Occupy Culture! There Will Be Dancing During the Revolution

Gore Vidal once said that the greatest cultural accomplishment of the United States is the advertisement. Consumer culture has subjugated art and creative expression to the market place, allowing for the people who dominant our society to be the source of the dominant ideas. By allowing our culture and history to be co-opted, to become commodified, to become something we buy and own and not something we actively participate in and become - we fail to learn how to work with others to collectively create. Consumer culture reinforces capitalist alienation, individualism, and the reduction of human activities to commodities, to mere objects on a rack for sale. We literally buy into our oppression and turn ourselves and our creativity into a product for sale, one object among many.

That is why it is so important to meaningfully engage in "culture work". We need to "Occupy" culture. We need to reclaim our power to create. We have to "awaken the zombies", because once we are truly awakened, we can never be silenced. We have to reclaim our history, which is being actively buried, because if we don't understand the present in relation to the past, we have no hope of truly molding the future. By rendering culture to what you can purchase, to participating in the market place, we are reduced to something less than human. The truth is we are part of a complex culture and history. We must reclaim the stories of our lives, our families and our communities if we are to truly gain a sense of our selves and our own authority. Cultural identity is at the base of any movement for change. Culture work provides us an opportunity to work meaningfully with compassion and passion in the creation of a more just world.

I want to take a moment to highlight what I have found to be some really meaningful, interesting, and fun acts of resistance that are themselves the products of talented and passionate collaborations. I hope you find them as inspiring as I do. I hope they lead you to act.

The Ruckus Society worked with Occupy Oakland to create the dance number: "I Will Survive Capitalism".

Activist perform "Target Ain't People" song and dance number!

Poster for upcoming Bank of America protest - promoting interactive street theater event: "Bank vs. America"

Poster promoting "People's History Bus Tours" - we literally rode on the Carta bus while discussing the history of our city and the various places on the route. This is a really fun participatory event that educates folks about the place we call home while also situating our own individual struggles in a deep and complex history.

I absolutely love this video, it shows the power of making our own media rather than relying on the corporate press. Here we presented our own message loudly and clearly - that the attacks against workers, migrants, women, queer folks, and the poor are part of an overall strategy by the rich to further consolidate their wealth and power. This analysis of our situation is the background against which the acts of civil disobedience on the floor of the Tennessee State Senate take on their meaning.

The Brass Liberation Orchestra performs "Homes Not Jails" on the streets of San Francisco. The BLO are some real bad asses who show how the revolution will require song, dance and fun!


UPDATE 5.3.2012 2:15 Updated to include the Brass Liberation Orchestra as the creme de la creme of culture work taking to the streets in an awesome and sustainable way!