It was the Left (as opposed to, say, the art world) that the Situationists most hated in the 1960s and thought worth targeting. Whether the Left is still worth targeting we are not sure. -- T.J. Clark and Nicholson-Smith, "Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International," 1997.
In the "Editor's Notes" for the previous issue of this magazine, we denounced the Lower East Side Collective (a New York-based group of ultra-leftists) for "blossom[ing] a new sub-grouping every time an issue becomes topical." Like the International Socialist Organization, the LESC regularly protests against "new" injustices -- which are always topical and sometimes unrelated to the group's putatively central concerns --as much to increase its own visibility and recruit new members into "the collective" as to fight for justice in particular instances. For the LESC, building The Collective -- a quantitative process of accumulation (increasing the number of members, people who will come out to the events, "issues" being addressed, and dollars in the till) -- is its politics and its ultimate goal. Collective action is itself more important than the individual issues around which the collective action is taken. The Collective imagines that a "mass movement" will be built in this way, one blockhead at a time. The Collective will work with (attempt to recruit) anyone who "thinks" as it does. But because "ideology" is supposedly "unimportant" to the Collective -- it does "whatever works" (instead) -- people who practice independent thinking cannot, almost by definition, be part of the "mass movement." This approach -- identify and exploit what is useful, and ignore everything else -- has earned both the LESC and its members the nickname "the Borg," a reference to the alien creatures in the TV show Star Trek that have no individuality, live as part of a vast interconnected "collective," and ruthlessly assimilate other technologies and species into their own.
Since our last issue, the Borg have continued to take opportunistic interest in the causes of others, but The Collective no longer responds to a "new issue" by forming a new sub-committee. The current style is to form a new group, an apparently autonomous one, but actually the LESC by another name. (This in part is our objection to the so-called Reclaim the Streets group, which is the subject of the following article in this issue). But the old and style styles of Borg assimilation share common and inter-related features: an apparently irresistible tendency to take credit for every success, and a preposterously inflated sense of self-importance.
In either late May or early June 1999, the garden-subgrouping of the Borg -- in response to the ambiguous "saving" of several community gardens, that is, to their sale to private owners who plan to preserve them, rather than to private owners who plan to destroy them and put up buildings in their places -- put up posters saying "WE WON." In response to this combination of deception (we didn't "win") and self-promotion ("we" are not the LESC), Bill Brown sent out the following "Open letter to the Lower East Side Collective."
7 June 1999To the members of the Lower East Side Collective, specifically its garden sub-group:
Forgive me if I respond to a LESC poster that was put up in the neighborhood (the Lower East Side) several weeks ago -- I just saw it yesterday (on Ave B) and don't know how long it has been there.
The poster's message is quite simple: "WE WON." We battled against Giuliani and the developers and won: We saved the community gardens. And now we must do more.
Who is "we" in your poster? Is it all of the people (known and unknown) who fought to save the community gardens over the last two years? There must be hundreds of such people. . . .
No. The "we" in your posters is simply the Lower East Side Collective -- one of the groups in the forefront of the struggle, no one disputes that -- but only one of the groups involved in the struggle.
Did you consciously intend to take credit for everything? This is certainly the effect or impression these posters create.
Your implied claim that YOU (and no other individuals or groups of individuals) are so central to the garden movement that, by metonymic substitution, you in essence are the garden movement is patently absurd, self-serving, arrogant to a degree that approaches monomania, and an insult to everyone else who fought to save the gardens.
How can YOU claim that YOU were the ones who saved the gardens when you are not BETTE MIDLER, whose name doesn't appear on the offending poster?
Please clarify your position.
Bill Brown
photographer of community gardens and activist
This letter was e-mailed to several members of the LESC, as well as to anyone in the garden-movement who might be interested in it, on 7 June 1999.
On 9 June, LESC-member David Crane responded to Bill's open letter. In response to Bill, who'd written,
Who is "we" in your poster? Is it all the people (unknown and unknown) who fought to save the community gardens over the last two years? There must be hundreds of such people. . . .
Crane said: "That is precisely what the poster means. My apologies if the message was too subtle. We keep our texts short to attract a larger audience."
In response to Bill, who'd written,
No. The "we" in your posters is simply the Lower East Side Collective -- one of the groups in the forefront of the struggle, no one disputes that -- but only one of the groups involved in the struggle.
Crane said: "Certainly, the six of us in LESC Public Space do not intend to claim all the credit. But we thought we'd take the opportunity to invite like-minded people to contact us. So we took the risk of 'signing' one of our posters, which I think we have NEVER done in the past. We are simply not into self-promotion, and I think that is obvious. Naturally, we could not add names and contacts for the other three organizations that made this Spring's campaign a success. For the record, those are the NYC Garden Coalition, the More Gardens! Coalition and the Brooklyn Alliance of Neighborhood Gardens. I should also add the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance and the Sierra Club, and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Ediucation [sic] Fund, and CHARAS, and countless individuals ... As we pointed out on the full-sized version of the poster on the fence of the Creative Little Garden (6th between A and B), thousands of New Yorkers were involved."
In response to Bill, who'd written,
How can YOU claim that YOU were the ones who saved the gardens when you are not BETTE MIDLER, whose name doesn't appear on the offending poster?
Crane said: "Actually, Bette Midler is the *ONE* person that we did not want to credit. We wanted to reinforce the message that grass-roots direct action works. Bette Midler did not save the gardens -- *we* did. *We* created the political momentum, and Bette came to the rescue of the Trust for Public Land, which had been busy all Spring creating a face-saving exit for Mayor Guiliani. I will say that I admire how hard Bette has tried to avoid stealing the limelight. But in our culture of celebrity, the media could not help itself. So the message that most people heard (over and over) was that things change because of what the rich and powerful do. Therefore, we created our own message, trying to convey the truth as we understand it about how the people can influence public policy. In the words of the wobblies, 'Direct action gets the goods.' Clearly, our message failed. I am sorry we caused offense."
Bill responded immediately. Crane had said,
That is precisely what the poster means. My apologies if the message was too subtle. We keep our texts short to attract a larger audience.
To which Bill responded: "This phrasing is completely unacceptable. First, your poster was very UNSUBTLE in the way it took credit for everything. Second, 'too subtle' implies it is the fault of the reader, instead the fault of the writer, which is what it is."
Crane had said,
Certainly, the six of us in LESC Public Space do not intend to claim all the credit.
To which Bill responded: "But A). this is precisely how several people have taken it, and B). the poster does in fact take credit for everything, and in fact doesn't mention anyone else or even say 'groups and individuals too numerous to mention.' "
Crane had said,
But we thought we'd take the opportunity to invite like-minded people to contact us. So we took the risk of "signing" one of our posters, which I think we have NEVER done in the past. We are simply not into self-promotion, and I think that is obvious.
To which Bill responded: "Only to you. The poster you put up was a textbook example of self-promotion and little different from all the LESC coffee cups, calendars, bottle-openers and god only knows what else the collective has put out."
Crane had said,
As we pointed out on the full-sized version of the poster on the fence of the Creative Little Garden (6th between A and B), thousands of New Yorkers were involved.
To which Bill responded: "That's nice, but it does nothing to soften the poster I saw."
Crane had said,
Clearly, our message failed. I am sorry we caused offense.
To which Bill responded: "Clearly, some sort of public explanation is necessary. Those posters are an insult to everyone who protested and worked against the auction and who isn't in LESC. I'm obviously not done with this."
Bill may not have been done, but Crane was. He never responded to Bill's Follow-up. As for the rest of the Borg, they -- or it -- never responded to the original open letter. It was Crane only, and Crane only once.
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