Occupy Boston

HAVE YOU EVER FELT LIKE HAVING AN UNEMPLOYMENT FESTIVAL? Did you ever suppress the urge to commit violent acts against the institutions that exploit you? Have you ever wanted to celebrate in the “lonely financial zone”... just to see what if feels like?

There are quite a few things going on here, and perhaps they can be captured, at least in part, by the old Wobbly adage of “the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old.”

I participated in the first two general assemblies preceding the forthcoming Occupy Boston movement. It seems that folks are angry – at corporate greed, at corruption, at bank bailouts, at being pawns in a game played by the richest 1% of the population, at not having access to food, shelter, health care.... None of this anger is unfounded. “We are the 99%.” And we have many reasons to be pissed off.

We also have reasons to celebrate.

Or do you not think so? Then let us make reasons to celebrate. There is a theory, and it has many variations, but I will state it this way: that what exists is only what one perceives at a given moment of space-time. What one experiences at that moment – that's all there "is." However much stock one takes in that theory, I propose we adopt it for our purposes. Let's make our perception beautiful, and let's celebrate that beauty, for as long as possible, in the gaunt, bony face of those in power – the dead eye socket at the top of the pyramid.

Dewey Square. Beginning Friday, September 30, at 6pm.

A fictional character once paraphrased a man wiser than himself in saying one should end with a quote. I make no distinction between fiction and non-fiction, wise and unwise; so here is Debord via Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life:

“Subjective imagination is not purely mental: it is always seeking its practical realization. There can be no doubt that the artistic spectacle – and above all its narrative forms – plays on subjectivity's quest for self-realization, but solely by captivating it, by making it function in terms of passive identification. Debord's propaganda film Critique de la separation stresses the point: 'As a rule the things that happen to us in our individual lives as organized at present, the things which really succeed in catching our attention and soliciting our involvement, are the very things that ought to leave us cold and distant spectators. By contrast many a situation glimpsed through the lens of any old piece of artistic transposition is the very one that should attract us, and engage our participation. This paradox must be turned upside down – put back on its feet.'”

And Hakim Bey, laying out the preconditions for the tactic of “The Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ), which Occupy Boston could theoretically become:

“Psychological liberation. That is, we must realize (make real) the moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual. We must know in what ways we are genuinely oppressed, and also in what ways we are self-repressed or ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us. WORK, for example, is a far more actual source of misery for most of us than legislative politics. Alienation is far more dangerous for us than toothless outdated dying ideologies Mental addiction to 'ideals' – which in fact turn out to be mere projections of our resentment and sensations of victimization – will never further our project. The TAZ is not a harbinger of some pie-in-the-sky Social Utopia to which we must sacrifice our lives that our children's children may breathe a bit of free air. The TAZ must be the scene of our present autonomy, but it can only exist on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings.”