Jasper Gregory

2012-01-29

Surreal scene of Occupy Oakland skater pondering frenetic police activity in front of City Hall #J28 8PM // #oo #osf

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‘This Tent Kills Fascists’ | Killer tent at #J28 Occupy Oakland Afternoon March // #oo #osf

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Medic Portrait | #J28 | The medics were hanging out on Occupy Oakland Plaza just before the evening building occupation set off | #oo #osf #anarchy #ows

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Photo | #J28 | Oakland | Brass Liberation Orchestra on way to afternoon Occupation of Kaiser | #oo #osf

@jaspergregory Perhaps a trivia point - but many don’t know the origin of “Fascism” (at least in the classic sense of the Italian Fascists). Mussolini started his political career as a hard-left revolution-oriented Marxist (Lenin considered him a leader of great potential). He remained in the Socialist Party fold, though at the militant-revolutionary end, until he rejected neutrality in the midst of WWI. Mussolini’s “Fasci” (the word means “bundle”, implying strength via the group) was initially a heterodox socialist “action faction”. They initially espoused various standard socialist positions (i.e. participatory democracy in factories/worker participation in management, a minimum wage, an eight hour work day, progressive taxation of capital, heavy taxation of war profits, improved state insurance for workers, universal suffrage including for women, well-funded state education with elimination of Catholic schools, confiscation of church property, nationalization of various industries, a requirement that landowners cultivate their fields with fallow fields handed over to peasant cooperatives, etc.). However, they rejected neutrality in WWI (leading to Mussolini’s formal expulsion from the Socialist Party), prioritized action, and railed against the Socialist Party as centrist/liberalism/reformist (rather than revolutionary)/too conciliatory. Their blackshirt garb (the color was borrowed from anarchists - Mussolini admired Sorel’s philosophy) served as a de-individuating, binding uniform (ala the idea of strength as “Fasci”, acting collectively).

Some lefties who were members of SDS and opposed the Weathermen faction actually do reference Mussolini as a parallel.

The Sorel connection is also interesting. Sorel advocated an aestheticized notion of revolutionary violence, argued for the need for heroic violent forms of resistance to capitalism, argued for the importance of “revolutionary consciousness” inspired/infused by myth, pushed agitational direct action. Typical Sorel text: “Proletarian violence carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class war, appears thus as a very beautiful and very heroic thing.” I’ve seen BB anarchists cite Sorel approvingly. The aestheticized notion of violence is very similar (evident in BB agitaprop - high production value violence pron videos and lit). CrimethInc - Days of Love, Nights of War: “When we tell tales around the fire at night of heroes and heroines, of other struggles and adventures…we are offering each other examples of just how much living is possible” - very Sorelian.
http://tl.gd/fjb0gf

2012-01-26

Zizek called Assange a terrorist, but in a good way like gandhi

“You are a terrorist in the way that Gandhi was. In what sense was Gandhi a terrorist? He tried to stop the normal functioning of the British state in India. You are trying to stop the normal functioning of information circulation.”

Source: Guardian

2012-01-23

Photo: Wild Old Woman at San Francisco #J20 Bank Occupation: #osf #GrandmothersAgainstTheWar

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#occupyWallStreet is a “left populist movement, a true people’s movement, the kind we haven’t had in over a hundred years—the kind to take on the unfinished business of FDR’s New Deal.” Reece was drawing a lineage to the late-19th-century political eruption of Populism, when the Farmers’ Alliance and People’s Party arose in response to the depredations of the Gilded Age.

“The Populists spoke the same language as OWS. “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin,” the People’s Party platform of 1892 declared. “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislatures, the Congress. … The people are demoralized … our homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished. …. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of mankind, and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

“The Populists formed primarily out of the ranks of the self-proclaimed “producerists” of the South, Midwest, and West—tobacco and cotton farmers, railroad workers, miners. The producerists, snarling at “the Money Kings of Wall Street,” banded together to build a “moral economy” based on “democratic capitalism” in a “cooperative commonwealth”—a society free of “special privileges” and “centralized corporate despotism.” This “was more than a party and more than an ethos,” writes Lawrence Goodwyn, professor emeritus at Duke University, in Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. “It was, in fact, a new way of looking at things—a new culture, and one that attempted to shelter its participants from sundry indoctrinations emanating from the larger culture that was industrial America itself.”

Source: prospect.org

2012-01-16

‘We Oppose Ecolomic Inequality’ parishioner from Oakland, Temescal’s FAME Church, the organizers of San Francisco MLK day Occupy The Dream rally at 101 Market @OccupyTheDreamOWS #occupySF #ows

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‘Dream & Join Lovelution’ activist bringing his experience in Solidarity 1981, Polish Freedom Movement to San Francisco MLK day Occupy The Dream rally at 101 Market #occupySF #ows @OccupyTheDreamOWS