[*BCM*] CM revolutionary tactics

[rob levy]

I can't sleep so I'm posting some observations about CM (all positive, but 
maybe nothing that has not yet been explored?? curious to find out... would 
like to hear some responses)

As a newcomer to critical mass (being from a non-large city for many years), 
but not to the kind of thing it is, I'm fascinated and inspired by the whole 
decentralized self-organization factor of CM. There really is no leader, 
just humble "leadership" actions that move things along. Obviously there is 
also no ideology, though there certainly is a "grassroots action" 
orientation and a shared sentiment that 4 wheels and a motor=bad, a 
structure pedaled by feet=good. I agree. And critical mass is both really 
fun and (I think) coherent as a form of effective activism.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there seems to be a number of tactics 
that emerge. No one ever sat down and said ok here is our plan, here's what 
we'll do, but the situations created by this moving free-zone of course 
creates a need to secure that space, and that leads to these tactics being 
applied. For example, in order to maintain the unique environment of a CM 
there needs to be a contiguous block of bikes, (of a certain amount, which 
is fuzzy but there's where the critical mass metaphor comes in), so people 
call out "mass up" to bring the group back together. Because cars breaking 
into the contiguous block of bikes would be unsafe and fissure the mass, 
people take the role of acting as "human shields" if you will, to stop side 
traffic from coming in. Because stopping at lights would break the mass into 
two or more pieces, we don't stop at lights. There may be other reasons for 
that one but they seem vague to me. 

Ok, so again, bear with me because I'm probably just rehashing the 
introduction to a book I haven't read about critical mass bike rides, but I 
feel the critical mass is effective because it builds a movement in the 
streets, grows in recognition over time, gains supporters (because it is 
easy to be involved in, it moves slow, occurs as regularly timed 
coincidence-- like the moon phases [or something natural like that], & is 
easy to get to wherever else you need to go next from, occurs before other 
evening events), and this matters because it nurtures from the ground up a 
community of people who can mobilize, not just in public displays, but in 
every day existence, to break down the monotony of motor-vehicles-- which 
have killed cities by taking people off of the streets-- maybe 
politically/spiritually wake up the underlying creative/ mysterious/ awe-ing 
reality that never really went away but just got divided up on the advent of 
the disappearance of the active city-community (but also on the creation of 
the sick nightmare known as the suburban neighborhood, and the isolation of 
rural areas from community at large).

Ok so here's my argument (this is also probably not new either) why CM is 
tacitly coherent despite being ideology-free and self-organized without 
fixed-role leaders.

--. It's not about expressing a belief, concept, or call for action on the 
part of any individual or organization. It's not about changing the 
political structure or turning an election. It IS about directly seizing and 
building a "temporary autonomous zone" in the Hakim Bey/ Zappatista sense. 
It's not about influencing, changing, or taking the government. It is about 
seizing democracy , liberty, justice etc in this local space, at this time, 
right now, no apologies and no justification added. 

The interesting/promising thing about this is that it doesn't seem to end 
here, as this strategy (which CM is a manifestation of) can and should 
expand until the TAZ is the permanent changing fluxing state of most of our 
social institutions.

--. I think the above fact is enough, but it converges with another 
indicator that CM is coherent. We all come from different backgrounds, 
cultures, have a variety of beliefs and priorities, so As a creative 
decentralized organism, the last thing CM needs is bulletted 10-point plan 
or an agenda to impose some kind of structure on it, whether it be a grand 
plan of action, or a set of dogmatic beliefs. 

Here's our state-the-obvious bare-bones common sense consensus:
(I may not have this totally right and I probably don't...)
1. Cars are bad. 
a. We all experience the inconvenience of biking in a city built for cars.
b. Based on our actions we can say definitely that we all respect 
pedestrians and human beings, and we all respect people LESS when they share 
the road in a car.
c. We may not agree on specifics but who can deny that motor vehicles are 
inextricably linked to a destructive foreign policy IN SOME WAY OR ANOTHER.
d. While we may not all share the opinion that cars have destroyed or 
minimized the active city-communities that once existed, this fact is 
strongly supported by both common sense and historical facts.

2. Bikes are good (not the same as saying "cars are bad" because nothing is 
said about trains and electric buses, etc)
a. Because we all experience the pleasure of riding bikes.
b. Because we would rather breathe air than car exhaust, and would if given 
the choice, accept and defend the right/ privelege not to have to breathe 
carbon monoxide.
c. Nothing is depleted, nothing is polluted.
d. Bikes are cheap, available to more people. Especially in terms of daily 
costs (little to none in any given month, even cheaper given minor amounts 
of technical knowledge or interest in figuring things out).
e. Bikes do the reverse of the anti-social effect that motor vehicles have.

Even there I'm probably saying too much (though I may be leaving out 
something important). Regardless, what I'm trying to foreground here is the 
fact that we don't need to overtly state our agenda because there is a 
pragmatic, situated, humanly embodied core shared common sense that could be 
called our "values" or call it something else that might be more hard to 
misconstrue as something like prescribed behavior, which it is not. What I 
mean here is not prescribed but described facts of our underlying shared 
motivation. 

There's some work in embodied cognitive science moving in the direction of 
providing something extremely relevant to this work as well. I want to 
disclaim first that I am aware of the dual nature of cognitive science-- ie 
we are told what we are, and this alters the culture of what we are-- and so 
on. But in my experience with this embodied work, the cognitive scientists 
are getting at this in just the right way, by welcoming in anthropology and 
other disciplines, and studying the structure of conceptual systems-- what 
makes cultures different, what makes them all possible, and other broad 
questions fleshed out in more detailed research programs. 

Anyway, skipping the many details, the result of this are the findings that 
meaning and emotion are woven into perception as it is enacted, and that 
higher-order cognition is fundamentally imaginative and "metaphorical", in 
the sense that you cannot know what it means to "go down that path" without 
drawing on the knowledge you acquired from going down actual paths. This 
seems obvious but the radical discovery is just how pervasive this is is, 
the fact that it now seems like every part of conceptual activity is 
manifested in image-schemata and the rest of the repertoire of imaginative 
processes that neurons somehow implement in an active organism's exploration 
of ones environment. ---- The point of bringing this in is that it's context 
by which cognitive science has revealed classes of metaphorical structure 
that describe "common sense" of various varieties. Liberal/Progressive 
common seems to be mostly based on a *family* metaphor in which leadership 
exists not to police but to nuture a given situation so that it develops in 
a healthy way. Conservative/Fascist common sense is in fact base on a family 
model as well, but it is the family resembling a police state, and to learn 
more I reccomend Lakoff's Moral Politics. 

The bikesgood/cars bad list above can consistently and clearly be given a 
Lakovian analysis which shows where CM common sense at this time/moment will 
fall on the spectrum of metaphor classification. I won't attempt it here but 
clearly we fall almost prototypically into the central characteristics of 
the nuturant morals system.

So my suggestion/question is, self-awareness may be helpful to a movement, 
even if it is non-propositional movement which is clearly not out to make a 
case ( instead to wholesale stake claim to freedom despite "the system", and 
to realize the here and now, beyond culturally empty and pragmatically 
ineffective political chess games, etc). The self-knowledge is I think 
useful because it reveals a common thread beneath what may have otherwise 
appeared libertine and morally relativistic. Even the farthest left are not 
morally relativistic, and CM has a very natural, strong, and richly 
structured moral underpinning to it. Again, I mean moral in the sense of a 
deep source of motivation that is part of who we are, not in the sense of a 
prescribed way of life. 

Another reason, other than that it unites us in a non-trivial way, is that 
it allows us to question our motivations in a detailed way. Obviously this 
could only be a good thing because there may turn out to be some details of 
our shared underlying common sense which are extensions of metaphors but not 
relevant to experience. It's kind of like the way molecules were first 
understood like planets, but the details were later added in as refinements 
of the model. I'm not advocating soul-seeking meetings- quite the opposite 
in fact-- but considering that we have discussions about the critical mass, 
it is worth putting on the table the consideration that the action is not 
only coherent, but also that those who carry out the act are "morally" a 
unified group despite differences on policy (war on Iraq, Israel Palestine 
if it is relevant), and priority (economics vs. health/environment vs. 
anti-war).

Rob
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