“LANDLINE” — AN EMAIL BULLETIN BY JAY BABCOCK
No. 0020
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 17, 2021
Music recommendations: Bandcamp (check out both Collections and Wishlist)
Greetings friends!
1. GLASGOW GOT YOU DOWN?
I’ve been reading this book — published by Verso, available at public libraries, purchasable at Walmart — and it is helping with the general despair.
The title is more than a tad misleading: other than a brief discussion of how to easily deflate luxury SUV tires (use a small piece of gravel or a mung bean), How to Blow Up a Pipeline is not an an Anarchist Cookbook-style manual but a manifesto. The author, a Swedish academic/activist named Andreas Malm, says that strategic violence against property—“soft sabotage”—should be an essential tactic in any movement to reverse climate change (or: “global heating”). He argues for soft sabotage’s morality; its effectiveness in liberation struggles across recent history, from Haiti, India, and Iran to the South Africa, Egypt and the United States; and the absolute need to get on with it now, at a scale that is commensurate with the scope and urgency of the shitshow we are facing, his favorite contemporary example being the Dakota Access pipeline saboteurs Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya.
I’m finding Mr. Malm persuasive, and his historical examples inspiring, especially…
2. THE INSANELY HEROIC AND YES, VIOLENT, SUFFRAGETTES OF THE WOMEN’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNION (1903-1918, U.K.)
Malm writes:
“The suffragettes are instructive. Their tactic of choice was property destruction. Decades of pressure on Parliament to give women the vote had yielded nothing, and so in 1903, under the slogan ‘Deeds not words,’ the Women’s Social and Political Union was founded. Five years later, two WPSU members undertook the first militant action: breaking windowpanes in the prime minister’s residence. One of them told the police she would bring a bomb the next time. Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament, the suffragettes soon specialized in ‘the argument of the broken pane,’ sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every window they passed…
“Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: ‘To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation,’ WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst lectured. ‘It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than herself, and to all who are to come after her.’ Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up, Women! gives an encyclopedic listing of militant actions: suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill’s door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dogwhips, breaking the windows of prison cells. Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilization. The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes; deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant action…”
And then, in 1913, they switched to a campaign of arson. More details at wikipedia. Here is Rise Up, Women! author Diane Atkinson lecturing on these won’t-cave-in women in 2018:
Amazing.
3. “OUR IDEA WAS, IF YOU WERE SUPPORTED, WHAT’S THE MOST CREATIVE, BEAUTIFUL LIFE YOU COULD LEAD?”
The San Francisco Diggers were an audacious, anonymous group of street anarchists and visionary pragmatists who helped kickstart-midwife what would become the American counterculture of the 1960s. As the years passed, some formerly anonymous members of the Diggers have given accounts of what they were up to during this period. Actor Peter Coyote and the late Emmett Grogan published memoirs chronicling their participation in that era; Grogan’s Ringolevio is particularly notorious. These are fascinating, essential books, but there are so many other Diggers whose testimony has never been told, at significant length, in a public forum.
With that in mind, here is an in-depth conversation David Hollander and I conducted with key Digger Judy Goldhaft at her San Francisco home in 2006. Judy, a brilliant and committed avant garde dancer-choreographer-artist-activist, talked directly about who she is — who the Diggers were — and how, and why, they did what they did. What a pleasure it was to be in the presence of this wise and inspiring woman.
Read the interview here: “A UNIVERSITY OF THE STREETS”: a conversation with JUDY GOLDHAFT of the San Francisco Diggers
4. TEA, DATES AND A PROPER TENT TO DANCE IN
Here’s a 44-minute video of fiercely ridiculous Mauritanian wedding party keyboardist Ahmedou Ahmed Lowla in a private performance with friends, recently posted on YouTube via Lowla’s American record label, the essential Sahel Sounds. Shred he does, dance they do — with painted rifles.
5. HOUSEKEEPING
Landline is a free email newsletter dispatched to over 4,200 friends and colleagues — cloud ploughers, antifascists, native plant gardeners, Alireza Firouzja fans, old heads from the days of Arthur Magazine (which I edited), and other curious sweetfolk — made up of ideas, nudges and announcements that hopefully form a small bailiwick outside the cruddiness at large.
Landline is free to read (please share!), but paying subscriptions make Landline possible. Hopefully it's worth the cost of one cup of fine dark coffee a month.
Thanks for reading. I am grateful to you all.
Be as radical as you can be,
Jay Babcock
Tucson, Arizona
Edward Abbey: “Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.”