Written by Angelina Llongueras   

Those of us lucky enough to have been part of the collective joy, empowerment and vibrant energy that made of Oakland last Wednesday an example of what a community that has lost its fear and has awaken to the reality of cooperation and right to decide what concerns us all (the body politic), cannot be lied to. We are aware of the whys of the media denial that we were there in the tens of thousands – between twenty and thirty thousand and certainly not three thousand - just to get started with the first big lie. Indeed there are hardly any media pictures that show what my simple, amateur camera registered, like thousands of other “private” cameras that have been made public to fight the silence, did. We are aware that to tell the truth: the beautiful truth of the joining together and the wonderful feeling of liberation that exuded from every corner of the city and port would be to expose the structural ever present violence of lies and distortions that used against any real genuine popular movement that is being as successful as Oakland was. Collective liberation has to be invisibilized because if other people saw just a glimpse of it, then what would happen to the corporate beehive??

We live at a time when it is not as easy as it used to be to silence a mass movement – so what can be done?? Distort it. Do not tell the essential facts but go to peripheral ones and repeat them once and again so people will forget what happened – not the ones who were there, indeed, for being there has become an indelible experience in our lives that will move and stir the best in us till the end of our days on the planet, but the ones that did not breathe it, the ones who saw or heard, or overheard from a distance - and will focus on something that took place outside of the main context. Focus on the night violence and once again you can use that other, matter-of-fact, structural violence of creating televised fear to make people think : “Mass movements are dangerous. Even if they are well intentioned, they cannot avoid losing control,...” . Aaaah! Control! What a term to dig into and research!

Now, talking about such a loaded term as violence: Everyone has to “take for granted” as a “normal condition of existence” the sickening televised violence of the hatred speeches, the fear conveying messages, the insistent repetition of everything that can “help” us doubt ourselves, feel powerless, disjointed, isolated, ill…our collective sickness keeps the pyramidal system going – if we can feel just a little bit better off than the (black, gay, woman, immigrant, homeless, divorced, jobless, you name it) and keep believing that our subservience will keep our place and theirs distant enough…so, an exercise of collective health and happiness like Oakland showed the world must not/ cannot be allowed to be seen, heard, felt, experienced, envisaged, dreamt...

And of course, the cameras are not present and reporting closely during the day but at night, when some either agent provocateurs (plausible) or idiots (in the “best” case scenario”) who play warriors, engage in a battle with the police instead of taking a martial arts course that would channel their energy and help them strategize intelligently and learn about alliances, opportunity and other devices taught already 5000 years ago in the Art of War.

It most certainly is a war, and a very unequal one, and the best weapons to fight it at present are our willingness to stop supporting the oppressors financially with our money, with our “debts” – another term worth digging into – and our validation and obedience to their vision. It is our personal research, our collective self education, our inquiry, our listening to each other and caring for one another not in words but in deeds, and our firm commitment to healing the collective physical , emotional, cultural, mental, and spiritual wounds that the monopolistic despotism of corporations have created, that will help us win not only decisive battles like the fought in Oakland on Wednesday, but the actual war (healing the foreclosures, the fracked earth, the looted dying oceans, the dirtied air, the orphaned animals, the poisoned vegetables and food, the war depressions and craziness, the economical despair, loneliness, exclusion and isolation, the violence that we carry as a reflection of the one inflicted daily upon us, the use of the arts as a business of alienation and creation of false images of “success” rather than the expression of collective wisdom, celebration and humor they are, the autism between generations, our lack of “time” to be there for ourselves and for the others in the reality of what we all are).

If these are our most effective weapons, as I think they are, then there is an “enemy” we must be attentive to: stereotypes...please, let us not fall into this trap. I have heard – not in the corporate media - that would not worry me, for, I have already explained that I take their lies as a matter of fact – but even in supposedly alternative circles that “Anarchy” is to be kept at bay in the Occupy movements. That is a stereotype, a very wrong one, and I cannot put up with it. What must be kept at bay is the use of violence, not anarchy.

First, let me tell you I am not an anarchist, so I do not write to defend a particular philosophy. Just as I am an agnostic in what concerns religion, I am also politically “agnostic”, but to use anarchy as a synonym for violence must be avoided. It is true that there is and there has been violence within certain moments, sections, etc, etc… of the anarchistic movement, and it is also true that anarchists defend that violence is not and must not be the monopoly of the state. And that is not an idiotic thought by any means! But just as there is and there has been violence within the socialist movement, the social-democratic movement, the democratic movement, or the republican movement, or any other political movement you may think of, without us defining them as “violence”, let us avoid stereotyping anarchy.

Let us make use of history, please: the US has the moral duty to go from a state of denial to a state of research. Too many times, and to an extent that has been much bigger and much more ludicrous here than in any other part of the world, this country has used adjectives in a totally meaningless, damaging, ignorant and devastating way: what is the meaning of “terrorism”, “communism”, “anarchy”????…do not get away from these epithets, please, look them up in the dictionary (a good thorough objective encyclopedia), google them, dig into them, follow their thread and see where they take you...what concerns anarchy you can learn a lot from a way of thinking that tries to go the farthest in conceiving of a society that would try not to coerce, not to punish, not to exert violence on others and on oneself. You will also discover a movement that has gone the farthest in trying to eliminate hierarchies,bureaucracy, and the corruption they imply, and that has defended freedom with a passion bordering on obsession. You will find luminous hidden American collective treasures, like the array of creative and energetic methods and actions of the IWW, you will engage in cooperativism, free and committed trade-unionism and some of the most brilliant general strikes in the history of the peoples of the world. Think of Ukraine, Spain, Somalia…all those amazing social intuitive experimentations in organizing the best in the human collective and succeeding in most cases. (That is why anarchists have been so massacred!). Those are things we can and should learn from. And we do not have to continue the old sad confrontations with other forces that indeed have their dark sides too, but that can also offer a magnificent array of creativity and improvement in the pursuit of human happiness and justice. The people of the US need to spend this coming winter in libraries, conference rooms, high schools and universities, community colleges, neighbor meetings, gatherings of all kinds with a blend of different generations, discussion forums and whatever more you may think of and they have to research all this legacy. They must do it for two basic, essential reasons: first because we have to learn fast, and second because the distortion and invisibilization I was talking about at the beginning, which has already happened in reference to Oakland – as early as on the same day when people were carrying up a most improvised general strike and closing of the port – has been ongoing, and we need to dig out the goods for our next ®evolution.

I realize that this writing has no “quotes” and it might be called “uninformed”, so, being a woman originally from Barcelona, now living in San Francisco, let me use a really classical one to finish it: I must say that although Kant bores me terribly, I cannot but admire his sagacity in his categorizing (he was German after all) of different societies:

A Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy)
B Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism)
C Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism)
D Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)


Dr. Angelina Llongueras
San Francisco, Saturday November 5th 2011