Conversations with Fred Dewey (Part 2 of 3)

The transcript of our 2020 webinar on "Power and Place: The School of Public Life"

July 8, 2020

Note: This post is an edited version of the full conversation which can be viewed on the Solidarity Hall YouTube channel here.

Because this is a lengthy post, you may need to click the three-dot button to expand the post in full.)

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

Elias Crim:

Welcome, everybody, I'm Elias Crim and the director of Solidarity Hall. Joining me for this conversation is my friend and co-host, Pete Davis.

Pete Davis:

Glad to be here.

Elias:

Today, we're talking about politics and democracy at a moment when we may be feeling a bit of what's called democracy grief. But we will also be talking about authentic power and where it comes from, or doesn't. As Hannah Arendt once said, there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is a dangerous activity. Here at Solidarity Hall, we're always working to make this connection between thinking and action. So that's very much part of our view of public life.

Now I'd like to ask Pete to set this up and introduce Fred.

Pete:

Thanks, Elias. We are so glad to be joined today by Fred Dewey, a political and cultural activist from Los Angeles or, as I like to refer to people like him, a super citizen. And is often the case with super citizens, people who see freedom as participation in power, people who take responsibility for co-creating our shared world, it's hard to describe them without a laundry list of the projects they're involved in. Because when you start taking on the role of self government, you get involved in a lot of things, but we will try to highlight a few of yours, Fred.

From 1995 to 2010, Fred was the director of Beyond Baroque, a cultural and arts center in Venice California. He was the founder of the Portable Polis, a public participation project in which people do close readings out loud of texts by Hannah Arendt and others, and discuss the texts.

Fred has sponsored multiple dozens of these working groups, as he calls them, in California and across Europe, at community centers, squats, schools, art spaces, among other places. And here's my favorite—the neighborhood councils project he did in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King uprisings in 1992, leading a decade-long and successful effort to establish over 100 of these councils in the city.

And here's my personal connection to the neighborhood councils since hearing about them. I have asked every Angeleno I've known about the neighborhood councils and they know them, they love them. Maybe it's the type of friends I have that are involved in civic life. They say the councils are a very big part of Los Angeles civic life. It's often the first thing they tell you to do when you have an idea is to go to your neighborhood council--which is only there because of Fred Dewey.

Fred is also the author of The School of Public Life, the most splendidly formatted memoir I've ever read. It contains thoughts and ideas, even poems, from his decades of civic action.

Fred Dewey:

And there are several rants in it in case you feel sleepy. (Laughter.)

Pete:

So, Fred, I'm so glad to have you join us. And we want to get into your personal background in a moment.

Fred’s Analysis of Where Power Is Located

But I'd like to jump in with a question first, and then we'll bounce back to your personal background. In your book, The School of Public Life, you have a section called “What Is Power?” And you say, power is often thought by people to be something that's out there, that you need to build power, seize power, gain power, that we don't have it.

But you say, that is not the case. Here's a quote: “Power is actually the easiest thing, for it is what we already have.” Could you talk to us about that? Because I think that's the theme of the moment and everything will stem from it. So what do you mean by saying power is what we already have?

Fred:

Well, I was, like many, raised on people like Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, the French theorist, who basically lines up power as a disciplinary and punishing form. And I, through various good graces, got myself to Montgomery, Alabama, and had been doing some research on the bus boycott, or as Martin Luther King called it, the non-cooperation movement.

And one of the things that I found striking about this, and I discuss it at some length in the chapter “Polis for New Conditions”, was how the boycott revealed to the completely disappeared Black segment of the population that they actually had enormous power.

And this really was a revelation, because King’s agenda was pedagogical, as much as anything else. He was teaching his people that they actually had power they didn't even realize they had. So all they had to do was say no. No, we're not gonna ride those buses. So they didn't.

And all of a sudden, the city came to a halt, and what I would call a kind of preliminary or preparatory nonviolent revolution, because suddenly the people realized how much power they had. And this is really important.

In fact, this is probably the most important part of the book, because we really are taught from our first infant cry, that power is over there, it's somewhere else, it's not in us.

And this is simply not true, even if it's been mercilessly beaten into us, like a form of enslavement. And once you start to think about it, the greatest thing about this moment is that we actually have some very important teachers in the country now called BLM. And virtually the entire Black population of this country understands freedom principles better than most white people. And they usually can't even practice them. And they are beaten mercilessly to make sure that's the case. But Black people understand the structure.

Now, what is this educational process? I was studying the boycott, and realizing how important this was. Rosa Parks was a very well schooled person in the school of public life, she spent time at the Highlander folk school, training with Myles Horton. And she knew very well what she was doing, as did Fannie Lou Hamer. And these people, we owe so much to these people. And to this new generation of people who studied, I might add, the LA riots and what happened after the police acquittal, which is seldom mentioned as the cause of the riot.

And we are facing a similar situation soon with our lovely Mr. Derek Chauvin, whether he will ever be truly prosecuted, charged and put away where he belongs. If there's an acquittal there, we're going to have a similar situation.

So what is power? That essay was an attempt made while I was in Berlin and feeling really distraught. I've been through several gentrification battles around New York, the East Village, and also in L.A. And then I moved to Berlin where I was really struck by how fatalistic the Berliners were about this. I wanted to speak to these people to try and tell them, you live in Berlin, you can fight to keep what you have.

Because there was an extraordinary freedom that I felt in Berlin which was slowly being chipped away by the political establishment and its economic forces. And I just wanted to say, I know many of you have read your Foucault. And power is a bad thing, it’s what we're trying to get out from under. And we think we need to get it.

No, you have it--you don't need to get it. And the people who are telling you, you need to get it, are the same ones who want to lead and control us. We already have it, it's between us when we gather. It's there inherently. Because–and this is the most important part–we're the ones who keep these systems going. This is the lesson of the Montgomery boycott. Those people realized for the first time, we're the ones who keep all these systems going. That's power.

Elias:

This is a bit like when some people discovered during the pandemic that we had “essential workers.”

Fred:

It's very similar. And of course, Myles Horton of the Highlander Center got in a lot of trouble, being branded a communist and so on. He did a lot of work with labor organizing, which I prefer to call worker organizing. And of course, the communists were very involved in the South back then. But one of the things that they were focusing on was worker power and labor power and these kinds of things.

Real Power is Not About Political Parties

Elias:

You have a quote in the book, Fred, that goes, “Politicians hate us, the people, because we are their rivals.”

Fred:

That's right. Sorry to give you the news, folks. I think the question of why they would hate us points to a primordial hate. I know it's sobering to think about this and it's not true of all politicians. There have been great politicians in this country.

But we are their rivals, because the politicians are the ones who claim to have power. And their claim to have power is very important for us not realizing we have power. And if we have power, then everything changes.

All of a sudden you realize power is not climbing your way through a political party. This also applies in corporations, climbing your way up the ladder, whatever. Power is about being able to do things to make things happen to govern your own condition.

Politicians don't like that. They fight mightily to get those positions of power and they're gonna hold on to them, whatever they have to do. And this is where the political parties come in, because the parties are a tool to basically keep the people out. We are the politicians' rivals and that's why people get beat up and shot.

But as I say in the book and elsewhere, power is actually the easiest thing. Let's think about that for a second: power is the easiest thing. You just have to understand that we're the ones who keep the system going. Not the politicians, not the economy.

The Political vs. the Social

Pete:

I'd like to share this parable from Zygmunt Bauman with you and hear your thoughts on it. Bauman said that politics has become like living in an RV park. You pull up your RV to your spot in the RV park. Maybe it’s a low-quality place, very few amenities. But you know, at its best, everyone's safe, and they all have their spot and no one bothers anybody else. You have your TV and your kitchen and everything’s inside your RV.

But sometimes the electric plugins and the water hookups don't work. And you start complaining. You walk over to other people’s RVs and knock on their doors and ask, are your electric hookup and water faucet working? And they say no. And they say why don't we get together and walk over to the manager's office and bang on the door and demand they fix the electric hookup and the water hookup.

Bauman says this is the best case in politics today: you get a bunch of fellow RV owners to go knock on the management’s door. And then they fix the water hookup and the electric plugins. And you call that politics. And you think oh, that was a big moment there, when there was a “revolution” and we got the hookups working again.

But what never happens is you don't co-create the RV park. You don't become a community. You just have shared private grievances that you demand the managers of society solve. And that's our best case scenario. Worst case scenario is nothing solved.

How do we move beyond the best case scenario politics being coming together every so often to demand that the managers fix the minor things that we expect? How do we get out of the RV park and start actually kind of having a shared community that we co-create together?

Fred:

Bauman is an interesting figure who talks about liquid modernity. I wrote about him in a piece on the Nazi’s “degenerate art” show in the 1930s. He had written a really wonderful book called Modernity in the Holocaust where he suggested that this barbaric thing that happened in Central Europe was actually at the heart of modernity.

I guess the first thing I would say is that his example is social. And this distinction between the political and the social is really crucial to any kind of understanding of politics. An RV park is a social, proto-urban form. It's also usually full of poor people, each of whom has found a way to cobble together the cheapest form of living they can find. I guess the problem with Bauman’s parable is that it's cute but it doesn't speak to people who are living in insufferable conditions. It doesn't speak to suburban homeowners who are not. And besides, RV parks are like gated communities for the poor. I mean, the point of a city is that the boundaries, if the political system hasn't stepped in with armed guards, are not fences and walls. And so the RV park is like arguing that democracy is for white trash, basically.

Pete:

I guess the point he was trying to make, Fred, is that politics has become people bringing their collective private grievances together, and demanding managers solve them for them. As opposed to taking ownership with self-government and broadening the sphere of areas that we take control over. That's what I guess he was going for with the metaphor.

Fred:

It's a good start but again, I'm not sure...

The Fight for Neighborhood Councils in L.A.

Pete:

I'd love to ask you something about this. Horace Mann once said, Be afraid to die until you've won a victory for humanity. And I feel your establishment of neighborhood councils in L.A. is one of the great victories for humanity.

And one of my favorite points made about civics was by the great Deweyan philosopher Roberto Unger. He says Americans love talking about civics and community and public life. You go to any government department, and often it's a cult to De Tocqueville and a nation of joiners. And every politician, if you ask them, Do you like community, they say yes.

But nobody in America puts their money where their mouth is in the sense that they don't demand that the government fund and enshrine civic organizations and participatory organizations. So they leave it to everyone to have these participatory things start up and then run out of funding because they never enshrined them in law, or in a governmental budget.

We can think of the great moments where we have enshrined things, like the NLRB enshrined unionization within law. With the neighborhood councils, you said, I'm not gonna just start a nonprofit, where we're gonna get one or two neighborhood councils off the ground and in seven years, it's gonna run out of funding. And it was a nice experiment.

But you made a demand of the city that these neighborhood councils be part of the Los Angeles City Charter, and now it's part of the L.A. budget. And they still exist, so many years later, because of that. So I'd love to hear about that fight and why you chose to make it a political fight, changing the law and changing an institution.

Fred:

Let me start by saying the L.A. neighborhood councils are not perfect. But the original representation in Los Angeles was one city council person for 200,000 people. This was beyond an outrage.

Now, it's more like one rep for 2000 people, 3000 people. I mean, the councils are not strictly political. We knew we could never ever get them into the city charter if we made them political. It would never happen.

We've studied the neighborhood council systems set up elsewhere and they always went for advisory power. My theory was, you give the people a little power, and they taste it and they want more, thank God. There had been councils, but they were set up by the City Council. And they were really only advisory and just part of the political machine.

A neighborhood leader would be put on it and then effectively they’d be bought off. And this is a huge problem in the black community. It's a problem everywhere in the country.

So with the neighborhood councils, we weren't demanding them. I knew and the other people who really wanted them as well, we knew the city had completely broken down. After the officers were acquitted, it broke down. I remember breaking curfew and driving around, seeing these columns of smoke. And there were white looters. Nobody ever mentioned it but this was a multiracial spree.

And people freaked out, as rightly they should have, because it was very clear that the government was totally out of touch, had beaten us over the head and then let off these goons. And it was just outrageous. It was so outrageous that everyone erupted. And so the councils came out of that. People wanted power. They didn't realize they had it, but they wanted it.

So I wouldn't say it was a question of demands: it was a question of rights. We have the right to power. We have the right to self government, every person in this country, every group, every community, workplace, neighborhoods, art centers, the dentist's office, whatever. And so, the council movement which frankly, at the crucial moment, was like two people, was not a movement. We called it a movement, we tried desperately to start a movement. I have some problems with the notion of movement, because I think power needs to be in place. It needs to be where you live, that's where you meet people who aren't like you, you have to deal with them, you have to work things out.

So the neighborhood council idea was power in place. And power in place as a tool to revive community. I did a research project in South Los Angeles interviewing quite a few people–it was some weird academic project, I can't even remember what the reason was. But I was so struck by a couple of the people I met. One woman who was super active in moving the trash bins and cutting the hedges and sweeping the sidewalks. And the police hated her. They tried to set her up, they tried to frame her. They would shine their spotlights in her living room window. She was just the sweetest lady, about 70 at that point. And I said, you know, we're fighting for neighborhood councils, so you can have something for your neighborhood. And she was like, yeah, right, like the system's gonna give us anything.

Well, Mark Ridley Thomas, the political boss who ran the neighborhood, had a neighborhood council. But it was part of the political machine. And what we were talking about was power in place that is not connected to the political machine. In other words, it's based on where people live.

And this principle applies across the board. It's not just what we think of as politics, but in every facet of our lives. So do you have a say over your conditions? Can you say, I don't like these conditions, I want different conditions, I demand different conditions.

And power that can change our condition is in the ability to recognize in the moment where we are now, what we’re doing to hold up the system, to make it work, because it's not working.

So we need to say, No, we need to pull back and to withdraw. And we need to learn the lesson of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And the neighborhood councils are very, very far from this. But there's a lot of No’s happening in Los Angeles. You see it every day now.

And those No’s are part, oddly enough, part of building a neighborhood and building power in place, because you're showing the problem with one of the fundamental tenets of democratic theory–which is that it's based on consent. There's no consent in this country! None. Does anybody disagree with me? There is virtually no consent. So the system is not built on consent, it’s built on something very different.

And we need to recognize this and figure out what it means. Taking responsibility for your lives and for the lives of others is not a burden. It's a beautiful thing. So neighborhood councils were a way to deal with the breakdown of the social order in Los Angeles. It completely broke down for about three days: the entire city was in anarchy.

And people said, What do we do? This is why it was beautiful. They had the chance and the inspiration to ask that question. And they came together across lines and neighborhoods to say we need to do something and we need power. We need to have some control in governing our own condition.

Now, the problem here was that the communities that most needed power were the minority communities that had been crushed, beaten, impoverished, riddled with drugs by the police department for one. So how do you convince people that don't believe in the system and suffer under it every day? How do you convince them to believe in politics. It's really hard.

One of the standard ways is to have a movement. The Black Lives Matter movement is very powerful because people are coming together and making claims and they're getting results.

Role of Cultural Spaces

Elias:

Fred, because you describe yourself sometimes as a cultural activist, what has culture and the arts got to do with all this serious stuff?

Fred:

Everything. I mean, does anybody have a poem handy? Let's read it. It has everything to do with it! (laughter)

Elias:

I know Beyond Baroque in Venice CA was and is today a kind of a civic center, a commons. You took a poetry center to mean a lot of things beyond poetry.

Fred:

Yes, and poetry, at its core, is about meaning, whatever our experiences with it in school or whatever. And one of the great contributions that Arendt was when she talked about politics being about meaning. That's the bridge. Now that has to be played out.

My taking on the poetry center was about trying to ground public space in a place and make as rich as possible a tapestry for people to realize they could reclaim their own experience. One of the programs I'm most proud of was the World Beyond series in Leimert Park–the center of Black cultural life in L.A.--which I crafted with Michael Datura. We would have these alternating readings at our two centers. And we both were like, man, this [geographical] segregation, it's impossible, you can't break it. It's unbreakable.

Of course, segregation is only a symptom of something else, which is the white power structure, but how do we alert other neighborhoods to our experience? How do we get their experience into our experience?

What we devised was a system of meetings of poetry, made by the poets in each community, Leimert Park and Beyond Baroque in Venice–which was thought of as the white poetry place, which it was to a great extent, but not altogether. And we would mix up these programs and move them back and forth from center to center. So Black poets would read at Beyond Baroque and bring their audience, and then the white poets would read it at the World Stage, this amazing, fantastic place in Leimert Park. And we expanded this out across the city into two citywide festivals. We brought in the Asian American community and Latino and Chicano community in East LA.

And we built up these crisscrossing poetry events in which the audiences from each community would drive across town, heaven forbid, and sit there with people they're scared to death of and share a common experience of beauty in words and language that often they did not recognize or maybe considered untrustworthy and wrestle with that. I mean, to me, that was totally political.

To wrestle with language, the language that you have, to hear the words that mean something, in a different neighborhood and community, not as a book, not as poetry day, but on an artists’ stage around which people can meet each other and find them as non-threatening. This is where difference begins to speak.

And that speech of difference, not just difference itself–is so crucial, because that's where you suddenly begin to experience reality. It's exhilarating. I mean, friendships were built out of these events that endure to this day.

When Michael and I first met to discuss this, something that we bemoaned and wanted to address was not being able to change anything. You know, tokenism is a huge problem in this country–in the art world, in the law, economics, the White House, whatever. So how do you get past tokenism to something real?

Poetry is actually a very good tool for that. It can be intense if people are real. I went down to the World Stage about two months ago and hung out for a music night, just amazing. Two or three people I knew were there, one of whom I'd hired from the World Stage to run our bookstore–A.K. Toney, just an amazing poet. His skin was as black as night and you can be sure that that guy experienced racism, even from his own community. I learned so much from A.K. and he learned from me. And now we're friends. I think what we need is more friendship. How do we build friendship? That's where poetry can come in–friendship and politics. That's a big subject.

Segregation By Class

Grace Potts:

I would just point out that segregation is terrible in the northeast, much worse than it is in the south, I think. Because it's not de jure segregation, even though it once was as recently as the late 70s and 80s. But it's a de facto segregation that's enforced along on class lines. And because in the United States, class functions as a proxy for race, right? The lines are hard and fast. I grew up in Connecticut, and those lines around class are very, very firm. There's more class solidarity amongst the upper classes than any other solidarity I've seen.

Fred:

Which includes Black and white folks.

Grace:

Yes, it does. There's an interesting story that was unfolding about eight, maybe 10 years ago, in my old neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut. There was a big kerfuffle because a bunch of middle class white teachers and hospital workers wanted to buy a house together in my old neighborhood, which was a very fancy neighborhood. And the neighbors freaked out. And they freaked out because they thought, we can't have all these people sharing a house together. Next thing you know, we’ll be like those frat neighborhoods over by the university. We can't have that.

But in many cases, you already had four families living in those homes: the owner’s family and the four families that work for them. You know, their live-in nanny, their live-in gardener, the live-in chef. Right? So four and five families live in all those homes on that street. But only one of the four families pays the rent. Their objection was because these people were not of the same class, they could not be in this neighborhood. Full stop. That was their objection, even if they wouldn’t say it in those terms.

Fred:

Is there a neighborhood council there?

Grace:

Gosh no, they don’t need a neighborhood council. They already own the city council.

Fred:

Haha, that’s right.

How would you propose two people who want to go in different directions and also have different skin color meet? In other words, Claire's question is where do we find the common?

Grace:

It’s in a shared need. The thing about the RV park metaphor is that, if you move into this RV park, and the water works and the electricity works, there's nothing to prompt you to meet. But when there's a storm and the electrical system no longer functions, that's your opportunity to form genuine community, right? It's like the classic moment when you need a cup of sugar. And ideally, your neighbor has the same culinary habits as you and uses sugar, right? Or maybe they don't?

So that it's those moments of crisis that present us with an opportunity to develop genuine shared community. I find it's an opportunity, though it's not a foregone conclusion. A lot of people do things that are contrary to building community and developing relationships in a crisis. So it's not a foregone conclusion. But I think that's when the opportunity presents itself.

Fred:

Well just to stitch together a couple of these questions, is there a space for that? Yes, you learn about your neighbor when you need the cup of sugar. And I think the question is, to some extent, those are private actions. So the question is, where are the public spaces for us to come together to talk about our conditions? That's really the issue.

How do you manage it so that it isn't just a cup of sugar between you and me, but a regular space where people can come together and get a handle on what's happening on their block, with their council that doesn't represent them, with a police department that is basically there to intimidate and divide.

Connecting Across Neighborhoods

Elias:

I think I know somebody might have a project that describes what you're asking for. Mike, I’m thinking of the post you made recently about the Writers Workshop in Chicago and what's going on with the Kola Nut Collaborative.

Mike Strode:

Yeah, I was just commenting here about the importance of culture as a sort of medium or context. And the way that factors into the work that I do with the Kola Nut Collaborative and timebanking is that I came to those spaces through other organizing spaces that were centrally focused on the work.

And the challenge is if you go to a space where you only see certain people when it's time to do a particular type of work, then burnout is very natural in that space. It's like, I don't really want to see you, because every time I see you, it's something I have to pick up. And I don't want to pick up that thing.

So the importance of culture in this space is like, there's something else to do, there's something else that we are here for. And so the Writers Workshop was that. And one of the other things that I was thinking about as you and Rebecca were talking was just the challenge of the context of Chicago, which has not gone very far from King’s day. I was just listening to one of my interviews with Stacy Sutton of the UIC Center for Urban Planning and Public Administration.

One of the segments that I pulled out to share as a piece of content at the Writers Workshop was the notion that if you study urban planning and you're from one of these communities that has historically experienced redlining and marginalization, your entire experience of the study of urban planning is a critique of that discipline–because planners were always at the table intentionally developing and designing communities that created these margins, these edges and these lines, the entire design of it.

So here’s the challenge for me. I can go outside in Southeast Chicago and I can rally my neighbors who might have different class dynamics, and we can have a conversation. And I have neighbors who have different relationships with the police. I have a much different opinion of the police than my elderly neighbors. But I've lived next door to them and there's certainly no animosity, there's a way that I can exchange with them.

So I don't have any cross-racial dynamics in my own neighborhood, right? But because of the design of the city, I would literally have to travel 45 minutes away from my home to get into an actual conversation that's cross-racial. And when I get over there, I probably don't want to talk to those folks because they've never really been interested in that conversation. So there's a lot of dynamics I would have to think through.

Fred:

My question to you, Mike, would be how do you build a space which is a regular place where you know you're gonna meet people from another neighborhood? That's the core of this whole thing. And I found poetry was a very helpful thing, because pretty much everyone, at least in that world that I was part of, had a poem. I mean, probably everyone attending this conversation has written a poem at some point, and sharing those is very helpful.

Let's say Bob's girlfriend was reading at the World Stage in Leimert Park, Bob would drive across to hear his girlfriend. They’re both white and they're on a program with a Black person, an Asian person, a Native American, a Latino. So this audience and the poets are completely mixed. Little groups are all there to hear their poets, their people.

So I think the question I would pose here is how do you get buy-in? How do you get people to drive across town and spend some time in a neighborhood of people that don't look like them.

I think what people discover is they want to cross the city, they want to be in a different neighborhood, to have a different experience. Because when you have a different experience, you're more grounded. If you only hear the experience of your white brothers and sisters, you're not going to be any more grounded. That's where poetry comes in. That's where art and culture comes in. I don't know, what do you think? Am I crazy?

Mike:

No, I do not see any crazy in you (laughs). There's a small area of concern that I find, which is just that we have a few of those spaces and some of them travel around neighborhoods to different parts of the city as cultural containers that do some of that work. The challenge is that the people who visit those containers are probably not the people who need the greatest level of work. And the people who might need the greatest level of work, probably need to do some work before they come to the container. Because there's a great challenge that a conflict will occur if they come in there undone, as it were.

Fred:

You're absolutely right. But what Michael and I were trying to figure out was how you get friendship. Your partner or your friend is reading in a foreign neighborhood which is like a foreign country. You get in your car, and you drive to the foreign country. And you're like, OMG, everybody here looks different and scary. And that's true across the racial groups. If you're a black person driving around in a rich white neighborhood, you're scared shitless, because you don't know what's gonna happen. So you drive across to this neighborhood, your partner or your friend reads and you have the experience of a bridge. And I think that experience of a bridge is what this is about, because if we don't build those bridges–this is going to sound liberal, how can I do this without making it sound liberal? But I can't, Rebecca says no, I can't. (laughs)

Okay, how about friendship? Will that work? Maybe?

The Beauty and Danger of the Present Moment

Elias:

We're running out of time here, folks, so let me give you one last one, Fred, which is about the present moment. I heard a Black actress say recently, this kind of a spontaneous moment [the George Floyd protests] is so powerful because it contains both beauty and danger. And so what's your sense of this public space? It's not one in any formal sense. But the protests have taken public spaces in a way that would have been absolutely unimaginable six months ago. Can you make an estimate of what is likely to come after, now that we’re seeing a global collection of protests in public space?

Fred:

What's going to come before is how I would rephrase it. We need to look at the before part of all of this–the history. But I think the danger issue is really real, especially since we have a cracker in the White House. A MAGA cracker!

That's the danger. I think the danger is from the political class or as I like to call it the political caste. It's not a class struggle. It's a caste struggle. Arundhati Roy has been talking about this for a while. Blacks notice the plantation society was a caste society and they are still stuck in it in the south. In the north, it's a caste society we have. And the political caste along with its economic subunits. I think we have to be very shrewd about this, because that's the danger. It's not us. It's the political people: they stir up conflict. And it's not just one party, it's both parties, keeping power by stirring up conflict. That is very dangerous. That led to a civil war.

It is a seldom recognized fact of political history that the South was not only run by one party, it was the first totalitarian state in modern history–totalitarian at the end, not all the way through. It was run by one party that is still very much half in charge of the country, the Democratic Party. And as Malcolm X said, a Democrat is a Dixiecrat in disguise. And that disguise is very well worked out.

So this is the danger in my view. I think we're in for a rough ride. But that rough ride, it's been there all along. It's just like Patrice Cullors and some of the other people in BLM have pointed out, we were just trying to show half the population what we deal with every day. So they took it up town, God bless ‘em. So in terms of the danger argument, this is an extremely violent country.

But where's the violence coming from? Do you hear this question asked? No, nobody asks this question. Back in the 1960s, they rubbed out eight or 10 of the most important energizers of civic life. Has anybody figured out who did that? I'm sorry to be controversial here but violence is pandemic, that's the real pandemic, and it saturates. It's at the heart of lying, it's at the heart of image making. Now it's the heart of just about everything. And so the danger that we have to watch out for is from the political order, in my view. And we must be vigilant, because we are going to be pulled into something if we're not.

And that was what was so beautiful about the neighborhood council movement was that we were pulled into a real mess. And then people started coming together.

This is something that Arendt talks about so beautifully in the latter part of her life, the spontaneous nature of council revolution. When a society breaks down in a political order is illegitimized, as I would argue it is, the people start to organize. So we look for where the people are organizing. And it's not just organizing a movement, it's like organizing in place, to get involved civically, to recognize that you have things to protect, to realize where the threat comes from.

And it's not just the police–who are working class, many of them, and they are really struggling. Probably 80% or 90%, maybe more–I don’t know, I don't have any cop friends. (laughs)

But I want to hold up one of the reasons I don’t–this was my California license plate, Freedom X. I took it off my car because I got stopped by cops. And nearly beaten.

I think the point here is: the danger is in our being tricked. In the Rodney King uprising, everyone was scared. My neighbor was out on the corner, shouting at the police, arrest those people, they're looting my neighborhood. I was scared. People looked at me like I was the problem when I was walking down Main Street. I understand that I'm not the problem. But I am the problem. I mean, it's very complicated.

So where does the danger come from? I think the danger is in each of us, just like the responsibility in each of us. And to be aware of and talk about real politics, not this baloney of the parties and this cracker in the White House. I mean, it's tempting, you know, and that's what they want us to do. They want us to buy into this party battle. Of course, it's important–we don't want Trump in there. But some others do want him. So what do we do?

I'd say get rid of the parties, they're illegal, they're not in the Constitution, for one thing. They are merely tools for winning elections, they should not be running the country. That's the danger. And if you go back to some of the whites who led the revolution, George Washington, in his final speech, was all about the danger of faction in parties. It's often interpreted as the danger of faction, the danger of difference of groups. But what he was really talking about was the danger of parties. The founders had all studied British history, and the civil war in Britain and so on. And they knew that once you have permanent parties, you have serious danger.

Grace:

Sorry, I know, we're getting close to time. And I just want to note this one thing–this mechanism of state violence that animates a lot of things, like precisely the structures that we're trying to fight against by creating spaces where we can connect with each other. And if I'm really honest about that question of how we can have these spaces, the fact is we can't, those spaces don't exist on purpose, and the unique opportunities that are presented in crisis–and mind you, it's a vulnerable moment, it's a dangerous moment, it's when authoritarians step in–but this is the moment for us to do something, to connect across our genuine needs, and develop the culture of meeting those needs, and to sustain and nurture that culture. And that is art is the mechanism that humans use to nurture and sustain that culture. So the poetry, the music, the experience of those times, is what calls us back into maintaining those relationships that we developed in crisis. And really, for the crises we face jointly right now, this is the space.

Fred:

Yes, yes. I just want to say one thing we need to do, it's beholden on us to plan for the future. Because if we only operate from crisis to crisis, then we are being controlled by the crisis. So we come together and we say, what is it that we want? Grace, what do you want? You know, what is the governing form that you want in your neighborhood? Let's just do pie in the sky, let's start planning for the coming moments when power is available. And if you're not ready to propose a structure, then the people that had the power before will take it right back.

So the trick is to be ready, not just to operate in crisis, but to say, what do we want? What would we wish for? As Claire pointed out to me in a wonderful song by the Beach Boys, wouldn't it be nice? Let's figure out what would be nice. Not from a point of view of crisis, because crisis is about violence, crisis is about being faced with something where necessity is so prevalent.

Grace:

Yes, I'm not actually disagreeing with you. But it is crisis that brought forth Mondragon. That's why it exists and persists today. Some of the things that we think are most valuable in our lives were born from crisis. And we took that opportunity to translate what we did in crisis into our everyday lives.

Fred:

But we start meeting, that's one thing that happens. The trick, I think, is to figure out what we want. Because, in Los Angeles, a moment came where the city looked like it would fall apart, not from the riots, but from political secession. And at that point, the political establishment said, Whoa, our power is on the line, we got to give the people something.

And we were there with a proposal for what to give the people. And this is why BLM is so effective, because they have a proposal for what the politicians should give the people. And I think that's our job, wherever we are, to think about what we would want, what we wish for, what we care about. So that in the crisis, when we come together, we say, not just vote for so and so. But like, no, we want self government, we want power, and what are the structures that we want? Okay, a regular meeting place. I mean, the resources of this country are so misallocated. Everybody focuses on Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex, which is totally justified. But what he also warned about was the disastrous rise of misplaced power. So how do we get power in the right place? And what are the structures we would want?

Elias:

Jeremiah Day has a good final comment: he says it’s too bad we can’t all go out for a drink and unpack some of this! Thank you, everybody, for showing up. And thanks, Fred, for an amazing conversation.

Fred:

Thank you, all. And long live Solidarity Hall. So great seeing everybody.

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See you next time—peace.