Some folks here at caucus99percent have asked those of us who reject mainstream political assumptions to start explaining more clearly what we DO believe. This thread is my response to that. I'm going to use this thread to uncover and piece together my own political philosophy. I also would like this thread to provide a place for everybody's questioning of assumptions, the more fundamental the better--and not just assumptions I want to question! I hope that everybody feels free to bring their own questioning and imaginings to the table.

Come outside.

Brass Tacks

It's fine to theorize about temporary autonomous zones--and semi-permanent ones--but to function as part of politics, TAZ and SPAZ need to be practical.

I should be careful here, because pragmatism is a colonized concept and has been for over 25 years. Those who don't support the status quo are always told by those who do that their politics is not practical. In reality, it's impossible to tell whether someone is being practical unless you specify what their goals are. "Practical" means "something that works out in practice," and if you're working something out in practice, you're probably trying to do something. So, tell me what you're trying to achieve, and I'll tell you whether I think your approach is pragmatic or not. Pragmatism only exists in the context of a goal. One cannot be generally impractical.

Let me give you an example. Saying "bicycles are an impractical mode of transport" is wrong. Saying "bicycles are an impractical mode of transport in twentieth-century American cities built to serve the internal combustion engine" is right. What is left out of the first sentence, and included in the second, is history: the history of economic, political, and moral choices made by human beings. In its absence, a false sense of inevitability flourishes which, if accepted as true, inspires bad analysis, bad decisions, and bad politics.

Say my goal is to create TAZ and SPAZ habitable to people with my worldview and inured to the poisonous propaganda that circulates through the general air. In that case, "practical" means the following: some of us need to know what TAZ and SPAZ are, know how to create conditions likely to produce a TAZ or SPAZ, and how to tell if they're in a TAZ or not. This is particularly true because TAZ is the foundation stone of my politics, the basic idea from which I extrapolate everything else that I conceive and might one day do. If I don't have a practical grasp of TAZ and SPAZ my politics will collapse into nothing but some pretty ideas. This is, of course, what supporters of the American political system always say is true of people like me.

There aren't exactly diagrammed instructions for how to build a TAZ like there are for IKEA bookcases. In fact, it seems to me that the creation of temporary autonomous zones is often an unintentional side effect of some other purpose. For example, at certain points in history, Mardi Gras has been a TAZ, but Mardi Gras as a festival originated not in a plan to create a TAZ, but from people's desire to live it up before Lent. That TAZ was an unintended consequence of the Christian predilection for self-denial at certain seasons. Someone mentioned that PRIDE used to be a TAZ. That's true, but again, nobody sat down (I don't think) and said: "How can we create a space that exists outside the control of the hegemony?" A lot of people said "We're tired of being constantly shamed, and we aren't going to take it anymore." That TAZ originated in people's desire to live without shame.

I've been using an architectural metaphor for the temporary autonomous zone, talking of foundation stones and such, but in some ways a TAZ acts more like a natural thing than the product of artifice. It's like a chemical reaction: certain ingredients come together under certain conditions and presto! a new molecule or chemical compound forms. In much the same way, temporary autonomous zones seem to arise more often than they are deliberately created. They seem less under conscious control than, say, a military coup or a Five Year Plan.

There *are* times when a TAZ is created consciously. I would bet that the anarchists who began Occupy probably knew Bey's work, or at least had heard of it, and knew what they were doing. Burning Man seems to have had some similar intent at its creation, and it arguably still functions as a TAZ for the large number of libertarians who attend (not all autonomous zones nourish views I support). I think it's possible that the medieval All Fools' Day, where the social classes were, to some extent, temporarily reversed and the social order turned upside down, was also consciously intended for the purpose of allowing the lower orders to let off steam.

Yet even Occupy was noteworthy for the vagueness of the call in Adbusters that began it all. People were called to occupy public space for an indefinite period of time to protest the government's protection of Wall St criminals. Compare that to the boycott of Nestle or United Fruit, to the defense of women's health clinics, to civil disobedience in protest against the Vietnam War, to petitions for rent control--or campaigns to get someone elected. All of these more ordinary political actions are much more planned and specific, much more directed and controlled. In contrast to those efforts, the call to Occupy could be summed up as: Be Present For a While in Public.

Some have said that caucus99percent is a TAZ. Hakim Bey would have serious problems with this notion, and I'll deal with that below, but let's say for the sake of argument that caucus99percent is a TAZ, or more likely a SPAZ. If so, this autonomous zone, like Occupy, was quite consciously created: we were deliberately trying to create a place where people could evade certain kinds of ideological control. But you'll notice that, like Occupy, we defined very little beyond being broadly left-wing, populist, and rational.

Perhaps creating a TAZ or SPAZ requires one to leave unbuilt, unplanned spaces, room for the new phenomenon--whatever it may be--to emerge. Creating one seems to be more a matter of bringing certain ingredients together and giving them space to react than of blueprints. So, what are the ingredients? Or, at least, what elements are usually present?

The most obvious ingredient is a kind of friction, something unpleasant that people wish to avoid. I guess you have to have a reason for leaving the Asylum, though some people, like ravers and the old Mardi Gras celebrants, create autonomous zones just so they can party. Many people, however, create a TAZ or SPAZ because there's something they want to evade: going without meat, alcohol, and general merriment during Lent; being shamed by heterosexuals and their culture wherever you go;living as a lower-class person under a pretty intolerable aristocracy in medieval France; seeing the government collaborate with people who just stole your house; getting bullied by roving gangs of trolls every time you deviate from the party line.

I don't meant to say that all these sources of friction are equivalent; obviously, they aren't. But humans seem to create autonomous zones, some of the time, like oysters create pearls. It starts with discomfort. It starts with friction.

The second and third ingredients I can identify are space and time, and the fourth, a group of people willing to show up. Friction, time, space and people.

Can anybody think of any more ingredients for a TAZ?

The second and third ingredients are where dissidents like us have the most trouble, in my view. Saying that a phenomenon occupies space and time may seem less than noteworthy, but we should not take this for granted. Americans, in particular, often assume that space and time are ours for the having, and that our problem lies merely in not being able to persuade, educate, or otherwise muster enough people. This assumption limits American political thinking severely, because in fact, we are terribly deprived of space and time.

I've written elsewhere about the assault on time, how driving people's wages down forces them to work longer and longer hours, spend more and more energy earning wages, until, of necessity, people have little time and less energy for everything from their next-door-neighbor to their Elks Club or sewing circle to their nation and their world. Even the nuclear-family-related-by-blood, the one set of relationships this culture holds as sacrosanct, generally starves for want of the time which is constantly poured into the maw of capital. We tend to talk about that phenomenon, rather ineptly, as "work/life balance," as if our lives were a circus tightrope act, with our talent alone determining whether we stay aloft or fall. It's a neat trick of American culture: injuries suffered magically become bad grades.

We do even worse when talking about space, which we only discuss indirectly. We talk about the lack of homeownership or the dreadful time small businesses have been having for the last thirty years; occasionally we talk about the homeless being moved from parks or about protesters herded into free speech zones. What unites these issues, and many others, is the shrinking of the space ordinary people have for creating, acting, speaking out: spaces where ordinary people have power, where ordinary people matter. Free speech zones are an early and obvious version of this insidious, quiet theft that goes on all around us. That's why Occupy's primary gesture was to inhabit public land, insistently.

I'll give you an example of the kind of access to space and use of space that I'm talking about. It's not just a question of hippie communes or socialist kibbutzes. There used to be a music club in New York--not even a very good venue, riddled with roaches and possessing legendarily filthy restrooms. This club launched the Ramones, the Smiths, the Talking Heads, Blondie, and many, many other bands. What caused this explosion of creativity? A man decided to start a club and feature original music from new artists, and he gave people a chance to play. That's all it took. Space, the final frontier. I could tell many similar stories, of restaurants and record labels, gaming companies, grocery stores. Ordinary people had access to physical space, and occasionally, amazing things happened.

What's remarkable about this is how capitalistic it is. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying we should keep capitalism around, because it was so great in the good old days. What I am saying is that, even under capitalism, we used to have a lot more access to space than we do now: space to start businesses, make art, live.

Space. We have so little of it. We've almost forgotten what it was like to have more. We've gotten used to being shrunk down.

The Internet is one of the few spaces we have left, and there is something to be said for Hakim Bey's assertion that the "space" of the internet, like its communities, does not adequately replace physical space and the enfleshed communities found there. In any case, we are harried even in the digital world, as our unpleasant history with Markos Moulitsas clearly shows. In retrospect, it felt like we left-wingers had been drawn to one place by the pretext of support simply so that we could be more easily bullied.

We are now approaching the place where the rubber hits the road--or doesn't. If we are to create a TAZ or SPAZ, we must have the time and energy to put into creating it. We must also claim space, if only temporarily.

Americans generally hate talking about the lack of time, space and resources. We love to talk about the choices people make and how those choices reveal moral character. We like to talk about bad education, willful ignorance, materialism, selfish indifference, bigotry. All these do exist and have a deleterious effect on our politics and lives. But the lack of time, space, and resources habitually cripples us. The challenge here is to find a way to regain time and reclaim space. I doubt one can create a TAZ without providing the time or space for its inception.

I meant to write about Gondolin and other intentional communities today, but as always, there's too much to talk about! I'm seriously considering taking this series out of my open thread and doing at least a few a week, because I feel I'm advancing maddeningly slowly through what I have to say.

How are you all this morning?
I can't really wish you all a happy 4th of July at this point, but I do wish you a happy morning.