Sunday, November 29, 2009

Bess Lomax Hawes, Occupations Spread Across California

Hi. This long, past week, I've tried to send you reflective articles you may
not get elsewhere, which cover a spectrum of themes likely to affect the
broad public, political and otherwise. Today's, on students, is one such.
It may be too radical for some, but is very reminiscent of the Free Speech
Movement of 1964, at Berkeley, which quickly morphed into the broad,
anti-Vietnam War movement, energized the Civil Rights movement, the
various 'Power' movements, the Women's movement, Environmentalism,
and much more. It merits great attention.

But first, a sad note from friend Frank Hamilton, one of the most creative,
talented musicians I've ever known, about the passing of our teacher, Bess
Hawes. I say amen to his brief eulogy and add that Bess, Pete Seeger and
Woody Guthrie formed the Almanac Singers, the role model for the Weavers,
Peter, Paul and Mary, and many others. Her daughters, Naomi and Corey,
called me from occupied Wheeler Hall in 1964, where they were part of that
action of the Free Speech Movement, asking the Ash Grove to organize a bail
benefit. Likely leading the singing. Fruit of the tree. Bess graced our
world.

Ed

PS. I now see another great woman, Alice McGrath has died. If you
don't know who that is, you should. LA Times obit page today.


From: Frank Hamilton
To: Ted and Marcia Johnson ; Chick and Ellen Marston/Ford ; Bau Graves ;
Bill Rutan ; Elise Witt ; Patrick Ferryn ; Gary Koonce ; Jim Fox ; Gail
Tyler ; David Hatch ; Jason McInnes ; Robert Lowe ; Doug Oster ;
Ed Pearl ; rriesman@gmail.com ; Paul Stamler ; Jimmy Tomasello
Sent: Saturday, November 28, 2009 3:10 PM

Hi,

Great sadness here. No Bess Hawes, no Old Town School of Folk Music. She
was brilliant. Just as important as her brother, Alan Lomax in the field of
folk music and anthropology. She introduced me to traditional folk music
like no other did and I owe my teaching skills to her.

Just got this off of Mudcat. What a real loss to folk music! People don't
know.

Date: 28 Nov 09 - 11:34 AM

"We're so sad to hear that Bess Lomax Hawes passed away this morning. One of
the pioneers of folklore, she was the daughter of John Lomax, sister of
Alan. She created the NEA's folk arts program. She taught at CSUN starting
back when it was San Fernando Valley State College and also lived here in
SoCal after her time at the NEA. Always generous with her time, creative to
the end, she will be missed by so many."

***

From: "Steven Robinson" <srobin21@comcast.net>

Occupations Spread Across California

"The wave of occupations that spread on November 18th-20th and the massive
student support of them shows a quantitative growth in the struggle by sheer
numbers of participants, but more importantly it demonstrates a qualitative
growth in the anti-budget cut struggle due to the deepening of student
militancy."

By: Advance the Struggle
November 24, 2009

Fully armed, a line of 10 swat team police marched up to the picket line.
Half-stunned by their presence, the crowd of supporters hesitatingly jeered
the cops. In unison and on command they charged forward and shoved the
picketers to the ground. Throughout the day there were various refusals to
accept these attacks; they ranged from hurling verbal abuse at the cops with
chants like "Fuck the Police," to acts of Police Attack, Students Fight Back
physical resistance such as refusing to sit down at the urging of cops and
fellow protesters, to minor incidents of exchanging blows.

Some of these bold acts of resistance were deplorable to those protestors
whose go-to chants were "Peaceful protest! Peaceful protest!" as the pigs
violently attacked students. One chant was even directed to the cops
themselves: "We are fighting for your kids! We are fighting for your kids!"
This brings into sharp relief the widespread confusion about the role of the
state in the anti-budget cut movement.

Let's be clear that the state, with its armed police and military forces,
carries out its brute force when peoples' consciousness begins to transcend
capitalism's ideological chokehold. What has been clearly demonstrated this
past week is that resistance to the budget cuts is a class struggle that
immediately brings us into confrontation with the force of the state.

The image of a protester violently resisting police brutality has certain
activists blaming the victims of the brutality, pleading with militant
protesters: "Why are you antagonizing them? You're only making it worse!"
It is an image that represents a political fact that we have been too slow
to acknowledge - that education sector budget cuts are a particular point of
a struggle involving the whole working class; a struggle against a crisis
that presents itself to us as an increase in the overall disciplining of the
working class; discipline which seeks to keep workers in line generating
profits - especially when we refuse to go on as normal as everything around
us falls apart. The escalation in the capitalist state's corrective violence
manifested on the UCB picket line is behind other seemingly disconnected
government actions: the murder of Oscar Grant, ICE raids, and the wars in
the Middle East. Behind every policy is an army of police.

The occupation of Wheeler Hall at UCB last Friday was a testament to the
value of confrontational tactics. The common fear that a bold,
confrontational action will look ridiculous and isolate the movement is
proven to be out of date. Thousands of students played a spontaneously
active role fighting the fee hikes and budget cuts. This action was
incredibly democratic, inspiring, and educational because it materially
mobilized the power of the people present at general assemblies held the day
before. The occupation and the struggle to support it acted as a teachable
moment by highlighting the farce that is the capitalist, liberal-democratic
state.

The liberal-democratic state is a tool of the capitalist class, a means of
bourgeois rule that by definition we, the working class, are shut out of.
The question is: how do we resist government policies from our position
completely outside the official, "democratic" framework of the state? In the
campus movement, the two primary answers to this question have been popular
organizing (general assemblies) and militant resistance (occupations). What
happened last week at university campuses across California was a step
toward a synthesis of these two approaches. UCB's occupation was approved at
a general assembly. This is a good development, but as this synthesis is
reached a new contradiction presents itself: what is the role of the
education sector (especially university students) in generalizing this wave
of campus resistance towards including the rest of the working class? What
active steps can students take to introduce the practice of militant
struggle independent of ruling class structures?

Student Uprisings

For three days throughout California universities engaged in militant
struggle. UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, SF State, and Fresno
State all had mass protests, strikes, and building occupations. On Wednesday
November 18, over 100 SF State students protested and then occupied their
administration's building for hours.

On the same day UC Berkeley students rallied with close to a thousand
students, and marched downtown attempting to draw out Berkeley High students
and Berkeley City College students; they had little success, largely due to
a lack of preparatory organizing. The march returned to UC Berkeley and
hundreds of students surrounded the administration building.

Hours later students occupied the architecture and engineering building,
with a supportive crowd defending the occupation. The occupiers agreed to
show their IDs to police and were released without arrest.

The next day, UCLA erupted in struggle as the UC regents voted to approve a
32% tuition increase. Protests took place throughout the day, including
multiple confrontations with police and arrests. As the UC regents tried to
leave the meeting, their vehicle was surrounded and stopped by angry student
protesters.

The regents had to be escorted out of the campus in ambulances. Campbell
hall was also occupied and renamed the Carter-Huggins building after two
slain LA Black Panthers.

Friday, the day after, on November 20, UC Berkeley erupted in mass struggle.
Over 40 individuals occupied Wheeler Hall the night before demanding among
other things the rehire of the 32 laid-off UC Berkeley workers and political
amnesty for the occupiers. Up to 1,500 students, workers and community folk
surrounded the building's six major entrances to make sure the police, who
controlled the space immediately in front of and around Wheeler Hall, could
not arrest the occupiers and send them to jail. The students held down
militant picket-lines, blocking the police each time they tried to break the
line.

This demonstrates that a militant occupation can only be successful with a
powerful critical mass supporting it from the outside; otherwise its
isolation will lead to failure and repression. The opposite can also be
said: having a quantitatively large protest doesn't automatically correlate
to challenging the property relations of the system.

The crowd didn't dissipate in the rain or leave despite long hours of
duration. Later that evening, the occupiers were finally released with
misdemeanor citations. The original demands were not met, but hundreds of
students and community folk experienced and coordinated a day of struggle
against the police and the UC administration. When the occupiers left the
building they told the mass crowd that they were the real heroes because
without them nothing would have happened. This embryonic awareness that
confrontational action only works as part of a mass struggle is the
beginning of a deep change in political consciousness of the anti-budget cut
movement.

These protests represent a political eruption in a time when militant
struggle is bubbling up to the surface. It's becoming progressively clearer
that proposing such militancy is not premature, as some Trotskyist groups
argued prior to the UCB occupation, but also prove that it isn't wise to
push heroic yet isolated occupation attempts as some anarchists do. We have
witnessed the first convergence of occupation with mass protest and observed
the fiery radical effect the synthesis has had on its participants. The
only way to challenge society's problems is to first understand that the
rich and powerful will stop at nothing. Capital brings only impoverishment
for our class while their class accumulates incredible amounts of wealth.
Our struggle has to win by beating back and altering the relationship of
class forces, which will not be easy. But this recent wave of occupations
and militant protests throughout California represent a new cycle of
struggle that gives hope and insight to such a possibility in the near
future. The question now is will the public sector working class, school
workers, janitors, K-12 teachers, bus drivers, BART workers, and city
employees join this struggle? If radical isolated students throughout the
UCs continue to fight, without public sector workers taking these struggles
into their own hands, the student struggle will reach a limit and eventually
decline in energy and momentum.

Spread the Rebellion

The wave of occupations that spread on November 18th-20th and the massive
student support of them shows a quantitative growth in the struggle by sheer
numbers of participants, but more importantly it demonstrates a qualitative
growth in the anti-budget cut struggle due to the deepening of student
militancy. So far, however, this militant consciousness has failed to
transcend the education sector. Why haven't the Republic Windows and Doors
occupation and the 2006 May 1st general strike for immigrant rights become a
generalized trend across the working-class as a whole? The US working-class
has gone so long without mass struggle that they lack the fruits that
struggle produces: theory, organization, and confidence.

Students can play a catalytic role by approaching the working-class with
traditional forms of political propaganda (direct agitation) and the
propaganda of the deed, as recently demonstrated at UCB. Students who become
radicalized should study the history of working-class struggle but don't
need to be experts before they can start talking to workers about the need
for struggle on a larger scale. This should be an easy thing to do because
most public higher education students come from working class backgrounds,
go to community colleges and CSU's and have jobs. Their agitation can start
at the spaces they already find themselves in such as their own work places
and school campuses, but should extend into other work places and
communities.

Agitation should center on building class-consciousness generally, and
building for a mass strike on March 4th specifically. It is clear that the
conditions exist for every school and perhaps every public institution to
form political committees composed of workers, students and teachers that
attempt to organize their workplaces and schools for militant struggle in
general and a strike on March 4thin particular. Unions will pass watered
down resolutions for March 4th, which is a positive development, but
rank-and-file militants are the key link in motivating the majority of their
coworkers to take political responsibility for the strike building process
to reach its radical, creative potential. Unions cannot do this for the
workers. It is commonly perceived by most left groups that the problem with
unions lies with a flawed union leadership, ignoring how the political
structure of unions have been vertically integrated into the state apparatus
since the 1947 passing of the Taft-Hartley act. The development of these
committees will be interlinked with the development of such rank-file
militant workers who can think and act beyond legalistic unionism. With that
said, budget cut "organizing" can mean many things, but the politics of such
organizing should have a clear vision, avoiding both centrism and
adventurism, in order to advance the struggle.

The budget cuts facing public education are the same crisis that faces
ghettos and barrios even in the best of times. Young people who California's
public higher education system rejects due to budget cuts will find their
reflection in the swelling ranks of the unemployed, high-school dropouts,
and highly oppressed section of the working class. Class-consciousness
transcends immediate self-interest; solidarity is not sympathy - it is unity
in a common struggle. Students have a responsibility to spread news of their
own rebellion, to encourage workers to rebel, and to help build the
proletarian struggle wherever it erupts.

http://advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/occupations-spread-across-california/

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