<underfire> chaos, utopia & the 60's

[Allan Siegel]

Michael is correct, my error, regarding Michael Moore – he was sacked  
from Mother Jones in ’86. But, moving right along…

However, I disagree with Michael’s other statement: “Allan speaks of  
theorization as if that has some great importance in lending  
opposition to violence. Much as I like theory, the relationship is  
nonsense.” Perhaps we have a different understanding of what  
theorization means – certainly it can be purely abstract BUT it can  
also apply and relate to the real world. On the most immediate,  
basic, spontaneous level one can intervene to prevent violence; on a  
larger plane theoretical assumptions can both result in violence OR  
prevent or diminish it. Quantum physics facilitated the construction  
of the atomic bomb – Hiroshima. Mass non-violent movements in various  
parts of the world diminished (quite likely) violence. Did the self- 
immolation of Buddhist monks prevent violence? Were they based on  
theorizations?

What is useful about the 60’s in the context of the current  
discussion relates to the strands of utopianism (on many levels) that  
motivated different spheres of political activity AND the  
organizational networks that arose to implement various visions of  
what might be socially possible. In that “strange days” 60’s surreal  
way there was some common thread that seemed to link the cultural  
revolution in China with Paris with Bolivia with anti-war protests in  
Washington.  The link was subliminal yet significantly driven by the  
potentialities of human liberation OUTSIDE of the dogma of turgid  
leftist parties. My interest here is not to discuss or dwell on what  
actually came out of all this (which was actually considerable). My  
emphasis is on the fact that people created structures suitable to  
articulating and implementing their goals. In time many of these  
structures became equally turgid YET without them little could have  
happened. And, naïve or otherwise most of these structures were built  
around theoretical assumptions.

Today, as Loretta points out, many of the structures we are drawn to  
– yearn for? - are ephemeral. The public space of activism is mainly  
a virtual space. There is a marked absence of a vision of the kind  
world we imagine or are committed to creating/building. Rosa Parks  
sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama was both a  
political and a visionary statement; The Port Huron Statement (1962)  
is a point of demarcation between two visions of the world; and, the  
Vietnam War, after all was a war against colonialism.

“A "chaos" has now completely, and for years to come, replaced the  
orderly world of the Cold War. Alain Joxe

The orderly world of the Cold War produced and orderly, palatable  
kind of utopianism. Whereas today there is a dystopic whirlwind of  
change in which:

“The question of territory as a parameter for authority and rights  
has entered a new phase.  State exclusive authority over territory  
remains the

prevalent mode of final authority in the global political economy.   
But it is less absolute formally than it once was meant to be and  
prevalence is not

to be confused with dominance.” Saskia Sassen

AND things look a little like Wim Wender’s THE END OF VIOLENCE. One  
might venture to say that the ‘materialist’ utopianism of the 60’s  
has been displaced by a more ethereal ‘evangelical’ form of  
utopianism – a moral utopia (Christian, Muslim or Jewish) to  
challenge a changing ethical center of gravity in which, as Alain  
states, there are:

“zones forming constellations of democracy or free market

clusters in circular form, then, further away, zones separated by  
flexible

or ephemeral institutional, economic or military membranes; zones in  
crisis,

zones of barbaric violence, social wastelands and slow or rapid  
genocide….”



In this kind of landscape what exactly is violence? Is utopia even  
relevant?

Allan
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