Democracy in America?: Occupy Movement Calls Nation’s Bluff

Posted on 01/10/2012

In many ways, the core of the Occupy Wall St. movement’s impact in the U.S. has been to expose how corrupt our systems of governance really are, and to show in action what (direct) democracy, actually looks like. We live in an age of perverse language, when “democracy” and “freedom” are exported by drones, or at gunpoint, and where anarchism — democracy without government — is viewed by many as tantamount to terrorism.

With those specific things in mind, here is a cluster of material related to the underlying theory and evolving practice of the Occupy movement, highlighting adaptive and prefigurative organizing successes and casting an eye towards 2012.

Principled, Consistent, Wrong: The Perfectly Selfish Problematics of Ron Paul

Posted on 01/06/2012

He’s the only truly anti-war, anti-imperialist candidate in the 2012 Presidential race, but Ron Paul’s ideas about getting rid of all environmental regulation, returning to the gold standard, rolling back civil rights, and further restricting women’s access to abortion, are all extremist.

Paul, like Rick “Oops” Perry, is another right-wing free-market zealot from Texas not worthy of holding higher public office. So what is it about Paul–his brand or his substance–that pulls support from so many parts of the political continuum?

Considering Zomia: Elevation & the Art of Not Being Governed

Posted on 09/07/2011

Last year, while traveling in East Asia, I read a fascinating book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, a professor of Agrarian Studies at Yale University.

Scott’s book is essentially about a very large number of intentional Southeast Asian maroons or refugees–Zomians–and the book is making me re-think a lot of things, about the normal “advance of civilization” narrative and all that it assumes, presupposes, and omits. It’s also made me to recontextualize my understanding of nation-states to include the surprising importance of elevation.

Tibetans are Zomians. They are are, as I think almost everybody knows, long-term resisters against the Han Chinese empire. The Tibetans are fierce and lovely people who wish not to be told where or how to live. Their monks are known for many things, including sparking militant protest, as they did in March 2008 in Lhasa (elevation: 11,450ft) :

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The Rising Violence of China’s Domestic Security Apparatus (“guobao”)

Posted on 07/11/2011

Ni Yulan, lawyer charged with “creating a disturbance," taken into detention April 17, 2011.

“For years, rights lawyers and dissidents have played a game of cat and mouse with the mainland authorities, refusing to buckle in the face of harassment, licence revocations, detentions, beatings and, sometimes, brutal torture and imprisonment.

But over the past six months, the feared guobao, or domestic security apparatus, which monitors the activities of activists, has adopted unknown new tactics that have frightened its targets into silence…”

Read Paul Mooney’s “Silence of the Dissidents,” originally published in the South China Morning Post >>

People’s Historian Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) Leaves China

Posted on 07/08/2011

Liao Yiwu in Wenjiang, July 2010. Photo (c) Brian Awehali

JULY 2011 | After repeatedly being threatened with imprisonment if he chose to continue publishing his “illegal work” in foreign countries, Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) has fled to asylum in Germany. In the weeks and months following the outbreak of popular revolt in the Arab world, the Chinese government’s repression of critical voices intensified, and Liao had been warned that he would be arrested if he chose to publish the German edition of his forthcoming memoir, Testimonials: The Witness of the 4th of June.

Philip Gourevitch has written a typically solid piece for the New Yorker detailing Liao’s “escape” from China and the reason his work is important enough to be threatening to China’s leadership. The piece includes the following quote from Liao about his status as a political “refugee”:

“I’m excited about political developments in China, and looking forward to a Jasmine Revolution. I am quite sure that Hu Jintao may be a refugee some day, but not Liao Yiwu.”

May this be so. When I had the opportunity to meet and interview Liao several times in 2010, I was deeply inspired by his willingness to take enormous risks in service of truth-telling, free thought, and art. Interested readers can check out the lengthy profile I did of Liao following these interviews, “Drift to Live.” which appeared originally on Counterpunch, then in expanded form here on LOUDCANARY.

Liao was denied permission to visit the U.S. in April of 2010, but he is scheduled to visit New York again this Fall, when there may be considerably less the Chinese Communist Party can do about it.

Chinese Writer and Activist Ran Yunfei Detained on “Suspicion of Subversion”

Posted on 06/25/2011

Authorities in China are nervous. Evidence of their unease may be seen in the government’s exaggerated response in February 2011 to fears of a “Jasmine Revolution” inspired by the recent wave of revolt in the Middle East and North Africa. After hearing word of an online call for protests in thirteen Chinese cities, the government arrested more than 100 activists, blocked Internet search terms such as “jasmine,” and disabled mass texting services throughout the country. The protests themselves reportedly drew only a handful of people.

Ran Yunfei at book signing, 2008

One of the activists arrested was Ran Yunfei (冉云飞), a tireless Chengdu-based writer and historian who wrote a strong letter in support of Charter 08 activist Liu Xiaobo in December 8, 2010 for the Guardian. (see *, below, for most recent updates on Ran Yunfei)

I met Ran at a riverside teahouse in Chengdu in May of 2010, and he was energetic and talkative to the point of being garrulous. His shaved head showed the scars of at least several bad beatings, and his speech (in Chinese) was so frantic that I only caught every fourth or fifth of his thoughts or sentences through a translator. Before his detention, he blogged manically, wrote large social history books, and was a “subscriber,” meaning official supporter or signer of, Charter 08.

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Sweatshop-Produced Rainbow Flags & Participatory Patriarchy: Why the Gay Rights Movement is a Sham

Posted on 05/02/2011

Newly available as part of the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt, edited by Brian Awehali (AK Press) [PDF]. From the “Constructively Negative” Sacred Cows issue.

As legends go, San Francisco is the place for sexual debauchery, gender transgression and political deviance (not to mention sexual deviance, gender debauchery and political transgression). The reality is that while San Francisco still shelters outsider queer cultures unimaginable in most other cities, these cultures of resistance have been ravaged by AIDS, drug addiction and gentrification. Direct on-the-street violence by rampaging straights remains rare in comparison to other queer destination cities like New York, Chicago or New Orleans, but a newer threat has emerged. San Francisco, more than any other US city, is the place where a privileged gay (and lesbian) elite has actually succeeded at its goal of becoming part of the power structure. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), members of the gaysbian elite use their newfound influence to oppress less privileged queers in order to secure their status within the status quo. This pattern occurs nationwide, but San Francisco is the place where the violence of this assimilation is most palpable.

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The Politics of Poop: Against the Modern Flush Toilet and Sewage System

Posted on 05/01/2011

Newly available as part of the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt, edited by Brian Awehali (AK Press) [PDF]

If Women Ruled the World, Nothing Would Be Different

Posted on 04/28/2011

by Lisa Jervis

Newly available as part of the online release of Tipping the Sacred Cow – The Best of LiP: Informed Revolt, edited by Brian Awehali (AK Press) [PDF]

Words and Music with Chinese People’s Historian Liao Yiwu

Posted on 04/15/2011

I’m pleased to share that two versions of my profile of Chinese writer and people’s historian Liao Yiwu have been published this month, in the print edition of The Progressive (also featuring contributions from David Sedaris, Jim Hightower and Dave Zirin), and in expanded online form on Counterpunch.

Liao’s first book to be translated into English, The Corpse Walker, was a collection of 27 startlingly raw and unexpected literary interviews with mostly older people on the margins of Chinese society, who were directly impacted by the horrors of life under Mao Zedong. Several of his other books, including Earthquake Insane Asylum, chronicling the invisible and uncounted following the disastrous 2008 Sichuan earthquake, have been published in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Please do check out my expanded profile of Liao, on LOUDCANARY, here ».