I am posting today a document from 1969, a summation of the
Battle of People's Park in Berkeley, CA. It is one very cool document, for
several reasons:
1. It reclaims another bit of the history of people's struggle from
the Great American Memory Hole. Those who came up in the '60s will find their
memories jogged, while younger folk will get a glimpse of a different period in
our long battle to smash exploitation and oppression.
People's Park was created by radical students and community
residents in Berkeley, CA on a trashed and abandoned lot on the University of
California campus there. It embodied many of the strains of what we think of as
The Sixties—a radical critique of the corporate multiversity and of capitalist
property relations, a turn to "natural" rather than built
environments, do-it-yourself approach to social change, direct action tactics.
After a period of community meetings and articles in the local underground press,
construction began on April 20, 1969. Residents donated tools, sod, plants,
time and sweat.
California governor Ronald Reagan had run pledging to crack
down on UC Berkeley students, whom he had called "communist sympathizers,
protesters, and sex deviants." Here was his chance. Overriding ongoing
local negotiations involving activists, the U and the city, he sent cops in on
May 15 to trash the park and erect an 8' chain link fence around the site.
A campus rally produced a march of thousands to liberate the
park. Cops fought them off while Reagan's chief of staff Ed Meese ordered in
hundreds of reinforcements from all over the Bay Area. The pigs used shotguns
and rifles, killing student James Rector, who was watching from a roof and
wounding over 100. Meese nrought in the National Guard, days of freeform street protest followed, and the park was
eventually reclaimed.
2. The document is an impressive early attempt at summation
in Marxist (and Maoist, to be more exact) terms of a major struggle by Red
participants. In this case folks who had helped build the Park, and took part
in the action summed it up, using the method of analyzing strengths and
weaknesses, and looking at the class forces and political lines involved in the way
the battle played out.
3. It is a glimpse at the birth pangs of new communist
movement of the '70s. This can be seen most clearly in the polemics are
delivered against other tendencies. Least effective (in retrospect) is the
section targeting a Jim Mellon article on People's Park in New Left Notes (the
newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society). Mellon was an early theorist
for the trend that became the Weather Underground, while this paper is clearly
aligned with the emerging RYM II trend. The authors of the article critique
Read more!
