Monthly Archives: April 2012

Occupy or Affinity?

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How does the Occupy movement now do its work? When the encampments began in 2011, the General Assembly was clearly the central decision making body. With the dispersal forced by the evictions and Northern winter (even its climate-changed moderate form), the affinity group has emerged as the main unit. The question now coming into the open is: occupy or affinity?

In New York, the experience of the General Assembly (GA) last year was for many of us the moment that led to greater involvement with the movement. It was, as many have testified, a really affirming experience and, at its best (as on March 17) it still can be. Too often the GA was bogged down with details of financial expenditures or unable to proceed because of the actions of disruptive individuals. Perhaps this was inevitable because Manhattan, especially downtown, did not lend itself to the creative possibilities of the Neighborhood Assemblies that have flourished in Spain, elsewhere in the US and indeed even elsewhere in New York City. Some Occupy locations, like Toronto, have recently restarted the GA, hoping to recapture the energy of direct democracy.

An affinity group is a set of people who decide to do something together, in this case, for the Occupy movement. Decentralized and autonomous, as the movement always claimed to be, the affinity group (AG) is something of a “back to the future” project. That is to say, while the AG is very flexible and responsive, it can also be invisible. In fact, that’s part of the point: with many being concerned about police infiltration, the AG allows for civil disobedience or other disruptive actions to be planned and carried out.

The Education and Empowerment Working Group of OWS, where I entered the movement, is now considering whether to formally disband as its affinity groups like Occupy Student Debt and the Occupy University are flourishing, so much so that people don’t have time for the extra meetings of Education and Empowerment itself. I’m one of those people and yet I still worry about this, it seems that we would be losing something important.

The issue, then, can be more clearly stated as how the new energies of the affinity groups can be made visible as a coherent movement, rather than as a set of issues in the now familiar (and ineffective) rainbow pattern. Global days of action are one such means to maintain visibility. At the same time, affinity actions bring new risks.

In New York, there was a recent action on the New York subway in which the gates at some stations were chained open allowing people to access the system without paying. Cleverly-faked notices were posted, appearing to authorize the free fares.

MTA spoof poster

It was asserted by some that this was either an OWS action or an action in sympathy with Occupy. Almost at once local police and media began a blitz of publicity denouncing these “crimes,” including lead items on the local TV news and video from CCTV posted on the New York Times website. There was also a good deal of internal recrimination about the action, which was apparently likely to lead to disciplinary action for MTA staff. However, the CCTV showed that, whoever did this, they were not wearing MTA uniforms or working with MTA employees. In the end, then, no harm done but it’s clear that NYPD and their friends in the media are now as ready for affinity actions as for attempts to occupy.

Thinking about such issues, Stephen Collis of Occupy Vancouver  proposed an action recently under the slogan

“system change not climate change” and indigenous solidarity — by announcing a one-week climate occupation, with daily workshops, teach-ins, information-sessions, and actions all around the task of defending this planet from capitalist and colonial plunder.

His focus on climate was intended to be Vancouver-specific, pointing out local priorities on logging and indigenous issues. On the other hand, the Democracia Real Ya! movement in Spain is calling for a day of global action of May 12 (or 12M12), in addition to the existing calls for May Day and for the anniversary of the indignados movement on May 15.

It’s probably not a question of either Occupy/or Affinity Groups, so much as both/and. For OWS, there’s going to be a need to think past May Day, as much as we will have enjoyed ourselves. Once the arrests have been highlighted by the media and the numbers on the march have been similarly downplayed, the future may well belong to the affinity groups. Perhaps the way to maintain the visibility of the movement as a whole is precisely to keep having such periodic mass days of action.

 

Movement Time

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I’m revising two pieces that I’ve done about Occupy, one from last October, the other from January. It’s odd how long ago they seem to have been written, while at the same time making me realize how short a moment this really has been. Movement time is like that: it extends the present, makes new pasts available and yet questions the future.

Raqs Media Collective "Strike" (2011)

I began thinking about this when I illustrated the piece about Sarai with the Raqs Media Collective’s work “Strike.” On a sheet of stainless steel is written: “IT IS THE MOMENT TO STRIKE AT TIME.” The slogan seems entirely conventional until the last two words: how do we strike at time? Who are the strikers and who would be their target? There have been many strikes about time, usually time to be worked in exchange for a wage. There are those Spanish Civil War anarchists, evoked by Benjamin, who shot at the clocks that made their alienated labor measurable. Back in the 19th century, people had to be taught how to regulate their lives by the clock, that they could not sleep in “work time,” let alone drink.

Then there’s the steel, shiny enough to be reflective but, at least in the photo, not without distortion. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s a formal resemblance to Anish Kapoor’s work here. It made me think of the complexities of steel as a form of labor. I’ve been following the strike and occupation by steelworkers at the ArcelorMittal in Florange, France. Last Friday, 17 workers from the plant completed a symbolic walk from Florange to the Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris and modernity, built from Lorraine steel. Everyone knows this is going to end with them being made redundant but officialdom continues to prevaricate until the elections are over. New polls show the National Front winning among young people. Meanwhile, as covered before,  Kapoor is creating a new monument for the 2012 Olympics paid for by Lakshmi Mittal in London, the Eiffel Tower for autoimmune capital.

Raqs also have another piece referencing steel and shipyards. The elegiac image above shows cranes being dismantled in the famous Swan Hunter shipyards of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England, prior to being sent to India. The enigmatic title of the seven-screen installation “For the Knots That Bind Are the Knots That Fray” has been proved right recently, when the purchaser of the cranes, Bharati Shipyard in Bangalore itself appeared to face bankruptcy, unable to pay its debts.

Behind such iconic modern forms lies a long history of the strike. On Glasgow’s Clydeside, the steel and shipyards formed the heart of the British labor movement. In a 1917 pamphlet called Industrial Unionism, the Industrial Workers of Great Britain visualized their situation as a battlefront.

The Class Battlefront

The Working Class and Master Class were mirror opposites, as if anticipating the shiny reflection of Strike. The IWGB was a branch of the IWW, and called for the abolition of wages, direct action, rent strikes and eventually in 1926 Red Clydeside was a key player in the General Strike of 1926.

Fast forward to 1971: after fifty years of class struggle, the workers at the Upper Clyde Shipyards on Clydeside faced redundancy as the government sought to close the yards in what can now be seen as the first wave of neo-liberalism. Instead of the expected traditional strike, which would have led to a lockout and acceleration of job losses, the unions occupied the shipyard, did no damage, and in the famous words of Communist shop steward Jimmy Reid, there was “no hooliganism, no vandalism and no bevvying (drinking).”

1971 Glasgow: Upper Clyde Shipyards Occupation

A placard in this photograph prefigures the 1984-5 miners’ strike that would be the turning point of Thatcherism: the “Jobs Not Dole” slogan on the far right clearly anticipates the later “Coal Not Dole.” The shipyard workers staged a march of 80,000 people, gained worldwide support, including that of John Lennon and used public opinion to save thousands of jobs. With the possibility of Scottish independence on the horizon with the referendum of 2014, and as jobs disappear at the behest of the bankers, such histories seem newly meaningful. Yet while two shipyards were saved, the departure of heavy industry from the U. K. and the construction of a permanent underclass was just delayed.

But none of the imagined futures in these strikes against time have quite come to pass. While the 1926 General Strike was repressed, its victors were themselves defeated when the 1945 Labour Government implemented the welfare state. Its creation of free state higher education, for example, lasted over fifty years. Nor do the Indian capitalists who dismantled the Swan Hunter yard look so clever now, a mere two years later.

So if the victory of the “Master Class” is shorter now, there’s also a longer rhythm at play, in which the anarcho-syndicalist demands of the IWGB for the abolition of the wage-system by direct action once again feels right. The proper lesson, then, is the future will be seen as the future precisely when something happens that we don’t expect or anticipate. To that extent, the future is always ours, not theirs, because the way it happens now is how they feel it always ought to be.

Occupy the Global (Cold War) Imaginary

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One of the most resistant spaces to the global Occupy movement is the global imaginary, by which I mean the way in which we imagine the planet. While the push-back against financial inequality has been very successful, with the 99% vs. one per cent divide now part of the global political vocabulary, we have not succeeded in framing an alternative means of visualizing the planet. That space remains occupied by the Cold War imaginary of binary divides between hostile camps, all underpinned by the threat of nuclear war.

The Nagasaki bomb, 1945

What sets the Occupy way of visualizing against neoliberal financial globalization is its willingness to bring issues together, to embrace complexity and to see patterns of relation. Yet in the case of the largest system of all, Earth, we have failed to shift attention towards the reckless destruction of liveable space in the name of profit. Strikingly, any effort to discuss the degradation of the Earth-system is designated even by radicals as a depressing subject–this from people who love nothing more than to read long essays describing how capitalism is collapsing, poverty increasing, employment disappearing.

So it’s not the depressing nature of the subject as such. It’s the sense that this subject is itself, as it were, futile because the imagined destruction of the planet is already occupied by nuclear weapons and the world they have produced. In this view, the military are the indispensable key to continued safety and it has been an article of neoliberal faith to maintain massive military budgets, while cutting all other areas of government. Thus we imagine we are “safe.” We have to expose this old idea for the peculiar hodgepodge of 1950s militarism and 1980s economics that it is, while espousing the new synthesis of science, anti-poverty, pro-diversity that has emerged in the past decade as a path to a real security that does not depend on world-ending weapons.

The Cold War spectres continue to haunt the earth. Consider how Romney has cited Russia as the greatest enemy of the U. S. More saliently, reflect how overwhelming the transnational governing consensus that Iran must not be “allowed” to acquire nuclear weapons has remained. This is old-fashioned Cold War doctrine: nuclear proliferation is bad, not because nuclear weapons are bad, but because it undermines the deterrence of the superpowers. In short, if “small” nuclear powers might actually use their weapons, then the deterrence of massive arsenals counts for nothing. How that works in the post-Soviet era no one seems to have tried to work out.

The evocation of the nuclear activates a form of pre-emptive dread, in which many of us have literally been schooled. It has been visualized many times but perhaps the 1964 “Daisy” ad for President Johnson did it best.

“Daisy” reminds us of “s/he loves me, s/he loves me not” and all the other binary games that you can play like this. The choice here is simple: to die or not to die. The ad mobilizes a fantasy that by voting we can affect our own destiny in the geopolitics of nuclear weapons. For many, the current crisis in the Earth-system lacks such a vision of solution and so it’s “depressing.” Now the International Council for Science has issued a “State of the Planet Declaration” that allows for us to imagine a different geo-politics. Here are its opening three clauses:

1. Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. Without urgent action, we could face threats to water, food, biodiversity and other critical resources: these threats risk intensifying economic, ecological and social crises…
2. In one lifetime our increasingly interconnected and interdependent economic, social, cultural and political systems have come to place pressures on the environment that may cause fundamental changes in the Earth system and move us beyond safe natural boundaries. But the same interconnectedness provides the potential for solutions… required for a truly sustainable planet.
3. The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes to ensure the well-being of civilization while eradicating poverty, reducing conflict over resources, and supporting human and ecosystem health.

“Saving civilization” can now be presented as practical the task of ending poverty and the conceptual work of thinking human and non-human systems as being so intertwined as to form one co-dependent network.

You can’t vote for this. You can’t expect the United Nations to enact it. You have to perform this set of changes and it begins very simply by refusing the global and imagining the Earth-system.

Research Practice: New Delhi

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In trying to reimagine research practice, I’ve been inspired by Mosireen in Egypt and Observatorio Metropolitano in Madrid. The foremother of them all is perhaps Sarai, the remarkable New Delhi collective. Formed as an off-shoot of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sarai has created a coalition of researchers and practitioners for the past decade.

Raqs Media Collective "Strike" (2011)

As befits, their legendary status in “new media” circles, Sarai maintain a comprehensive website that is at the center of their practice. Here they define their mission as:

a commitment towards developing a model of research-practice that is public and creative, in which multiple voices express and render themselves in a variety of forms. Through these practices that range from art practice to publication, academic research to the organization of discursive events, setting up of media labs and creative practices in locality labs in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the city, reflecting upon the culture of freedom, in speech and in software, we have sought to participate in and cultivate a public domain that seeks to find a new language of engagement with the inequities, as also the possibilities, of the contemporary world.

So some distinctive notes created by Sarai are their involvement with visual arts practice as a form of research, “new media” work and software development and a commitment to openness.

Let’s quickly note a couple of these projects before thinking about the challenge they pose to activist research in the overdeveloped world. I am particularly struck by Cybermohalla–a word formed by adding the Hindi and Urdu word mohalla, meaning neighborhood, implying alleys, street corners, and a sense of place both in the city and online. Since 2001, this project has collaborated with young people in some of the newer “colonies” or districts of New Delhi. The hope was that:

if the space can draw a relation between writing, researching, experimenting, and tap into different forms of knowledge, modes of cultural expression and infrastructures of circulation of these within the neighbourhood, then it will be able to build new grounds of knowledge.

The knowledge generated in such projects is shared through print, visual and online sources. One example is the range of Sarai Readers on a range of topical subjects, available copyleft and free of charge on the website. The Readers differ from the Anglo-American model in that they give space to shorter writings than are typical in the academic context, often more experimentally written and less burdened with academic apparatus. There are substantive interviews with key figures, visual interventions and so on.

Some common threads link the different projects from India, Egypt, and Spain despite the very different contexts in which they take place. Each seems to serve as a key source of information regarding what’s happening in the giant cities created by financial globalization. While Madrid’s three million people would disappear into New Delhi, which has a population density of 37,000 per square kilometer, each city has been transformed over the past twenty-five years of neo-liberalism.

Perhaps it is the very belatedness of the impoverishing, distancing, hierarchizing effects of this moment of global capital’s transformation in its former capitals like New York that has been so traumatizing and galvanizing for us. We should start to look with humility at those who preceded us in this struggle.

Next, each group privileges making its work available free, producing it rapidly and in as many formats as possible. These tactics strike at the heart of the walled, gated communities that call themselves universities in the Anglophone world, always happy to think of themselves as elitists in the intellectual sense. Can we continue to assume that we can still be egalitarian in other ways while maintaining such hierarchies?

Consider these scenarios: a person wants to join your department/program/seminar having attended free, open classes previously. If it’s a class at the Public School with top academics like my colleague Alex Galloway, you’re going to be impressed. What if it’s a person you’ve never heard about before?

Will you consider publishing your own work free and open source? People worry about the imprimatur of double-blind peer review. If you want it, you can get it at Open Humanities Press. But this is not so simple. I’ve benefited from such reviews, especially for my recent book. I’ve also run foul of the system, where a person fundamentally unsympathetic to the project has been allocated to read it. It even happens to Gayatri Spivak, according to her talk at Left Forum:)

Set aside the bias question, and assume it always works for the best. Do we want this kind of closed door process? Would it not be preferable to have discussion in open ways? If material is published digitally, it can be corrected and changed easily as long as people are making comments or suggestions. If we find ourselves reluctant to participate in such interaction, perhaps we are less invested in change than we think? Or is the overload already demanded by the neoliberal university such that we simply can’t?

I’m for quick, direct, open publication but I don’t want to pretend it’s a panacea. It may be best suited to moments of rapid change and not so central when things are more locked down. I think nonetheless that we have to assume that the crisis in research, whether activist, militant, corporate or academic, is not limited to debt and funding but goes to the core of the project.

Occupy Passover

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Why is tonight different from all other nights?–and all other Passover nights? Because tonight we don’t say “next year in Jerusalem.” We say “next year in Cairo.” Tonight we do not think about Occupy but about the ongoing colonial occupations around the world that continue to oppress. And tonight we hope for another future.

In the traditional Passover service, the gathering say “Next year in Jerusalem,” the utopian wish of the diaspora. The “Jerusalem” of the Haggadah (the text used during the service) was interpreted by many modern progressives in the manner of Blake as a place without slavery, the place of emancipation.

The Liberation Haggadah

Often, such affinities are felt to have been expressed by the work done by Jews during the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, noted for its beautiful illustrations was the exemplar of how the book could also mobilize cross-cultural alliances. It was hidden and protected from the Nazis during World War II by local people, including a Muslim cleric. Later it was again saved from damage during the devastating “ethnic” civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

These affirmative histories feel remote from modern Jerusalem as it is ruled under what is, to use Jimmy Carter’s telling phrase, a “new apartheid.” In Jerusalem, Orthodox Jewish men actually send Jewish women to the back of the bus, as if to say that they want to erase the Civil Rights history.

So today the anti-slavery “Jerusalem” is somewhere much more like Cairo after the Tahrir revolution than it is the city of that name.

Perhaps no visual example is more telling than this picture:

The "separation wall" in Bethlehem.

It shows the city of Bethlehem, named as the birthplace of Jesus, a city of importance for Jews as the seat of King David and long part of the Arab Caliphate. Now it is divided by the separation wall that epitomizes the key tactic of global counterinsurgency: once you have identified your insurgent, separate them from the “good” population.

There’s so much writing about the disastrous consequences of Israeli policies, above all from progressive Israelis like Ariella Azoulay, Eyal Weizman and Adi Ophir, that there’s perhaps no need to dwell on them. Except that it has now become clear that Israel has embarked on a “necropolitics,” a sovereign determining of who it is that must die, which now extends to other nations. The entirely unsurprising “October surprise” of the 2012 election will be the Israeli attack on Iran, telegraphed and planned by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Obama might be enough to get him on the Supreme Court. Just because we can see this coming does not mean it will not have most serious consequences.

Not least will be a renewed clampdown on all anti-militaristic, anti-hierarchical politics. It should be remembered that the tent city in Tel Aviv was evicted long before Liberty Plaza. Only you can’t call it the Israeli Occupy because that already exists.

Looking back, as one does on ceremonial days, I reflect on the opportunity that the Oslo Accords appeared to present in 1993. Among them was the possibility for a secular Jewish identity that was not linked to Israel and also not shamed by it. At the time, the late lamented Edward Said indicated that Oslo was going to be a disaster. Along with many others, I could see that but hoped that it would lead to something better. It did not and the possibility to play with being “Jewish” disappeared as well. Israeli officials do so much in the name of “Jewish” and not just Judaism that it would be sophistry to do otherwise.

Nonetheless, there is of course a new Haggadah this year, translated and commented upon by earnest, bearded young men from Brooklyn of the Jonathan Safran Foer kind. Actually, it is edited by Foer.

The Haggadah says that

in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt

I don’t want to do that now. I want to stay in the “Egypt” that we’ve seen since 2011, the Egypt of Tahrir. I want to decolonize Palestine and finally bring an end to slavery. L’chaim.

Militant Research–Madrid

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It is one thing to call for activist research, it’s altogether something else to carry it out. There are a number of interesting existing models. They seem to have in common a willingness to work outside the formal structures of the university, to work on projects, rather than within disciplines, and to publish their work freely and open source on and offline.

One example is the Madrid collective Observatorio Metropolitano [OM from now on]. Their work was presented last night at 16 Beaver by Ana Méndez de Andés, an architect and urban planner who teaches Urban Design at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. In the announcement for the event, OM were described as:

a militant research group that utilizes investigations and counter-mapping to look into the metropolitan processes of precarious workers, migrants, and militants taking place in Madrid, brought on by crisis, gentrification, speculation and displacement.

In her presentation, Méndez de Andés described how the group had come together in 2007 at the height of the speculative building boom in Madrid to try and discover exactly what was happening in the city. With disarming wit, she commented that it was an advantage that Madrid was seen as a provincial city, lacking the cosmopolitan identity of Barcelona, because it was easier to examine the city’s changes.

The group was intellectual but not academic, interested in carrying out what she called “militant research,” which she distinguished from activism. In their Manifesto for Madrid, OM define this as being [these are my no doubt dreadful translations: do consult the originals before quoting!] :

Militant investigations which will bring the knowledge and policy tools necessary to address these enormous processes of change. To build a communication space between members, technicians and stakeholders, and above all between small projects (or embryonic projects) of militant research already occurring in the city and the social movements.

Méndez de Andés joked that she herself was not very good at organizing events, so she had stuck to analysis. Their research generates both substantial books, 400 pages long, and short, accessible pamphlet-length works available free as PDFs. The Manifesto strikes the signature note for OM projects in its denunciation of

the destruction of the elementary bases, which make possible common life (la vida en común) in a city like Madrid.

Written at the height of the boom, the Manifesto was able to visualize the transformation of Madrid into a global city at the expense of the creation of a marginalized class of people living precariously, the undermining of social provisions for health, environment and education and (as we all now know) spectacular debt.

Banner from Traficantes website

The related open-source copyleft publishing venture, Traficantes de Sueños does not define itself as a publisher:

It is, however, a project, in the sense of ‘commitment’, which aims to map the constituent lines of other forms of life.

Central to this venture is “freedom of access to knowledge.” All publications are available either as downloads or as books. Some people buy all the books as a means of supporting the project, regardless of whether they intend to read them. Publications are generated rapidly so that they can contribute to the ongoing discussion and debate within the social movements, rather than reflect on them later (I was recently asked by contrast to contribute to a collection on OWS, bearing in mind, as the call put it, that Zuccotti Park will be ancient history by the time of publication).

In La crisis que viene (The Coming Crisis) [March, 2011] OM see the the financial crisis as a prelude to the unrelenting privatization of the commons across Europe. For OM, there is:

a constant underlying all measures: interest and financial benefits go first. Although this will cost the immediate and future welfare of entire populations. Although this will involve the dismantling of pension systems and the decline of social rights acquired over decades. Although such policies will cause the whole economy to slide, limping along the path of stagnation. The next decade offers us no more than a new round of privatization of services and social guarantees, a greater decline in wages, and a social crisis which is still known only in its embryonic stage.

By October 2011, this pessimism was offset by the possibilities of the new social movements across Europe. Crisis and Revolution in Europe argues that, to quote the poet Holderlin,

“there grows what also saves.” The antidote has been accompanied by citizens’ movements now extend across most of the continent. This is the 15M, the movement of Greek squares, the French strikers and the indignados in a growing number of countries. It is in this work in progress of political reinvention, where you can find a social outlet to the crisis, in addition to rescuing that which really matters: democracy and European society.

Their analysis is now being translated into Portuguese, English, Greek and Italian in order to create a transEuropean dialogue about the crisis and build towards transEuropean social movements, perhaps even strikes.

No-one yesterday asked the quintessential Anglo question about funding. I took it that there the project was sustained by a mix of commitment, donation and the blanket subscriptions.

While there are many nascent publishing ventures using online and low-cost publishing in the Anglophone world, I don’t think we have anything to quite match this: though I would love to be corrected! Too many of the new digital publishing ventures spend so much time accommodating the demands of tenure, the one per cent of academia, that the online virtues of speed and accessibility get lost. Too much of the Occupy research is about the vicissitudes of Occupy and not the collective issues that brought us into the movement.

That said, where the Spanish have led the way before, we have also followed from the “Take the Square” movement to Occupy Wall Street. Of those who are still reading at this point, I bet many of us are intellectuals of one sort or another. How about it? A collective militant/activist research project(s)?

A Day Without the 99%

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A day without the 99% is the part of the slogan used by OWS for its May Day action that has not been discussed enough. While even the New York Times has run a plodding exposé of the low chances of a mass observation of the general strike (no, I’m not linking, you can make it up), the day without us is much more than that.

In 1974, the Italian activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa already saw that a general strike was in fact no such thing

Let’s make this clear. No strike has ever been a general strike. When half the working population is at home in the kitchens, while the others are on strike, it’s not a general strike. We’ve never seen a general strike. We’ve only seen men, generally men from the big factories, come out on the streets, while their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers went on cooking in the kitchens.

Perhaps today some male-identified activists might question that 50% figure: I suspect not many of the female-identified ones would do so.

Indeed, tonight at 16 Beaver, Ana Méndez de Andés from the Madrid-based Observatorio Metropolitano, a militant research collective, made an almost identical set of observations. She recalled discussing with the organizers of the Spanish strike what those who were unemployed or involved in domestic labor should do. The answer was simple: show solidarity.

In the U. S. context, the “big factories” are among the least likely venues to strike because they cannot call a solidarity strike due to anti-labor legislation. Manufacturing has been able to increase productivity while using fewer and fewer human workers by means of automation. So, as we all know, the workforce is susbtantially composed of dispersed individuals from the unemployed, part-time and casual labor, to those working as freelances, without documentation or on piece work, none of whom can visibly “strike.”

The OWS kitchen in action at Liberty Plaza

How, then, could a “day without the 99%” offer a visualization of the refusal to accept the neoliberal privatization of everyday life? Writing for the new Occupy.com aggregator site, Chris Longenecker suggests that the day should involve:

mobile street kitchens, free stores and free medical clinics, as well as occupy their schools and workplaces and make their goods and services available to all who need them.

Now that finance capital has withdrawn from the housing sector, it is eager to privatize health, knowledge, education, music and art (or to accelerate the existing tendencies to privatize). It is as if they will not be satisfied until no one can even imagine an alternative.

So a well-attended and highly visible union march and Occupy-style disruptions to the normal practice of expropriation and dispossession are excellent and important gestures. In Occupy-speak, these are “direct actions” and highly valorized, rightly so. What Dalla Costa, Mendez de Andes and Longenecker are calling for is usually known as “mutual aid.” It’s been crucial to those actually occupying space in providing food, health care and other services but it is less prestigious, if that’s the right word within an activist movement. There needs to be a leveling so that each form of action is seen as equally important.

So far OWS hasn’t been able to cater to all needs. A few days ago I remember a young woman intervening in a discussion about activism, saying that she can’t be active because there is no child care provision for her two-year-old. While efforts have sometimes been made (though not enough), there is a thicket of law around child care that makes such work really complicated. This is a recurring issue. The first radical event I was involved with in the U.K. called “Left Alive,” which took place just after Thatcher’s crushing second election victory, provided fabulous child care: which no one used because they hadn’t expected it to be any good.

So, no, there won’t be and can’t be a general strike on May 1. Certain duties of care will continue and should do so. Still more people can’t strike because they will be fired if they do. And many others have nowhere to withdraw their labor from, other than domestic situations.

So we need to become in Ana Mendez de Andés’s phrase “traficantes de sueños,” traffickers in dreams: what would make people’s day better on May Day that doesn’t involve work, housework, banking, or school? What do we have in common that we can share? How can we reclaim time from the compartmentalized day, just as we have struggled to reclaim public space? How do we make May 2 seem like a positive beginning to something for each and every day, rather than a return to the chores of the everyday?

 

Another Brain Is Possible

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Immaterial labor, the knowledge economy, service-based industries, call them what you will but they depend on the brain, in the same way that factory labor depends on the body. It is, then, a symptom of the suicidal autoimmune capitalism that has been forged in the past thirty years that fish, the single food most associated with improving the brain, actually kills it. Our brains ourselves demand a new global system as the precondition for our survival.

Nearly all varieties of fish, long exalted as brain food, contain significant quantities of mercury. The mercury arrives in the ocean as a by-product of coal, used above all in power stations. Washed out of the air into rivers by rain, it accumulates in the sea. It is absorbed by fish and more particularly by carnivorous fish. So the higher up the food chain you go the worse the problem becomes, because fish that eat other carnivorous fish get more concentrated doses. By the time you get to top-end carnivores like tuna, shark, marlin and swordfish, the levels are very noticeable.

But there’s no such thing as a “safe” level. Mercury doesn’t simply harm the brain–it makes it disappear. Here’s a video from the University of Calgary that shows how brain neurons wither and disappear in the presence of mercury–at 2 mins 30 if you want to skip ahead

So let’s say you don’t really worry about rising temperatures, drought and the other indices of climate change: do you care that you’re killing your brain by what you eat?

The dots are easy to join. A fossil fuel based energy economy puts increasing amounts of mercury into the biosphere, which concentrate in the bodies of fish. This toxicity makes the flesh of humanity’s last remaining wild food source unambiguously hazardous for consumption. It threatens the very possibility of human creativity itself. This problem is easy to describe but cannot be solved in the present economic system. Increasingly the choice is between sustaining the greatest number of human lives or the largest profit. The change for the former cannot be achieved by policy, by interstate treaty or by the market. It will either happen post-catastrophe or by systemic change.

Surely this is the usual alarmist stuff from environmentalists we have become so adept at ignoring? Last year Time journalist Bryan Walsh had himself tested for mercury–and found his levels at twice the government recommended limit. He bizarrely adds that this is not a problem for men, presumably because they don’t use their brains. Under heavy pressure from fossil fuel industry and fishing alike, government has simply caved and designated mercury a risk for women and children only.

Still not bothered? Now studies are showing that sharks and other top predator fish are contaminated with BMAA, a neurotoxin related to cyanide that accumulate in human flesh:

A growing body of research suggests there may be a connection between exposure to the toxin and the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The bacteria that cause the toxin are naturally occurring: perhaps it’s just an indication that we did not evolve expecting to eat sharks and other animals with extensive rows of teeth that live in the open ocean.

Who eats shark anyway?

Shark fins, second row from the top, China Town NYC

Lots of people, that’s who, mostly as shark fin soup, which now stands revealed as the ultimate autoimmune dish. The fins are, even by shark standards, intensely concentrated sources of mercury and BMAA. The soup is eaten to celebrate special occasions or as a luxury item, mostly by Chinese people. I’m not even going to get into the practice of harvesting fins from sharks that are then thrown back into the ocean to die.

Let’s not get a frisson of superiority here if we don’t eat such soups but restrict our choices to more “sensible” fish. So many “forage” fish, the small fish humans don’t eat but larger fish do, have been fished that the species now face serious risk of extinction. What happens to them? Fish farms grind them up and feed them to their animals–what better way could be imagined to intensify the concentration of mercury and BMAA in the food chain? Your reasoned choice for a farmed salmon or whatever else is just as implicated in the collapse of world fish stocks and the toxicity of top-end fish as shark’s fin soup, just in different ways.

As usual, it’s Africans, least involved in any of this, who are paying the highest visible price. Off the coasts of West Africa, huge quantities of forage fish are gathered by European Union supertrawlers that freeze the fish on board. As such fish constitute a vital food source for Africans, the risks of overfishing are literally life and death for subaltern populations. Yet the European fishing industry is more concerned about Chinese boats than the sustaining of local people. Once again, threats to profit are taken more seriously than threats to people.

We like to say another world is possible. Another one is actively being made right now in which wild species of fish will be close to extinction with their few remaining specimens will be too toxic to eat. Human brains and bodies are suffering. Another world is necessary.

 

Take 2: Activist Research

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It seems that  my title “activism is the new theory” was somewhat misunderstood–or better, open to misunderstanding. I’ve had interesting comments via FB, email and word of mouth that made it seem worth following up the post today (by the way, if you feel nervous about posting a comment to the blog, you can email a comment to me and I can post it anonymously). If you’re not nervous do leave comments where everyone can see them:)

Objection one: isn’t “activist theory” just praxis by another name? Perhaps; but with a couple of caveats. Praxis is often described as something like the interaction of theory and practice, often with an able-ist quote of the “theory without practice is blind” variety attached. Or you can cite Marx: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world–the point, however, is to change it.”

For all that, the philosophy of praxis has tended to be more philosophy than praxis, especially in university contexts. On the other hand, I think it is perhaps the moment to leave philosophy to the philosophers. By suggesting that activism is the new theory, I didn’t mean it should replace theory. In rather compressed fashion, I meant that the highly privileged space afforded to “theory” in the academy might be replaced by activism, providing we take that to mean the “interface where we ‘do’ theory.”

Objection two: isn’t this is all wildly optimistic? Again, perhaps so. But if you look at the posts on debt, especially student debt, I am doubtful that you’ll find me so starry-eyed. I have spent my entire working life under the rhetorical shadow of crisis, from Thatcherism to the War on Terror and now the global financial crisis. I’ve been in left and social democratic political parties, pressure groups and even did some work for the Obama campaign.

I think this moment is different. The crisis is such that even as neoliberal austerity is clearly failing, a growth policy would only exacerbate climate change that is setting drought and temperature records daily. I’m still not pessimistic, because the global movement of which Occupy is a part has had more torque than anything I’ve seen. The very violence unleashed by the cops from coast to coast suggests that this movement gets under their skin in a different way. Once we give in to the pleasures of pessimism, though, it’s easy to read this as a “moment,” perhaps a transition. Since things started to move during the Arab Spring, it’s seemed to me that this is it–either there is change now or there isn’t for some long time to come.

I don’t pretend that this is all my idea. The 16 Beaver Group today circulated a very interesting text from 2005, a response from the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones to a set of questions from the Madrid-based Precarias a la Deriva, Precarious Women in the Dérive (Drift). Note that they were writing after the great wave of militancy in 2001 had passed. The Colectivo outlined their strategy of “research militancy” situated in tension with the “‘sad militant'” and the “detached, unchangeable ‘university researcher.'” Their goal:

a practice capable of articulating involvement and thought.

In a time when the phantasmagoria of common ground has dispersed, idealization of all kinds is problematic:

We think that the labor of research militancy is linked to the construction of a new perception.

This is precisely the project of my own work in all arenas. At the same time–because this project is after all not (yet) a collective one–I also agree with the Precarias

We consider as a primary problem to ‘start from oneself,’ as one among many, in order to ‘get out of oneself’ (both of the individual ego and the radical group to which one belongs) and encounter with any other resisting people [in order to] politicize life from within.

Research radicalism, a feminist politics of immediate experience, the necessity of a certain commitment, the awareness of the an-archive of refusal, all in a moment where uncertainty creates opportunity for new ways of thinking and doing–that’s what I mean by “activism is the new theory.” Call it what you like.

Activism is the New Theory

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Can we say that activism is the new theory? Not the replacement for theory, not the subject of theory but the interface where we “do” theory. As this project is today one quarter complete, a look around seems in order. I feel change, everywhere. I feel it most where I try to think, wherever that is: that place in the twilight of the shadow city where things look different.

I’m thinking back to Ruth Gilmore saying in her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association that “policy is the new theory.” She did mean “replacement for” (in part at least), I suspect. However, given the paralysis of the existing political process that began in November 2010 with the Republican takeover of the House and many state legislatures, such a move has not seemed promising.

With the wholesale conversion of the judicial branch to political theater, as evidenced by the ludicrous Supreme Court “hearings” on health care, the old stand-by of legal activism also seems foreclosed. Let’s pause to dwell on the rank misogyny of Scalia and his ilk, insisting that, like a bad mother, the government might force real men to eat broccoli. The legal and economic ripostes are beside the point–health care makes men into wimps, according to the Stand Your Ground right.

So in saying that activism might be the new theory, I’m not saying something as simple as “we can only learn in the streets.” I am suggesting that a certain kind of High Theory, so privileged over the past two decades, and so masculine in its exaltation of rigor, is demonstrably (as it were) not the way to get to grips with the crisis. For example, the widespread suggestion amongst theorists of a certain kind that we should read St. Paul–really? I’m just not going to do that.

For Jack Halberstam, the alternative is “low theory,” an approach that he sees as a mix of Stuart Hall’s Gramscian concept of theory as a “detour en route to something else,” the Benjaminian stroll and the Situationist dérive. Add to this Rancière’s concept of education as emancipation, learning what it is that we need to learn, and there’s a very dynamic way of thinking to hand. Unsurprisingly, these approaches have also featured widely across Occupy 2012.

What is surprising to an extent is the new viability of anarchist approaches in the critical context. When I was writing The Right to Look, I spent a good deal of time worrying about whether I could discuss anarchist interpretations of history, the general strike, Rosa Luxemburg and so on and be taken “seriously.” I wonder why I worried now. On the one hand, who cares if the seriousness police mark you down as one of them? On the other, the reason those ideas seemed important was a mark of the crisis in which we were already immersed. The an-archive is newly open for thinking.

At the same time, I’d be surprised if anyone who has been reading frequently here thinks of this as a theory project as such. I think of it as having a series of threads, one of which might be labelled “theory,” but which would not, as it were, hold up on its own. It gets energy from, and is sustained by, the interaction with a set of activities that can be designated “activism.”

The funny thing about being an activist is no-one really thinks of themselves as being one. Those that do probably get paid to do so, which is not quite what I have in mind. I think there’s a distinction between “being an activist” and learning from activism. In this sense, the current form of activism takes all of the activities and actions that we do every day as being the site of a new politics and a new invitation to theorize.

This invitation is about making connections, finding histories, creating tools, and hearing new voices. It is also about refusing: refusing the market view of the world, refusing to “move on, there’s nothing to see here,” refusing to give up, refusing to just accept that in the end it’s all about the [Democratic/Labor/Socialist/whatever] Party.

It’s not about being the cleverest kid in the class, showing how much we know, upstaging or undercutting others with ideas. For me, it was enabled by Occupy but it is not in any way limited to that frame. In some ways, it’s already moved out of the encampments into the networks and beyond the control of all the police trying to contain it.  I’m looking forward to seeing what the next nine months will bring.