#berkeley commune

[carlwillat]

Trashin’ Downtown

YIIIIIPIE! YIIIPPIEE! and with a cry of “Hit the streets”, an energetic mob surged into Center St. God, was I surprised. I had had the feeling that we were going to listen to a couple of concerned speeches, get rained on for awhile, and then go home. But suddenly I was exhilarated and scared as we all ran down the street yelling and windows crashed into the streets all around us.

At first all I could do was keep running and wonder what was going to happen to us all. Visions of masses of bloody bodies kept wandering ‘round my brain, of helicopters and blue meanies. But soon the spirit of the day prevailed, and I found a nice 3 foot stick/club which was very helpful for large holes in windows.

Tried it on parking meters, but noticed that bricks, hammers and picks did the job, so I engaged a brick for that purpose. A cadillac found an early death as we attacked it with two by fours, clubs, rocks and knives. Found another better club near People’s Park. That aided in the killing of one lone car in the Park, and a couple of holes in Fraser’s.

Shattuck was something else. Watching those showroom windows of the car palaces was like a cinerama spectacular. Something like seeing solid water fall and break into solid drops. The salesmen’s faces behind windows -- WOW!

The Safeway store buckled under our attentions. Their garden supply store got it first. Soon the windows were busted and we were standing there with shovels from the store, bricks from the wall, and various other paraphernalia.

All of a sudden, as I was standing there with a shovel and a brick, another dude (also with two shovels) and I were approached by two ugly pigs who told us to “SCRAM” They took our shovels from us and split. We were amazed for a split second. Arming ourselves with bricks, we continued the downfall of Safeway until the pigshit got too heavy and shopping carts had demolished the windows completely. 

Back up Shattuck, going north, we found that the windows on the right side of the street had miraculously escaped. We did the job on all pig institutions. For me, the day was about over. Pig confrontations near Hink’s, and then one last victory -- the Selective Service office on Grove. Tried to find something dry enough to light and throw through the broken door, but we were too wet, so we dripped home, happy as hell.

The jury had acquitted the Chicago 7 of conspiracy to incite riots. We have convicted the State. 

POWER TO THE PEOPLE! (1970)

[dystopiance]

Another Carnival of Left Politics, an excerpt from Black mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

"It seems the respectable left organizations (YSA, PLP, SDS, PFP, ISC) never tire of providing entertainment for the bourgeois - and worse, keep trying to rechannel any really radical energies back into their bullshit forms. Their self-styled 'revolutionary attitudes, based supposedly on Marxism (antique 19th century ideology), certainly aren't reflected in their lifestyles - just ask one for a buck [...] and now that Huey is convicted what will they do? Sadly, we all know, they'll have another rally, they'll picket death row, they'll march on the courthouse, they'll shift from their tv armchairs to auditorium armchairs; while they sit righteously clukking like hens, disapproving of the 'terrorists and provocateurs' who are taking care of business. And in the absence of any relevant politics they make false separations and throw around labels. Well, who are the saboteurs and the terrorists? We are. All of us who will sabotage the foundation of amerika's fucked up life; all of us who strike terror in the heart of the bourgeois honkies and all their armchair bookquoting jive-ass honky leftist/white collar radicals who are the VD of the revolution.

And if there's a panther or french student on the stage talking at them, they go home feeling radical, as if revolution were a disease you could get by association... the Only thing a liberal or honky leftist is good for is to throw between me and the pig/ or to jack up for lunch money. And when the people on the streets realize it, they'll run the bastards back up to their tv sets.

At the same time we must understand the role these organizations have played. PFP has rallied elements of the white community to the "support" of the besieged Panthers / but the time for support is over, not to speak of the time to stop playing with bourgeois forms of electoral politics. And YSA rallies have provided a focus for street energies, but rallies and pickets won't stop the racist pig oppressor.

What we have to realize is that these early levels of struggle have been transcended by the development of the struggle itself. Chicago reveals a higher form of street event and the bomb on Telegraph reveals another, while Cleveland's ambush offers an altogether higher plain, moving us toward real (not metaphorical) guerilla struggle... But at our present stage of development the issue is not whether we should take to the streets, finding some form of mass expression, RATHER than engage in clandestine activity. There is no separation in the revolutionary movement. Every act is assimilated into the struggle, if it furthers the revolt... We must be flexible to rally one day and bomb the next. And we must find new forms for massing and moving in the street at the same time as we create alternative modes of actions when street action is impossible.

And in France we saw that the worker-student alliance didn't come about because the workers responded to traditional left forms of organization, but because they saw the students and street people moving the struggle to a real level of confrontation in the streets. And in a post-industrial world, what have the traditional leftists to offer workers who know that their work is meaningless. Certainly not another does of protestant work ethic. They still can't understand it but in 1919 when they were struggling for higher wages and better working conditions DADA was in the streets calling for total unemployment and the new [man...].

But beyond these considerations the movement must understand the real reasons for its actions.  We do not take to the streets because we want free speech or free assembly (those are liberal demands) nor do we take to the streets in support of Chicago or Paris, or anywhere or anyone else (i...) We have our own struggle. We are fighting for ourselves/ for our community/ for our very lives. The issue is not something other than ourselves/ we are the issue. It is the liberation of our lives that we are fighting for/ to liberate ourselves from tight-assed bourgeois life, and it is our experience of the boredom and misery of amerikan life that drives us to destroy it anywhere it confronts us. "

Berkeley Commune

UP AGAINST THE WALL/MOTHERFUCKER

[misinterpret it as you will]