This week, MITCHEL COHEN talks about the politics of everyday life and what he means by "The Left". He also discusses reports from Oaxaca, Mexico by Barucha Calamity Peller on http://nyc.indymedia.org, and George Salzman on http://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=SCIENCE-FOR-THE-PEOPLE, and provides an update on the state-sanctioned murder of our friend Brad Will, independent journalist, last year in Oaxaca and recent assassination attempt of another journalist investigating Brad's killing.
Then, Mitchel jumps across the ocean to take a look at the forming of a new political party in Germany, calling itself "Die Linke" ("The Left"), based on a story by Victor Grossman in a fine resource, Portside.org.
MUSIC:
Opening theme: Mario Savio, speaking in Berkeley, 1964 Theme Song: Dave Rovics, "Jenin"
- Dana Lyons, "Cows With Guns" - Mama Cass, "Dream a Little Dream" -- for Brad Will - Donovan, "Universal Soldier" - Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, "Forever Young"
Please send MP3s of your own music and items for the show to mitchelcohen at mindspring.com
**************************************** Text of Mitchel Cohen's introductory remarks:
Each week we try to bring you some reports, philosophy, interviews and music of interest to rebuilding a radical left movement in the United States.
What do I mean by "Left"? Certainly not Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards or the rest of the corporate clones running for President in the Democratic or Republican Parties.
And by "The Left" I certainly do not mean The New York Times, where they decide what news is fit to print and what to leave out or distort.
No, by "The Left" I'm not even talking about The Nation magazine, where I worked for a few years as a typesetter -- remember those? -- 23 years ago, where I had run-in after run-in with editors and columnists for daring to write my views in the margins of what I was typesetting. Some of the authors were inadvertently sent back their articles with my notes challenging the things they were saying, and that was a biiiiiig no-no.
Now, you'd never know listening to the political pundits on TV and radio or reading their columns in the newspapers that for us Radical Leftists the word "liberal" is a dirty word. But it is.
Before I joined the Brooklyn Greens and the Green Party, I came out of a group called the Red Balloon Collective, which started out at Stony Brook University in 1969 as an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (you may have heard of us under our initials, SDS). Red Balloon continued organizing into the mid-1990s. We believed in Direct Action, not just around issues of War and Peace, or the fight against injustice, but around the politics of everyday life -- issues of how to raise children differently and what it is about our sex roles that reinforces capitalism. Daily Life -- how to eat healthier foods, yes!, but also to realize that much of the food we eat is picked by farm workers living in desperate conditions -- so we support their organizing efforts; the clothes we wear are manufactured by people dying of brown lung, or who develop carpal tunnel syndrome from the repetitious hand motions they have to make in working with machines over many years.
It's an old story: "You're a very good worker," said the efficiency expert schooled in the time-and-motion studies of Frederick Taylor, as he watched a carpenter plane a piece of wood. "Now if we can just stick a buffer on your elbow you could plane and buff the wood with the same motion."
"Yea," the carpenter responded, "and if you'd stick a broomstick up your ass you could take your notes and sweep the floor at the same time."
Remember the movie "Modern Times"? Charlie Chaplin plays an assembly-line worker whose job is to wrench bolts all day as they come flooding down the conveyor belt, faster, ever faster. Charlie has no idea why. He just gets paid for it, and it warps his mind as well as his body.
Politics of the body. Politics of everyday life. Go and read one of the great books of the past 50 years, Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation," published by Autonomedia. We're going to talk with Silvia about her incredible book in a future show, not today, so please stay tuned ....
What does a new radical left built around the politics of everyday life mean? It means that everything that happens to us, ALL of us, has its roots in the society around us. Even the metaphors we use in writing poetry presume certain ways of seeing, a set of assumptions that are culturally specific, that most people in THIS culture can riff off of.
I'm convinced that the cultural glue that binds us together as nation are TV commercials. Everyone watches them. They're omnipresent. Remember "Help I'm falling and I can't get up"? No one from another country would know what we're talking about when we make reference to it. But everyone here in the U.S. connects to it, in SOME way. The NEW left, in the 1960s and 70s, felt that we needed to unearth all of those associations those culturally specific assumptions -- that we needed to think about them, and maybe challenge everything we were taught to believe as true. You know, "under God, invisible, with liberty and mustard for all."
This does not mean that all assumptions are bad, that everything about our culture is rotten -- no! But it does mean that we have to think about it, we have to be self-conscious, we need to understand why we do what we do, why we think what we think, and ask WHO is profiting off of it. ALL OF THAT SUBCULTURE, THAT IMPORTANT WAY OF BEING, HAS DISAPPEARED. We don't talk about this stuff hardly at all, let alone every day the way we used to. We need to.
One of the reasons I am doing Steal This Radio is to create a venue where that can happen, where we can not only THINK, and QUESTION, but do so regularly, as a matter-of-course, as part of the process of reconnecting with each other and rebuilding our movements.
So most of the things I write go back and forth -- on the one hand, I try to examine and understand events in the world with that set of lenses; and on the other hand, I write a different kind of pamphlets in which I try get us to examine ourselves, our movements, our own interactions and relationships so that we can gain insight with an "s" AND incite with a "c". We move to change the world, but we also need to change ourselves along with it, to make ourselves fit to live freely in the new world we seek to bring about, and not be slaves to the capitalist system, with all its tentacles reaching into our brains and into our souls.
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ALSO:
Mitchel Cohen's new book of poetry, "The Permanent Carnival," is almost sold out. If you'd like a copy, it's $14 + $1.35 postage. You can buy it directly through Mitchel by dropping him an email at mitchelcohen at mindspring.com, or by buying it via the TribecaRadio.net website.
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