I Survived Chicago

The Ministry of Culture had very little to do in Chicago, but we were there.

As Kamala Emanuel (the Other Kamala) and I were touring on the west coast, people frequently wished us luck in Chicago, particularly with regards to the Chicago police, who will, for good reason, forever be associated with the police riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

I wasn't worried about the cops.  I've been to Chicago lots of times, and played at lots of protests in Chicago over the decades.  What I was worried about was the protests themselves, and just how much they would suck.  Unfortunately, my expectations that they would indeed suck were borne out 1,000%.

If you are by now bristling with the sentiment that "if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything," stop reading now!  But if you want my reportback on what a captured, defeated social movement looks like, and my ruminations on how to instead build one that has a chance of actually growing, read on.

When I survey the history of social movements in the US in my lifetime, there are patterns that are fairly easy to observe, that are very strongly supported by the vast amounts of information gleaned from the raid on the FBI offices in Pennsylvania way back when, that revealed in great detail the way the FBI coordinates with local authorities to systematically undermine social movements.

It's easy enough to read about the ways they have historically sought to undermine social movements -- promoting ultraleft tactics, suppressing the careers of prominent figures of all kinds so they don't become too influential, embracing views that may appear righteous but which are actually intended to alienate the public.

What has been easy to observe directly and through various FOIA requests and leaks along the way is that these sorts of efforts have continued unabated since the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program was first exposed and supposedly ended.  The red squads are alive and well.  We only get the occasional, but clear, hint that the program continues.  

The big picture is one that always has to just be pieced together approximately, until decades later, as a general rule.  But at the risk of once again being called a "conspiracist," whatever that is, I'll tell you what I've been observing since I've been actively involved with social movements in the US and other countries.  Actually I'll start with what my boomer friends observed before my time, since it is just an extension of the same pattern that I've observed throughout my adult life.

The Movement, as it was known to participants, in the 1960's, had become a serious social force to be reckoned with.  There were millions of people who considered themselves to be members of Students for a Democratic Society, whether or not they technically had joined a local club or not.  They had chapters on every campus, and could shut down campuses across the country if they wanted to, which they and the broader student movement regularly did.

The interracial cultural renaissance with its centers in places like San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City had swept the nation and the world with the new sounds of a rebel movement that existed in stark opposition to militarism, racism, and capitalism.  In large part as a result of this deeply musical and inclusive movement's pervasive spread into every corner of the country, the US would not involve its military in a major war for decades, with what they called "Vietnam Syndrome" having infected the hearts and minds of much of the country -- not only because of the horrors of the actual war itself, not only because of the heroic and massive resistance of the Vietnamese people to the imperial invaders, but because of this domestic social movement as well.

The divide-and-rulers did many things to undermine the movement then -- all the usual things that should by now be familiar to you, dear reader, if you live in the US and you've been around a few years, especially.  They promoted ultraleft tactics that would be designed to alienate most people at a given time and place, which would be engaged in, as usual, by a combination of undercover agents and enthusiastic revolutionaries.  They did their best to sow ideological as well as interpersonal divisions within the movement.  

But in addition to trying to divide the grassroots groups that made up the movement, they took their efforts a step further by creating new organizations, that generally seemed to come out of thin air.

At most every point when there has been a movement that involved genuine coalitions of grassroots organizations doing things like organizing massive rallies and other events, there has arisen some form of ideologically rigid caricature of a grassroots coalition that seems to exist entirely in order to undermine the efforts of the actual grassroots coalition.

In the late 1960's this was the process through which SDS was destroyed by the cultish uber-militant group calling itself the Progressive Labor Party, which essentially rejected all the things that had built the movement into what it was, in the name of working class militancy, naturally destroying it, as they clearly intended to do from the outset.

Since first reading Kirkpatrick Sale's extensive history of SDS a long time ago, I believe I have seen this pattern resurrect itself as clear as day on multiple occasions.  Whether I'm right in my suspicions may or may not ever be known, but the pattern I have observed is one that must at least be described, because whoever is responsible for the state we have now arrived at, we will never dig ourselves out of this hole until we start to be able to identify the nature of the hole we are in.

I don't need to consult any elders or read any books to tell you what I've directly observed as an active participant in protests across the US from the 1980's to the present.

I remember the date of the big protest against the gathering war against the government of Iraq -- January 26th, 1991.  The ad hoc antiwar coalition that had come together announced their national protest planned for DC and San Francisco.  No sooner had they done this than another group made up mostly of groups no one seemed to have heard about organized a national protest to take place in the same locations, but a week earlier.

Once the antiwar coalition disintegrated, after the withdrawal of most of the US military at that time from the region, the other antiwar group also disappeared.  Years later, after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, the same sorts of grassroots organizations once again came together to form an ad hoc national antiwar coalition, called United for Peace and Justice.  

Once again, another group made up of organizations no one had ever heard of came into existence, and started planning protests to happen a week before the ones UFPJ announced.  Once again, this other coalition seemed to come out of nowhere, and though it was full of people no one had ever heard of, it had massive resources, always got permits for their protests, and always got lots of media coverage.  Once again, their protests were full of clearly sectarian, black-and-white thinking people shouting into microphones, with virtually no live music.

The contrast between the grassroots coalition made of up groups people had heard of -- with speakers and performers who generally consisted of the sorts of activists, authors, professors, leftwing politicians, whistleblowers, actors, musicians, etc., that at least some element of the folks going to the protests were familiar with -- as opposed to the coalition that only had sectarian people ranting at the crowd and nothing else, would be impossible to overstate.

In one case you have an inclusive variety of left speakers and artists trying to build a movement, and in the other you have unknown people shouting at you, with no art or music involved in the shouting, either.  In one case an effort at movement-building, in the other, a clear case of an effort at movement-destroying.

With the genocidal war on Gaza since last October, this traditional phenomenon can once again be observed, sort of.  Now, however, there is no competition between a coalition oriented towards building a movement and one oriented towards destroying it.  We only have the destroyers running the show, to the very slight extent that there is even a show to be running, in the US, as opposed to other countries, where the protests are usually far bigger and far more frequent.

I point out this stark reality not to discount the efforts of so many good people who want to raise their voices against the genocide, to somehow put a stop to it.  I'm among this group that desperately wants to see the genocide stop!  Which is why I'm so horrified by the movement-destroying nonsense that I witnessed in Chicago, which I suppose we call protests. 

Unrelated to the horrible programming choices or the rallies, or the decision by some ultraleft elements to try to "shut down the DNC" with a handful of teenagers against 2,500 cops, the city of Chicago was making it impossible for anyone to have a permit to hold a protest or a march anywhere near the United Center, the venue where the main DNC events were taking place.  

Permits were not granted until days before the protests.  It would be impossible to overstate what a devastating impact this kind of anti-democratic orientation displayed by the Chicago authorities probably had on attendance at the protests, when so much was totally up in the air until the very last minute.

But what the people who did show up ultimately had to experience was the sort of debacle that had nothing to do with the holdup in getting a permit or anything else.  Chicago is full of brilliant organizers and artists who could have provided some fantastic content for all the media who were there filming everything.  We could have had medical practitioners just back from Gaza, talking about the horrors they witnessed in the hospitals.  We could have had Medea Benjamin fresh from disrupting DNC events to talk about her recent months spent harassing Congresspeople and beseeching them to stop the genocide.  We could have had musicians performing on the stage whose very moving music about the genocide has been featured on Al-Jazeera.  We could have had this program in place just drawing on local Chicago people, to say nothing of the many people in from out of town.

Instead, what the world's media and a few thousand people who had come from around Chicago and around the world were treated to was a string of speakers most people there had never heard of, shouting at them.  Sometimes shouting about their outrage against the genocide and the American politicians facilitating it, and sometimes shouting at the crowd about how they need to stop just going to protests, and do more to stop the genocide, on the assumption that all they do is go to protests now and then.  The kind of nonsense I heard from the stage at those rallies could only be rivalled by an ANSWER rally, because, as far as I can tell, it's exactly the same sorts of people speaking.

How did this ultra-sectarian element, these obviously black-and-white thinkers who have a clear revulsion for any kind of communication that might be actually effective, who have no interest in art or music or other actually effective means of communication, get to determine the programming for all the rallies in Chicago?

It's a fascinating process, that we can also observe as I mentioned in 1991, 2002, etc.  A group can claim to be a coalition, and get lots of different groups to help get the word out and mobilize people to go to the protests, but in the end somehow or other all of the speakers seem to be from the same extremely sectarian faction that believes in shouting at the people in attendance and engaging in interminable bouts of very boring chants in between each rant.

How this all happens is not entirely clear to me, but that it does, is beyond any doubt at all.  It's easily observable to all, much to the collective horror of anyone who understands anything about what kinds of efforts tend to build a movement, and what kinds of efforts tend to destroy one.

As people know who read my blog regularly, since last October, every time I leave the US, up until last month, I play at protests everywhere, often several times a week, against the war in Gaza.  That organizers of a protest should say "yes" to having me sing at the protest when I'm in town is a no-brainer.  Everyone outside of the US knows that music moves people in so many ways that can be so positive.  Everyone knows how it fosters a sense of community, gives people hope and a sense of purpose.  Everyone knows this, everywhere but in the US.

The biggest of the protests, which had around 3,000 people at it, by my estimation, involved a very nice sound system, though no one might have known how good the sound system was, except if they were there when the thing was being set up, and they were playing music through it.  Once the rally began, the sound system would only be used as a sort of giant bullhorn.

The oft-stated excuse for not including music in the program is that there are too many sponsoring organizations, and everyone wants to speak.  This argument is preposterous in the first place, when you have 200 organizations signed on, and you're obviously not going to have 200 speakers.  It's even more preposterous when you see that the rally started 38 minutes late.

38 minutes during which musicians could have been performing songs about the horrors going on Gaza, filmed by the world's media.  38 minutes when we could have been winning over the hearts and minds of passersby, and drawing them into the park.  38 minutes when we could have been keeping all those children entertained, instead of having them stand around, literally crying from boredom.  38 minutes of dead air.

Then the interminable chanting began.  Eventually, after it seemed impossible that anyone could rasp "free, free Palestine" yet another time, the speakers began shouting at us.

Normally, as a rally continues, it draws in more people, who are interested in the stories being shared, and excited by the music the performers are sharing.  With all of these rallies in Chicago, as new people were arriving, because they were getting in late, others who had already been there since the beginning were leaving.  Not just a few people, either, but most anyone with children.  These were not child-friendly events -- children can get lots out of a good rally with moving speakers and musicians, but they don't like being shouted at.  They like it even less than adults do.

Eventually, the rally became a march, with many of the young participants wearing masks and referring to each other by code names, I guess in order to more thoroughly alienate themselves from each other and from anyone not involved with the march who might be wondering what's going on.

A breakaway group of masked youth from the march headed over to the fenced-off area surrounding the United Center, and pulled some of the fencing down, before being detained and arrested.

This kind of effort used to be the sort of thing that would be organized well in advance, and might involve thousands of people, in which case it might be successful.  Or on many other occasions it might involve thousands of people surrounding the fenced-off area in order to try to shut down the farcical proceedings.  But a few dozen people pulling at a fence and getting arrested?  It's a symbolic act that serves no purpose, aside from making protesters look disorganized, ineffective, and hyper-militant.

It's also a type of action that seems to have become increasingly common over the past 15 years or so in the US -- much more common than well-organized, well-planned acts of civil disobedience, and certainly much more common than efforts at reaching out to the broader world.

You could say there's been a competition for a long time now, between authentic people trying to do authentic organizing, and these groups that appear fabricated, synthetic, made up of strange people who shout all the time when they get on stages, who appear to be a caricature of a left group, as if invented by a low-budget TV studio.  When these two groupings on the broader left were represented by groups as different as UFPJ and ANSWER, it was abundantly obvious to anyone who went to actions organized by both coalitions that UFPJ was trying to organize a movement, and ANSWER was trying to kill it.

Now, however much I might hope for it, there is no equivalent to UFPJ anymore.  There is no group like that organizing protests to oppose this genocide.  We are left only with the rabid sectarians who only know how to organize shouting matches.  The sectarians have won, the left as some of us once knew it is gone, or certainly not in evidence in the past week in Chicago.

As to the circus that was was taking place within the confines of the United Center, I'll leave that for another commentary.  What was going on outside of it was a circus of a different kind.

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