Remembrances of things past (and future)

The next target is Wall Street,” an anarchist collective known as Black Mask wrote in its January newsletter, 1967. On February 10th, around twenty-five members of the group, wearing black balaclavas and carrying giant skulls, took to the streets of the financial district and handed out this statement:

WALL STREET IS WAR STREET

The traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers—but the coffins return to the Bronx and Harlem. Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange of death. Profits rise to the ticker tape of your dead sons. Poison gas RAINS on Vietnam. You cannot plead “WE DID NOT KNOW.” Television brings the flaming villages into the safety of your home. You commit genocide in the name of freedom.

BUT YOU TOO ARE THE VICTIMS!

If unemployment rises, you are given work, murderous work. If education is inferior, you are taught to kill. If the blacks get restless, they are sent to die. This is Wall Street’s formula for the great society!

The photographer Larry Fink was there. “They had nothing but their own stealth, and no support,” Fink told me. They hoped to stoke a revolution. “They were working from a massive historic misinterpretation,” Fink said.

Fink thinks that today’s Occupy Wall Street protests are different. “We’ve gone past the time when utopia seemed like a viable option,” he said. “There’s no hope for some kind of Marxist future, so it seems formless. They just know that it can’t go on like this: the greed, the inequality. It can’t go on, so we’ll sit here.”