Protest has evolved over the years into institutionalized and funded shell of its former self, where large scale parades and pre-arranged civil disobedience have created toothless hours-long spectacles that scare the organizers—who spend significant energy policing their own protesters—far more than they do the targets of the protests.

No one who has been involved in political action over the past decade can have failed to notice this dynamic, because the Democratic party has made it all but impossible to ignore. The inability of the party to fulfill its former role and grant even the token requests that used to accompany symbolic protests from institutional organizations and unions has become pervasive.

Democrats have become abusive partners in this dysfunctional relationship, rubbing the left’s nose in its own failures as it increasingly courts a mythical center composed of depoliticized Americans disengaged from political concerns.

The constrained and commodified nature of “activism” is geared to produce events judged on their own merits: did the speakers show up? Was there enough water? Did the PA system work? Were participants manageable? Thus, the institutional left has one success after another as it evaluates its actions as events, and not protests.

The Occupy movement  grew as a response to this decades-long record of impotence. But there was nothing special about it. Indeed, Occupy elbowed its way in front of another action that had been in the planning and organizing stages for months, named simply “October 2011”. The coalition sought to use the same tactic in Washington D.C.–an open-ended civil disobedience action to decisively end US wars and curb militarism, with attendant social and economic demands [though one can gauge by the organizers involved just how far it would have went].

Something was bound to pop up from the ruins of “activism”–a dynamic, flexible, broad based movement that would capture the energetic revulsion that so many Americans felt at the reprehensible acts of their new Democratic President, almost from the beginning indistinguishable from his Republican predecessor.

It’s not surprising that the idea that popped was direct action occupation. The tactic has always been an almost autonomic strategy when groups are allowed to form organically and make their own decisions, rather than take orders from a national office. Sit down strikes and occupations were the order of the day in previous labor generations.

The fact that workers at Republic Windows and Doors occupied their factory to protest layoffs in 2008 is not surprising; the fact that such a strategy was not more widespread is. Chicago again is the scene for aggressive seizure of time and space this weekend for a coalition of the Chicago Teacher’s Union and parents beginning a three day protest against the closure of 54 city schools—but CTA’s actions over the past year have been the first in a quarter century.

Despite the obvious strength and long tradition of the tactic, Occupy faced much criticism–not from the depoliticized mainstream, you’d expect that. It was the very activists who had been crying for a movement to save them from the cul-de-sac of institutional politics who pronounced Occupy DOA. Despite the yearning of over a decade, activists themselves gave the Occupy movement bare months, and in most cases no more than weeks,–and sometimes not even hours– to bring decisive victories and copious change.

You’d have thought that the quickness to bring the Occupiers back into their former stables of “activism” would have been accompanied by a better idea—indeed, the “99 percent spring” started by Move On and SEIU, seemingly to undermine Occupy on May Day of last year, had promised a revived institutional activism. And yet, almost as soon as Occupy faded off the scene, so mysteriously followed the “99%” actions. Since then, the focus is once again on large, expensive events that announce their impotence by getting permits and fading away after just one day.

Forward on Climate, was the most tragi-comic exponent of this dynamic in February. The “biggest environmental protest” in history put on by a coalition of groups including Move On, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, marched around the White House [while Obama was in Chicago] and then promptly departed to the dustbin of history. Meanwhile, the Obama administration sends every signal that it will approve Keystone.

The institutional left only seems to come to life when it’s in danger of losing the last shreds of its legitimacy. Last year’s Oakland immigration protests during May Day were envisioned as a response to the perceived hi-jacking of May Day by Occupy Oakland. But the reality was that the immigration events had ceded protest to legislative politics in 2006, and they had grown smaller yearly. Ironically, the decreasing turn-outs were a mirror-image of the increasing number of deportations that skyrocketed toward the end of the Bush administration and only increased through Obama’s first term.

Even the increased activity in Oakland in 2012 was trapped in the amber of “activism” and looked “more like a parade” [as Chip Johnson, conservative hater of protest in general, noted approvingly]. This year, rather than some creative form of escalation, the  same kind of “parade” as previous years has returned. Having completely handed over the responsibility for immigration reform to legislators once again, the May Day action seemed to have no goals other than fulfilling its annual mandate to exist.

This year’s “Fight for 15’ series of one day strikes sponsored by SEIU and local nonprofits seems to fit a similar profile. It’s not a coincidence that most of these one day strikes take place in states where “right to work” laws have passed or are considered to be likely in a near-future. And though “right to work” laws are dishonestly pushed by conservative politicians doing the work of greedy capitalists, it’s not surprising that such laws have passed in state’s teeming with low wage workers.

For years, the national leadership of large institutional unions like SEIU have focused their efforts mostly on increasing their revenue through membership growth and maintaining national power. They deprive locals of autonomy while they hand their member’s dues over to the Democrats in exchange for little to nothing.

Even when big institutional actors like national unions are pushed into action as a last restort, it’s of the most cautious sort. It can certainly be argued that so far Fight for 15’s one-day strikes seem more of a plea to states to raise minimum wage–with the knowledge that such efforts can lead to meager increases—than an actual low-wage worker’s movement. The future of an SEIU-fronted Fight for 15 remains dubious.

What made an idea like Occupy engaging in the first place, was its power to scare governments and corporations into listening. Likely every “activist” whoever marched in a circle, then stood around in an air of impotent confusion when the mc told everyone that the event was over and that it was time to go home, has dreamed of a sustained and aggressive protest action. That’s why it’s surprising that when the left finally got its hands on something like that in the form of the unexpectedly popular Occupy movement, it had to be born perfect, crawl, and then walk a tightrope in less than a month.

It’s true that something of a mythology grew up around Occupy. The frequently fetishized tropes of “process” and “transparency”; the iconography of tents and Guy Fawkes masks; and the mantra of “mic-check” became vehicles of their own leading nowhere. While pleasing on some aesthetic level, the idea of prefigurative politics and of horizontal strategizing in a completely open space with absolute strangers has perhaps reached the end of its usefulness. The first generation of the Occupation movement needs to be re-evaluated, obviously

That re-evaluation should not become an opportunity to redeem vertical leadership, nor to indulge in the kind of natal regression that we’ve seen in Zizek’s recent call for a “Thatcher of the left”. The failures of top down organizing are plentiful; the reason people keep going back to the paternal comfort of vertical leadership is because it promises participants limited paths and a bigger return on their investment than their efforts would merit alone, with a concurrent lack of responsibility for [ubiquitous] failure. Vertical leadership makes good on only the latter half of that promise, but it seems to be enough to keep bringing people back.

Nor should the new Occupy be seen as an excuse to continue to hover only in the realm of middle class concerns, nor to play at being “grown up” with service-oriented, crowd-funded actions that mirror the work of large NGO’s in every meaningful way.

The beta test for an Occupy strategy will require small committed groups and networks to strategize and organize. Luckily, many of these groups already exist from the initial  Occupy of 2011-12. Public assemblies that go to the streets with concrete local targets and goals will be necessary—expecting a depoliticized nation to suddenly appear out of the ether with plans and strategy intact is unrealistic to say the least, given the lack of active support over the past two years.

But within the originating groups, leadership can remain consensus based and horizontal. The new Occupy must subsequently call on those same originating mobilizers to create structures that can be readily usurped if mass mobilizations begin.

The organizing that follows must be focused, relevant and capable of yielding both short and long term victories. Beta Occupy can evolve in myriad ways. It could be a new labor movement, based predominantly on wildcat walk outs and work stoppages in key sectors or geographical locations. As with the rhetoric [but not practice] of Fight for 15, a new vibrant labor movement could organize outside the workplace for a sectoral, wage or geographic polity.

The new Occupy could be in the occupation of closed and closing factories, schools, libraries. It can be in protection of vulnerable individuals, those facing eviction not just from owned properties, but from rentals and homeless encampments. It can be in the liberation of blighted public lands for the bolstering of besieged communities.

It can be all or any of these things, but all of these actions should have a few things in common if they want to reclaim efficacy again. They should stake tenacious claim over time and space. They should lead to leadership being transferred from originating cadres into the hands of the people most affected by harmful policies, policing, austerity and capitalism.

Perhaps just as important as any of these, they should have an antagonistic analysis of local police—because in every Occupy, local police all on their own with no assistance prompting from the federal government have worked like anti-bodies of the corporate and institutional powers that protesters threatened.

And in every locality, police drain vital resources from embattled communities, contributing to insecurity and violence, not ameliorating them. Police are the local equivalent of the federal security/prison industrial complex. As such, constant critique of the police offer new ways of changing local paradigmatic politics.

Nothing is guaranteed. But the antidote to the failure of the first iteration of Occupy can’t possibly be the tactics that led to consistent failure for the previous two to three decades. Occupy should at least get one more chance. Those who are impatient for change, at least owe it to themselves to reject the triumph of ‘activism’ and move on from there.

As the march, which had surged around the city center and lake, came back to Oscar Grant Plaza to plug back into the rest of the day’s events at around mid-day, the police suddenly rushed the crowd from behind, causing panic. In the ensuing confusion, the OPD targeted several individuals. As you can see from these photos, they were offensively brutal in the arrests–but in the case of Prince alone, they went the extra step of tazing him. I think that given that he was the only African American arrested that day, its definitely arguable the extra force was racially  motivated.

I was in the crowd that day and absolutely no one posed a threat to any police officer. All of the protesters brought to the ground and arrested, were quite literally just standing there, except for one woman, who was rushed from behind and yanked from a bicycle.

Now, nearly a year later, Prince, has been picked up on a warrant for a charge generated by the arrest. Like so many arrested during actions of civil disobedience and protest, the district attorney has stacked charges on top of the initial ones, and failed to notify the accused of their arraignments.

For those like Prince, who already faced multiple charges, it didn’t occur to them that they would have to check in with the district attorney to see if even more charges would be stacked on. Despite the fact that the city and county complain about lack of legal resources and funds, they nevertheless generate extra arraignment hearings; knowing as well that these will likely result in warrants.

This behavior is typical of a DA focused on spectacle prosecutions for the viewing benefit of a law and order constituency. The DA almost never “dropped” charges against protesters, for example, throughout the last year and a half;’ rather they kept the charges open, and in some cases brought the charges months later. Again, this generated warrants, creating potentially dangerous situations for activists, given what we know about the habit of police of shooting first and asking questions later.

The DA”s behavior is even more absurd when considering the fact that the office has still not responded in any way to the recent exoneration of two Oakland residents who were arrested and convicted under the shoddiest and most racist police, judicial practices imaginable; no investigations, no studies, no reports about the fact that OPD and DA actions could produce such startling outcomes as the loss of a combined two decades of freedom for two wrongly accused Oakland citizens. Despite years of complaints and evidence that police and prosecution work are sorely racially biased when they are not incredibly lazy and incompetent, the DA continues on its course, with not a complaint from the City Council nor Mayor.

The DA also lacks the time to do all but the most cursory review of the shooting of Alan Blueford, reviewing police files and interviewing Miguel Masso, but doing no investigation of their own. Satisfied, the DA closed the book on Masso only five months after it was opened.

What does the DA have time for? Politically motivated frivolous prosecutions against activists like that of the “Ice Cream 3′, who were disappeared into the county’s jails on bogus “hate crimes” charges that were eventually dropped. The DA had the time to target Chris Moreland, who committed the crime of embarrassing OPD Chief Howard Jordan with the truth about his violent police force. The DA has time for harassment of political activists who’ve been through the system like ‘Ghetto Prophet’, who spoke loud and proud at a recent Justice for Alan Blueford action, and hours later found himself being arrested on bogus charges. And the DA has time to prosecute activists like Prince–a father to be who nearly a year ago, helped create a farm out of UC-owned mismanagement and blight in Albany. It’s quite clear that one of the county’s overriding motivations is to intimidate activists like these and others. Remarkably, almost every one of these people disappeared into the local justice system–those singled out for extra attention–were people of color, African Americans targeted because of their activism.

The math is simple and striking here. The DA and police want Oakland’s marginalized people to develop an ingrained fear of speaking openly about the city and county’s malfeasance. And they want the natural outcome of that fear to be the ceding of political activism and the public sphere to the socially connected and affluent, so that the mayor and council can always describe uprisings as the work of “unconnected outside agitators”. So that the city’s poorest and most marginalized people will even begin to believe that getting out in the street is something that only rich, white people will do. Something that only white, affluent people can do.

We say no.

_______________________

One last thing. Despite the fact that it shouldn’t matter by half if Prince were the most unpleasant guy I’d ever come across in my travels, I have to say it’s extremely shocking to see someone like that brutalized and maligned by the police for standing around at a constitutionally protected activity. I worked alongside Prince one morning at the Farm Occupation in Albany converting the ad hoc rickety chicken coop into an ad hoc rickety petting zoo for a bunch of kids. He was one of the warmest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and someone who’s had to overcome some pretty serious obstacles on top of it. The reality that this father-to-be may have to miss his child’s birth because he’s in jail on this bullshit is beyond tolerable.

Here’s a clip of Prince talking about his participation in the great Occupy the Farm action in Albany last year around this time. Its worth listening to, to get an idea of the kind of positive energy and enthusiasm that the DA seeks to silence.

PFblog has more details on the arrest.

The photo that just about says it all.

After a week of round the clock Dorner coverage, one thing remains clear: the generations-old criticisms about LAPD are as true as ever. LAPD  nurses a culture of corruption, racism and violence and it deliberately protects its brood from the prying eyes of the public or accountability.

From beginning to end of this fiasco, LAPD has comported itself with the same lack of scruples and antagonism towards human life that it has been known for for decades: shooting first, asking questions later and going on a Dorner profiling spree that led some African-American men to wear t-shirts marked “I am not Dorner”. The apparent deliberate incineration of Dorner and/or whoever else might have been in the cabin, is the testament that this culture of violence is the norm across law enforcement agencies.

All of this should be obvious. But what’s less clear, is the image of Dorner that has emerged. In fact, the fixation on Dorner has overshadowed the focus on LAPD, because to a great extent the lever of criticism against LAPD has become Dorner’s account of his experiences and opinions.

This is all very problematic as Dorner, whatever his crimes and mental comportment, is an unreliable interlocutor at best. At worst, he is a mass murderer who killed two people of color simply because of their relationship to someone he held a grudge against.

Much of the spectacle surrounding Dorner emerged from the release of a so-called manifesto that shifted commentary about Dorner from a presumption of innocence to a politicized confession. This is where the problems began, and they began because most commenters, myself included, took the manifesto at face value. There are normative protocols that most left-wingers SHOULD take whenever someone is publicly accused of a heinous act, or crime. The presumption of innocence, of course; is not just a constitutional trope, but also good practice. The rejection of all, not just part, of public documents said to be about or from the individual in question until positive proof emerges, is another.

Had those people commenting on Dorner, and I include myself in that number, relied on these protocols, we would be discussing the LAPD first and foremost. We would still be talking about their unbelievable propensity for lawless violence, as shown in the shooting of two women and the shooting and assault on a third man, while “searching” for Dorner. The short shrift given to these two episodes prevented a true accounting of the danger that many LA communities were plunged into as police searched for Dorner with their own safety foremost.

Residents in the neighborhood where Emma Hernandez and Maggie Carranza were shot, reported hearing as many as “60 gunshots”. Some found bullets in their doors and on their driveways. False accounts that claimed the second victim of the Dorner shootings wasn’t injured, neglected to mention that David Perdue was indeed not injured by gunfire—he was injured when police rammed his truck, giving him a concussion. All of this passed nearly without comment in the public sphere.

We might be talking about Michael Nichols as the ultimate example of the safe harbor police departments in general give to repeat violent, abusive and racist police. Despite being the focus of an internal investigation for over three years after accusations by several women of color of being raped and coerced into sex with him, Nichols was still allowed to police. He is now the focus of another lawsuit, by a victim who claims Nichols beat him severely in an attempt to extort his cash. This news arrived at the luckiest moment for Nichols, who has avoided scrutiny completely during the Dorner manhunt. Almost no attempt was made to link Dorner’s supposed narrative, to their living embodiment in Nichols.

Additionally, during the Dorner manhunt, an off duty police officer is reported to have brandished a gun during a fight with civilians at a sushi bar. Again, a testament to the culture of violence and lawlessness nurtured at LAPD. But hardly a mention in the public sphere in the rush to analyze Dorner’s views.

Regardless, the manifesto became the focus of interest. Within that context, there have been some egregious errors in reasoning and ethics. These begin with ignoring the timing of Dorner’s report on Evans—weeks after the event, and a day after a bad report–but they go much deeper. Almost all of the analysis of Dorner’s manifesto overlooks his promise to kill “misandryst” lesbians in the LAPD, and other misogynist comments throughout–such as his focus on the “disgusting” appearance of another female officer he holds a grudge against. Dorner depicts Asian officers as prisoners of cultural restrictions on speaking out; he calls for the deportation of Fareed Zakaria for never having “a positive thing to say” about America.

Most importantly, the focus on Dorner almost always ignores the promise to kill family members of police officers with whom he has beef. In the problematic context of creating a heroic whistleblower narrative out of the manifesto, this is almost as disturbing as the apparent shrug at the murder of Quan’s daughter and her partner.

All of this is further compounded by the confusion around the versions of the manifesto. One version was around 5,000 words long, another about double that. Mainsteam media exacerbated the confusion by not commenting on the existence of the two separate versions, nor seeking to discover whether the shorter was an edited version of the longer piece—which would bring up its own problems, regarding what was edited, why and by who.

No matter the reason, this pit would-be manifesto analysts against one another: some remarking on the political content regarding assault weapon bans, others positing that the portion that contains the most overtly political [and inane] comments might be manufactured, and thus potential evidence of Dorner’s innocence. The latter is a position that implicitly accepts portions of the previous manifesto as genuine.

Accepting, again, the entire manifesto as truth, one finds an enthusiastic Navy Seal; a lover of military jargon; a fan of George HW Bush, the progenitor of today’s wars in more ways than one; and a supporter of our current conflicts.This combined with his commentary about liberal war supporter Zakaria implies a certain Islamophobia and jingoism. These images all draw a clearer image of the kind of people drawn to police service in particular, than they do an insurrectionary rebel opposing police.

The failure to focus on these aspects of the manifesto when it was discussed publicly in left wing circles, prevented important connections–the ever-more popular destination for ex-military personnel in police agencies, for example. There were no connections of Dorner to Miguel Masso, who served in Iraq, and returned to be involved in at least two episodes of serious violence, one of which left an Oakland teen dead. Indeed, I was surprised to find many “radicals” using Dorner’s military career as a way of normalizing him as a more effective discursive tool.

One thing is for certain and verifiable. Witnesses to the Big Bear standoff and publicly available media archives show an police with a total disregard for law and human life. Law enforcement apparently took the conscious decision to burn down the cabin in which Dorner was hiding. From liberal to civil libertarian, this should indeed cause a furor. Authorities as of this writing have still not determined whether Dorner was in the cabin, and at the time they could not be sure if he was in the cabin alone. Moreover, the act seems to have been part of a planned response, according to audio records of police band exchanges.

Despite this, commenters again and again undermine valid arguments against police mentalities, and those in LAPD in particular as representative of their most virulent iteration, with the need to turn Dorner into an insurrectionist, folk hero, revenge figure, or blowback revenant. Whoever Dorner was, almost nothing that was verifiably done or said by him is a more powerful commentary on the LAPD and law enforcement, than every communication and action of the LAPD itself throughout this period. I fear the reality where this is not obvious.

Update:

–h/t@onekade comes this report on Democracy Now, where former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper claims:

“…then they went to the pyrotechnic version, or the incendiary version of CS gas. And whether it was intentional or not, a very predictable outcome of deploying seven burners in what appears to have been a wooden cabin would predictably leave it in rubble…I’m not going to second-guess it, but I think over the days and weeks ahead it’s imperative that that agency and the rest of the country…By definition, these pyrotechnic versions of tear gas start fires…They are not intended for contained structures, particularly wooden structures.”

–the attorney for Maggie Carranza and Emma Hernandez claims he counted 102 bullet holes in the vehicle. That’s in addition to bullets found around the neighborhood and in people’s homes, apparently.

old broccoli never dies, it just becomes flowers; another lesson learned at Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez

After over five months of unbelievable transformation–from dark blighted encaged dumping ground to accessible garden and outdoor library—Biblioteca Popular is once again in crisis as the city has moved to shut down the space. On Wednesday, city workers abruptly arrived and removed our “Biblioteca Popular” sign, and the next day they put a lock on the gate that we and neighbors use to access the space.

This all comes at a critical juncture in the life of the People’s Library. When as activists we began this project in mid August 2012, we had minimal expectations. We wanted to draw attention to the unused building and the extremely toxic impact that it had on the neighborhood for nearly two decades. The decaying fence, rotting facade and overgrown grounds invite constant dumping both on the property and in front of it. And the negative space around the building encourages only negative transactions—prostitution, violence and drug abuse. Opening and stocking the building with books, we believed, was a message to this and other communities that positive control of their neighborhoods wasn’t a pipe dream; it was real and achievable. We also thought that creating a conversation around the building would fire a salvo against austerity logic, and up the ante for city governments, daring them to listen to the sleeping giant in their poorest communities or lose legitimacy entirely.

But when we began to do these things, providing the symbolic services that create hope and strength in a community—access to knowledge, green space and food production, an open, malleable space free to use for positive instead of strictly negative things—we found a deep reservoir of support. Neighbors wanted the space repurposed, and they knew that the city would never do that because only the oldest members of the community remembered a time when the space wasn’t shut up and fenced.

Biblioteca Popular was just too good and had too much potential to let go after a few days of activism. The initial group evolved into a hybrid structure with neighbors new to activism and community development. In fact, we were all new to that, and we all learned a lot as we progressed. With no small amount of enthusiasm, we together embarked on what has been, no matter the outcome, a rewarding journey.

From laying the first garden boxes, planning out our summer, fall, and then winter libraries, nurturing the garden and then, incredibly harvesting the food, for me and other neighbors and activists there were many lovely and wondrous firsts: I was surprised to learn that I like working with kids and that I enjoy gardening, despite having feet firmly planted in curmodgeonry. These and other things made us decide, despite the enormous amount of work and hard-thinking necessary for an ongoing project like this, to double down and see things through to their logical outcome.

The Winter library and garden

The partnership was effective and got the city’s attention. It was obvious that a fight for the building was a long-term one and would require resources and dedication that we didn’t have yet. But there was not much of an argument for why the grounds couldn’t be converted into a positive space for people who lived there. Our first hurdle was removing the constant presence of police, who, despite claiming to protect a city under siege, were being tasked with threatening gardens and libraries. It was clear that many people would understandably not use the space if there was even the most minute chance of being arrested or cited. So we first needed to create a safe space for a population that already has various impediments to activism.

Our first idea was inspired by the work of organizations like Phat Beets and others around the US, in terms of getting some kind of written agreement to use the grounds on the North side of the building. We faced immediately our first hurdle when we were told that the city’s real estate agency would not separate, even temporarily, the grounds from the building. This, despite the city’s admission that it had no intention of either rehabilitating the building or tearing it down and repurposing it.

We eventually secured a tacit agreement to be left alone while we and neighbors developed some kind of long-term form for the space. The subsequent struggle was in handing off the responsibility for the space to a group that was predominantly members of the community and not just activists. This was also, unfortunately, difficult. We had several regular supporters of the space, and at times this number swelled to dozens from the community.

But there have been several sobering realities to work against. In the first place, rain, shortened days and cold weather obviously put a damper on the community building that occurred in the summer and warm fall months. But more importantly, life just gets in the way of even the most committed members of a community building process like this. Bottomliners come and go, and that’s natural; but for a project is just getting on its feet, relatively long periods without active input from neighbors can be devastating. In the short-term, our goals became survival until Spring and Summer—laying down wood chips to temper mud and aid in soil rehabilitation, and keeping a core set of books dry and available. Good weather in the spring would give families a renewed chance to plant crops and would invariably inject some much-needed life into the grounds.

All of that may still happen. Renewed activity of the past month or so, in fact, seemed to be turning things around. Some of our founding kids began to reappear, after burrowing at home with game boxes and TV, many had just assumed we’d left—and with the short attention span of most activists, I can’t say I blame them. We began to do a regular harvest and mini-library on the sidewalk which became popular. Some of the naysayers that typically gave us the cold shoulder actually inquired about getting more involved. One of our most obstinate neighborhood detractors, in fact, began to give us some hard-won praise.

And then, without any warning, city workers appeared and with them, at first police. This had happened before, of course, but not long after we managed to score the “pinky-swear” with the city and we were able to assure people with reasonable certitude that there were no repercussions for participating in the project. Now, of course, that’s an assurance that doesn’t pass the laugh-test. Despite obvious benefits from a people’s space in a neighborhood bounded by regular violence and where young people naturally gravitate towards nearby liquor stores instead of distant parks, the city would rather have the space return to service as a demoralizing trash heap.

While the People’s Library remains at this crossroads, its important to note that despite any failings the project may have had, it would be difficult to manage the space and building in any worse fashion than the city has. Despite the fact that the city’s own historic preservation department regards buildings like Miller Library as generators of income and stability for neighborhoods, the city has squandered the space with obvious effects on the area.

Communications between the city’s Planning and Real Estate Agencies reveal the corner the city’s misuse has painted the community into. When approached by a potential buyer of the building—a well-known gentrifier who wanted to demolish, not purchase the building—the city’s historic preservation specialist was forced to admit [pg.47] that the building was virtually unsellable for such purposes. In the first place, it is against federal law to demolish historic register buildings “especially if the deterioration came about through neglect.” The city offered the developer tax credits for the necessary refurbishment, but noted that these would only be available if the building would be income-generating. That meant that even if a developer wanted to create a community center there, there’d be no economic help to do so.  Nothing became of the offer in any case, since it couldn’t make money for anyone.

Thus, even with the city’s developer friendly disposition, it is virtually impossible to sell or demolish the Miller Library. The city’s lack of planning and  ideas leaves the community with the burden of an ever deteriorating building that takes up a huge amount of space on the struggling neighborhood—half the block on the Miller side, and at least a quarter of it on the 15^th street side. The city doesn’t even properly seal the space from the community.

This apathy towards the needs of the community is further highlighted by the recent revelation during a city council meeting that the city had applied for—and then failed to spend—a 600,000 dollar state job training grant. Though difficult to believe, the supposed beneficiaries on the funds were Biblioteca’s non-profit neighbors: the under-utilized Youth Employment Partnership which shares the North fence with Biblioteca Popular; and Volunteers of America, the organization that runs the transition housing across the street from Biblioteca and that once used the library building for job training until it lost the funding to do so.

All of this points to the fact that more Biblioteca Popular’s are needed throughout the US and world to challenge the austerity logic and apathy of local governments. British community and occupy activists recently won a hard-fought battle to save a local library by Occupying and running it, in much the same way as we did at the People’s Library. The Friern Barnett Community Library project in London had some natural advantages over our own action—the building had recently been decommissioned and needed no repairs. Nevertheless, it was resuscitated almost instantly into a community model because its importance in the community still echoed. The community drew a line in the sand, and the activist/community partnership that thus developed is now negotiating a permit to run the building as a library and community center.

Communities and neighborhoods can win significant victories in these kinds of organizing models. These can lead to new politicization of depoliticized communities and can also deliver tangible victories, while providing an answer to the never-ending grind of austerity logic. Disempowered communities pushed forever to the margin in favor of the economically powerful now have a powerful way to say “not this time”. If Biblioteca Popular has contributed in any way to that emerging reality, then our victory is far greater than we could have ever imagined.

So its really inexplicable why “reporter” Ted Friedman has written this, the perhaps worst sourced and most innacurate article ever posted to a blogsite. The innaccuracies begin mildly, with a misstatement on the year with the highest number of homicides in Oakland. Both the number and the date are incorrect, the high was 148, not 125; the year was 2006, not 1998.  But that’s just the beginning. This article is so inaccurate, that even the date of the march and Cukor’s murder–February 18th–is misstated as November 18th, not once but twice! This is all the more remarkable, in the context of Friedman revealing that he joined the march when it arrived in Berkeley at “10:20pm” on “November 18th”.

Despite having the date wrong, he would obviously know–since he joined the march when it arrived in Berkeley nearly two hours after Cukor called BPD for help–that the march was miles away when Cukor placed his call to BPD. Yet, after a meandering  jumble of apocryphal crime statistics, Friedman states, uncategorically that: “ The Fuck the Police march killed Peter Cukor, and that demonstration began in Oakland.”

I’ll grant that the entire article is a hair’s breadth away from being flatly dismissed as hallucinatory. And it should be noted that even by the flexible definition of the term ‘reporter’ in this day and age, Friedman hardly qualifies as such. But these constant attempts to lay heinous crimes at the feet of a movement that on its worst day broke a few windows, are grotesque and nauseating. The apparently deliberate inaccuracies of date, time and place; the hysterical Munchausenian accounts of harmless street theater; and the febrile misuse of loaded accusations to describe mundane encounters: it all needs to stop. You idiots are dealing with real people’s lives. Seriously.

I had timed my statement at something around 4 minutes and even read it out loud several times, so I knew that I only needed to find one person to donate some time to me to get through it. But Council person Kernighan at the last-minute, changed the rules, limiting speakers to only one minute. She did this after the city had arranged, via back channels, a succession of about 6 pro-police clergy who were given 3 minutes each by city-enabled shuffling of time. It was fucked up and bullshit. I could’ve waited for someone to donate me time after I ran out, but I didn’t. It was only another  minute.

Kernighan directed the police to make me stop or arrest me. I told them they could arrest me when I was done, but thankfully before any of that happened, the Riders–self-styled successors to the Black Panthers–surrounded me in a de-arresting action that was just simply fucking awesome. Anyway, here’s the statement, with the zinger at the end I didn’t get to read. And video of it [and others great comments] below [all clips from Daniel Arauz]:

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6 months ago, I participated in a direct action to re-open an abandoned former library in the San Antonio district. The building, which was also once used as a high school, is a national historic landmark that belongs to the people of Oakland and yet has sat there empty for over ten years.

Before the action, the shuttered building couldn’t be legally used in any constructive way, so it instead became a dumping ground for garbage, self-destructive substance abuse and the under-age sex trade of the area—sofas, mattresses, drug paraphernalia and just plain waste littered the building and the grounds. A report from Urban Ecology several years ago noted that the derelict building and grounds created an unsafe environment for neighbors at 15th and Miller avenue where the property is located..

It’s no surprise, then, that neighbors came out to partner in repurposing the building almost as soon as we started. The promise of a library or community center in a negative zone in the middle of a troubled place was exciting to everyone who lived around there. By the end of a very long day, our new collective of neighbors and activists had cleaned up the building and started a garden on the grounds.

That all ended before midnight, though. The city administrator sent practically every available officer to come shut us down. They stationed sometimes as many as three patrol cars 24 hours a day for a week afterward, with only one task–to make sure that the building wasn’t used . This at a time when OPD and the city constantly complained about not having enough police to combat crime in the city.

We came back, anyway, and in partnership with the community, eventually created a garden and a library on the grounds, which are still used today.

Leaders like Ignacio de la Fuente at the time stated that the building couldn’t be repurposed because it needed a seismic retrofit the city couldn’t afford. It was right around this time, in the face of city-wide criticisms over an out of control OPD, that Mr. Wasserman began his first 100,00 dollar contract.

What were the costs of the seismic retrofit? While they varied, at the lower end, the estimate had been calculated from around 250,00 dollars. 250,000 dollars; about half of which you’ve already given to Mr. Wasserman’s firm, who you hired for advice on how to bring OPD into compliance and, who, by his own admission last week has nothing to show for it. You’re planning on giving him two and a half times as much tonight to include the cost of paying for the advice of William Bratton, whose failed ideas on police work are already well-known.

What are we getting for our money? Well, Mr. Wasserman’s promised to produce a plan of some kind that might be available some day soon; that is if even more time isn’t needed to develop it and more money, of course.

What could the city have done with this money instead? So many possibilities of which the following is only 1: the city could have retrofitted the building for not much more than the price of Mr. Wasserman’s contract.

It could have given that building–which no one has wanted to buy for nearly two decades–to the community for a symbolic honorarium. The community, with partner organizations, could create a collective and raise funds for the renovation of the interior—a project that could be directed to employ only local people, and especially those from the neighborhood. Those people could use and teach the skills they already have, while learning new ones.

The end product would be a community run-resource that could be used for any number of wonderful things and set an example for struggling communities everywhere.

Instead, you’ve double-downed on counter productive policing methods and you’ve invited in their most enthusiastic poster child while spreading the myth that more–and more aggressive–policing means less violent crime.

Despite the best efforts of pro-police lobbies to link natural declines in violent crime to the strategies of local police, as was done in the much-hyped example of Bratton’s tenure in New York city, it’s just not supported by evidence as shown in studies like those by Richard Rosenfeld of University of Missouri—St. Louis and that of Bernard Harcourt and James Ludwig..

The only way to stop violent crime is to create stronger communities that have the resources they need to care for and nurture themselves and their families, and to create a just society where economic survival is in a community’s control. A society where ideas like randomly stopping poor people of color and groping their bodies in the hope you’ll hit the jackpot and find physical evidence of wrong-doing, sound like brutal remnants of a bygone era.

I by no means intend to argue that the plan I just laid out is the only way–or the best way to spend the money you’ve wasted on consultants like Wasserman which now exceeds over a million dollars over the past year. Indeed, there is a wide spectrum of better ideas, beginning at one end with literally taking that money, breaking it into twenties, and tossing it into the street at the end of the meeting. The possibility of more than only a handful of consultants benefiting from this expenditure would already be dramatically magnified.

Adam Blueford, the father of Alan Blueford poignantly describes the real horrors that can come from stop and frisk and racial profiling. Halfway through, council person Libby Schaaf interrupts him to remind him that Police Chief Jordan claims there won’t be any more racial profiling. Incredible.

As the Black Riders, self-styled inheritors of the mantle of the Black Panthers approached the podium, council president Kernighan suddenly remembered that there was some kind of prescribed order to the speaking roster and turned off their mike. That was fine with them, they went ahead unamplified and rocked the house anyway.

Mike Wilson really laid out a great case about why what we were doing, though ultimately pointless, since we all knew they’d vote yes no matter what, had value as setting the predicate for the next stage of direct action.

Jessica Holly, aka Bellaeiko spoke about her fears of raising an African American male in the US, because of profiling and policies like stop and frisk, and incidents like the killing of Alan Blueford and Oscar Grant. To highlight her case, she attempted to show video that she herself had shot after a political event of two young African American men being racially profiled. Despite her clear position on these issues, CBS news later mischaracterized her quote as being solely about gun violence, not racist police policies. The link to her video from Ustream is below [for some reason it doesn't provide a player on wordpress]

I’d like to feel I learned a lot over that period, and that the organizing and strategic skills that I picked up went into making Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez a successful initial action, and an enduring community presence that’s activated only a fraction of its potential. I spend a lot of my time there, and in the interregnum of political energy we’re currently experiencing, don’t really feel like any new writing would be very useful to anyone at this juncture. I may feel differently soon; I’ve been writing this blog for almost ten years now, after all.

The archive, Occupy Oakland Essays and Reporting at  hyphoo.wordpress.com is linked in the top menu of this blog. It also has a link to the archive of GA recordings.

 Its been a long painful and hopeful year for activists around the country. The Occupy Movement that began in New York was a bright light in an otherwise dreary and demoralizing decade of failures of activism and direct action. What began as unprecedented demonstrations that aggregated tens of thousands to what had once been manifestations of just hundreds, had its zenith in various forms throughout the country. In Oakland, the high point of planned and executed action came on the November 2^nd, port shutdown, and then the smaller, but still impressive December port shutdown.

There were actions that were smaller, and not exactly successful: the preparation for Longview was a triumph of logistics which ultimately had nowhere to go; foreclosure defense and labor aid actions demonstrated the ability to aggregate the power of Occupy to on-going struggles, and the potential for radicalizing institutional organizations. But they too, have had short lives and won no mass victories. Actions with Causa Justa, ACCE, at American Licorice and in solidarity with the Pacific Steel workers showed just what a novel mass movement can do when its lens is in focus, though they too proved ultimately useless.

That’s the hopeful part for Occupy Oakland, in summary; its revealed a lot of potentialities for activists, literally putting a loaded gun in their hands and only requiring of them a sound and evocative target to use it. Now for the painful part. No one said direct action was going to be easy, but most activists in my experience were shocked at the reaction from the police and the OPD throughout the last year’s worth of actions. This, of course, is clear to all who’ve been paying attention throughout the last year. You needn’t have even gone to the demonstrations to know it. Clubs, lethally wielded less-lethal weaponry, dangerous use of chemical weapons; all of this has been done in the open, in full view of the public and media.

Perhaps people were ready for this kind of reaction, and perhaps others who were shocked and radicalized by the experience came to expect it. But what’s been more shocking perhaps, is the collusion of the District Attorney’s office and city government in abusing the judicial system to stopper up popular demonstrations. It would take a horrendously long post to enumerate all of the scandalous corruptions of the local judicial system in Oakland.

These range from the oppressive, like extra-judicial stay away orders and exaggerated probation sentences, to the grotesquely unjust, like bringing bogus hate crimes charges against protesters. Throughout it all, the DA’s office has rarely dropped charges, though they imply that they do. Most charges, large and small, have been dangling over the heads of protesters for the past Occupy year, leading to absurd situations—like refiling the charges on the eve of their one year termination to coincide with an Occupy event commemorating the arrests that spawned them in the first place.

I won’t even go into the city, DA’s and police easy manipulation of local media. They easily spin these 1% corporations into a pro-establishment news cycle simply by hitting an email send button. Always at the beck and call of the powerful, the media published mugshots of protesters who were never brought to trial, but accused in absentia of all kinds of violent crimes [and they set a trend. The SFPD followed a similar strategy in smearing protesters arrested during anti-colonial marches recently]; they repeated hearsay charges but never checked on their veracity, like the protester who was supposedly accused of carrying dynamite, but who was never prosecuted for carrying explosives. They filed press releases as stories; ran hagiographic pieces about the tough decisions city administrators and mayors need to make about free speech; dutifully ran to the offices of Ignacio de la Fuente whenever there was a quote needed about law and order. They even published an op-ed by the DA so riddled with inaccuracies and slander that she could have been sued for libel had she actually mentioned any protesters by name.

What’s ironic is that the Occupy actions in Oakland started with a mostly hazy, but nevertheless directed, focus on national level issues. Of course there were radical critiques of capitalism and the security state it needs to survive; but they were tempered by the ongoing plague of foreclosures, constant warmongering, and an economy almost comically forever teetering on the brink of collapse. The agenda was national and not local for a large number of protesters; especially those who were coming out into the streets for the first time, less driven by ideology than by simple frustration and anger.

The city thought it could ride that sentiment, herding the protesters into the rut of confused progressive electoral politics while they ran ahead to get in the lead and score points with concerned voters. Things didn’t happen that way, no one asked for the mayor’s help, and the mayor and city administrator soon proved themselves to be at the beck and call of the chamber of commerce and other corporate cheerleaders who feared the camp would turn attention back at them, rather than hazy overlords.

The police and city attacks that followed forever turned a page for Occupy. Though Occupy made many mistakes, nothing was more toxic to an open organizing system than the constant threat of arbitrary arrest, unjust imprisonment and brutality. The numbers began to winnow [and yes, not only because of police actions]. But especially in Oakland, righteous anger against the police, the city and the local judicial system became a unifying constant for activists associated with Occupy. It was initially an aggregator of esprit de corp, but now, as the populist cast falls off Occupy, leaving only committed activists, the main focus of activism has become a never-ending battle with the police and city for contested space. Symbolically and initially, this was a good thing, that could have [and perhaps SHOULD have] inspired thousands of others in long-standing fight with the establishment to do likewise. But when a formerly mass movement has become a cadre, it’s the cadre’s battles that begin to be fought, not those that would be fought under a mass perspective for all of the people of a city, state, nation or world.

Thus, what can be said to be “Occupy Oakland” has been frozen in a re-enactment of battles with police and city establishment, solely for the purpose of fighting them. And even when greater goals are stated, the default action is again, a stand-off with local police to take a contested space that now has very diminished value to most outside of the cadre. Despite this being a valid form of activism for a group that has been battered by police for their activism, the role of activists is not to fight battles for themselves and their cadres—they are the advocates for those that can’t or haven’t yet risen up, those who would choose other terrain and other containers for their own battles with the establishment if they had the opportunity.

This is not an issue of tactics, it’s not even one of strategy. Here’s a simple metaphor: the band in the fellowship of the ring gives up the quest to reach Mordor, and instead stages endless glorious battles with the Orcs for territory. The Orcs are bad, there’s no denying it, and they prop up an evil rule. You do need to eliminate or get past the orcs to get to Mordor. But they aren’t the target.

Biblioteca Popular and Community Garden on August 26th, 2012

Whatever happens in the coming days and weeks of the Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez, the action has so far brought together an unprecedented union of local activism with Occupy tactics and community organizing. Though bottomliners began with humble expectations—filling the library with books, dropping the banner, inspiring communities to oppose austerity by taking issues into their own hands and escaping arrest—within hours they found that the action itself caught the imagination of not only the neighborhood, but a greater public audience as well. Mainstream media, normally addicted to negative stories about occupations, covered the story both honestly and sympathetically. A City of Oakland library administrator and candidate for the district seat even visited, giving their kudos.

Despite this wide-spread mainstream support, the radical politics of the action have always been front and center. That’s because they are easy to understand for even the least politically sophisticated persons: people have the right to control their communities, no matter what city government says; taking property left to rot through willful incompetence and/or greed and repurposing it for communal good, is an unimpeachable act; cities are perhaps the worst austerity offenders, directing endless finances at “security” measures through police, while cutting off funding for neighborhood keystone services vital to social health. Most importantly, all sanctioned attempts to end this reign of misuse have failed; it must be contested through direct action. Every response to  Biblioteca from the community embodied these points.

Not surprisingly, then, the city’s exaggerated police reaction—which shut down the entire neighborhood from 16th st., to 23 avenue, to international and 24th avenue–was widely condemned by all who witnessed it. Some community members that I spoke to expressed shock when they realized that the police action was not a demonstration of some unprecedented interest in a murder or robbery in the neglected neighborhood, but was instead aimed at shutting down the increasingly popular library. And when police stationed cruisers running their engines twenty-four hours a day around the neighborhood to prevent re-occupation of the library, the sense of disgust from the community at the waste of resources and seeming contempt for residents was palpable.

No one knows for sure why police eventually stopped stationing vehicles at the intersection of Miller and 15^th,   but they did just shy of a week later, on the following Sunday afternoon. One hopes that the most salient reason was to avoid the embarrassment of explaining the outsized waste of resources.

Following the Biblioteca shut down, the action has gone through various permutations; all of them have been empowering to the community and have continued to keep open the discourse on the decades of austerity and neglect that have created an atmosphere of chaos and hopelessness in the “murder dubs”. First the books and garden were transferred to the sidewalk elbow of decaying fencing around Miller and 15^th streets. The enthusiasm from the community only grew and was perhaps even greater, because the entire collection was visible and accessible from the street. After police cut short their 24/7 watch, activists and members of the community focused their attention on the nascent garden bed that had been started by kids from the neighborhood on Biblioteca’s first day, entering the grounds to fill it, despite admonitions from police that trespassing charges could result. The first bed was laid with donated soil, compost and starts, then another was built and filled, then another. Homemade compost bins were added, and some benches were made from discarded lumber found in the neighborhood; there is no shortage of police for stopping the positive use of forgotten property, but dumping of all kinds continued right in front of parked police cars throughout the last weeks. For once, that waste goes towards enriching the neighborhood, not cluttering it.

This is where the rubber met the road for Biblioteca activists. The murder dubs didn’t get its name by accident; incidents of violence are high, the neighborhood faced police invasions in the days after the raid as a consequence of shootings and armed burglaries. Moreover, the area is ground zero for International Boulevard’s notorious sex trade, where a small army of young and very often teen women march day and night under a feudal patriarchal regime as toxic as any that mainstream capitalism can produce. Some of Biblioteca’s biggest supporters are ex-felons, and more than one is a former occupant of the halfway house across the street. One of them, in fact, berated police on the day after the raid, recounting all the times he had shot heroin and received blow jobs in the building under their nose. He meant this as a bit of sardonic and comic criticism. But that supporter has battled with heroin addiction for the majority of his adult life–some three decades according to his own math. Facing poverty and a lack of options, he’s tried to kick the habit with Methadone over the last few years, with a marginal level of success. Biblioteca’s most enthusiastic participants are often undocumented; one new bottomliner commented today that a relative had been recently deported due to a routine brush with the law that would generate no more than an expensive traffic ticket for a legal resident. The dangers are real, and the ambiguous relationship with the police, can be a source of insecurity and stress, where it has been one of relief for the documented.

The kids who’ve adopted the building and grounds as their own, also face a sobering environment; they live with the constant threat of their parents disappearing into the legal system and facing deportation, sometimes unhealthy and violent home environments, and the call of attractive solutions to tough problems embodied by prostitution, violence and drug use. More than one of the parents of the kids who are responsible for helping to create the community garden are “paleteros”–selling popsicles for lack of better options. They must hope for the best in the summer for their unsupervised children.

There are also logistical challenges. By the end of the second week, activists and community members are facing some predictable stumbling blocks. Books can endure only so long unprotected from the elements. And the elements are not the only enemies facing the milk crate sidewalk library–a 24/7 watch by activists was running on fumes by the end of the first week and exhausted activists faced the reality that the books would be vulnerable to vandalism and large-scale theft from local entrepreneurs or official efforts to eliminate this on-going referendum on city government’s uselessness. Indeed, shortly after activists made the decision to conserve energy for other efforts and cease the night vigils, someone vandalized the library, destroying crates and books, flinging them into the street and over the fence and tearing the eponymous banner in half. Hours of very careful and detailed sorting and categorizing were undone in moments.

Prompted by this sudden and cruel reality check, and the work of recreating the library that would be needed, the activists moved forward with an idea that had been floating around for some time–moving the library into the grounds behind the building along with the community garden. Biblioteca is now a self-contained and unique entity, existing on unused city property, ostensibly without permission, and under the control of members of the community. The space weds the healthy food and knowledge base absent from communities like the “Twomps”–the experience of Biblioteca demonstrates that these are  the most intensely felt aspirations in the community as residents seek to end their cycle of poverty, violence and decaying infrastructure.

The greatest challenge will now come in the form of providing community members the space, sense of security and resources to step up fully and take over what the activists began on the inaugural day of Biblioteca Popular. Regular meetings to discuss the disposition of the library and the building have begun, and while there are many issues to circumvent–including translation and varying levels of political sophistication and vulnerability before the law–community members seem very excited to create a new kind of political and social zone in the Biblioteca.

None of this is easy–the odds of a successful outcome are daunting. But there are heartening signs: police now avoid the 15th street side of the building where the garden and library are located almost completely–either by decree or their own choice, it’s still not clear. The city seems to have, for the time being, turned a blind eye  to the use of the property. More and more community residents seem completely comfortable with enjoying the benefits of a modest library and open green space in their neighborhood, and even undocumented residents who voiced concerns about entering just a few days ago have started their first bold forays into the contested space. The community’s natural, if not always recognized leaders, have become increasingly involved, not just in “helping”, but in directing the future of the space, including a campaign directed at eventually opening the building. No matter what happens, Biblioteca lights the way for a new form of activism, where Occupy tactics reshape community organizing and open up the potential for creating organically self-radicalizing communities.

Update:

Just when the library was on a steady course to become a self-sufficient community aggregator in the empty lot at 1449 Miller Ave., police arrived on Tuesday accompanied by several Public Works vans. I was told by the three police at the scene that they had been instructed by their lieutenant to patch the holes in the fence. They had no further orders, however, and the library on the other side of the fence remained intact. What followed was the kind of wasteful and useless repurposing of public funds and resources that most Oakland citizens have become accustomed to: police stood by and did nothing as three cars careened around the corner of Miller and East 15th at an alarming speed in an area where children had been playing just minutes earlier; the city called out four public works vans, one of them was there simply because the radio had malfunctioned in one of the vans and he was there to receive transmissions and then relay them to his co worker in another van; the hole was “patched” with a sheet of chain link attached by easily removed hooks; workers added a metal lattice in the area where the fence meets a brick and mortar wall on the other side, which will serve as a perfect ladder for those not wishing to jump the barely five foot tall fence in one of the many areas where, over the decades, the barbed wire has disintegrated away; and etc.

The action had a different effect than the one intended by Ignacio de la Fuente, who most likely ordered the police response long after the OPD had seemed to limp away in an acknowledgement of their buffoonery. Several neighborhood residents who came to use the library and found its entrance closed were incensed. They went out to organize the community to come to the meeting at 5:30pm that day that had already been scheduled. In one of the most organic congregations of community that I’ve witnessed, about a dozen or so parents came out with their children to talk about the next steps; not only in re-securing the space they were coming to depend on, but to re-open the building as a library and/or community center. Most of the participants were low-income working people of varying levels of documentation in this country, they brought their children, some of whom participated. The meeting was bilingual and faciitation and structure also developed organically, which for me, after a seeming lifetime of frustrating inflexible meeting structures was especially gratifying. The next steps will include direct actions aimed at council members and a petition drive of neighborhood people which will demonstrate the overwhelming support for community control of the space.

The power of a united community to change city policy through direct action was nonetheless evidenced, despite the temporary setback. Police officials did a slow drive-by and observed the level of community support; the next day Ignacio de La Fuente, the district’s council person, sounded much more conciliatory in his statements to Oakland North about the space, saying that use of the space could possibly be worked out with community members.

For the time being, participants agreed to keep the library going on the sidewalk on the 15th street side again, during after school hours, until the grounds are secured again for community use.

People’s Library in the First Hours of its Brief Life

On Monday morning, in the first recent action of its kind, anti-austerity, Occupy activists and radical librarians converged on a newly opened derelict building in the Fruitvale district and began to stock it with books. The building at 15th and Miller Avenue had been a library for over six decades, then an alternative continuation school founded by radical Chicano activists, and an adjunct to a halfway house across the street; but it had been abandoned for over a decade since. The libary was part of a national set of Carnegie grant donations, still known for their architectural beauty; the building remains in the National Registry of Historic Places. But long years of absolute neglect have meant a decaying facade. A crumbling barbed wire fence keeps families and children from using the green space on the building’s grounds, and for years has created a dark corner where drug-addicted people and street sex workers escaping police harassment have sought refuge; not surprisingly, and with other things on their minds, they left a pretty foul mess inside and out, that the city had little interest in addressing.

That all changed on Monday morning. Having gained access to the building and grounds, the main gate mysteriously moved aside and the door wide open, activists and community members spent hours cleaning the built-up and stagnant refuse of the forgotten interior’s accumulated detritus. Others brought milk-crates full of books and stocked the shelves, still in place over forty years after the building had ceased being a library. The call out to resurrect the library brought more books; one activist estimated that there were well over a thousand books on the shelves, sorted by author and subject—non fiction, fiction, young adult, children’s, poetry and Spanish language. Activists suffered under no delusions about the permanency of their act—they realized that at any moment the police could arrive and evict them. They were only a handful for the first hour or two, but the community immediately appreciated the significance of a sudden library in the middle of the neighborhood. The first patron was a sex worker who picked up a romance novel; then a Spanish-speaking resident on his way to work, beaming with joy and surprise.

By noon, kids and families from all over the community were stopping by the new library and picking up books. Books were checked on the honor system and no card was necessary; as one activist put it, “your soul is your library card”. The response from the community was overwhelming: “thank you for doing this, please stay”. With such an incredible amount of public support for reversing the neglect caused by the city’s austerity logic, it was not surprising to face an exaggerated respressive police response. What did surprise activists was its quickness; less than an hour after a rousing inaugural potluck and poetry reading and the ground-breaking of a community garden bottom-lined by the neighborhood’s children, police cordoned off four square blocks around the library. Dozens of squad cars descended on the neighborhood; police threatened those inside with arrest and gave them scant time to rescue the books and leave the area.

Activists took the books to safety, and, disheartened, agreed to meet at the library again the next morning and decide how to proceed. No one involved had high hopes. The dejected group sat in front of the newly secured space—the front door blocked with plywood, the gate awkwardly fastened with hard plastic zipties—but couldn’t decide what to do. The kids who had set up the first garden-beds showed up, asking if they would be able to finish their work. Somewhat bolstered, the group decided to bring the books back and arrange them in front of the fence. By afternoon, the current sidewalk iteration of the library was open, and the banner had been transferred to the fence. The new stacks looked oddly triumphant and unbowed in their ad-hoc milk crate bookshelves. Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez was back, after only a brief pause in its newborn life.

The Resurrected Library on the Sidewalk in Front of the Building

The community seemed more engaged at this point, not less. There was a great deal of anger against the police reaction, not surprisingly—residents roundly denounced the response, given the awful impact of the decrepitude of the building and its new, empowering incarnation as an aggregator of community. More books were brought out by members of the community. Another potluck was held; one member of the community, a master chef, undocumented immigrant and resident of the community for decades, brought home-made fettucine al pesto and flan. It was a bribe, he said, to convince the activists to stay. The community had never had anything like this and needed it. Dozens of similar interactions have followed. Neighbors nightly bring out gallons of coffee and cookies; another neighbor brought a bag full of the tamales he makes and sells for a living to help the activists who guard the books from being taken by police. The answer from the community has been overwhelming; don’t leave. And the activists and the community have responded; as one passerby put it today, “Alright, you’ve got the books on the sidewalk. They ain’t stopped nothin’.”

That doesn’t mean the nascent community library doesn’t face problems. Activists can’t keep this up forever. Running a sidewalk library with an antagonistic 24-hour police presence is far from easy or manageable. While incredibly supportive, a large proportion of the community faces legal challenges for a variety of reasons in participating—from being undocumented to having already been through the justice system. At best this is a working class neighborhood—but many of its residents are society’s most precarious workers. The odds of gaining entrance into, much less holding, the building again are not good, either.

But the repurcussions of leaving and then doing nothing with the space are also untenable. To allow the city to spend tens of thousands of dollars in police repression to turn the building and grounds back into a dark ugly garbage hole is repugnant to both activists and members of the community—though pleasing to garbage-advocates and violence-fans like the district’s supervisor Ignacio de la Fuente. Activists and community members have begun to set their sights on the grounds as the final target. De la Fuente claims that the building is unsafe to occupy without costly earthquake retrofitting. That may or may not be true—the building was being rented out by the city to Volunteers of America as late as 1998 without the retrofit. There can be no practical or moral argument for keeping the children from growing the garden that they designed and built on the grounds, however, or any reason for keeping residents of the community from using the area for a community center and garden. Now that the question has been opened for discussion, city hall must argue why it must deny the community access to the grounds. And it doesn’t have a leg to stand on.