Mike Beggs wrote: I'm not sure what Foucault would have said about the possibility of interacting "in an uncoded way". But anyway, is this not saying 'it's all in our heads', the manacles are mind forg'd? Even if this were true, if we all needed to just cast off the 'codings' in our relations, how is it supposed to spread into society at large? The movement develops through the bulk of the population being drawn into activist culture?
FM: I can't speak for Natasha Lennard but no, it's not saying "it's all in our heads". It's saying that sustained and focused confrontation with power has the potential of breaking down barriers between classes and connecting them in struggle. It is about the potential of alliances formed between previously separated classes. Greg Smithsimon put it succinctly in his essay on the 1970 "Hard Hat Riot" in Lower Manhattan:
"On May 8, 1970, high-school and college students came to Wall Street to protest the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and the murder of students at Kent State by the National Guard. Hundreds of construction workers streamed out of their work sites on their lunch break and charged the protesters. Construction workers beat protesters with crowbars, fists, and their hard hats. Seventy people were injured. The police did little, and only six were arrested."
Contrast that to the kind of alliances that were formed between students and workers in Paris of '68; an alliance that set the stage for a politics that impacted the French state for quite some time. Contrast it also to the current OWS which has, for better or for worse, not made war and American imperialism a central issue. It's not necessarily a good choice erasing the elephant in the room (as the cost of living demonstrations in Israel have done) in order to form new coalitions but it does seem to be what is happening not just here but in many of the global uprisings.
Regarding the question put "to anarchists" at the panel concerning how a tactic turns into revolution, I'd research the writings on "Dual Power" or better yet invite people like Wayne Price, who stood up in the Q&A session and who have spent their lives working in relative obscurity on the questions being asked, to future panel discussions.
My past views about Dual Power strategies have been closer in spirit to Doug's school radiator parable. They are too uncomfortably close to reactionary ideas of a dismantled state where social programs are taken care of by churches and volunteerism. But recently I've been coming back to some of these ideas as have many others on both the left and the right. That may be less because we underestimated the ideas themselves as much as we underestimated the viciousness and suicidal behavior of the global ruling class.
FM
Hard Hat Riot article:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=568