billions on the media blitzkrieg that is required to justify the fuckery they continue to unleash. All of this carnage just so Wall Street can continue to be the gift that keeps on giving. How quaint.

Quick 9/11 reminder: If you are one of those who doesn’t believe that it was an inside job, fifteen of the 19 hijackers were citizens from Saudi Arabia, and the others were from the United Arab Emerites (2), Egypt, and Lebanaon. There is nary an Afghanistan citizen involved in 9/11. And yet, here we are, well over a decade and a half later, still blowing up their people, land, and dreams to smithereens. And that’s right folks, for those of you paying close attention (shout out to Big Brother), my consumeristic tendencies are also imbedded deeply into the endless “War on Drugs”, which was lovingly set up to obliterate as much hope as fuckkking possible.

The “War on Drugs” is one of the main driving forces of our country’s not so subtle caste system. This caste system insidiously winds it’s way throughout the granular details of our healthcare, environmental assaults and the vicious entrapment factory better known as the industrial prison complex. Just think about everything that goes into it’s daily operations. Prisoners in the San Bruno Jail in California have no yard time to gain access to fresh air or feel the sun and wind upon their face. Countless prisoners country wide slave away for pennies on the dollar so that the companies who continue destroying the last remnants of “Mom and Pop” shops can cash in on the billion dollar prison labor industry. Even “Whole Foods” was guilty of this practice, until they got called on it. And don’t forget about the massive disenfranchisement of voters, infinitesimal opportunities for gainful employment upon release, and the endless hell that is unleashed while they are behind bars, often for being guilty of nothing more than a pathetic lack of opportunity where they were raised. You think it’s a coincidence that crack and meth houses have replaced former neighborhoods where, just a few generations ago, hardworking families had economic opportunities that were legal and a source of pride? This caste system has grown from the seeds planted by the genocidal slaughtering of between 30 – 130 million indigenous human beings (so many estimates, but they seem fall between that range) who were a part of this continent long before any cracker ass cracker ever stepped foot upon it’s shores. This caste system took those ol’ Jim Crow laws and evolved them into more than their inceptors could have ever fathomed within their most pyschotic of fantasies.

OBVIOUSLY, I am as much of a cog in this fourth Reich powered machine (hail hydra!) that we call home as the next asshole who feels the need to feed their greed and watch it force their conscience to concede victory to capitalism’s juggernaut. This bloodlust based monstrosity keeps picking up more steam with each and every new birth upon this planet. We deserve better, and so does the rest of the world.

Now we can get into a whole other crate of canned serpents that I just had Amazoned to me straight from Costco. Wait a second. Fuck Amazon and Costco. They both denied my credit application and actually want me to pay for what I purchase before I check out of their respective stores. Don’t they know who the drunk I am? My long suffering wife knows who I am. I am a gutter pissant addict in recovery with a clean and sober date of August 31st, 2009. Can you believe that shit? Just because I would black out nightly, and wake up in a bed stained in psychedelic urine samples doesn’t mean I have a problem does it? What about all of the fecal matter that was accustomed to having its way within my pants as I walked home, and the bar, bathroom, and bedroom walls where my projectile vomit would work it’s magic? Fun, fun, fun.

I am not going to get too much deeper into the trials and tribulations resulting from the endless sedations that I administered to my heart, body and soul during my sanity’s vacations. Suffice to say, I have never met anything that I am not capable of abusing. And that includes the patience, financial security, and faith of my incredibly intelligent and beautiful wife, Mariposa Loca. Just imagine her stress, if you will, as she watched my spending habits this last year, fully aware that I am still employed for a non-profit organization based in San FranSpending Cisco.

But I am making amends to her right now as we speak. I am seeking solutions on a daily basis. I have redoubled my efforts to be more cognizant of each purchase I make. I have stopped purchasing technology. It has been at least four months since I bought something that brought my wife pain and discomfort. I no longer shop at Safeway, Whole Foods, or any other corporate store, to the best of my ability, I seek out family owned retail opportunities by investigating a business’s history. I seek to make amends to my wife by actually paying off all of my debt in a timely manner so that I can actually be the provider that she deserves, all while living in a city where the succubi never sleep, honoring their programming to drain every penny found in my bank account.

I am continuing to get deeper entrenched within the RESIST Community that has so many branches throughout the incredible Bay Area. I am the event coordinator for both a non profit Soto Zen Japanese Buddhist organization comprised of multiple temples throughout California, and the only Anarchist Collective Bookstore in San Francisco which has been volunteer run for over 40 years. I facilitate a weekly open showcase there on Thursday nights that has everything from 18 year Non-Binary identifying poets to 75 year old living encyclopedic jukeboxes of every protest folk song known to humanity. I am seeking to take advantage of all of the ecstatic bliss, genius, and pure unadulterated power that the Bay Area has to offer. And I am thriving.

Now we can get down to the sub-atomic molecular structure of what this article is all about. I am calling myself out to live according to the principles that I claim to hold dear. I have not been respecting them with my rampant consumerism, and that needs to change, pronto. “McTexAssTrumpLandia” wants to be the air that I breath. It wants me to swallow the lies that so many believe and ignore the totality of why I ever grieve. “The Owners of All Things” do not pledge allegiance to any flag. All the flags of the world are butt toilet paper for the digestive systems, I mean “governments”, that they place in power by any means necessary from sea to toxic sea. Saddam Huissein was put into power through a C.I.A sponsored military coup in the late 1970’s. Osama Bin Ladin and his boys received tens of millions of our tax dollars from the late 1980’s until just about a month before the events of 9/11. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. In fact, I could give a fuck. I am so tired and broken down physically, mentally and spiritually from trying to figure this all out. After all, as my lovely voices are reminding me right now, what I really care about is my quest for the meaning of meaning. Meanwhile, I am fucking sapped like a tree in a haunted forrest that knows the chainsaw is all gassed up and waiting in the shed while the master sleeps.

I know that I have a part to play in all of this. My daily decisions ripple to the ends of infinity’s patience with being ascertained. I vote each and every goddamn moment that I spend a cent and it is high time that I hold myself accountable for these reckless decisions. I take part in a goregous revolution each and every time I offer kindness and compassion to anyone, whether or not I feel they deserve it. For that judgement is not up to me. There is a sacred force which is so beyond my ability to encapsulate it within the confines of the written word(or typed:). All I ever need to be reminded of this awesome unknown is to try and listen to a motherfucking dog whistle. How dare anyone, especially myself, ever think that our pathetic explanations of anything can be considered an absolute for all of time. We need to evolve past the fear of the unknown. I am going to start right now.

Be well my friends, and know that you are loved. You can trust me on that……

February 17 – 7pm

Chris Robe author of A History of Anarchist Filmmakers @Interference Archive 7th St. Brooklyn, NY

February 18 – 3pm (every Sunday)

Occupy Oakland General Assembly Frank Ogawa (Oscar Grant) Plaza

February 21 – 7:30pm

Anti-Police Terror General Meeting – Eastside Alliance – 2277 International Blvd. Oakland

February 21 – 6:30pm

Meeting Oakland Privacy Fighting Against the Surveillance State – Omni Commons 4799 Shattuck Ave. Oakland

February 21 – 7:30pm

KPFA Benefit w/ Richard Wolff – First Congregational Church of Berkeley 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley

February 24 – 9pm

Thrillhouse Winter Formal w/ Fleshies, The Banannas, Midnite Snaxx, Robo Cop3 @ The Knockout – 3223 Mission St San Fran-sicko

February 25 – noon-5pm

Dear diary zine fest – Humanist Hall 390 27th Street, Oakland CA :).

February 27 – 7pm FREE ALL AGES

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Disarming the 2nd Amendment

City Lights Books 261 Columbus Ave San Francisco

February 28 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Shaping SF Public Talk om Art & politics w/ Lou Dematteis

518 Valencia St. San Francisco

March 3 & 4 FREE ALL AGES

Steel City Anarchist Book Fair – Venue TBA Hamilton, ON

March 4 – 10:30-am FREE ALL AGES

Talk on the Death of God @ Niebyl Proctor Library 6501 Telegraph Ave. Oakland

March 4 – 7pm

Slingshot article brainstorm & new volunteer meeting to kick-off work on issue #127 – 3124 Shattuck, Berkeley

March 5

Al-Mutanabbi St Starts Here, Poets & Writers Respond to the bombing of Baghdad’s Street of Booksellers – everywhere

March 7 – 7:30pm

Shaping SF Public Talk on the Language of Water – 518 Valencia St San Francisco

March 8

International Women’s Day

March 9 – 8pm

East Bay Bike Party – at a BART station to be announced

March 10

World Naked Bike Ride

March 11 – 7pm FREE ALL AGES

Party for 30 years of Slingshot publishing – Long Haul – 3124 Shattuck Berkeley

March 14 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Shaping SF Public Talk Tenderloin & Mission Dirt w/ llana Crispi -518 Valencia St. San Francisco

March 28 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Shaping SF Public Talk Saving the Bay from “The Future” –

518 Valencia St. San Francisco

April 4 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

SHAPING SF Public Talk Insurgent Country Music w/ Glenda & Jesse Drew – 518 Valencia St San Francisco

April 7 – 7:30pm Free All Ages

Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair 1 Great George St.

April 12 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Kathleen Belew on The White Power Movement & Paramilitary America – City Lights Books 261 Columbus Ave. San Francisco

April 14 – 3pm

Article deadline for Slingshot issue #127 – 3124 Shattuck Ave Berkeley

April 25 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Shaping SF Public Talk Universal Basic Income – 518 Valencia St San Francisco

Late April

People’s Park 49th Anniversary – Berkeley

May 1

MAY DAY

May 1 – noon-8pm

How Weird Street Faire Howard@2nd St. San Francisco

May 9 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Shaping SF Public Talk Platform Cooperatives- 518 Valencia St San Francisco

May 16 – 7pm FREE ALL AGES

Michelle Tea reads from Against Memoir – City Lights Books 261 Columbus Ave. San Francisco

May 23 – 7:30pm FREE ALL AGES

Shaping SF Public Talk on Archives & Memory – 518 Valencia St San Francisco

May 28

Los Angeles Zine Fest

June 1 – 3

Left Forum conference (New York City)

Post navigation

Book Review

 

“Street Farm” – Growing Food, Jobs and Hope on the Urban Frontier

by Michael Ableman, Chelsea Green Publishing, $ 29.95

or read for free at the Long Haul Info-Shop

Review by elke

 

Author Michael Ableman is one of the early visionaries of urban agriculture and co-founder of Sole Food Street Farms.

The colorful, expressive pictures alone were soul food to me.

The book describes the struggles, set backs and lessons learned in pursuing the vision to establish a farming project in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood that was lacking healthy food and jobs. It tells the heart- (and soul-)warming stories of a lot of the person(alitie)s working hard to grow the project. I was touched by the openness and honesty of these stories about how the connection to food also was changing people’s connection to life, a sometimes challenging process.

This is an inspiring and, at the same time, very practical book for people who want to get involved in urban farming or start their own project even outside the city. It also contains numerous tables and side notes, turning it into a valuable handbook for future urban farmers.

It is a beautiful book, even if it didn’t fulfill my hope of presenting a way out of our disconnected agricultural and economic system: The farm is heavily dependent on the high end restaurants that it serves (it also sells some of it’s produce at local farmers markets).

Much of the money generated by Sole Food Street Farms stays in the community and gives meaningful work to people who have been socially and economically marginalized.

Though I admire the folks involved with this project very much, the image of these fat cats dining on this beautiful produce in their 5 star restaurants made me want to throw a pipe bomb! You know that feeling, right?

 

ZINE Reviews

 

So we were cleaning the Slingshot loft and discovered this pile of fucking zines from like years ago that we probably should have reviewed but well, we’re activists, so like we’ve been busy with freeway shutdowns and putting on punk shows, and all sorts of other stuff that seemed more important than reviewing your zine (sorry). (seriously, sorry!!) We wish we could review everything that is sent to us, and it totally keeps us up at night, all these great zines that just keep piling up for us at the infoshop. The zines we don’t review still get added to the Long Haul zine library, where they will live until someone steals them—so at least that’s something, right? Shit. Anyway, sorry. Here are some hella belated zine reviews:

 

GREEN-EYED MONSTERS: My Report on Jealousy

By Lacey Johnson

www.etsy.com/shop/CreamyThighs

 

This terrific zine is a very courageous personal exploration of the intense jealousy Lacey experienced in a romantic relationship. She responded to a crippling episode of jealousy by reading about, researching, and analyzing jealousy. Being a professional illustrator and writer, she wrote the zine as a therapeutic tool for herself and others struggling with the primal experience of fear, anger, and sadness that can be triggered by a partner being attracted to or involved with someone else.

While brutally honest about the pain and the sometimes less than stellar behavior that jealousy can cause, the zine is hilariously funny. Even better, every page is brimming with amazing graphics and comics including everything from Miss Piggy and her rival pig Denise, to Beyonce with the baseball bat, from Homer Simpson to Oprah, to Bob Ross painting your emotional landscape, and more. Despite the heavy topic, she doesn’t take herself too seriously. The disclaimer on page one says, “This was born from snot and confusion and a failed love project and turning on the light to look in the mirror. I am not a love doctor, I am just a Pisces with an Aquarius moon.” The whole zine has that same humility and humor, and whatever your experience with jealousy, you are likely to find it educational and entertaining.

It is filled with great advice and specific tips on coping with and reducing your jealousy, in very bite-sized chunks and and a very welcoming format. She includes a bibliography with books, websites, and videos for those who want to learn more about jealousy. “Green Eyed Monsters” can be ordered from etsy.com/shop/CreamyThighs. You can find Lacey’s other comics at: tumblr.com/blog/whaleribbed and her artwork at: laceyjohnsonxoxo.com.

(Review by Kathy Labriola, Counselor/Nurse)

 

The Anarchist’s Guide to Travel: A Manual for Future Hitchhikers, Hobos, and Other Misfit Wanders

By Matthew Derrick

www.squattheplanet.com

 

Whether you’re a seasoned train-hopper, an urban explorer, or a homebody who likes to occasionally pick up hitchhikers, this book will make you smile and nod your head. It has the feel of sitting at a campfire and slowly sipping a forty with Squat the Planet founder Matthew Derrick, while he spills all his tips, knowledge, stories, and personal philosophies from over 15 years of being a migrant.

It gets a little preachy at times (spoiler alert: the Golden Rule is do your own damn dishes), but Derrick’s earned it. Like the dude has seriously figured out how to live a pretty decent life while traveling the country and living in tents and cars and squats and shit, and he wants you to know that you can too.

I especially appreciate that he included a bunch of interview questions with other travelers, so you get to hear stories from folks of other backgrounds and orientations in regards to what their experience has been like. Also, seriously, don’t hop a train until you’ve really thoroughly read the section on train hopping like ten times at least. Whether you just want to do your first off-the-grid road trip, or actually plan go all in and start rubber-tramping, bike touring, or become a boat punk, grab a copy of this book, hit the road, and unplug your ass from the capitalist machine. (Review a. Cat)

 

Restless Legs: A Photo Zine

www.cargocollective.com/bryanbrybry

 

If you’d like to venture through Portland, trash dive a punk art festival, and train hop to Pennsylvania alongside a crew of ruggedly inked friends, this could be a ride for you.

The true love of zine making as archive blooms in this collaborative photo zine.  The epigraph reads: “Nobody sees a flower, really. It is so small. We haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

The artist’s friends appear in vivid color photographs that capture a certain and sincere care that the photographer puts into each relationship. Whether the subject is smoking a cigarette, grinning wildly, or reaching their hand into a trash can, the shared devotion of time between artist and subject—both past and present—throughout the transiency of space, paints a warm portrait of solidarity among radicals.

Capitalism’s colonization of time has endangered time as “the ultimate scarce resource”. Our allocation of time is a matter of justice. (Shippen, Nichole Marie “The Colonization of Time: Production, Consumption, and Leisure”)  This zine is in itself a fight for time, a political response—using moments and travel to nourish friendships, to create community, to support one another.

The diligent printing and care in the craft complement the zine’s beautiful simplicity. At second and third read, its deeper complexity moves the reader to go outside, call a friend, and take back one of the most precious resources—time.

Find this and other works by the artist at www.cargocollective.com/bryanbrybry.

(Review by H. Sabet)

 

No Gods. No Dungeon Masters.

Text by Ion O’Clast. Art by Rachel Dukes. Cover by Andy Warner.

www.silversprocket.net

(2015)

 

Anarcho-nerds rejoice! Behold an anti-capitalist riot populated by ents, druids, and Dr. Who! Gawk at a group of anarchists who disguise themselves as a Katamari ball-o-garbage cosplay to sneak into Comic Con! This zine is brimming with hella geek soul food punctuated by philosophical reminiscings about how radicals and nerds ought to team and rule the galaxy together. “Out of the Ether! Into the Streets!” +2 damage against cops! Check out their website for more of this ilk. (Review by a. Cat)

 

 

By Catakin P. Parkwalker

The key difference between the Jedi and the Sith is the difference between experiential and authoritarian teaching styles.

The Sith teach through authoritarian obedience, with apprentices unwaveringly obeying the dictates of masters who lie to and manipulate them. Rather than asking questions of those more powerful than them, the Sith either obey an authority unquestioningly or murder and replace it with themselves. It is this type of pattern that replicates empire. It is a pattern that will tempt revolutionaries to merely throw rebellions, a pattern that tempts revolutionaries into directing their energy towards narrow visions that are simply regime changes rather engaging in true revolutionary overhauls to the system. It is because of this that Sith spirituality lends itself so acutely to empire —the building of structures for the sake of replicating a structure, rather than the wellbeing of those interpolated by them.

The Jedi are about learning things organically. They hold on to the names they were given at their births, and their journeys as individuals are woven intricately into their training. Jedi Masters don’t attempt to divert their claim to mastery to some abstract system but rather embody it, meaning at times a Jedi Master’s personal truth and personal experience will, by necessity, cloud their judgment. And the Jedi Masters let their judgement be clouded as such; they let themselves make mistakes because they are letting themselves be specific people with actual specific circumstances that are meaningful to them. They retain their connection to those very personal circumstances, and never, like the Sith, attempt to erase them. And that is why a true Jedi is always ever a revolutionary, without even meaning to be, as their very existence posits itself as a challenge to empire. When a Jedi is turned, something terrible happens to the way they use the force. One might say that they lose themselves to the force, or at least to the social power it grants them, and rather than defending what they love with it, defending what makes them who they are, they find the deployment of the force eclipses them, subverting their subjectivities.

True mastery isn’t about doing things correctly, it is about how you direct your attention. The force might be thought of as a metaphor for many things. Religious Star Wars fans think it is god. I think it is social power — systematized social power in the Foucauldian sense. Star Wars offers a universe in which that Hegelian fantasy is given a more tangible form, with the Jedi and the Sith serving as larger-than-life ideological figures around which the sometimes clownish social structures of daily life in the empire or rebellion form themselves. But yeah, the force isn’t real or you would have noticed it. This isn’t some kind of Kansas City Shuffle. No.

Women have always been in positions of high leadership in the rebellion, even in the original 1977 film in which Leia Organa and Mon Mothma play central roles as decision-makers in the assault on the First Death Star, which might also be thought of as an assault upon that empirical, Platonic impulse best described by T.S. Eliot as “To have squeezed the universe into a ball. To roll it toward some overwhelming question.” Perhaps we all have to blow up our own inner Death Stars sometimes, to destroy those overwhelming ego questions, that, if left unchecked, will destroy the everyday world of eating peaches, of being there for our friends.

It is exciting to see, in the 2017 Star Wars universe, there are more women in all levels of labor in the Rebellion, and to also see a woman on the bridge in a Star Destroyer. Hey, representation goes both ways! And no matter what side you work for, this conflict must belong to all of us, and be accessible to all of us, and so much so the pageant of it. Good versus evil isn’t just a game for white men to play any more, thank goddess. But perhaps as Kylo Ren tempts us to speculate, there is more to “evil” than we, who shun the concept, might give it credit for. As Nietzsche argues in his Genealogy of Morals, evil is a category that can only be perceived by those who experience oppression. To those who are oppressors, there is only “good” and “bad,” which is to say that oppressors don’t see their enemies as evil, just as “scum” to be eliminated. Evil is a mask we put upon those who oppress us so we can hate them as we fight them. But as Ren’s shedding of his mask shows, it is in seeing our oppressors as human that their power over us is made complete, and in its completion, finds itself destroyed. When Ren begs Rey to join him by his side, it is no longer as an oppressor but a frightened creature who, in that fleeting moment before manipulating his way back into the structure of the Empire, is at his most human.

Among the Jedi and their rebel counterparts, individual lives matter. Among the Sith and their imperial counterparts, individuals are killed for failing because their lives don’t matter. To be among the Imperials and the Sith is to have been made into a type of human commodity, into a faceless, interchange thing, and publicly murdering their own who fail is a way of reifying everyone’s interchangeability within the empire, of showcasing to each other the degree to which, within the empire, individual lives don’t matter.

To those of the dark side, only raw power matters. They see the talent rather than the person. They are focused only on properly placing that talent within the pyramid-shaped hierarchy of their organizational structure and have no grasp of what it means to have a personal experience as an individual, which is why they so frequently deface individuals with masks and new names, erasing the individual’s past and future, erasing that person’s journey and any markers that might allow them to construct the narrative of being on a journey, and rather reduce existence to an ever-present state of completing tasks and obeying or destroying your superiors and subordinates. The dark side doesn’t afford its adherents things like sisters, lovers, and comrades. The only antidote for this despair is extreme obedience. Vader knelt before the emperor even as he commanded him to murder is own son, but in a reversal of the ancient story of Abraham, Vader’s unwavering faith in the force-for-the-sake-of-the-force is shattered by the command to end his son’s life and his humanity is restored.

As people on the internet have pointed out, the new film redeems the prequels, as unwatchable as they are, by reframing them as a time in which the Jedi Order became corrupted, with a pseudoscience of “midichlorian counts” overshadowing the spiritual underpinnings of using the force.

To turn someone from the dark side back to the light is to make their life matter again, to give them an identity with relationships and channels of meaning that matter to them and to others.

The rebellion offers no ready-made hierarchy between strategy and feelings, so at times, two groups within the movement find themselves at odds, talking past each other, one group saying “this is how it feels,” the other group saying “this is how it should be done.” This type of social messiness is tied to the basic human expression that they fight to maintain space for.

The Buddha is sometimes credited with saying, “Be your own light,” but to do that means you don’t get to have the sort of easy answers that only others can give. This is why Jedi Masters do not demand that their apprentices obey unwaveringly, but rather, as Master Yoda says to Master Luke after setting fire to the ancient Jedi texts, “We are what they grow beyond, that is the true burden of all masters.”

Master Yoda also tells us that fear is what turns people towards the dark. And this is what we see time and again in the lives of those who succumb to the way of the Sith. Sure, the Jedi also have fear and insecurity — they are plagued by it — but the Jedi manage their fear and insecurity as best they can, sometimes making wild, irrational decisions propelled by it. But the Sith have a very different relationship with fear and insecurity. Rather than managing it daily, they attempt to make it vanish by making themselves so powerful that they no longer have fear and insecurity. In doing so, they erase themselves. Giving in to the dark side is guided by fear — fear that you aren’t enough — leading to the donning of a mask: you become fear itself. This embracing of fear to escape fear — of turning yourself into a thing to be feared as a way to avoid grappling with your own fear — is at the heart of any gesture towards fascism, of any turn towards the dark side, towards the rigid lines of empire and colonialism, it is self-erasure at its deepest form and it is this that guides members of our species towards organized, machine-inspired behavior that destroys all living things.

Like the Sith, the Jedi sometimes do conceal the truth from their apprentices. Old Ben lies to Luke about his father being dead, and Luke conceals the truth about Ben Solo’s turn from Rey. These lies come from the very flawed yet deeply human place of wanting to protect others, and perhaps oneself, from the truth. Does that make these lies any better then the types of lies Sith tell, lies inspired by the desire to increase the power and obedience of the apprentice? In words of moral relativist DJ, “Maybe.”

Luke’s end was so perfect for him. Yoda had long chided Luke for always watching the horizon — never focused on where he is, what he is doing. In his final act, Luke’s not-there-ness achieves perfection. Because Luke was never supposed to be “there” or “here now” or any of that 1970s Ram Dass crap. Luke Skywalker’s job was to be a symbol, to direct people’s attention, to direct it in all the wrong places, or in the right ones, depending on who you are. Yes, Luke Skywalker is a commodity, and what Episode VIII does so well is it acknowledges that. But Luke Skywalker, at least within the story world of the films, is a revolutionary commodity. As Jedi Master Gil Scott-Heron taught us, “The Revolution will not be televised.” But until capital falls as hard as Darth Weinstein did last October, perhaps, for now embodying the revolutionary commodity is the most we can hope to achieve. #OccupytheSpectacle

Even if the police, guided by the lifeless logic of capital, march in and crush our seedlings with their bulldozers, as they did at Occupy the Farm in 2012 and 2013, and even if they fence in People’s Park and harm and murder peaceful protestors as they did in 1969 and the early 1990s, and even if the FBI breaks into the Slingshot loft and steals our computers as they did in 2009 — even as they strike us down in so, so many ways, we only grow stronger. The more they tighten their grip… well, you get the idea.

The rebellion could be wiped off the map — we have been before — but as long children are born who can feel their inherent worth as living beings — and refuse to let anyone convince them otherwise — the struggle will live on.

Water is Sacred.

Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing.

Black Lives Matter.

May the Farm be with you.

May 1000 Parks bloom.

Another collective member’s opinion

Okay so other than being a big goofy metaphor for the “Bernie bros” screwing up the 2016 election through their, uhhhh, “tangential” direct tactics to confront the conditions that empower empire at the codic level, the new Star Wars movie was okay I guess. Worth the torrent. (Wendy)

By Tom Crimmons

A victory! I fought for 3 years to get my veganism accomodated, including a drop of 20 pounds of body weight at one point with some weeks of getting as few as 3 vegan-acceptable trays a week (out of a possible 21 meals per week), the rest refused. In response to my complaint in the US District court, Tuscon, a vegan option is now available here at United States Penitentiary (USP) Tuscon, perhaps only the second Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) facility to make a vegan option available — the first being a facility up in SeaTac. The vegan option is now available for any inmate at USP Tuscon to sign up for, and as the menu develops, it will be a possible model for other BoP facilities.

I hope other federal inmates reading this, who are going through similar trials, will be helped knowing that some change has taken place. They might wonder, as I did, why veganism is (or was) resisted in the BoP. I’ve been vegan since February 1982, with my long-term veganism noted in my pre-sentencing report. I’m vegan because of deeply held beliefs rooted in empathy for animals and concerns for the world, beliefs which I can put in terms of my Taoism. I’d think most people would think such things should be positively reinforced. Why would BoP policy discourage such efforts based on the higher aspirations of inmates?

Here, the refusal to accomodate my veganism even went so far as instructions to the inmate servers to put nonvegan items on my trays, even after nearly three years of me refusing such trays and my complaints about weight loss. These instructions were necessary because the inmate servers normally had the common decency to leave nonvegan items off of trays intended for me. It would have cost the BoP nothing to allow inmate servers to continue doing this. It was hard for me to understand this active hostility to my veganism.

. . .

It’s apparent that much of what happens here is simply the following of old patterns – old traditions – some of which go back thousands of years. Realizing this, I had to concede that the people who are the gatekeepers of the BoP bureaucracy, who ignored my complaint, my rights, my wellbeing and my potential for positive contributions, are generally not conscious of the patterns and their origins. While these patterns didn’t begin with Constantine, they reached a certain stage of violent maturity in his actions.

When Constantine prepared his premeditated cruel murder of the Pythagorean Christians, there must have been a smell to the molten metal, and Constantine’s victims must have felt the radiant heat as it was brought close. There was perhaps one last opportunity to concede to the will of Constantine, who threatened a horrible death for refusing to eat the meat — meat brought into the empire by the slaughter done by Constantine’s armies. Constantine would have known of sources, like Plato’s republic, making the link between the warfaring of empires and the consumption of meat by their people, so he could consider it rebellion to this co-opted Christianity or simple ingratitude when the Pythagorean Christians refused to eat meat, and this he would not tolerate. His victim’s mouth would be pried and held open — no way to agree anymore — and the molten metal would be poured. What was the sound of attempted screams in an instantly-seared throat? Does the next victim still refuse, so core to his or her beliefs was refusing to eat meat?

The essence of that devil Constantine’s actions continues within the United States today. His premeditated cruel murder of the Pythagorean Christians has become the bureaucratized cruelty of the United States Penitentiary system, and an inmate’s passion for life can still get a life-threatening response.

There are at least two basic ways that human-on-animal violence leads to an increase in human-on-human violence:

1. The geo-political pressues, that Constantine might have learned about from Plato’s republic, come from the much larger ecological footprint required for a meat-centered diet, such that concentrated populations on such a diet are unable to live within the means of their region, thus they’re required to war with neighboring populations to obtain control over their neighbors’ agricultural production areas. This principle continues to play out as Americans, generally with one of the most meat-centered diets on the planet, have the largest military spending and reach.

2. There are cognitive processes where the way we treat animals is a training ground for how we treat other people. Becoming more comfortable with the killing of animals can make a person more comfortable with the killing of people. Some cultures have constructs to mitigate against this tendency, so that a pleasure in killing animals doesn’t become a pleasure in killing people, but warfaring cultures tend to exploit it. The “enemy” is dehumanized with racist or other characterizations that equate the “enemy” to animals, making killing mentally easier.

. . .

In the BoP prison system, we’re at a nexus between these principles. An imperialistic society requires subjugation of its people. So if a meat-centered diet requires imperialistic reach around the world, it will also require the willingness to imprison some high percentage of its people. And the high-security status of a prison like USP Tucson requires the guardianship by people who are willing to kill people under the right circumstances, so it’s no surprise to find a high percentage of hunters and ranchers among the corrections officers – and so no surprise there would be responses to veganism ranging from indifference to hostility.

The system is very costly and unsustainable, so change is inevitable – and it has begun. The ghost of Constantinople will continue to fade away.