February 12 1968 – The Motherfuckers do their motherfucking thing, with garbage in New York.
Fifty five years ago, on this day, February 12 1968, New York City was the scene of an inventive piece of activism.
“On February 12, 1968, a group of radicals led by Ben Morea collected garbage on the lower east side, trucked it, then dumped it in front of the Lincoln Center on a gala night. The event coincided with a NYC garbage strike and was meant to express both the group’s contempt for the bourgeois establishment and its support of the strikers.”
(Gottlieb, 1993: 350)
and
COMPARE NATHAN HALE “BLACK ECOLOGY”
“No solution to the ecology crisis can come without a fundamental change in the economics of America particularly with reference to blacks. Although some of the ecological differentials between blacks and whites spring directly from racism and hence defy economic correlations,44 many aspects of the black environmental condition are associated with basic economics. Blacks are employed in the most undesirable or polluted occupations,45 lagging far behind their educational attainment. About two-thirds work in unskilled and semi-skilled industries. Aggravating, and associated with, the occupational effects on the black environment is the consistently low family income of blacks which must generally support larger families. Since the turn of the century, the family income of blacks has remained about half that of whites” (Hale, 1970: 7)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 323.1ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
The Vietnam War, black civil rights, the beginnings of second wave feminism were beginning to kick off, and poor people were getting shat on (for once). At this exact point, Martin Luther King was planning for his march on Washington in the summer of 1968 (he wouldn’t be there). And the Motherfuckers and black Mask were in that milieu. The idea of bringing the unwanted waste back to the people who produced it, for them to deal with, was an inspired one. It has become a famous action.
What I think we can learn from this
Why am I talking about it on a climate change website? Because of exactly this. The super rich – and the rich – enjoying their/our imperial way of living, don’t want to know about or think about the consequences. The costs are out of sight and out of mind. Activism can be about making those costs more obvious.
What happened next
Oh, to the Motherfuckers I suppose the usual schisms and splits and anarchist pathologies. Possibly/probably helped on by COINTELPRO. But the FBI could have saved its money except of course for them it was all about the lulz and the need to dominate and control, but I’m going off on a tangent here
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Gottlieb, R. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington DC: Island Press.
Hale, N. 1970. Black Ecology. The Black Scholar Vol. 1, No. 6, BLACK CITIES: COLONIES OR CITY STATES?, pp. 2-8