``is there a punchline? or is just the thrust of the argument that discussing possible slogans is a way to get a conversation started. and, is the conversation the point? (sortuh like the israeli-palestinian dialogues or peace..'' martin
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I think I understand Carrol's intent, but I have other views.
The main point I want to make is about the central importance of speech but speech to be fully political must be linked somehow to action. Also speech here is more broadly defined. Remember books, writing, talking, videos, film, radio... All these are essentially speech--for me.
Entrapment in the present. Imagining the present from the future.
My problem with these slogans and their full meaning, is that I've actually seen, been part of, and shared in some of the political success of political movements. The first was to open the university (UCB) to political action, built on the success of Free Speech Movement (FSM) which succeeded in opening the university to political speech.
The second movement could be loosely called the disability movement. It had several goals. The primary one, was independent living in the community and not in an institution. The next goal was a series of civil rights, many of which converged on broadening the public concept of `access'. For example access to all public space, like sidewalks, streets, public institutions, especially governmental institutions...which meant access to the broadly understood world of political action. Much of these latter gains were deliberately designed around the de-segregation, civil rights, and black power movements that preceded and overlaped them.
The disability movements, transported disabled people from the silences and prisons of back wards in the public hospital system out to the world so that they could become fully human in Arendt's sense of the word, activa vita. We had learned that segregation is also a form of silence, the denial of political speech.
The point is that I have seen what the future is supposed to be. I've also unfortunately seen how all the work, the time, the energy, the friends. the solidarities, the struggles for a full life of the political was destroyed, co-opted, and erased from the public mind and history. Yet many of the gains remain.
The core ingredient, or the means to accomplish something like those movements of the past, is some shared sense of solidarity. That is, the sense we are all in the same boat. I have no idea what `boat' we are all in here on LBO. I guess the general boat is what we are against, i.e the US political economy as currently constituted and run.
In the past the boats were created by public institutions themselves. For example, the UC system had a rule that there could be no political speech on its campuses. The institution created the FSM boat with this rule and many others like it.
The students within FSM understood that without the freedom of public speech there could be no political action possible.
I wasn't part of the early developments that lead to FSM, but I listened to the older brother of a friend who discussed the events (SF HUAC hearings, etc) when he came home to LA for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I knew immediately, that's were I wanted to be. So being a student with something to say about the world, and being prevented from saying it, was the boat we all felt.
The Selective Service system created the mass anti-war movement. Every male between 18-34 was subject to draft and induction. That's a pretty big boat.
The few dozen disabled men and women I worked for in the UCB student hospital were definitely all in the same boat, living in an institution, completely subject to the tyrannical whims of the staff and administration. The freedom to come and go, the freedom of assembly, all the space of the hospital conspired to be a prison whether that effect was intended or not. We lived in Foucault's world.
So, The Boat, is the symbol for solidarity, the shared fate.
CG . . .
Last night I turned on KPFA and listened to a full hour of news. Every story was one I wanted to hear. Many involved all the places where political struggle is taking place today. Iran, of course, and Honduras. I had no idea that the Honduran struggle is on-going everyday and is seriously distrupting the goverance and political economy of Honduras. A woman reporter phoned in her story that was recorded and played back. There is talk of strikes. Go here to listen to her report:
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/53204
This reminded me of the heady days of yore when KPFA had a mobil van with local telecom equipment to talk live to the station which in turn broad cast live from the tear gas and rock throwing on Telegraph or on campus rallies, or occasionally in downtown Oakland with the Panthers and other groups. This live radio was a new form of media.
But the political struggles are not just elsewhere. In the Bay Area today there is going to be a transportation workers strike, because the BART board wanted too many concessions. This strike as some real political potential:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5igg_jIZm_fSZaKQF5t1kmwixBL2wD9A2E8VG0
Getting back to the Honduran story. I suppose there has been a media black out. Googling news Honduras gets the usual bland pronouncements, `Zelaya Supporters Clash with Police'. The empirical facts hide the political reality.
The first political act is speech. So without news, without stories on the ground, we have no political world to relate our speech to. It is the global internet that provides the infrastructure of global speech.
In history, among the first acts of either a military coup or a revolution was to sieze the central telephone exchange, e.g. Russia(?), China, Spain, then later many other places, also Cuba.
Now days, the US and other militarist states target the radio, tv stations as well as the telecomm installations. Today it is much more complicated to control all the methods of public speech.
Public speech is the glue of resistance movements. Speech is the vehicle to carry demands, to project what should be, from what is.
The point here is that we do have something evolving like a global resistance movement or its potential, but it depends on seeing and hearing each other and discussing our actions. And that in turn depends on the very fragile nature of the internet.