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Title: The Next Eclipse
Author: anonymous
Date: 2018
Language: en
Topics: rural, midwest
Source: Retrieved on July 25th, 2018 from https://thenexteclipse.wordpress.com/
Notes: https://thenexteclipse.wordpress.com

anonymous

The Next Eclipse

An invitation and a challenge

The Next Eclipse is an invitation to shift our perspective on southern

Illinois. Rather than seeing it as a dying region waiting for outside

interests to save it, we propose that what makes it special is rooted in

its status of being economically overlooked. A better future for this

region will be built not by the wealthy or their politicians, and

certainly not by more polluting industries, but by everyday people

organizing ourselves to build a unique way of living and sustaining the

life, history, and struggle of this region.

The Next Eclipse is a challenge to build the capacity for regional

autonomy in this time between the eclipses. By “autonomy,” we mean the

possibility of a life outside the existing economic and political

relations, the possibility of a dignified, free, and equal life here in

southern Illinois.

The Next Eclipse, finally, is a short book that has been passed hand to

hand in southern Illinois, its intended audience, and shared over a far

broader range. It has inspired others to think about their own regions

in new ways, and there are rumors of similar projects in different

places.

We are currently collecting stories from people who have lived and

struggled in Little Egypt. We are interested in stories about a wide

variety of topics: subsistence farming, labor struggles, struggles

against racism; about fights for the forest; about what you cherish most

about life in southern Illiniois. If you would like to share your

stories with us, please visit our contact page by clicking here. (

https://thenexteclipse.wordpress.com/contact/ )

vol. 1: The Next Eclipse

Preface

The following text was written in the weeks before a solar eclipse, the

totality of which passed over southern Illinois on August 21th, 2017. In

seven years, a second total solar eclipse will be visible from the same

place. The two paths of these eclipses make an X across the so-called

United States, intersecting in Makanda, IL.

The Next Eclipse is the beginning of a vision for regional autonomy, and

a challenge to southern Illinois to build the infrastructure for such

autonomy in the time between the eclipses. It is an attempt to allow

these astronomical events, reduced by local governments and businesses

to nothing more than opportunities for tourism, to have some deeper

significance for the inhabitants of the region.

It has been a pleasant surprise to find that the text has resonated with

people in other places as well. Reading groups have formed in a handful

of places around the country. We hope that the text inspires the

reflections of others in their own regions, as we have been inspired by

movements for autonomy around the world.

The night before the 2017 eclipse, a march led by musicians took the

main strip in Carbondale, IL. A hundred or so people clapped in time and

sang “Negra luna [Black moon],” a song from a musical tradition rooted

in resistance to colonization. A banner at the front of the march

declared “THIS EMPIRE, TOO, WILL BE ECLIPSED.”

Since that eclipse, it has become more and more clear that certainties

are scarce regarding even the near future. None of us know what seven

years’ time will bring. On the short list of certainties, things around

which a life can be build, three things stand out:

First, it is certain that at 1:59 pm on April 8th, 2024, for 4 minutes

and 9 seconds, southern Illinois will fall into darkness in a shadow

cast by the moon.

Second, it is certain that we owe nothing to the institutions that

prolong this empire, and that we owe everything to each other, to those

working to retrieve the world from the ecocidal and biocidal clutches of

the economy and its government.

Finally, it is certain that in the course of time, this empire, like all

the others before it, will be eclipsed.

Nothing can prepare you for a total solar eclipse. It is worth stopping

whatever else you are doing. It is worth traveling great distances for.

And it is worth allowing it to take on significance in your life – not

merely the dumb movements of rocks and gases, but a moment that reveals,

that inspires, that ignites.

For life and joy; for freedom, equality, and dignity; for a patient,

deep, and sensitive rebellion.

Carbondale, IL, February 2018

1. What is an eclipse?

In ancient Greek, éklipses meant “the abandonment,” “the downfall,” “a

failing or forsaking,” or “the darkening of a heavenly body.”

Two of the most pronounced differences of the natural world – day and

night – find themselves momentarily confused, reshuffled, paradoxically

intertwined.

In those moments, all the ranks, badges, and hierarchies that bind the

powers of the earth, are revealed for what they are: the stupid games of

humans, who have forgotten their place in the mortal order of things.

The eclipse reminds us, contrary to the meticulously structured optical

illusion of this social system, that it is the sun and not money that

breaths life into the inhabitants of earth.

The fact that the eclipse has been viewed by the ruling class of the

area as a momentary economic manna from heaven only underlines their

idiocy, their disconnection from the world.

The fact that we tie our fate to them, that we allow them to decide the

fate of this beautiful region, only underlines ours.

What is an eclipse?

an abandonment of those dependencies which prevent our lives from

flourishing;

a downfall of those powers that destroy us;

an honest recognition of what has failed and forsaken us;

a darkening of those entities who seek to decide our fate as if from the

heavens;

What is an eclipse?

Let’s allow the eclipse to be an invitation to be present, together,

before the challenges we face.

Perhaps to eclipse is something we do. Perhaps an eclipse is something

we become.

///

This is a call. It is meant for those who hear it.

We’re not trying to argue. We are writing for those who have all the

arguments and reasons they need. Consider this a flare shot into the

momentary night of the totality:

for those who are looking,

for those who are sending out flares of their own,

for those who may have caught sight, through an accidental glance, and

recognize a part of themselves in what they see.

For those who understand that we are living through the end of a

civilization, and who want to build a new world within its empty shells,

its ruins, its ashes, its wake.

For those who see that such a world will not come from the politicians

or divine economic forces, but only from our own prolonged and committed

efforts.

For those who have given up faith in all the mechanisms of “change,” and

are ready to assume responsibility for their own future.

For those who understand that there is no hope on the horizon, unless we

create it.

We offer no argument. We only want to state the obvious and point the

direction that follows.

2. What is obvious?

We all know it is ending.

Trump is not an aberration. There will be no “return to normal.” The

damage has been done. America is over.

For some of us, America – while flawed and incompletely realized – was

inseparable from an inspiring vision of human progress. It is therefore

not without some pain that we watch it become a parody of itself, its

hallowed institutions transformed into reality television, its ideals

turn into propaganda for the naïve, its most evil traditions of white

supremacy, exploitation, and sexism once again resurgent.

For others of us, we say “good riddance” to a country whose founding

values were inscribed in blood-red hypocrisy, and whose world-historical

legacy is to have accelerated the genocidal and eco-cidal forces of

capitalism.

But whether it is a moment of solemn acceptance or celebratory joy, the

truth is obvious: America is over. The question now is whether we have

the courage to go beyond it, or whether we will accept its zombie-like

afterlife, marked by a blatant effort at total control over its

population.

///

At a more local level, we can see the writing on the wall: the economic

fate of Carbondale is tied to the University, which is tied to state

funding. State funding has revealed itself to be fundamentally

unreliable. With Rauner, a process that has been underway for decades

was merely accelerated to the point where it has become undeniably

clear. The state cannot be depended on to care for the fate of this

region.

To some, this has been clear for a long time. The university has been

ravaged for decades by a rotating managerial class that has shown itself

unable to chart a path that works for the university, let alone the

region in which it is embedded.

A new Chancellor arrives, carefully projecting a gruffy masculinity

designed to assure us that daddy is here, that someone is going to save

the day, that he’s done it before. How many times will we fall for this?

We know how these people operate: cut some things, build some things,

send out applications to the next University. Progress on your C.V. is

all that counts. The chaos of southern Illinois has been a ladder for

too many administrative entrepreneurs.

The only plan that will ever count as “realistic” to that managerial

class is to “streamline” the university. Liberal arts will be

increasingly consolidated into fewer departments, and corporate money

will be attracted to build the robots and drones that will displace

workers, surveil everyday life, and wage war against anyone who

challenges the power of corporations to turn the world into a giant open

air prison. This is the only real growth industry of our time, hidden

behind the innocuous banner of ‘tech.’ The university will be brought

into the twenty-first century, a bit late, as a research&development

extension of the powerful.

In this context, many are looking for a way to jump-ship, to leave town

and find some stable employment elsewhere. But there’s not enough room

in the world’s gated communities for everyone. Instability and precarity

are the present and future of this world. You can desperately try to

save your own hide, but the odds are stacked against you. Another path

must be created for those of us who understand that stability at the

expense of others is an illusion, always threatened by the fear of those

excluded others. Another path must be made for those who want to create

the conditions for a good life – abundance, comradery, virtue,

compassion – here where we call home.

Such a path cannot be found on the existing political or economic map.

It is off the boring charts of liberal and conservative and libertarian

and socialist. It is a road that must be made by walking.

There are some, in their own places, who have taken steps in this

direction. Small experiments in resurrecting a sense of collective life,

a concern for the fate of a whole community. A town of 3000 people in

the hills of Spain, Marinaleda, has created an agricultural co-operative

that is owned by and employs the whole town. They deliberately chose

labor-intensive crops to make sure they could give everyone work. If you

help build your house, its yours for 15 euro a month. There are no

police, because there is no crime, because there is no poverty. The city

is cleaned every few Sundays by its own people, who make a party of it.

While the unemployment rate in Spain is approaching 50%, and while the

foreclosure crisis displaced hundreds of thousands, Marinaleda remains

insulated from these market forces because it has built material and

political autonomy at the local level.

There are other examples, each a unique attempt to forge a different

world. The ZAD, or Zone to Defend: an autonomous zone the size of

Carbondale and Makanda, composed of occupied farms and blocking the

construction of an airport in the north of France. Two dozen small,

interlinked communes inhabit the zone, building on it a world that is

inconsistent with the airport and the world that demands it. A few times

a year, tens of thousands of people flock there to express their support

and show their commitment to defend the zone from eviction.

Rojava: in northern Syria, the Kurds took the civil war as an

opportunity to launch a revolutionary project in democratic autonomy

against capitalism, patriarchy, and the state. They created a form of

government that is answerable to neighborhood assemblies and have shown

themselves the most effective combatants against ISIS.

On every inhabited continent there are tiny worlds breaking off from

global capitalism, sometimes quietly, sometimes accompanied by a fight.

People building the possibility of a world beyond this imploding

civilization.

Meanwhile, in Southern Illinois, people are placing their bets on an

eclipse to provide a windfall of cash… for what? So they can continue

the same course for a few more years, against all the winds of history

that are desperately trying to blow us in another direction. Why

couldn’t a dozen towns in Little Egypt go the direction of Marinaleda?

///

There are some of us who feel ourselves to be inseparable from this

region. Some others are scrambling to get out. In the latter group, many

came for work, at the hospital, at the university. Some were raised here

with the idea that their future is obviously elsewhere. No matter how

many years we stay, many of us still think we are merely passing

through. This is a local symptom of a wider phenomenon.

In the last few decades, the economy’s imperative to go where the money

is has uprooted people from their places on a scale that is historically

only paralleled by wars and colonization efforts. With that uprooting,

we are sucked out of our networks of family and childhood friends,

transformed into isolated individuals or nuclear family units, whose

sole responsibility is to care for our small bubble. Nothing is worth

struggling for in any particular place; if things get too hard, just

move.

Of course, not everyone can. And not everyone will, even if they can.

Two types of people are emerging: those who feel so connected to a place

that they refuse to uproot themselves without a fight, and those who

refuse themselves that contact with reality. The latter surf on the

waves of a turbulent economy, thinking their work is more important than

the ground they stand on to do it. Life is a highway and places are

pit-stops.

The relation to every place as somewhere one is merely passing through

is what prevents the kinds of struggles that are needed from emerging.

It is what makes every particular place expendable.

Creating a future requires allowing ourselves to develop and take

seriously our connection to a place. To recognize its fate as our own.

///

On April 8th, 2024, a second eclipse will pass through Little Egypt. We

can let these two eclipses be nothing more than an astronomical

coincidence. We can let the movements of planetary bodies remain

separate from the movements of our hearts, let their migration have no

effect on our social life apart from being two opportunities to scam the

tourists. We can do that.

But why? Aren’t we looking for something? Aren’t we waiting for

something to reorient us, to trigger the transformation of life that is

necessary to survive, let alone to thrive?

Let the next eclipse be ours. Let the first eclipse be a period, a hard

stop that brings relief to the long winded speech of those who have told

us this is the only life on offer, there is no alternative, you’d tear

yourselves apart without us, and on and on. Period. Thank you for your

thoughts, but now its time for some of our own. What can be accomplished

in seven serious years, here in Little Egypt?

Economic autonomy. The ability to meet the needs of Little Egypt through

growing and producing in Little Egypt. With it, the confidence that,

were the global economy to collapse, we’d be alright – better maybe?

A social safety-net from below. The ability to provide care for those

whose health and well-being the state has abandoned, or is always a law

or two away from abandoning.

Ecological restoration and defense. The ability to not merely beg those

who call themselves our leaders to stop fracking, but to physically

prevent such a disastrous industry from poisoning our region.

A sense of collective fate. Forms of celebrating the forgotten history

of resistance, of feeling ourselves as we really are: fragile links in a

human story of struggle.

How far can seven years take us? Seven years from now, will we have

squandered our lives working to pay off debts and rents to those who we

feel, deep down, that we owe nothing?

There are no maps for where we must go. There is a direction, and a path

to make by walking.

3. Fragments of a Future

Every block has a garden and a tool library. Houses are fixed up and

owned through use and care. Contracts are for people who hate each

other, and they still get written up from time to time, but shelter is

not something you deprive even someone you hate. In the garden, the

neighborhood watch meets twice a week to practice de-escalation

techniques and nonviolent communication, and trains for situations when

those don’t work. The strip is dotted with every variety of eatery,

collectively run with locally grown food and some specialty items

acquired through autonomous trade routes. We always have enough, but we

don’t have everything all the time. The excitement around sharing

something special returns to us.

///

Its a shitty morning. Its the day of your twice-monthly shift for trash

collection, because we still make trash for the time being. Your crew

gets up early, because you all want it to be over by lunch time. As you

roll up in the bio-diesel powered truck, someone gets the idea that

turns the mood: death metal. You will blast death metal as you all toss

cans of trash into the truck. Its perfect, as if the genre, invented

decades ago, existed in a sort of limbo until it discovered its sole

purpose as the soundtrack to a communal trash collection team. Those

sleeping in along your route yell for you to turn it down, but whatever.

When its their shift on trash duty, you promise yourself, you’ll let

them get through it however they need to.

///

There’s a bonfire again on the strip, this time for the Tomato Fertility

Festival, which has moved out of clandestinity and into the open air of

the town. The chant of TO-MA-TO echos throughout the neighborhoods, as

marches start from various gardens led by children carrying baskets of

the first tomato harvest. Gallons of the red fruit are poured into a

cauldron over the fire and a sauce is cooked slowly amidst dancing,

which is still more fun because its in the streets.

///

You can’t get out of bed. You can’t stand the light. Nothing happened to

you; there isn’t any reason. You just can’t see other people, hear their

voices, feel their touch. All that you can do today is feel. And even

though it feels like pain, you don’t mind it. It has messages for you,

which you can hear if you have the time to listen. And you do now.

You’re allowed to feel. No one judges you or shames you and you won’t

get fired since there are no jobs. There’s always work to do, but work

and life and fun and play are integrated, and none of those things are

jobs. The work you are responsible for can wait, or someone else can

pick up your slack for the time being. You are allowed to feel. You are

encouraged to feel. You are free to feel. And there will be no

penalties, no consequences for staying in bed all day, all night, and

for however many days it takes for you to feel all the parts and moments

of that feeling. When you emerge from the fog, you remember you were

cared for, and your responsibilities were cared for, and you are

refreshed.

///

Hospitals are run as cooperatives. Specialist doctors and surgeons

commit blocks of time toward patient care and participate in skill

share, which trains other health care workers to the extent they can.

Through the collective nurses have become household physicians, the

family doctor. Cooperative Hospitals provide access to tests, medicine,

and are hubs for emergency treatment when a nurse cannot be accessed.

They serve the severely sick, those with ongoing, intense treatment

plans, and are sterile environments for surgeries, but most ailments are

treated in the home. Babies are born where mothers want them to be – at

home, at a house run by midwives, in the hospitals. Notably, with a

large-scale diet shift from processed foods to regionally grown and

raised, organic meat and produce, in combination with the shift from

jobs to collective work forces which have reduced anxiety and

depression, the health of the general public has increased dramatically.

When people are terminally ill, they are placed with their families and

loved ones, provided end of life care with a nurse (there’s usually one

in every communal unit), and are allowed to die in peace, however they

desire. While we once required the need for death doulas — emotionally

mature individuals who could guide the unfeeling through trauma— we now

are able to take the time we need to mourn, to feel, and to celebrate

the life of those who leave.

///

A group of kids and adults are repairing a broken node on the solar

powered mesh network that keeps the internet running, free from the

infrastructure of the big telecom companies who still dominate in some

places. A few trucks are moving the day’s harvest to neighborhood food

hubs, where young kids load bags of produce onto bicycle trailers.

You’ve had the longest day, you think, as you sip peach brandy on your

porch. What did it start with? Death metal, right. And then there was

the Yemeni festival for lunch, then someone asked if you would help

mediate a conflict they were having over in the Arbor district – a fight

about someone sucking up all the block’s electricity, which admittedly

tested your patience. Then there was that walk with that someone to that

persimmon tree, the one with the candy-tasting fruit the size of

tomatoes that you had kept secret til today. Then the hour of canning

while the old woman read aloud from One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then

the cleaning out of the rainwater filter, a quick but messy job. Then

the dinner you shared with the sunset. And now the brandy, and the sound

of music growing down the block. But your friend is on their way over,

and you plan to continue tonight the friendly debate you’ve been having

for a decade, since even before life became the pleasant chaos that it

is: what is happiness? Its a question that doesn’t get old.

///

Across fires and under stars, we share stories of how silly we were. We

have to look at it as silly, so as not to fall into a rage at the ideas

and practices that our ancestors allowed to decimate so much beauty in

the world.

“It turns out people like to create things, and like it even more when

what they create is useful to others. This obvious fact about our being,

so evident all around us, was obscured by the foggy lens of ‘the

economy.’ They had actually convinced some of us that it was money and

selfishness that made people work! Having never actually allowed people

to live without scrambling for their basic necessities, the economists

never actually got to observe free people undertaking free activity. As

if humans before the economy were isolated misers, as if they weren’t

born from and dependent on one another. As if our greatest joy wasn’t to

be found in being the cause of joy to others!”

A child speaks up: “But what was ‘the economy’ you’re all always talking

about?”

Old timers laugh: “We didn’t know either! That’s what was so crazy about

it!”

A more serious voice rises: “When you were in it, it was hard to see it

for what it was. When you were in it, it just looked like ‘the way the

world worked’: you had to sell your time in exchange for some paper or

numbers, in order to buy the ability to live and sell your time more.

You got a weekend, a few holidays, some vacations if you were lucky, but

otherwise your life was owned by the companies you sold it to. At the

end there, it seemed like people turned themselves into little

corporations, and forgot entirely what it meant to be free. Now, outside

of it, we can see it more clearly: it was a way of controlling us, of

governing us. Of keeping us ignorant of the fact that we didn’t need the

companies and the governments who said we needed them.”

“But how did such a thing ever take hold of everyone in the first

place?”

“That’s a very good question.” The fire crackles. “Let me tell you about

our ancestor, Tecumseh.”

///

Tecumseh was a Shawnee Indian chief, who led a rebellion against the

colonizing forces of early America. In 1811, a year before the rebellion

he fomented broke out, Tecumseh passed through southern Illinois during

his ceaseless efforts to unite the tribes. He carried with him a bundle

of sticks, demonstrating that while a single stick can be broken, a

united bundle holds under pressure. This image was so powerful it was

eventually taken up by his – and our – enemies, to signify their

commitment to a united force of colonization and genocidal conquest.

After Tecumseh’s visit through southern Illinois, the New Madrid fault

line let loose an earthquake that reportedly rang church bells as far as

Boston. The most powerful active fault line in the North American

continent, it slumbers, for now, in the southernmost parts of Little

Egypt. The 1811 quake was taken as a sign of the justness of Tecumseh’s

cause.

“But what was his cause?”

Well, as he put it:

‘No tribe has the right to sell land, even to each other, much less to

strangers … Sell a country!? Why not sell the air, the great sea, as

well as the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for the use of

his children?’

You see, the game the economists and the others who controlled us played

was to tell us that people like Tecumseh were not our ancestors. That

they were backward or savage or that their way of doing things would

never work again. And so they gave new names to the genocide and the

destruction of all the possibilities in the world. They called them

‘progress,’ and they taught us that we were better than all those folks

who’d lived for so many thousands of years.

///

We construct tiny utopian glimpses because they are potent exercises in

unfreezing the imagination. For too long its been easier to imagine the

end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Maybe the image

of chaos that we are told lies beyond this tightly controlled society is

just the ruling class’s view of what autonomy would mean: a world that

could not be controlled from above. A world of free communities,

unsubmissive to the rule of money.

4. Autonomy

Autonomy. It’s a word that today has more of a direction and a practice

than a meaning, per se. Around the globe, from the Zapatistas of

southern Mexico, to the Kurds of northern Syria, to networks of communes

throughout Europe and North America, autonomy is the dream taking shape.

We could define it as collective self-determination, the ability for the

people of a place to chart their own future. To eclipse the power of

financial, industrial, and political elites.

The obstacles to autonomy are twofold: on the one hand, a global economy

that wraps people’s everyday lives in an international network of money

exchanges, and on the other hand, the governments and their police whose

job, at bottom, is to keep it that way.

Struggles for autonomy, then, involve both building and fighting.

Building the means for regional production outside the existing economic

order. Fighting for the right to organize our lives in ways are

inevitably contrary to the laws of the state. Those laws, whatever their

stated intention, have the fundamental purpose of keeping us dependent

on the institutions that are destroying the earth and its various

worlds. Reducing us to isolated individuals, whose sole course for

freedom involves submission to the gambling ring called the economy.

Autonomy is about creating different freedoms. Creating different

worlds. Creating the conditions to create ourselves, with all the

potential dangers and joys that such a project entails.

5. How?

How would we do it? How would we eclipse their power?

a. Many of us are already doing it. Around the continent and around the

region, networks of organic farms are self-organizing. Spaces are being

taken over and filled with people and projects for the struggle. What is

necessary is not some party or political organization that sucks us into

the dying gasps of a system that, with Trump, has shown its true colors.

We are already a party, partisans, of a world that is inconsistent with

this one. Acknowledging this fact, deepening our cooperation, and

extending our ambitions are our first tasks.

b. Start with desires, and build what is needed to fulfill them. None of

us want a life reduced to blandness and scarcity. We want a luxurious

life that can be shared with others, and we’re willing to work for it. A

craft brewery or ice cream company that builds its own local production

network can be a partisan project, building within the money economy a

set of skills and resources that could just as easily be detached from

it. Create something, share it, and link up with others.

c. Don’t try to do everything. Make friends who have the skills you

don’t have to accomplish what you want. We need engineers, farmers,

computer scientists, permaculture experts, listeners, singers, thieves,

nurses, historians, visionaries, carpenters, plumbers, and a thousand

other people who love the skills they’ve developed and want to share

them. Make your skills available, and look at something you can’t do

alone as an opportunity to meet someone new.

d. What passes for “political debate” today is a trap. Political

discourse today is designed to pidgeon-hole us into pre-defined, easily

manipulated categories. If you have a neighbor or a high school friend

that is on opposite sides of the political spectrum, find a common

practice or form of sharing material things that can create common

ground for a relationship. Chart a course off the political spectrum

with unpredictable friendships.

e. Build a culture of resistance. Non-cooperation with the police and

the state, solidarity with those who resist. Turn out to demonstrations

and make them true expressions of our collective capacity to transform

life and the city, if even for a moment. Ask yourself how you can best

contribute to creating or sustaining joyous chaos, a breakdown of the

sad reign of normalcy, and make a plan with those you know.

f. Diversity is strength. Racial and class diversity, but also

ideological, spiritual, age, and any other kinds. We want a world that

values each of our perspectives and unique abilities to contribute, and

this is an ethos that needs to be in the genetic code of our struggle.

Keep in mind, the most effective tool of the powerful is division along

racial, ethnic, or other lines. Within any identity, there is more

difference than there is across its boundaries. The only lines that

matter are ethical lines: how you are, not who you are; what you want,

not where you come from.

g. Think ethically and strategically. Breaking out of the structures of

this world is not something that will happen simply because it is a good

idea. Good ideas lay buried in the brains of millions of dissidents.

Similarly, rigid moral principles paralyze people from acting in a

context where no action can be safe from a context of suffering. I type

this on a computer, using electricity created from burning coal, which

is warming the atmosphere and destroying the lungs of people around the

globe. Morality creates guilt around these facts, which are beyond any

of our control and therefore responsibility. Guilt paralyzes and brings

out nastiness, resentment.

What is needed is a strategic ethics, which starts from what is

practically possible in any given situation, and is oriented toward

expanding those possibilities for the next moment.

Morality commands, whether it is from a church pulpit or a conscience.

Ethics, in contrast, invites us to steer a course through the

undesirable extreme consequences to grow more powerful in each unique

situation.

For our broad situation, there are clear extremes we want to navigate

between: on the one hand, we want to steer clear of what is normal,

which is the destruction of the world at the hands of the economy. On

the other hand, we don’t want to catalyze the outbreak of open civil war

in a context where the state and right wing paramilitary forces can be

deployed to crush everything we love. Veer too far from normal, without

having built enough strength, and the reactionary forces will be

shipping us off to the camps. Come too close to normal, and our projects

will be captured in the economy and become a nightmare version of what

we hope for, as has happened so many times before.

6. Which Future Past?

Fifty years ago, no one could have imagined the world we have now. Fifty

years from now, the world will have transformed several times over in

ways that we currently cannot imagine. This is beyond question. The only

question is whether the terms of these changes will continue to be set

by the interests of the wealthy and their political lackeys, or whether

a new historical force will enter the equation.

Eclipses are useful to historians, because they allow the precise dating

of events that otherwise may have been recorded unreliably. What will

these eclipses mean to the future? A moment where the sublime movements

of astronomical bodies was reduced to a marketing gimmick for a dying

region? Or a moment when, however subtly, some otherwise inconsequential

earthlings began seriously organizing to save themselves?

vol. 2.1: Frozen in Place

Repairing Our Relation to Carbondale’s Rebellious History

The following essay is a beginning to the second installment to The Next

Eclipse, the beginning of a longer, deeper project of repairing our

relation to history. History, in order for us to have a relationship

with it, must be local. But local history must be informed by an

understanding of the broader political and economic transformations, of

which the changes in a particular place are only an instance. The

guiding existential hypothesis of this text is the following: if things

feel meaningless, without sense or direction, it is because we have lost

the capacity to understand the historical forces that control our

present and shape our future. The aim, then, is to reconnect our

existence with the historical forces that have shaped it, and to draw

attention to what was lost along the way. This aim is strategic, because

it outlines our reality in terms of the power relations that define it.

Introduction

Southern Illinois University Carbondale is in crisis. The university is

hemorrhaging students and the state has revealed itself to be an

unreliable source of funds. Everyone agrees that something needs to

change. Many have given up already: their applications are out, their

houses are for sale, they are trying to find a way off a sinking ship.

There was a time when crises could be seen as moments of opportunity,

moments when the problems with the existing social and economic system

were revealed and genuine questions could be asked about new directions.

Since the 1970s, however, a new form of thinking has become dominant,

sometimes called “neoliberalism.” According to neoliberalism, there is

no alternative to the existing social system. The only possible world is

a world where everything is evaluated according to one measure: that of

the economy. Crises today, rather than an opportunity to reflect on new

directions, are used as an opportunity to force more and more aspects of

life into economic values. The only cure we are offered is more of the

same poison.

Chancellor Montemagno’s plan is an exemplary case of this. Like so many

other neoliberal gestures, it is an attempt to centralize power within

the organization, and discipline it to make it attractive to capital

investment. No values other than economic values count when it comes to

attracting capital: drones that will surveil and kill, Homeland Security

to deport our neighbors, police to lock people up, fossil fuels to

continue the destruction of the conditions for human life on the planet?

Anything, as long as its money. The only “solution” on offer for the

institution is to more deeply collaborate with the institutions that are

causing the problems.

But neoliberalism didn’t come out of nowhere: it emerged as a response

to social movements that challenged the functioning of the American

Empire to its core. It was a form of government that was developed to

destroy the welfare state, build up the prison and policing system, and

tame sites where rebellion had broken out during the 1960s and 1970s –

among those sites, the University was one of the most powerful for

generating a critique and opposition to capitalism and the wars that

sustain it.

If we look closer at those social movements, we see that they were

fighting against the same problems that we are concerned about today,

and they were developing solutions that were based on principles that

many of us hold today. Principles of egalitarianism, of autonomy, of

community, and of ecological responsibility. We must rediscover and pick

up the baton from those struggles, long repressed in our memory. Any

proposed solutions that do not address the fundamental problems of our

society – problems that have been evident for almost 50 years – will

fail, and will continue us down a nightmare path of endless war,

ecological catastrophe, and widespread immiseration.

The University can, and should, be a site where these problems are being

faced head on. It should be a site where we develop the means to break

free from the economy.

CHAPTER 1: THE UNIVERSITY THAT SHOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED, BUT DID

Southern Illinois Normal College was opened in 1869, thirteen years

after the first train stopped in the newly founded city of Carbondale.

Carbondale had been founded by Daniel Brush, when he heard that there

were plans for a railway to be constructed through the region. He hired

a surveyor to determine what the most likely path of the railway would

be, and planted Carbondale in that path so it could become the center of

rail traffic for Little Egypt.

Little Egypt, the name for southern Illinois since the early days of

European colonization, itself has always been a resource colony for

business interests located in larger midwestern cities:

“In many ways Southern Illinois has a ‘colonial economy’, one controlled

by outside financial interests. Outside interests have developed the

regions mineral and timber resources, its shoe and work-clothing

factories and the rail transport for such development. These companies

have employed local labor, even recruited labor to come to the region to

work, but have taken the profits from their operations elsewhere. To a

degree, the corporate base of Chicago and St. Louis has been built on

Southern Illinois labor and resources.” (Harper, 10)

This attitude of business interests toward the region, and the

determination of southern Illinoisans, helped fuel massive and intense

labor struggles throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. For coal

miners and their families, the fight for unionization was a life or

death struggle, since non-unionized mines meant not just starvation

wages, but lax safety protocol that time and again led to collapses or

explosions that killed dozens of people at a time.

Throughout this era, Southern Illinois Normal College was a small

teachers college a few thousand students at most. The city of Carbondale

was the major connection with the rest of the world – which also meant

the site from which the national guard would be deployed to beat up

striking miners and protect scab laborers.

From the 1930s through the 50s, many mines began to close, leaving small

towns throughout the region without any ability to participate in the

money economy. Interestingly, the mine closures were not a result of

coal running low, nor as a result of the ecological concerns that we

have today. Rather, they were closed as a part of a global strategy to

shift from coal to oil as the major industrial fuel source, a decision

that was made specifically to break the power of the coal unions.

The coal unions played a decisive role in early 20th century labor

struggles because they had the privileged ability to literally paralyze

the economy. And they use this power to help striking workers around the

country win basic labor rights. This power of coal workers was a

vulnerability to industrial capitalists, who shifted their fuel to oil

because it required less labor to both produce and distribute, and could

be more easily rerouted around blockages posed by workers in any given

area. The coal mines closing left the region, already “undeveloped” in

capitalist terms, in a localized depression.

And this was the regional condition in which Southern Illinois Normal

College would be transformed into a completely unlikely University, ten

times its previous size. The fact that the region was viewed as backward

and violent, combined with post world war 2 investment in higher

education through the GI Bill, were seized upon by a man of some

extraordinary talent: Delyte Morris.

Morris was appointed President of the new University in 1948, after a

quick succession of unsuccessful Presidents. Morris had two big ideas

that guided the remarkable growth of the University: first, to pitch the

University to the State as a development project for a troubled region,

and second, to draw upon alternative visions of higher education which

were by no means well-established at the time.

Major research universities tend to be located in or near major cities.

The idea that one could – or should – be built in what we would today

call flyover country was unorthodox. But Delyte toured small towns

throughout Little Egypt to pitch the idea of a “open university,” one

that would be a resource for developing economic and cultural life

throughout the whole region. His philosophy of education related to

this: the University was not to prioritize inquiry and reflection

detached from real life. Naturally, the classics of higher learning were

to be on offer, but not the centerpiece. One of Delyte’s hires was Baker

Brownell, a philosopher turned radical educator who developed regional

educational programs for the University and author of the rhapsodic book

The Other Illinois. According to Brownell, in response to the stuffy,

Ivory tower vision of education that privileges reason detached from

experience,

Southern would reply, “Reason with a small r is the only useful kind of

reason. The training in its method, its beauty, its triumphs, and its

uses is surely important. But reason segregated from the community of

men is sterile. Withdrawn from the experiences, the disasters, the

problems, the delights of the human adventure it is cracked and futile.

For these things are the crucible in which reason is created. Neither

reason nor any other single function of our many-stranded life is the

key to it all.” (241)

This unique philosophy of education is what gave rise to the first

ecology program at touch of nature, a hodgepodge of classical academic

and vocational training distributed throughout the region, as well as

earlys teps toward racial integration and handicapped accessibility. But

the program that most embodied this philosophy was the Division of Area

Services, pioneered by Baker Brownell. This program sent out teams of

academics and experts in various fields to conduct community inquiries

and discussions about how to develop small impoverished towns in the

area. The delegates from the University were not to impose their own

ideas, but to listen to the needs and desires of the communities and

figure out how to make their plans a reality.

Unfortunately, since many of those plans involved attracting outside

capital in the form of factories, they were not able to be realized. But

imagine for a moment if the task was to specifically develop the means

for life that could allow for local production of basic needs – imagine

if rather than the assumption that “development” meant “integration into

the capitalist economy,” the aim instead was to help communities build

their own autonomous infrastructure outside of it. If that path had been

taken at the time, decades of poverty and all its attendant social

problems could have been avoided.

But that’s not how it worked. Instead, the University did indeed become

a center of capital investment in the region – the economic engine that

we all know. And it did grow into an unlikely major research

institution, responsive to the local region while attracting students

and scholars from all over the world. And, in due time, the insistence

on connecting reason with life came back to Delyte in a way that he

couldn’t have expected, and ultimately led to his downfall.

CHAPTER 2: REASON REBELS

When reason is connected with life in a society that is hostile to life,

reason leads to rebellion. This is what happened in universities across

the country in the late 1960s, and SIU Carbondale saw some of the most

intense outbreaks of a rebellious reason of anywhere else. In order to

understand why the student movement was so intense, we should consider,

among other things, the way SIU had encouraged students to think freely,

outside the logics of the state and the economy. No single faculty

member better embodied these values than Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller was a world renowned intellectual, hailed by some as the Leonardo

Da Vinci of the 20th century. He was critical of both American

capitalism and Russian state socialism, and argued that a political

revolution was destined to fail. Instead, he encouraged his students and

audiences the world over to initiate a design revolution: to redesign

the conditions of life, to create livingry instead of weaponry. Fuller

would hold massive lectures, sometimes outdoors, speaking for hours on

all subjects. His philosophy of education was a radical extension of

Morris’s own vision of a university open to all:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody

has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us

can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the

rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this

nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this

false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery

because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his

right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making

instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of

people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was

they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they

had to earn a living.”

Bucky and his ideas were a major influence on the counterculture of the

sixties, his geodesic dome design springing up in communes around the

country.

His ideas, and the wider counter-culture, was active on campus and

around Carbondale. The aim of the counter-culture was not merely to do

drugs and have long hair, as so many stereotypes today would lead us to

believe. Actually, people were building organizations and forms of life

that responded to their own needs, without asking for permission from

those in power.

The Women’s Center, now an established non-profit, was begun by a group

of women who saw a need for a home for those escaping domestic abuse. So

they rented a house and created one. The Black Panther Party, whose

Carbondale chapter began in 1968, created a free breakfast program for

local children, a free medical clinic, and the first food co-op in

Carbondale, which brought in weekly shipments of eggs, bacon, and

vegetables from local farms. There was a health food store run by

members of a commune located outside of town, a cheap dental clinic,

endless music, radical newspapers, an LSD crisis-hotline, and even a

drug testing collective that checked for toxic additives to recreational

drugs coming into town. The drug testing collective was called

“Synergy.”

On campus, students developed a Free School, open to anyone, where

people could collectively pursue subjects oriented toward expanding

their sense of joy and meaning. There were classes in Zen Buddhism,

Yoga, philosophy, and skill shares in everything from building to

“making love in the fields.”

And these expressions of the world people were trying to build – a world

of local agricultural production, of sharing, of food for all, of a

harm-reduction approach to drugs, of support for the most vulnerable in

society and joy in one another’s presence – were connected with the

struggle against the current system and its injustices. This was reason

connected to life at its best: people freely coming together to

creatively solve pressing problems in their communities, using the

university’s resources – with or without permission – to improve the

lives of everyday people.

In the late 60s, protests against racism and sexism on campus were

building, as well as an anti-war movement that would eventually

transform the course of the entire university. At bottom, the

counter-culture students were rejecting not just the specific war in

Vietnam, but an entire social system and economy that was premised upon

war, racism, and destruction of the environment. And the strategy for

taking on such a monstrous thing was the same as that of the coal miners

50 years earlier who fought, not merely for their own higher wages, but

for the rights of working people everywhere: paralyze the functioning of

everyday life that allowed the economy to operate. Also, just like in

the coal miners struggles, arson, sabotage, and bombings were used to

gum up the wheels of the system. In 1968, a bomb was placed in the Ag

building – detonated in the middle of the night, so that no one would be

injured. In 1969, Old Main was burnt to a crisp, presumably by student

activists/arsonists. Again, no one was hurt.

The focal point of the local anti-war movement was the Center for

Vietnamese Studies, a research center funded by a million-dollar federal

grant to advise and provide technical support for Vietnam when the war

ended. Students had read about a similar center at the University of

Michigan, in which it was revealed that there were CIA operatives

working there. One of the faculty members associated with the CIA

faction in Michigan, William Fischel, was hired for the center at SIU.

This was the source of the allegation that the Center for Vietnamese

Studies was a CIA front. Apart from that, it would have been opposed

anyway as a symbol of colonial development in a country that America had

been murdering people in daily. As one faculty member opposed to the

Center put it, in reference to the center’s mission of post war

“planning”: “you’ve planned enough already.”

The rebellion began after the Nixon administration expanded the war in

Vietnam to Cambodia. Students marched, smashed some things, and about a

hundred set up camp on the train lines, blocking train traffic through

town. This action brought the Illinois national guard in – [the national

guard which had been created in 1877 to beat up workers in a nationwide

railroad strike, which had led to the first general strike in American

history, which took place in St. Louis, where workers took control of

the city for three days before being beaten and shot into submission by

a small army raised by the ruling class (this ruling class victory was

commemorated every year in the so-called “veiled prophet” parade, in

which arms were displayed led by a Klan figure. The tradition continues

to this day as an exclusive gala.)] When on May 4, 4 students at Kent

State in Ohio were murdered by the national guard, students went on

strike and took over the town.

Days of streetfighting ensued. Students, out of town rebels, and

community members, took on the police and the national guard. Eight days

of riots culminated in a march to the President’s house, which was

smashed up. School was cancelled for the remainder of the semester, and

all students received full credit for the classes they were enrolled in.

What needs to be understood is that this was not merely childish acting

out or mere chaos: this was a rebellion that followed a conscious an

coherent political strategy. In the face of a business that is

exploiting and threatening the lives of its workers, the proper response

is to strike for better conditions. In the face of a society is that is

powering a war machine that is murdering people both at home and abroad,

the proper response is to strike – to prevent that society from

functioning.

This event spelled the end for Delyte Morris, who had already outstayed

his welcome as far as members of the Board of Trustees were concerned.

He was stripped of all his Presidential powers, and consigned to a

marginal, symbolic role.

The irony is that the rebellion of May 1970 could be aptly described as

the fruit of a philosophy of education that Morris endorsed in

principle, but whose consequences he couldn’t see. To connect reason

with life, in a society that produces horrors, is to invite reason to

rebel. The students took risks – to their lives and livelihoods – based

on their conviction that the world could be changed, their correct

assessment that the official channels were not willing or able to change

it, and their sense of justice that this change could not in good

conscience be postponed. So they became what all great people become:

historical actors, who recognize that now is the only time to act in.

CHAPTER 3: THE REACTION, OR, THE AGE OF DEPERSONALIZED

AUTHORITY/CONTROL

[After the student rebellions from 1968 to 1970] the university’s

development was sharply arrested… [T]o a large extent Southern Illinois

University lost its momentum, its vision, its leader. It has been

largely frozen in place since 1970. Its future became hostage to a

frightened board of trustees, a restrictive state legislature, and false

impressions created during the events of Morris’ downfall.” (Robert L.

Harper, The University That Shouldn’t Have Happened, But Did!, 4)

What could it mean for a university to be “frozen in place”? No doubt,

things have happened, lives and careers have been led, time has passed

and things have changed. And yet, this metaphor of being “frozen in

place” somehow rings true: development has been stunted, the

contradictions and tensions that a generation sought to resolve have

been maintained by ever increasing levels of force and novel forms of

control. The wrong things change, and the things that so many struggled

to change remain the same.

In a sense, this is what the role of governing powers has always been:

to freeze a society from developing beyond the need for them. In the

1920s, when the labor movement was at its most militant, the U.S.

government pioneered a strategy of counter-revolution: use direct

repression against organizers, associating them with foreign

governments, killing them, deporting them. And then, to hamper the

ability for communities to continue organizing, pass laws that allow the

police the ability to raid and disrupt those communities. In the 1920s,

this meant Prohibition of alcohol, which was used to target working

class immigrant communities who were accused of being the most radical

segments of the labor movement.

This drama played itself out in Williamson County, Illinois, with a

catch: the police in Williamson County, at the time, were themselves

“corrupt,” i.e., they tended to support the union over the federal

government. As a result, the wealthy business interests of the county

had to invite S. Glenn Young, a former federal agent and Klan organizer

to lead a campaign of “cleaning up” Williamson county, targeting the

immigrant labor movement under the veil of enforcing Prohibition. This

led to the fracturing of the labor movement into bootlegging gangs, and

waves of violence that recall the gang warfare under the War on Drugs

today.

This strategy was how, in the wake of the first world war, the U.S.

government managed to “freeze in place” the class relations that were

intolerable to working people of that generation.

A similar strategy has been deployed nationally since the movements of

the 1960s. This was famously admitted to by John Erlichman, the domestic

policy advisor to Richard Nixon, after he was released from jail for his

role in the Watergate scandal. In a 1994 interview with Harper’s

Magazine, Erlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the

bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal

prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the

Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and

black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make

it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the

public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin,

and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their

meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we

know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This quote is a lens through which a whole, deliberately obfuscated,

sequence of history becomes clear. But almost all instances in which it

has been quoted focus solely on its meaning for race relations, its role

in constructing a “colorblind racism” that persisted through the

criminalization of black life. This is no doubt true, and significant.

But what is left out of these interpretations is the fact that Erlichman

points to two enemies, the other of which is the “antiwar left.”

Targeting Black radicals meant targeting urban areas for repressive

restructuring, turning them into zones of police occupation. What did it

mean, however, to target the anti-war left?

Simple: it meant targeting universities, turning them into sites that

were adapted to the interests of capitalists. It meant “freezing them,”

and freezing the capacity of thought to interrogate and intervene in the

society more generally. It meant, as Ronald Reagan had proposed when

running for Governor of California in 1968, creating a situation where

students were more concerned about getting a job after school than about

reflecting on the conditions of the society they were being asked to

inherit and reproduce (Reagan’s plan to do this was to raise tuition).

And it meant doing so in a way that was shielded from criticism of the

movements that they were targeting, movements which had launched a

devastating cultural critique of authoritarian power, just as the

movements for Black freedom had launched a devastating moral critique of

overt racism. For the latter, after key organizers were assassinated and

organizations destroyed, a form of “colorblind racism” was invented that

had the same effect of maintaining a racial caste system, but without

overtly racial justification. Similarly, for the anti-war left, whose

stronghold was universities across the country, a form of

“politics-blind political repression” was created, as generations of

students were burdened with debt in order to control the direction of

their inquiries and action into avenues subdued by the economy.

At the national scale, this is partly how the “freezing” of social

relations has been accomplished, and why we are left burdened with the

same problems that the generation of the 1960s rebelled against, only in

a different and more intensified form: racism, now in the form of the

largest system of prison slavery in the history of the world; ecological

devastation, now in the form of literal ecocide, or the destruction of

habitable life on the planet; imperial wars, now in the form of endless

global policing operations fought increasingly by people whose heroic

warrior activity has been reduced to something barely distinguishable

from playing video games.

Our task, then, is to repair our relation to this history, to the

struggle for liberation from these conditions. Which means

understanding, at a local level, the war that has been waged against us

to maintain them.

So how did this happen here?

Consistent with the wider FBI project of neutralizing the Black

Panthers, in November of 1970 – the semester after the student rebellion

– cops from Carbondale and other surrounding towns shot 778 bullets into

the Black Panther house on the northeast corner of Washington St. and

Allyn St. Shockingly, no one was killed, and, just as shockingly, a

cease-fire was negotiated by members of the northeast community. Six

Panthers – the Carbondale 6 – were arrested and none were convicted. But

the legal battle lasted for a long time, and the attempted massacre by

the Carbondale Police Department accomplished its presumed goal of

neutralizing the organization’s activity.

The Black Panthers had been declared by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to

be the greatest threat to American democracy. The FBI’s

counter-intelligence program, or COINTELPRO, engaged in assassinations,

frame-ups, and misinformation campaigns to demonize and neutralize the

group around the country. The Carbondale Police’s story that they had

seen a “suspect” enter the Panther house on the night of the shoot-out

is consistent with stories used to excuse assassinations around the

country that destroyed the Panthers’ organization.

Apart from the Panthers, there were drug raids of high profile leftist

activist houses, suspected at the time to be pretenses for repressing

them. The house of Reverends Norman S. Bach and William E. Garrett, two

of the many clergy involved in the anti-war movement, were raided on

suspicion of marijuana possession. The Big Muddy Gazette interpreted

this, at the time, as an act of repression, which is consistent with how

we know the drug war was used. A chilling effect must have set in among

public organizers: if you’re Black, the cops might shoot up your house;

if you’re white, you may be publicly shamed and arrested on whatever

charges can be cooked up. Step one of counter-revolution: target the

organizers.

Next, there was the Horsely Commission, led by Senator Horsely to

investigate the conditions that led to the student uprising. Initiated

at the beginning of the semester after the riots, a few months before

the Panther shootout, the commission blamed the uprising on an

“international communist conspiracy,” and made the following

recommendations to the University:

introduction of student ID cards

that the administration be able to fire politically problematic

professors, even if they are tenured.

Introduction of pornography legislation, presumably as an excuse to

ban independent student newspapers

The banning of material “inciting violence,” presumably for the same

reason

to cut off scholarship to students awaiting hearings for participation

in the unrest.

Elimination of the difference between property destruction causing

under $150 in damages and damage in excess of that. In other words,

punishment was not to be proportional to the economic damage, but rather

the principle of property itself was what was to be protected, and any

violation of it, no matter how economically small, was to be considered

with equal seriousness.

Each of these recommendations, with the exception of the ability to fire

“problematic” professors, may appear innocuous, or at least

“reasonable.” They had to: there was a strong movement, and the measures

taken to suppress it had to be careful not to trigger more resistance.

In light of what has occurred – the construction of a hyper-controlled

world, justified at each step with reasons that obscure its true aims –

we can see these measures for what they are: excuses to expand the

ability for police and administrators to intervene in and make trouble

for the movements that had challenged their authority. Governments being

what they are – organizations for maintaining hierarchical power – we

should assume that the published recommendations of the Horsely

Commission were only the visible surface of the policies that were being

pursued.

The recommendation that the University fire problematic professors for

political reasons was tested on Douglas Allen, a philosophy professor

who was up for tenure. Allen had the support of his colleagues and

department, but was denied tenure explicitly for his participation as a

leader of the anti-war movement. The administration was sued by Allen

and eventually had to offer him tenure. By that point, he had already

found another position at the University of Maine, and did not return.

Although they achieved the intended effect of rooting out a radical, it

was clear that the method of overt political targeting would not stand

up legally.

Another tactic for rooting out problematic professors and reshaping the

university in the interest of the wealthy needed to be found. And,

within a couple of years, it was: the tactic of the “budget-crisis.”

It has to be stressed that the first “budget crisis” that SIU

experienced was a direct result of the student rebellions. The Illinois

Board of Higher Education was formed in response to the state’s sense

that things had gotten out of hand down in Egypt, and they were no

longer going to support Delyte’s dreams. They turned off the spigot, and

demanded the university adapt.

In 1974, SIU President Derge fired 104 professors, a quarter of them

tenured. The fired faculty were largely from departments of philosophy,

history, english, sociology, and from the Division of Area Services,

ending the latter program of community engagement. Adding insult to

injury, Derge’s administration also tried to sue a number of the faculty

that they were firing. The fired professors publicly declared that they

saw this as a political purging of those departments that were most

supportive of the anti-war movement. Derge denied this, and articulated

for the first time what would be the standard justification for all

university changes down to today. It wasn’t about politics, it was about

budget cuts, failing to mention that those budget cuts themselves were

about politics. In a statement that could have, and indeed has, come out

of administrators from Derge to Montemagno, Derge said “decisions as to

what departments should be cut were made according to enrollment

trends.” This was the local application of a form of governance that

would overtake the globe in the coming decades: political decisions

imposed from above, justified not in political terms, but as necessary

adaptations to the demands of “the economy.” This sleight of hand was

first applied here as a repressive retaliation for a university that had

brought thought together with life, and demanded that life change.

But the rebellious spirit of Carbondale and SIU didn’t die so easily. It

continued for decades after the uprising, in a town in which the

university administrations and the city government had become afraid of

the students that were also their bread and butter. The city government

and university administration have gone to quite extreme lengths to kill

the rebellious energy of students and locals, only to find that it was

this energy that kept the place alive. So they always look like idiots:

destroying the conditions for collective joy, and yet begging people for

“vibrancy” downtown. This was a vibrant town, but its vibrancy was

connected to freedom, to the possibility of rebellion, to a

counterculture. They have worked to police that out of existence, but

also long for the flowers of the plants they have ripped out.

What were called the ‘riots’ were really just a ceremonial culmination

of the life of the town, a moment of communion for the energies that had

been released by the 60s, and denied their right to remake the world.

From the party scene in the 80s that would shut down the strip on a

weekly basis, to the Halloween riots that brought rebellious energy from

all around the midwest. These events need to be understood, not simply

as kids getting rowdy – though they are also that – but as the

continuation of the rebellion launched in the 1960s, but within a new

circumstance where the terrain of politics had shifted to undercut the

possibility of this energy taking an explicitly political form. As a

result, the measures of control, the process of policing existence, took

a form that were similarly apolitical – as measures of crime reduction

and safety.

Taking the strip was a collective gesture of transforming public space,

of intervening in the order imposed by the police. Engaging in such

acts, especially if connected with a party atmosphere, is what creates a

genuine experience of community – the feeling of friends, neighbors,

strangers, stepping outside of the roles and rules imposed upon them and

creating their city on their own terms. It is ironic that today everyone

is obsessed with “community,” but so few recognize how to build it: it

comes from people having experiences together that are not pre-defined

and constrained from above, from the moment when people engage with each

other in recognition of their individual and collective capacity to

shape their world and their futures. This is precisely what every act of

government today is designed to destroy. The role of government,

achieved through its police, its procedures, its regulations, its laws,

is to lock all the exits from the burning house that is this

ecocidal/prison society; to prevent the development of the very

possibility of community life, and the sense of collective autonomy that

it requires.

So it is worth stressing the extreme measures that were taken to destroy

this spontaneous continuation of rebellious life. First, there were the

riot police and their tear gas. Next, the city cancelled Halloween for a

few years in the 90s – an extraordinary step – blaming the riotous

activity on “outside agitators.” After a few years they lifted the ban

only to find they had not killed the spirit, and the town choked from

tear gas for days. Thus began a decade and a half long ban on Halloween,

a celebration that was in the process of becoming a midwestern Mardi

Gras. Rather than recognizing this as a local culture in the making, the

city government and reactionary forces clamped down for 15 years,

finishing off the death of the public counter-culture. Now confined to

basement shows, this culture, while it has nurtured musicians and a few

rebels, suffers from the isolation it was forced into.

This has been the beginning of a sketch of a different history for

Carbondale and SIU. It is not complete or authoritative: it is more of

an invitation for others to speak up, to correct, to fill in the gaps,

to value their own memory.

It is easy to see why people wouldn’t do so. The world appears to have

changed into something unrecognizable, and it is hard to imagine how

experiences 50, 30, even a decade ago feel relevant today. This too must

be understood as a move a in a battle for control: the principle tool of

American power is amnesia, the smothering of the possibility of

collective memory. The story sketched here is an invitation for us to

fight back, to recover a history that makes sense of where we are, to

recognize that the official narrative is deaf and blind to all that is

relevant for life, for our desires, and for the challenges we face.

Reducing everything to the laws of economics and the government that

imposes them, it systematically ignores that these laws, far from being

natural, are tools for preventing the growth of an autonomous community

power. Such a power was growing here in Carbondale, nourished and

inspired by rebellion, by thousands of people recognizing that life as

it was offered was intolerable, and who insisted that thought and life

must be brought together against the forces that subject both to the

superficial calculations of penny-counters, to the reign of the

neurotic, the paranoid, their wealth and their police.

Our guiding thesis, hardly proven here, is this: we cannot understand

the problems we face today – at the university, in Carbondale, or indeed

nationally – unless we understand that the world we have was built to

destroy the movements that sought to fundamentally change it. Here in

Carbondale, that means that we need to remember that the roots of the

long stretch of budget-crises have their origin in thinly veiled

political repression, disciplining the university for producing students

that were capable of asserting their power against a war machine.

Unwilling to change, and now afraid of what young people were capable

of, a process of “freezing” life began.

It is not, and never has been, money that makes the world go round. It

is labor, love, friendship, desire. These forces must be mutilated and

confined to money-relationships in order for the wealthy to stay in

control. Today, here, the crisis is not really lack of money – that is

only the crisis for those in power. The crisis for the rest of us is

disconnection from our own sense of the world, disconnection from the

power we have to build what we need and desire without the crutch of

money and those who have it. We have a crisis of energy, and a crisis of

struggle, a disconnection of our thought and our lives, a studied

superficiality of our relationships, a paralyzing anxiety that holds us

back from recognizing that all we need to chart a path out of this mess,

and to repair our relationship to those who struggled before us, is here

with us already.

1Fred Hampton, the 21 year-old revolutionary genius of Chicago, who had

travelled to Carbondale and advised Reggie Brown to start the Panther

chapter here, had been shot in his bed by Chicago Police. It was later

learned that Chicago Police were working with the FBI and this was a

targeted assassination, since the FBI was concerned Hampton could have

been a “Messiah-figure,” linking struggles between black and poor white

people. Indeed, this is exactly what he did with what would become the

original “rainbow coalition,” in which the Panthers organized against

the cops with displaced Appalachian white people, many of whom were

racist and proudly wore their Confederate flags. This willingness to

organize across the cultural/color lines and against the state made

Hampton in particular a target, and his brief life has been examined to

an extent that other Panther chapters, like the one in Carbondale, have

not.

vol. 2.2: Introducing the Knights of the Flaming Circle

During the 1920s, a nation-wide, secret organization called The Knights

of the Flaming Circle took on the Ku Klux Klan in the streets. Little –

far too little – is known about the organization. But we do know that

there was a chapter in Williamson County.

This essay collects what little we do know about the “Red Knights,” and

helps us to recognize that today’s antifascism is a part of a long,

largely forgotten, tradition of giving no public forum to fascists.

In late September 1923, a dynamite blast went off in the hills outside

Steubenville, OH. Residents streamed out of their houses to see “white

robed figures moving about in a strange ceremonial,” lit only by a

gigantic, flaming circle.

Were these members of the Ku Klux Klan that had simply switched their

flaming cross for a circle? Soon word spread through the town that, in

fact, this was an anti-Klan group that was inaugurating its formation:

The Knights of the Flaming Circle.

A month before, in Kane, Pennsylvania, a similar circle had burned, and

the local paper, the Kane Republican, received an anonymous letter

announcing the founding of the “Knights of the Burning Ring.” The letter

stated: “Kane is selected as the starting point of a movement that will

ring the earth with blazing justice to all. We are enemies of all clans

or klans. We believe in liberty for every human being, black, white or

yellow, regardless of race, religion or creed.” For reasons unknown, the

“Burning Ring” name seems to have been subsequently dropped.

A short time after, a Klan parade in Steubenville, OH, a few hours away,

led to a riot, during which “six or seven Klan cars were overturned by

the Steubenville people. Flags were torn off the machines and their

occupants were attacked with bricks and bottles and clubs and other

flying objects.” The hillside dynamite blast and ceremony in

Stuebenville followed the riot by about a month, announcing to western

Ohio that there was more than just a raucous disruption of Klan

demonstrations going on, but rather an organized effort.

A local dentist, Dr. W. F. McGuigan, claimed to be the founder of the

Steubenville chapter of the Knights of the Flaming Circle and the Grand

Supreme Monarch of the organization’s “central division,” stretching

from Massachusetts to Illinois. A few days after the initial ceremony,

McGuigan told reporters that “The Knights of the Flaming Circle is a

non-sectarian society and its object is to combat religious, racial and

political intolerance.” They wore no masks or hoods, but did wear white

robes, embroidered with their official insignia: a red circle with the

figure of the State of Liberty at the center.

But the very notion that there was an “organization” at all is disputed

by one of the few oral histories that mentions the Flaming Circle. In an

interview conducted in 1984 with Nicola Criscioni, of Youngstown, OH,

Criscioni claims “there was no organization, it was the papers that

dubbed them that, but it was no organization, just a thrown-together

outfit…. What we did was we got a bunch of tires and put them around a

circle and burned them, or bailed the hay and put them around a big

circle and burned them. They burned the cross and we burned the circle.

It was a hit-and-run outfit. There were no heads of anything… then when

we heard that there was going to be a parade, by then we maybe put

together a certain bunch and would try to disrupt it.”

This ambiguity – an organization with Klan-esque titles like Grand

Supreme Monarch, or a rag-tag hit and run outfit with no meetings or

dues – hints that this was a decentralized organization, one for which

any group that wanted to take up the cause could do so on their own

terms.

According to the 1923 A Dictionary of Secret and Other Societies, the

Knights of the Flaming Circle “welcomes Catholics, Jews, and Negroes,

but excludes Protestants. The members wear robes at the initiation

ceremony, and each knight has a flaming circle over his heart, symbolic

of the truth.” White protestants made up the base of the Klan, and were

presumably excluded on that ground. According to the Klan, the Knights

of the Flaming Circle were “a mob that proffered anarchism and sought to

ruin the Republic.”

We have evidence that there were chapters of Knights of the Flaming

Circle in Vermont, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa,

and New Mexico. In the coming years, in various parts of the country,

they used a diversity of rebellious tactics to confront the Klan. Many

of those tactics are also practiced today by antifascists: pressure on

meeting-halls to refuse to allow the Klan to meet there; publishing

lists of Klan members, destroying the anonymity of the organization;

organizing counter demonstrations to show mass opposition to the Klan

and what it stood for; physically interrupting their parades and

rallies; assaulting Klan members and damaging their property. In

Youngstown, Criscioni recalls lining the road with roofing tacks before

a Klan parade, popping their tires and getting some laughs at their

expense.

They even, one could say, “trolled” the Klan. In addition to wearing

illustrious garb of their own, sometimes white, sometimes red, they

fought back with fire: in response to the Klan’s practice of burning

crosses in front of the homes of immigrants and minorities, the

Circlers’ would set tires alight on the yards of known Klansmen. It

seems likely that McGuigan’s claim to be “Grand Supreme Monarch” was

just another jab at the Invisible Empire’s ridiculous hierarchy.

But if indeed McGuigan was in some role of leadership in the midwest, he

was certainly hard at work organizing. Numerous articles from the time

repeat the Flaming Circle’s claims that they had organizers in every

city in Ohio, and throughout Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And

somehow, within a year, a chapter was formed in Williamson County,

Illinois.

Williamson County, known at the time as “Bloody Williamson,” had just

been the site of one of the bloodiest labor battles in American history.

The Herrin Massacre was the final major explosion of decades-long

battles between coal-miners and mine-owners, and it had brought

international infamy to the county. During the massacre, 19 scabs were

killed by coal-miners. No one was convicted by a Williamson County jury.

A group of wealthy businessmen, interested in restoring the county’s

reputation and affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, hired a former Bureau

of Investigations officer, S. Glenn Young, to lead their campaign. But

the campaign wasn’t against the miner’s union. The Klan made the move

characteristic of all fascist movements: it attempted to divide the

working-class union movement along racial and national lines, targeting

Italian-American immigrants.

Moreover, in a move that prefigured the War on Drugs, they targeted them

not for political activity, but for violations of Prohibition. A

“clean-up Williamson County” movement was underway, led by the Klan,

which blamed the violence of a thirty year long class struggle between

miners and mine-owners on immigrant communities in Herrin. S. Glenn

Young’s raids targeted immigrants and anyone who opposed the Klan,

ignoring the drinking of Protestants and flamboyantly ignoring the very

laws he claimed to be enforcing. Eventually, Young even opened a

“soft-drink parlour” of his own.

Prohibition, a constitutional amendment passed in 1919, didn’t go into

effect until 1920 because it was well-known to be unenforceable by the

American state-apparatus at the time. The Ku Klux Klan served as a

para-military force, disproportionately targeting minority groups in the

name of enforcing “law and order.” They defended their targeting of

immigrants because of their unfamiliar culture and their supposed

“predisposition to radicalism and anarchism”

And this might have gone well for them in Williamson County, IL, if they

hadn’t encountered an unexpected adversary in the Knights of the Flaming

Circle.

We don’t know how the Knights of the Flaming Circle made it to

Williamson County. Perhaps word of the group travelled along lines of

conspiratorial communication that the miner’s union had already

established. If not, anyone reading The New York Times would probably

have encountered mention of the group in 1923. Perhaps Ora Thomas and

E.E. Bowan, the rumored founders of the group in Herrin, decided they

could take up the name without asking any permission from some Grand

Supreme Monarch. That would have suited them.

The Flaming Circle in Williamson county was an alliance of miners,

immigrants, bootleggers, and even law-enforcement who were

none-too-happy to lock up their communities just because some new

Prohibition law had been passed. The city of Herrin was almost

completely integrated with the miner’s union, and what little wealth and

safety miners knew at the time could be attributed only to the

solidarity that union embodied. The union rightly saw the Klan as a

threat, a ruling-class funded attempt to divide the strength of the

working-class union along racial and ethnic lines, obscuring the actual

conflict between the poor and the wealthy. For that reason, the UMWA

issued a statement barring all Klan members from the union, and noting

that the Klan’s efforts were aimed primarily at disrupting and dividing

the power that working people had gained through Union organizing. It

was later learned that S. Glenn Young, who was notoriously fast and

loose with the facts about his own history, had worked as a scab-herder

during the 1922 Railway Shopmen’s Strike – a feature of his past that he

tried to conceal.

The Klan, under the leadership of S. Glenn Young, was so powerful in

those years that it would have been very dangerous to make membership in

the Circle known. Still, newspaper articles from the time attest that

when the Klan would hold a parade, the next day you could be sure the

Flaming Circle would, “neutralizing the effect of the Klan’s.”

But events did not remain at the level of competing parades for long.

The first shooting occurred at an anti-Klan meeting, by pro-Klan police.

While the first victim was recovering in the hospital, a constable, and

member of the Klan, named Ceasar Cagle was shot and killed in

retaliation. In response, the Klan laid siege to Herrin hospital, where

Flaming Circle members were gathering with their wounded. The Klan fired

into the hospital, and the Circlers’ that found themselves held up in

there refusing to leave. The National Guard was called in. This was just

the first round of what would be an all out war that would engulf

Williamson and surrounding counties for the next year and a half.

The war came to an end when Ora Thomas entered a cigar shop at the

Embassy Hotel in January of 1925, overhearing the familiar voice of S.

Glenn Young threatening a young miner for spreading the story that Young

had been a scab-herder prior to his becoming a Prohibition agent. Young

had two men with him, and all three of them died in that cigar shop. As

did Ora Thomas, the founder of Herrin’s Red Knights.

In the years after the Klan was defeated, many of these bootleggers

would go on to engage in bloody battle with one another. Even the

notorious Shelton and Birger gangs, who wreaked havoc throughout

southern Illinois for the next decade, were momentarily allied in

opposition to the Klan.

///

The Knights of the Flaming Circle, whatever they were and whatever their

shortcomings, are a sign that there has always been a counter-history to

“America” on this continent, one full of people who, regardless of race,

religion, or creed, have been quietly conspiring and jubilantly acting

toward freedom for all. Today’s anti-fascists fall into a long tradition

of those willing to risk everything to confront the racist forces who

aim to re-create the “Founding Father’s” dream of a white ethno-state.

That old American dream is recreated with new racist, nationalist lies

in every generation that the wealthy feel their power threatened.

May we instead remember as our ancestors the brave people who fought to

the death against the racist dreams of the wealthy, and against the

stupid who accepted their lies.