FSM: No Cause to Celebrate

We live in the Society of the Spectacle, in which representations seem – in fact, are – more “real” than actualities. Such is the case with the 40th Anniversary Commemoration of the Free Speech Movement’s days in the sun of media attention, when a five thousand-strong mob of relatively privileged students (and a few spectacular leaders) defied authorities who attempted to limit their free speech by forbidding their distribution of political pamphlets on campus. As part of the event, we are told, “A police car will be driven onto the plaza for added realism for the crowd to surround” in a reenactment of the FSM’s finest moment: Mario Savio’s rousing oration, delivered from the roof of a police car holding Jack Weinberg, surrounded by thousands of students. I hate to rain on their parade … well, not really. FSM-ers don’t need realism as much as they need a whopping dose of reality.

Strengthened by an inner awareness, although perhaps not consciously so at the time, that their class positions would ultimately afford them a measure of protection from the most egregious police violence (the kind that, until the rise of the anti-capitalism and anti-globalization movements, was reserved for Black, poor and otherwise marginalized people), the students mounted a demonstration that garnered nationwide media attention. I was not a participant, not even a Berkeley student (in fact, did not acquire university degrees until many years later, when I had already developed the critical faculties necessary to resist the brainwashing experience); but I watched the news on television in those days, and was inspired by the notion that other young people were asserting our right to be free and to speak about and work for the causes we believed in. I, too, once had that middle class sense of invulnerability and, when I joined the fight, I could not have known that the terrain of the battleground would shift so dramatically that I would eventually find myself acting upon my convictions from a very different class position – one just like that of the oppressed people around me, and would learn what oppressed people have always known: that free speech is much less a problem than having no voice at all. (But thanks, FSM, for making it possible for us to express our most profound ideas in sentences in which half the words begin with the letter “F.”) But I did not anticipate that so many “radicals” would become oppressors not so very different from their predecessors, disappearing the people whose rights they claimed to defend, usurping their voices, exploiting them. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

A big event in the 40th Anniversary Commemoration program will be the 2004 Mario Savio Memorial Lecture. From my new, vulnerable vantage point, I think of Savio’s famous words: "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." And I wonder, why is the machine still running? And why is it that most people, including former radicals (although very few ever got close enough to the root of things to have truly merited that epithet), don’t seem to find its operation so odious anymore. I would be most interested to find out more about the lives of those FSM-ers who will be in Berkeley from (one can only imagine) all over the world to attend this Commemoration. What have they been doing all these years? What proportion of them is engaged in socially valuable work? (And from whose class perspective is that work socially valuable?) We already know that a number are university professors. How many are property developers? Politicians? Accountants? Lawyers? Psychiatrists? Social policy researchers and analysts? Community organizers? Having participated in many demonstrations over the years, I’ve learned that 5,000 university students surrounding a police car at a demo says nothing about any of those people as individuals, and participating in a demo gives no hint about the direction one’s life will take when the future brings fresh choices.

I and many others have been throwing our bodies on the gears for many years, and we bear scars and open wounds inflicted by the machine as we have tried to encourage, assist and organize our fellow victims of social injustice, determined to resist from the margins of the System while scrupulously avoiding its blandishments. Meanwhile, friends of my youth, schooled in university radicalism, having gradually made their way into “progressive” careers, were moving in another direction. One former friend who had been a member of SDS (though she hastened to add, years later, that this was in the “pre-Port Huron Document” phase) wrote to me in 1971 about her marriage to “an anarchist quality control baker.” When I last spoke with her, in the early ‘90s, she had ditched the anarchist, given her child up for adoption, had married the city desk editor of a large newspaper, was starting her own small business and admitted to having voted for Reagan in his second term. She berated me because I “haven’t changed since we were 16.” Other former friends developed careers in some of the plethora of new government agencies that seemed to have been created in response to the organizing efforts of radical students (although, actually, they were the machine’s response to the threat the movement might have posed had it matured into decisive direct action – much as the New Deal saved Capitalism in an earlier period of instability). Of the former radicals I known through my work in community organizing, one of those “red diaper babies,” later a municipal politician, told me in response to my suggestion that we find a way to involve people in a local anti-poverty group in providing input to the government on developing an anti-poverty strategy: “Poor people aren’t sufficiently intellectual to represent themselves.” Another “Marxist,” this one an urban planner, responded to my suggestion that we try to gain broad community support for a housing initiative she and her group (which included the politician) by saying, “If you try to do that, I’m afraid I’ll have to oppose you.” Despite the EPA, the environment is headed for catastrophe. Affirmative Action seems to be an idea that is dead in the water, even though it benefited relatively few minorities and women (a majority) in the first place. HUD – remember, the “H” stands for “Housing” – is cutting back on Section 8 vouchers, even as the number of people who can no longer afford to pay rent is increasing. HUD is now launching a program, the Homeless Management Information System to track Berkeley’s homeless people (Berkeley Daily Planet, Tuesday, September 7, 2004 http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=09-07-04&storyID=19574), although that agency could not come up with the money to maintain Berkeley’s Jobs Consortium, which provided homeless people needed access to job training and assistance in writing resumes. It’s interesting that no old radicals wrote letters to the editor protesting this outrage, or even noting that homeless people are the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to surveillance and data collection. It seems to me that the FSM-ers should be mourning their failure to bring about lasting, positive social change over the long period of 40 years, during which their generation reigned as the most powerful in American history. Isn’t it time for old radicals to critically examine themselves to see where they went wrong, rather than looking back to their activist roots for new direction. It’s time to deal with 21st century realities.

Scanning the FSM’s page of links to articles about their Commemoration, I noted in Richard Brenneman’s article, with its overblown title (“From Atop a Police Car, A Revolution Was Born,” Berkeley Daily Planet, Friday, October 1, 2004 http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=10-01-04&storyID=19756), that Saturday’s event will feature: ‘10 panels on modern civil liberties challenges, a panel of FSM veterans discussing “How the Spirit Moved Us,” satirical performances, a film festival and an archetypal event of the early ‘60s, a hootenanny, a communal sing-along.’ An “archetypal event”? Such was the hubris of young radicals in those days that we imagined ourselves capable of staging “archetypal events”; but to ignore the realities of the present time suggests that there are many movement “veterans” who still have not reached maturity. It’s worth considering that we might not be in this mess, in this “Dangerous Time,” if those who considered themselves to be in the political vanguard had gone beyond talking and singing and dancing as they half-stepped their way into the machine’s self-correcting mechanism of middle class job placement – in universities, government and the professions. Nowhere is the failure to mature more evident than in the article, “The Steps of Mario Savio?” (Hartford Advocate, March 25, 2004), which, still reflecting the sexist spirit of those days (which, if anything, has increased in virulence in these times) and the adolescent male sexuality that reached its full tumescence in the 60s (and now relies on Viagra for its ability to “perform”), the article features a photo of a lithe, smiling, bra and panties-clad young woman, surely not an FSM “veteran,” posing seductively in front of a tank, with the caption: “Put your body on the gears of the machine and make it stop.”

The list of Anniversary Commemoration events refers only tangentially to people who have to live outside because they can’t afford to have a roof over their heads. Possibly the Black Freedom Struggle panel will look at the huge number of Black youth continuously entering the armed forces out of economic necessity, and losing their lives in huge numbers in a war from which few, if any, of them will derive any economic benefit. Perhaps the Panel will bring attention to the immensely disproportionate number of former prison inmates living on the streets because, even more than the relatively fewer poor people with “clean” records, they face dismally few employment opportunities. A search of the FSM Program page for references to the terms “poor,” “homeless,” “mothers” and “veterans” turns up … nothing but a couple of references to FSM “veterans.” Nothing about women hoping that their housing vouchers will come through before their babies are born, because if they are still living in their cars at that time, their babies will be confiscated – excuse me, “taken into care.” Nothing about poor and homeless people being exploited in “third world” fashion because they are presumed to be so desperate for money that they will work 12 hours in a field in the hot sun for $20 cash. Nothing about veterans who were lured into the military with the promise that they would have an opportunity to learn a trade that they could use to make a living in civilian life, only to be routed into sonar technology, or some such program that has no apparent civilian use. Nothing about the veterans who are returning from the Middle East in droves, with bodies and spirits so broken they cannot work, and who face financial hardship because their claims won’t be assessed for months. And nothing about the people who, in ever-increasing numbers, are moving out onto the streets because, without a job – or even with two or three jobs – they cannot afford to pay sky-high-and-rising rents.

Instead of self-congratulatory speeches and hootenannies, the FSM’s old “radicals” should be looking around to see what relevance they might have in these times. Instead of gathering in well-furnished homes and apartments to reminisce over wine and cheese, FSM “veterans” should spend at least one night on the streets (even if it means getting a ticket for sleeping outdoors), sharing their opinions and their food (and maybe some money) with some of Berkeley’s homeless people, who remain invisible to “veteran” radicals – and whose realities are still “non-issues” to many in the “activist community.” Those who are truly concerned about the worsening state of the world will find among the city’s homeless people some fine writers, poets, artists and organic intellectuals, many of whom would be more than willing to engage them in critical discourse. Unfortunately, many who rest on their activist laurels are blinded by their own comfortable relationship with the machine, and would find themselves uncomfortable with any situation that does not feel like “reality” TV. (As one homeless friend says, “It don’t get no realer than this.”) To those of us who have no home, gatherings of well-heeled radical poseurs from the 60s – gatherings that only seem to reproduce our marginalization – are a slap in the face.