California in world
revolutions since 1789
Draft v. 7-25-14
A
series of suppositions: are these accurate? Who did it? Where were they from?
Hypotheses, what else happened along these lines?
The peoples of the state of California have been strongly connected to
an emerging world society since the arrival of European missionaries, settlers
and miners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But these connections
have grown stronger as communications and transportation technologies have
knitted the Earth into a single network of competition, cooperation and
conflict. Because California has led the way in contemporary economic and
technological development both the positive and negative consequences of
advanced development occur first in California. We will examine social movements in indigenous California
before and during the arrival of the Europeans as well as the participation by Californians
in the several world revolutions since 1789.
World revolutions are periods in world history in
which rebellions and social unrest occur in several areas at the same time, and
are indirectly connected with one another because global elites are aware of
and must respond to these rebellions. Rebellions in distant places have become
increasingly directly connected to one another as global communication and
transportation have become more available and less connected (Martin et al 2008). World revolutions are
designated by a symbolic year in which important and telling events occurred: 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968, 1989 and the current world revolution.
Social
movement activities have a long history in California. Before the arrival of
the Europeans indigenous Californians passed songs and dances across group
boundaries [e.g. the Chumash ‘antap cult, the Kuksu cult, etc. (Halpern 1988)], developing trade and
intermarriage networks and passing new interpretations of reality. These
activities accelerated as California Indians adapted to the influx of Europeans
(DuBois 1937).
The world revolution of 1789 was important for
California because of the decolonization of the thirteen British colonies in
Eastern North America and the beginning of anglo
incursion into Alto California. The Franciscan missions in Altal
California were founded in part because Spain was trying to nail down its
empire in anticipation of competition from other European powers. The French,
American and Haitian revolutions were all linked and the Haitian Revolution of
1804 had an eventual impact on California because Napoleon’s defeat by
plantation slaves led him to sell Louisiana to the Americans, thus
jump-starting the expansion of the U.S. toward becoming a continent-wide
sovereignty.
Mexican independence and the
decolonization of most the Latin America was related to the ideas and political
movements of 1789 and was a bridge to the world revolution of 1848. 1848 also had
important consequences for California because of the connections with the Spanish-American
war and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that transferred sovereignty over
California from Mexico to the United States. And the gold rush of 1849 was
stimulated by the population pressures that spurred the influx of gold-seekers,
bringing social movements from China as well as from the Eastern United States
and Europe. The 1870 Ghost Dance and its
derivatives in Northern California were prototypical revitalization movements
among indigenous Californians who were under great pressure from the influx of
Europeans (DuBois 1939; Thornton 1986).
The
rise of the workers movement in Europe culminated in the world revolution of
1917 but this was also related to the national revolutions in China and Mexico
and the Arab rising of 1916. In California labor unions were growing and the
Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) were quite successful in the labor
camps and the mining and lumber towns of the U.S. West. Joe Hill, the Wobbly
songster, was active in San Pedro. Wobblies organized a general strike in
Seattle to prevent the U.S. Navy from shipping arms to the White Russians. John
Reed, a communist from Portland, was an outspoken participant in the early
meeting of the Comintern (3rd International)
that met in Moscow. Jack London, a
socialist and labor organizer in Oakland, typified the white racism of parts of
the labor movement. The Los Angeles Diocese of the Catholic Church sent support
to the “cristeros,” a regional conservative movement
that opposed the anti-clericalism of the Mexican Revolution (Davis 1990).
The
industrialization of California was spurred by the realization that the U.S.
would have to fight a war in the Pacific to counter the expansion of Japan
(Davis 1990). The great wave of decolonizations of
most of the rest of Asia and Africa after World War II had consequences for the
U.S. and for California because the U.S. was able to establish a global
military apparatus consisting of the 782 military bases by supporting
decolonization of most the colonies of other core powers. This further bolstered
the military-industrial complex and military bases in California.
The
world revolution of 1968 began in California in 1964 when college students
returning from the Freedom Summer civil rights struggle in the U.S. South found
that their citizenship rights of free speech were to be curtailed on the campus
of the University of California-Berkeley. The Free Speech movement soon morphed
into the anti-Vietnam War movement and the youth counter-culture (Gitlin 1993). The Black Panthers emerged first in Oakland.
The Youth International Party (Yippees) was founded
and led by Jerry Rubin from the Berkeley campus. San Francisco had a contingent of Chinese Red
Guards who worked with the Panthers. The Peoples’ Temple was a tragic spin-off
of the world revolution of 1968.
The world revolution of 1989 was
mostly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union but Californians as well as
others in the New Global Left learned that political rights are not just “bourgeois
democracy.”
The rise of
neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology in the 1970s and 1980s was partly a
counter-movement to the world revolution of 1968. The ideas came from
conservative economists, but Ronald Reagan, governor of California before he
became president of the United States, was an important politician who
championed these ideas and turned them in political policies. The “middle-class
tax revolt” that eventuated in Proposition 13 in 1978 dealt a hard blow to
public education in California by limiting the availability of property taxes
for the financial support of schools.
The
contemporary world revolution started in the Global South when Zapatistas in
Southern Mexico … participation in social forum process. Zapatistas, Global Exchange, solidarity movements, immigration rights, amory staff, big bird,
The struggle
over the South Central Farm, a 14-acre community garden in Los Angeles that was
sold and bull-dozed in 2006, was notable as an instance of what can be called
Planet California. The activists sought and got support from U.S. celebrities
but apparently did not reach out to transnational organizations such as Via Campesina, a global SMO for small farmers.
[altruistic
solidarity, church groups in Jubilee 2000,
UC- Haiti Initiative; Temecula
church project in Hinch, Haiti; volunteers in
Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. ]
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