Life is Great! Life is Horrible!… OK, It’s Both!
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20171001175643im_/http://www.nowtopians.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Flower-Piano_CA-Native-Plant_20170716_163022.jpg)
The amazing free public Flower Piano takes place in the San Francisco Botanical Garden over two weekends in July… over a dozen pianos set in gorgeous spots with an endless stream of talented pianists either scheduled, or dropping in to play for fun. On Sunday July 16, the weather was spectacular, the crowds were plentiful but not overwhelming, and the hours passed blissfully in one ideal spot after another… Here is the California native plant garden with a piano in the distance, surrounded by enthusiastic listeners.
It’s a beautiful summer in San Francisco. I’ve obviously not been keeping up my blogging. We’re living in strange times to be sure, and I, like most people, am intermittently obsessed and disgusted by the ongoing trauma of what passes for a federal government these days. Not that I would’ve felt much better with another round of Clintonism, but this endless narcissism and inarticulate stupidity distracting attention from the profoundly venal and kleptocratic seizure of public wealth is a tough diet to stomach. And our collective responses have been pretty feeble, after an encouraging first few weeks, having descended into predictable patterns of “clicktivism” and frenzied, panicky “activistism,” neither of which does anything but reassure the practitioner that they are “doing something” (no matter how impotent). I’m not saying this from a position of having the correct line, or the appropriate program, or even better behavior. I’m busy writing one book, contributing to another, carrying out a summer full of research for yet another project, and as always, preparing an interesting line-up for our Fall Shaping San Francisco Talks and Tours. I’m also organizing a syllabus for a new class on labor history and politics that I’ll be teaching this fall at USF, the first time I’ve been able to design a class on this topic that’s been so central to my life, so I am very excited about this! So I’m busy. I also realize that most of our political efforts are hollow at best, whether directed locally, state-wide, nationally, or globally.
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Premonition of Civil War to come? Nah… just a routine 4th of July on Harrison Street a block from my home…
This doesn’t mean I don’t believe it’s possible to radically change the world, to radically change how we live. Our political efforts fall short because we don’t address the heart of our predicament. For a long time I tended to explain this by saying “wage-labor” was the heart of the problem. I still think so, but obviously that doesn’t get you too far in this culture. Lately I’ve taken to framing the question as “how do we make life? How do we produce the world we want to live in?” I want to engage and stimulate the subjective capacity of each individual to rethink their own behavior, but also to reconnect to the collective process by which we make life together. Because even if we live in a neoliberal fantasy that our personal choices make our lives, and that all problems are solvable by changing those choices (like whether or not to have health insurance?!?) in a context-less, permanent present, the reality is that our collective and cooperative social production of life is dominated by interests and powers that ensure they are the winners and most of us are the losers. The enormous concentration of wealth in San Francisco and the Bay Area has as its inevitable and necessary companion the enormous rise of homelessness and desperate poverty, conditions that threaten to grow dramatically worse if the current regime’s agenda is carried out. Even if we just manage to hold it at bay, the polarization will continue to gain speed, and the expansion of poverty will continue while the 1-10% at the top keep getting richer and more clueless.
Where does that leave us? Should we be signing more petitions? Writing more letters to corrupt millionaires who masquerade as our political representatives? Continuing to post articles on Facebook proving our point of view about politicians, generals, corporations and their CEOs is true? It seems that with all the imaginary power to communicate we’ve gained from social media, what has really happened is a radical increase in our isolation and social impotence. We feel connected through our phones and screens, but that connection amounts to nothing when it comes to the trajectory of society. I’m not alone in feeling this, and like many I’m coming ever closer to checking out of the social media house of mirrors.
Organizing, going door to door, making real relationships among neighbors, coworkers, people who live and work near each other on an ongoing basis, is the indispensable missing link. I assume lots of newly activated people are doing this in various parts of the country. I have heard anecdotally that a lot of old friends have decided to join DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) because that group is the closest to the Bernie Sanders-style politics that suddenly legitimized a type of left-wing democratic socialism, and they are committed to grassroots organizing… I haven’t felt the same calling, but I respect those who have. I do share the frustration with the circular firing squad logic of young radicals, who continue to attack anyone who fails to embrace every nuance and detail of what today’s recipe for “real revolution” entails.
I was talking to a friend a couple of days ago in a café about our having spent too many years being pure, being so sure of our own revolutionary beliefs that we had a hard time relating to anyone who didn’t share the same ideas, and that we were both sick of that. We’re at least smart enough to look around and realize that whatever certainty we held had no effect on a larger social movement (as we imagined it might at various points going back as far as the 1970s), and that actually the kind of social movements we thought of ourselves as the far left-wing of had withered away and died, much as we’d always hoped the state would! Whoops!