Monthly Archives: June 2012

Welcome to the Garbage Can University

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In the last few days, a coup at the University of Virginia (UVa) and a report on the mass exploitation of the part-time academic workforce have made it clear that the US university system has come apart at top and bottom. All that’s left is the middle, endlessly putting itself into debt to stay in these increasingly dysfunctional institutions. Welcome to the garbage can university. There’s garbage at the top, rubbish pay at the bottom, and people treated like garbage in-between. And the masterwork of the new Interim President at UVa is on, yes, garbage cans.

First, UVa. This is unbelievable, even by the messed-up standards of university administration. Out of a clear blue sky the Board of Visitors (i.e. the Trustees) simply fired the current President Teresa Sullivan. The email trail dug up by student journalists at The Cavalier Daily, and pursued by the online daily Inside Higher Ed, shows what was up. Board members were so taken by a mediocre  Wall Street Journal piece of hype about online courses that they felt they had to expedite removing Sullivan. Here’s what got them salivating:

Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive)—as has happened in every other industry—making schools much more productive.

The sleight-of-hand that will not have escaped your attention is to transform education, which is a public good, into a private industry. Rather than create a well-informed citizenry, this manufacture can be quantifiably more “productive.”

Perhaps most telling is what the Board did next. Sullivan, an expert on work and debt, was replaced with the Dean of the Business School. What use could a university have for the author of As We Forgive our Debtors : Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America? Or The Fragile Middle Class : Americans in Debt? Interim President Carl Zeithaml, former dean of the McIntire School of Commerce, is the third author of Barriers to Corporate Growth (1981). That really tells you all you need to know. Except that Zeithaml wouldn’t make tenure in most places with that publication record. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot his recent essay “Garbage Cans and Advancing Hypercompetition.” My mistake. What could possibly better summarize the current American university than that?

At the other end of the academic pay scale, we learned today from the Coalition on the Academic Workplace that the neo-liberal revolution has fully succeeded. Composed of 26 scholarly societies like the College Art Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the  Modern Language Association, the Coalition began from this starting point:

According to data from the United States Department of Education’s 2009 Fall Staff Survey, of the nearly 1.8 million faculty members and instructors who made up the 2009 instructional workforce in degree-granting two- and four-year institutions of higher education in the United States, more than 1.3 million (75.5%) were employed in contingent positions off the tenure track.

Rightly, the Coalition saw its responsibility as trying to learn more about the conditions of these workers. Their survey received over 30,000 responses, with 20,000 from self-identified part-time faculty/instructors. The conclusions are stark:

◆ The median pay per course, standardized to a three-credit course, was $2,700 in fall 2010 and ranged in the aggregate from a low of $2,235 at two-year colleges to a high of $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities.

◆ Part-time faculty respondents saw little, if any, wage premium based on their credentials.

◆ Professional support for part-time faculty members’ work outside the classroom and inclusion in academic decision making was minimal.

◆ Part-time teaching is not necessarily temporary employment, and those teaching part-time do not necessarily prefer a part-time to a full-time position. Over 80% of respondents reported teaching part-time for more than three years, and over half for more than six years.

It is in this context that we need to discuss the assertion that labor costs are too high at US universities. It is in this context of systematic impoverishment of part-time faculty and instructors that students and those who support them should discuss the value of the tuition being paid for these courses, which now amounts to over $40,000 per year at all the top-ranked private institutions.

The disgrace of all this has been realized in Quebec. CLASSÉ point out that state support for public universities has fallen from 87% of the budget to 71%. That’s a level no US public institution can now dream of receiving. And that’s why they are on strike: because they can see where they are going–a world of essays on garbage cans, garbage level pay and garbage universities. And they want none of it.

 

On Church and State: the case of Mark Adams.

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The Anglican Church is the established religion in the UK, meaning that it is the official religion of the country. Formed by Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church in 1531, it has long been known as “the establishment at prayer.” In New York City, Trinity Wall Street is the Episcopal church on Wall Street, part of the Anglican Church. For nine months it has tried to pretend that it supports Occupy Wall Street, without ever doing too much to alienate Wall Street. Now it’s clear that Trinity is truly Anglican, siding with state over populace.

For the charges it has leveled against OWS activists have lead to eight convictions, including that of retired Bishop George Packard. Shockingly, OWS stalwart Mark Adams has been sentenced to 45 days in jail on Rikers Island. His offense? Gaining access to a patch of open land, known as Duarte Square on December 17, 2011, which is owned by Trinity Wall St based on a 1705 land deed. Because he allegedly used cutters on the fence, Mark was charged with possessing burglary tools. So keen was the judge to endorse this concept that he sentenced Adams to 15 days more than the prosecution asked for.

Mark Adams

Mark is a non-violence activistand  person of color, who is homeless by choice as a form of protest. As a result he has a long black beard, like many a Brooklynite, but which may have activated the anti-Islam reflex in downtown Manhattan. In short, he makes the perfect target for punitive action in Bloombergistan.

Trinity is no ordinary church. It is a major landowner managing 6 million square feet of real estate in Hudson Square and distributes millions in philanthropic grants to nonprofits around the world. However, since the Reverend James Cooper has been in charge, the church has moved away from helping the poor, closing its homeless drop-in center in 2009, and towards a twee PBS view of the church. One indication of the change is that Trinity overspent its music program by $800,000 while donating only $2.7 million to international philanthropy.

Cooper has taken good care of himself, however, making:

demands for a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, an allowance for his Florida condo, trips around the world including an African safari and a fat salary.

To be precise, Cooper gets a $1.3 million compensation package, including a salary of $346,391 and deferred compensation of $507,940, plus over $115,000 a year “housing allowance” to cover his other place in Florida.

Half the church’s board of directors has resigned in the past six months in disgust at a variety of policies implemented by Cooper, such as:

lavishly overspending church funds on Bach concerts and other events, and planning an opulent overhaul of the church’s office space at 68-74 Trinity Place rather than focusing on his ministry and helping the poor.

In light of all this, it comes as no surprise to read Cooper opine in relation to the convictions:

While we are sympathetic to many of the OWS protestors’ stated goals, we do not support the seizure of private property.

Seizure? Adams, Packard and the others simply climbed the fence to walk onto land marked with a sign saying “open to the public.”

George Packard climbs the fence at Duarte Square, 12-17-11

If Adams and others hoped to start a new encampment there, it would be consistent with the “stated goals” of OWS to do so. It says, “Occupy Wall Street,” not “write a genteel letter to the editor about Wall Street.” But Trinity had only wanted to gain the veneer of progressive activism, not back it up with actions and Cooper has now remade the church in Wall Street’s image.

Alas, poor Occupy. The state is against it, the church is now against it. Some local press have wasted no time with the usual “Occupy is over” pieces. Someone forgot to tell OWS. A 45 day vigil began today outside Trinity. Bishop Packer was there.

Amin from OWS (left) with Bishop Packer

There was music.

Ari plays a violin solo for Mark Adams

Because Occupy is not about church or state. It’s about mutual aid, about a different way of being there for each other. It doesn’t win or lose.

The King is Debt! Long Live King Debt?

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The original saying was “The King is dead! Long live the King!” That is to say, while individual kings may die, Kingship never dies and is eternal. This theological fiction preserved monarchy during contested successions and other periods of difficulty. Now the fiction that must be preserved is the integrity of sovereign debt: governments come and go but sovereign debt, the debt incurred by the nation, must always be paid.

Yesterday’s three card monte of overdetermined elections produced two coups and one wild card, all in the name of sovereignty. What remains to be seen is whether the fiction of sovereignty can sustain the very different outcomes in Egypt, France and Greece, a result that will be determined as much in the bond market as in any political process. Take away sovereign debt, however, and the world market fantasy comes undone.

Sovereign debt is debt incurred by a nation state. The modern financial system depends on the fantasy that nations will always repay their debts. Huge penalties are levied on any nation that dares to even suggest that it might not do so for fear of exposing the emptiness of sovereign bonds. Actual sovereigns quite often failed to repay their debts, leading in significant part to the revolutions in England (1642), France (1789) and Russia (1917).

Sovereign debt relies on the paradox that, while it will never be repaid, it will always be serviced, generating a “safe haven” for money to become capital. Thus we have seen huge recent flows of money to German and US bonds, as investors cease to trust banks but assume that sovereigns never fail.

Since the US ended the international gold standard in 1971, it has been able to operate a system that has been called “debt imperialism.” As David Graeber has shown, the massive US war expenditures are financed by the sale of treasury bonds, now purchased extensively by China. This “tribute” system continues to function fairly efficiently. It is the non-imperial sovereign debt system that is in crisis.

Since 2008, it has become increasingly common for sovereign debt of troubled economies to be held largely by the banks of that country, a circular system that is only underpinned by low central bank interest rates. While this system supports international debt repayment, it does nothing for economic growth, employment or social services in the nations concerned. This robo-economy lends money to sovereigns to repay their debt, thereby incurring yet more debt and ensuring the continued flatline of the lived economy.

Greece has experienced the full force of this non-quid pro quo. In yesterday’s repeat election, the full force of global authority was brought to bear to keep out Syriza, resulting in a narrow win for New Democracy. While the media attempted to frame the question as to whether or not Greece would remain in the euro system, Syriza had always been clear that it would.

The question was whether the so-called memorandum subjecting Greece to humiliating and devastating cuts in order to “repay” debt with borrowed money would have to be renegotiated. Now that Greece has acquiesced to the Troika, a game is being played in which there will be some modest “concessions” by Merkel and the debt crisis will be postponed until December. The hope is that some solution to the permanent instability of the euro will have emerged by then.

Meanwhile, in Egypt a military coup has been allowed to take place without comment from the G20, suggesting that it had been cleared in advance. Sovereignty is deployed here as force to prevent a transnational grouping of elected pro-Islam governments in the North Afica/Middle East from forming. Both the revolutionaries and the Muslim Brotherhood appear to have been outmaneuvered by the sheer cynicism of this realpolitik.

For a not-particularly-threatening but “Islamic” government in Egypt, like the existing one in Tunisia, would undermine the global binary of “democracy” vs. “terror.” As we have come to learn, this binary means Occupy must be terror, while the heavily-manipulated and hardly decisive election in Greece is “democracy” and a “mandate.” On the other hand, if Hamas wins an election, that is not democracy.

France voted for sovereignty, continuing the fantasy that sovereign nations determine their own future. Whether it will get it is an open question. Hollande has a majority across the French parliament, the first time the Socialist have had this strengh since 1981. At that time, the markets were able to contain any radicalizing tendencies by creating a run on the franc before the new ministers reached their offices. Ironically, the anti-sovereign currency union has provided cover, with the euro ending slightly higher on the day after the election and the French stock market only very slightly down. Will markets come after France once they’re through with Spain and Italy as some have suggested? To pose the question is to answer it: of course they will.

For the slow-motion euro crisis has continued to unfold as if nothing had happened. Interest rates on Spanish bonds climbed well over 7%, the rate that triggered crisis in Ireland and Greece, while Italian rates are moving steadily upwards. There is, of course, no particular reason that 6.9% is OK but 7% is not and the sky has not fallen. However, it’s clear that this new rule has been invented to try and keep things from collapsing too soon. What’s less clear is why this permanent instability has now affected even major economic powers. Some German banks were downgraded last week.

All of these “events” are determined by the young, greedy men who work in the bond markets and like to be thought of as Big Swinging Dicks. Their imagination, such as it is, is populated with porn, sport and video games. In their minds, these men are the sovereigns.

Peter Campbell (right) at Mad Men’s idea of a brothel

To visualize this, recall the scene from Mad Men (above), in which the arch-capitalist Peter Campbell is forcing a prostitute to seduce him. She does so by saying “You’re my king.” Sovereignty is porn, the bond dealer is king. Can these minds continue to sustain the idea that a contiguous geographical region designated a “nation” can never fail to repay its debts? Or not? And if not, what happens?

To learn to live, finally, strike debt

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It’s been a week of mourning since I posted here. I missed it. I missed being involved. It made me think about loss, about debt as loss and how we might move to losing debt. Perhaps because of the moment in which I’m working this through, I’m coming to think of these questions as being equally ethical as political. Or we might say, as creating a new division of the sensible in which the ethical is in the same domain as the political, rather than being separated from it.

On Sunday 10 July, Strike Debt held its second Education and Debt Assembly and the first NYC Debtors Assembly. In the latter event, people spoke about their debt, how they came to be in the situations that they now find themselves in and what they’re doing as a result. One OWS stalwart, Mike Andrews, tweeted that he was surprised how many of the speakers were in middle age, not their 20s. It’s then that the debt taken out in your younger years often returns to devastating effect.

My partner’s mother, Alice, who just passed was an example. Forced to take over her husband’s automotive business after his sudden death in the 1970s, she found herself in difficulties once the Reagan-era neoliberal recession began in 1980. An unscrupulous bank required her to sign her paid-off house as security for a business loan, breaching normal ethical practice, but giving the bank a chance to recoup some of what it suspected to be a bad loan. Sure enough, the business failed and the house was lost. The bank itself went down not long afterwards. But lives were permanently damaged.

So it was that, at the age of 64, the Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida began his work on Marx and what he called “the State of the Debt” with this aphorism:

I should like to learn how to live, finally.

This is the education of education. It is, he notes “ethics itself.” It is to speak of

justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights.

Derrida says that this justice is a politics of inheritance, in the context of the state of the debt, so I think we need to open up that aphorism to read:

I should like to learn how to live without or beyond the state of the debt, finally.

I do not think this is so simple a thing to do.

What is the state of the debt? It can be said that the state is debt, the possibility of creating debt, of sustaining, issuing and guaranteeing debt. In that case,

there is something rotten in the State.

Originally of Denmark. Leading to Derrida’s mirroring of the ghost in Hamlet with the spectre of communism in Marx. Now we might write it tout court, the State is rotten. And that:

There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of debt.

Behind that spectre, or its other face, is the older spectre, the spectre of communism, living beyond debt.

Let it be quite clear that this haunting has nothing to do with the Marxist-Leninist states that had just collapsed when Derrida wrote. In fact, there is no longer any point in trying to capture state power because there is none. That is not to say that there is not state violence, because that there most certainly is, and it is now the raison d’être of the state itself.

I do not set my life at a pin’s fee

says Hamlet as he confronts his father’s ghost. He acknowledges that he is

….bound to hear

Ghost: So art thou to revenge.

So while his life is not valued in monetary times, because to learn to live is finally to get beyond such accounting, this haunting is a matter of debt, something is owed. The King is the State in a monarchy, for Majesty adheres to him, whatever the weakness of the king’s own body. More precisely, Majesty never dies but is, as it were, transferred from one bearer to the next, a form of unpayable debt.

Hamlet has not inherited, that is to say, become King, despite being of age at his father’s death, because Denmark elected its monarch from within the nobility, as Hamlet acknowledges later in the play:

He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother,

Popp’d in between the election and my hopes

There’s a new ambivalence here: does Claudius’s usurpation extend only to power or to Hamlet’s “hopes” in relation to his mother’s body? The state of the debt is not good. Not good at all.

For Derrida, the debt is one of the “ten plagues” that should conjure into being a “new International,” a grouping in the spirit of Marx:

The ‘New International’ is an untimely link, without status … without coordination, without party, without country, without national community, without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. … It is a call for them to ally themselves, in a new, concrete and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers’ international, in the critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it.

That sounds familiar now, doesn’t it? Are we, finally, in a place to learn the state of the debt? And to realize that undoing the debt is not the work of the State but of what will have to come after it, and has haunted it all along?

There would be mourning to be done, for lost dreams, lost hopes, for loss. Since the deployment of terror as justification for State expansion, the State has monopolized and militarized even mourning. To do this work of mourning against the State and against its violence, says Derrida, there will be the need for a certain language, a new way to speak of debt and loss. And that in turn will require

a certain power of transformation.

That power is not State power, the force of “power over” that would be known as poder in Spanish. It is rather the potencia, “the possibility to.” A suivre.

Collected Debt Posts

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Occupy 2012 is sadly sitting shiva from now until May 17 after sunset. In the interim here are the top posts on debt, many of which have been among the most popular posts in the project and are not always easy to find. Turns out there are a lot!

Endebt and Punish: an analysis of debt as punishment

Abolition (Free, Open) Education: what happens to education if there was to be debt refusal

The Out of Control Society: How the society of control went out of control via debt

The Student Debt Campaign Intensifies: Data from the Federal Reserve on student debt

The American Spring: Debt, Segregation and the Limits of the Unspeakable: on shame

The Debt-Prison System: On debt and slavery and its aftermath

Self-Killing and (the) Depression: debt, the crisis, depression and self-killing–ends optimistically!

1T Day: Waiting for the Debt Jubilee: How I missed the 1T Day march sitting delayed in an airport and was surrounded by discourse on debt nonetheless

On Hardt and Negri’s “Declaration” Including their discussion of debt

From Debt to the Land: Via the Farm and the Forest On the common, land and Occupy the Farm

Student Debt: Stage One Accomplished The public recognition of the debt crisis

Sovereigns to Students: Debt Enforcement as Law: The Montreal crisis and the law

Debt (new) media and academia: The interface of debt and visuality in academia

Debt Strike: Make Debt Public A manifesto for the new Strike Debt campaign in OWS

Hope you find this useful. See you in a week.

 

Prometheus Falls

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If Prometheus is anything to go by, the cinematic age of production is well and truly over. This apparently endless film barely retains your attention, the means by which that mode of production created value. Instead, poorly-thought through and contradictory “ideas” lead lazily to a conclusion that simply sets up the inevitable sequel. In that sense, I suppose, the film represents the circulation of its own capital but if this is capital’s vision of its own future, it’s in bad trouble.

Prometheus

The Alien movies directed by Ridley Scott defined the fear of alterity for a generation. Their vision of the future as a damp, dismal and dangerous place visualized the neo-liberal collapse of the Jetsons’ future promised in the 1950s and 60s. Far from flying with individual skypacks, this future offered low-paying jobs hauling crap from the far edges of the universe on ships ironically named Nostromo, after Joseph Conrad’s novel. And much worse besides.

Prometheus takes some mediocre theology from 1970s pop theory like Eric von Daniken and blends it with the familiar Alien tropes from the evil Company to the seething eggs, stickly effluent and dark corridors with forbidding spiky things. I would call what comes next a spoiler normally but in this case I doubt it. Anyway, there’s an evocative opening in which a figure derived from Blake’s drawing of Newton breaks himself down to his DNA in order to animate a planet that we take to be Earth. This leads into some archaelogical movie stuff–see, all the ancient art forms depict the same alignment of planets!–and we’re off to The Planet.

Two twists to mention: the Prometheans, for reasons yet to be revealed, first decided to send proto-Aliens to earth to kill all the humans and then decided not to. And the Alien is a hybrid of Prometheus and their own nascent Alien weapon. So, because human DNA is, as we’ve seen, Promethean, that means the Alien is half-human. Ta da!

I can’t really be bothered to get into a critique of all this because the narrative, the ideas and the visualizations are so lame. The scientists want to know “where we come from, where we are going.”

Paul Gauguin, "Where do we come from? Where are we going?"

The colonial dimensions of this quest are reinforced by the fact that Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) is the daughter of missionaries–her mother inevitably died young–and is a convinced Christian. Like a good Republican, Shaw wants to know “why they hate us,” a formula in which Prometheans stand in for Muslims. It’s too late, no-one really cares any more about this Bush-era formula. The sad retreat from Afghanistan that will be called a “victory” already seems to belong to a bygone era.

Cinema had its day as the visualization of capital and there was a certain exhilaration to it. Brecht once said he found himself supporting the cowboys in a Western despite himself. Now that’s all gone. At the end of the Roman Empire, they somehow forgot how to make classical sculpture and their art became odd, rounded figures seemingly made from clay. The empire has forgotten how to make films.

What’s the Word?

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I seem to have spent much of my life engaged with words that people find mystifying or enraging from punk to acid jazz, visual culture and now Occupy. It’s the very flexibility and floating nature of these terms that gives them their ability to motivate and empower people. So no doubt it’s just a coincidence that the new Occupy debt campaign has been greeted with two pieces from the mainstream media declaring, yet again, that Occupy is dead.

Adbusters posted a not particularly helpful blog that quoted an anonymous “Zucotti” to the effect that Occupy has consolidated into forms of power:

“This translates into ideological dominance and recurring lines of thought. We are facing a nauseating poverty of ideas.”

This phrase was immediately taken up as a headline by a blogger for Forbes, whose expertise appears to be that he once lived in Brazil. There’s very little more to the piece than this. It even ignores the remainder of the Adbusters post that talks positively about initiatives like Occupy Farms. It’s designed to be tweeted, posted and used as a FB status.

Meanwhile a Reuters journalist has also become worried about the survival of Occupy. Apparently we failed to change our tactics, if you look from Harvard:

“Most of the social scientists who are at all like me – unsentimental leftists – … think this movement is over,” said Harvard University professor Theda Skocpol, a liberal academic who wrote a book on the Tea Party.

Skocpol’s analysis rests on two comparisons with her favored Tea Party: that Tea Party activists are mostly 45 and over (and white and male, which she doesn’t say). And that they had influence in the Republican Party. I am not sure why it’s preferable to have older people rather than young. For what it’s worth I fit Skocpol’s frame. Again, as Stuart Hall has always emphasized, the neo-liberal right has consistently radicalized itself since 1975 and shows no sign of stopping until the entire capitalist machine collapses. Further, it’s always easier to work with the grain of the dominant system than against it.

Reuters offer an analysis of Twitter that claims to show that OWS peaked as a hashtag on October 1, the day of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests. If that is true, it shows what a disconnect there is between social media and social movements. Most people would see October 1 as the beginning of the viral spread of Occupy, not its peak. The article concentrates on tweet numbers and citations in the traditional print media as an index of influence.

The spread of Occupy into its own media such as nycga.net, the use of Google groups, the Facebook pages, the print publications, the affinity groups, let alone the direct actions: none are mentioned. By the same token, the failure of many Tea Party candidates in 2010, costing the Republicans control of the Senate, and the patent disregard that Mitt Romney has for them other than as pawns is not mentioned, Of course, the way that the Democratic machine co-opted the Wisconsin occupation to negative results is ignored.

When a new way of expressing experience emerges, it at first confuses and then mobilizes resistance from within and without. Punk was called dead in the first fanzine Sniffin’ Glue in 1977. Visual culture was dismissed by October magazine in 1996. Yet the DIY ethos of punk obviously informs both some digital culture and Occupy, while the Now! Visual Culture conference showed that this much smaller frame of analysis is alive and well.

In the film The Future is Unwritten, Clash guitarist Mick Jones rolled his eyes when remembering hordes of black leather jacketed young men demanding power chords wherever they went for years after 1977. Now it’s media hacks demanding that OWS occupy a park or be declared dead. If it’s a choice between being the Tea Party or being dead, I’d rather be dead: or better yet, undead a spectre haunting the collapse of capital.

After Wisconsin, Occupy.

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It was somewhat expected but still not great news from Wisconsin last night. It does suggest that, despite many prominent voices to the contrary, Occupy has had the better read on tactics after all. As we should have learned, there’s no short-cut here. Would a Democratic governor even have been able to abolish Walker’s law, let alone improve things? The hope remains with the social movements, even if that seems attenuated now,

As no one will need reminding, the 2010 elections returned Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin. In the manner of George W. Bush, he swung hard right after the election and introduced one of the most sweeping anti-collective bargaining laws anywhere. Led by students, organized labor quickly moved to resist, occupying the Capitol building.

The Madison occupation of February 2011 was a great moment. It claimed the right to be taken into account and the right of the people to actually be present in what is known as “the people’s house,” the Capitol building. In what became a precedent for later public space occupations, the occupation was ended by quasi-legal force of law after only a few weeks.

March 9, 2011 Madison WI

Late in 2011, unions and the Democratic Party decided to attempt to recall Gov. Walker. In a very short space of time from November to January 2012, a million signatures were gathered, a remarkable accomplishment by any standards. There were those who thought that the Occupy movement as a whole should pursue such electoral goals.

However, when I was in Madison in April, you could already feel a sense that the situation had slipped out of the movement’s control. The Democrats failed to coalesce around a candidate and held a divisive primary as late as May 8, choosing the same man, Tom Barrett, who had lost to Walker in 2010. Whatever Barrett’s merits, the election looked like a replay, rather than a referendum on collective bargaining rights or democracy.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the nascent global social movements, skilled in the “local” work of holding public space, demonstrations and organizing their own have proved less accomplished in mass electoral theater. Almost by definition, movements that take their energy from direct democracy don’t transfer to mass manipulation, sound bites and fund raising, the very cynical maneuvers they are against.

The Egyptian Presidential election is a case in point, where pro-revolutionary candidates gained the majority of the votes but failed to make the run-off. The Wisconsin election showed almost no change from the 2010 precedent. I don’t think it was the money or anti-union bias, so much as a sense that what Walker had done fell within the purview of electoral democracy. His Thatcherite neo-liberalism recalls precedents like Reagan firing the air-traffic controllers in 1981 or Thatcher abolishing the Greater London Council in 1986. Both were clearly extensions of what had hitherto been considered standard practice but they did not breach the letter of the law.

So what we are seeing is an extension of electorally-validated authority beyond what is taken to be the norm. Precisely because such norms are largely unspoken, there is very little preventing someone who wants to do so from extending their authority, as long as they can corral the necessary votes. In the UK, this elected force of law has long been standard via the “whip” system, in which parties require their members to vote as they want them to do, or face expulsion. What gives the current US system its peculiar feel is that its mechanics are so based on consensus within a narrow ruling elite that it is surprisingly easy for a determined party, whether formally in government or opposition, to drive the agenda.

The simple lesson for social movements is that you can’t win battles against those who have defined the very way that battles should be fought. You have to change the way, not that battles are fought, but the way that people think about their relationship to the social. If it’s about battles, those without the monopoly of violence tend to lose. If it can become about changing how we understand ourselves, what the purpose of life might be and how to enlarge the possibilities for all, then sometimes very surprising things can happen.

What happens next depends very much on whether finance capital manages what it has so far been unwilling or unable to do: to restrain and reform the banks and their markets. The Eurozone crisis suggests that the mechanisms of debt on which the endless circulation of capital is based are so flawed as to be beyond repair within the present neo-liberal framework. The US economy is slowing to halt, even China and India supposedly exempt from market cycles because of their endless supplies of free labor have slowed. Don’t be depressed: imagine something completely different. And go and make it happen.

“The Transit of Empire”

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#BREAKING PHOTO- VENUS IS ENTIRELY IN FRONT OF THE SUN! HUMAN... on TwitpicToday for only the eighth time in the era of the telescope, Venus made a transit across the Sun that was visible from earth. This transit is, as all those since the eighteenth century have been, a “transit of empire,” to quote Jodi Byrd. For much of that time, empire has been in the ascendant. Perhaps, if we might indulge in the pathetic fallacy, today’s transit might herald the exit of empire.

The pathetic fallacy–the idea that the natural world reflects human moods–was itself the product of industrial modernity. Our own pathetic fallacy is both that humans can ignore the destruction of the natural world caused by fossil-fuel industry and that there is a modern “we,” who are not and have never been indigenous.

It had been mostly cloudy today in Manhattan but when the sun came out at 5.45, I left the gym and jogged up to Union Square to join perhaps the geekiest crowd ever seen outside. About a hundred astronomy nerds and passers-by clustered around some grad students with specially-rigged up telescopes to allow looking at the sun. At six o’clock, the clouds were thick overhead

At that point, and I am not making this up, the NYPD sent two white-shirt officers and five uniforms to investigate the crowd. Perhaps, I thought, Bloomberg has now decreed that the sun revolves around him and so this event was heretical. Luckily, they decided against the use of force and the clouds did thin for an instant. The carefully masked telescopes allowed us to briefly see the image of the sun with the tiny dot of Venus on a thick screen placed where you would normally view the image.

It was not the kind of high-resolution image we have become used to, such as this from NASA, who are live-streaming the event.

The transit seen from Mauna Kea, Hawai'i

It’s noticeable that their telescope is based in Hawai’i, an American colony, creating an echo with the first measured transit of Venus in 1769, observed from Tahiti by Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook and the crew of the Endeavor. This voyage is one of the most minutely analyzed events in colonial history, thanks to the immense data assembled by the British crew, ranging from Cook’s own journals to the drawings of Joseph Banks and the paintings of William Hodges.

Cook's diagram of the transit of Venus

In more recent years, the emphasis has rightly shifted to locating the “voice” and presence of the indigenous peoples, whose pre-contact culture can be deduced in part from these materials. This encounter inaugurated what Jodi Byrd, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and professor at U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has called:

the imperial planetarity that sparked scientific rationalism and inspired humanist articulations of freedom, sovereignty, and equality [which] touched four continents and a sea of islands in order to cohere itself.

While many of these terms were and are valued by many, this history is also one of the violent dispossession, compulsory religious conversion and eradication of indigenous cultures. For Byrd, therefore, “transit” has a double meaning, suggesting

the multiple subjectivities and subjugations put into motion and made to move through notions of injury, grievance and grievability.

What’s noticeable here is that “movement,” like our own Occupy movement, is not singular but contradictory.

Reflecting on the U.S. context, Byrd points out that one of the “grievances” in the Declaration of Independence was the British use of

merciless Indian savages.

That image persists to the present via the cowboy movie, even so-called classics like The Searchers (1956), and mediocre animated cartoons. Witness the present furore over Elizabeth Warren’s claiming of American Indian descent in the Massachusetts Senate campaign. Never mind that everyone who has ever run for anything in Massachusetts, let alone the US as a whole, always claims Irish descent on the most tenuous basis. Claiming to be Indian is somehow always wrong.

The language resists here. No one is born indigenous, they are made indigenous by the arrival of the colonizer. Indian is a misnomer, but so is Native American. The notion of the Fourth World, composed of indigenous peoples, simply raises the question as to why they are not the First World as indigeneity, if it means anything, must mean being there first.

A transit passes from one side of that which it encounters to the other. Its end its always part of its journey. The damage will have been done.

 

Debt Strike: Make Debt Public

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There’s a growing call in OWS for a debt strike. What does that mean? It means using the call to refuse debt as a means to make debt public. There should be a public discussion about how endebted we all are within the debt square that has replaced the public square. It means overcoming our shame at being locked in the debt square. And it means taking the debt public set people free. That last is not a demand because we all know no legislature at present is going to enact it. Look at Montreal, though: the government has not listened to the popular will and the people have not backed down. It’s public.

What is the debt square? It is the space defined by the four corners of modern US life:

  • student debt ($1 trillion)
  • mortgage debt ($14.6 trillion)
  • credit card debt ($800 billion)
  • medical debt (unknown)

Mortgage debt has declined slightly from $14.6 trillion in 2008 to $13.4 trillion at the end of 2011. The real change is in the amount of mortgage debt held by the federal government in various ways. From $725 billion in 2007, it’s now over $5 trillion. That means that the Feds control close to 40% of mortgage debt.

You hear less now about foreclosure because banks are short-selling houses and taking a loss:

All told, 233,299 bank-owned homes or those in some stage of foreclosure sold in the first quarter, making up 26 percent of all U.S. home sales in the period

As for credit cards, it’s what you already know: debt is rising, as are interest rates. Credit card debt snuck over $800 billion last year, even as interest rates rose to over 12% on average. The average credit card in households that have them is now over $15,000. Fewer people do have cards, as credit is being denied more often, but people who have credit cards have 3.5 each on average.

Increasingly, people are using credit cards to “pay” their medical bills, which is the third corner of the debt square. One in three households are struggling with medical bills and eighty per cent of those questioned for a PBS Newshour survey were having issues with financing health care.

If that seems a little abstract, here are some hard numbers:

As of 2010, 73 million people reported problems paying their medical bills or were paying off medical debt, up from 58 million in 2005. An estimated 44 million people were paying off medical debt in 2010, up from 37 million in 2005. (Source: Press release, The Commonwealth Fund, March 16, 2011.)

The least surprising news story of June 2012 will be the Supreme Court decision to revoke the Affordable Health Care Act, setting back even those modest improvements to health care affordability. But note that the Commonwealth Fund also found that

Sixty-one percent of those with medical debt or bill problems were insured at the time care was provided.

There is little available recent data on medical debt and no collated national figure that I could find.

Student debt has been the most widely discussed form of debt here. Today NYU President John Sexton announced:

Undergraduate tuition, fees, and room and board – For the 2012-13 academic year, we have budgeted an increase of 3.8% in tuition and mandatory fees, and 3.5% in room and board; the aggregate increase in the cost of attendance will be 3.8%.

So that $1 trillion of student debt is going to keep rising beyond the rate of inflation yet again.

The debt square defines the aspirations of most citizens: health, education, shelter, consumer goods. It defines them as things you need or want but renders the means of obtaining them into an object of shame. Who hasn’t stayed awake at night worrying about one or other of these debts? The answer to that question is now simple: the one per cent.

What is the answer to the prison of the debt square? To make it public. As we can see with mortgages, the so-called free market wants to move non-prime debt to the public sector anyway. With public money so cheap, the government could take on all private debt and have us reimburse them at the one percent rate it charges banks. Or it could just abolish the debt altogether.

That government is not this government that we have now. It is the government that the students in Quebec want. It is, more exactly, not a government at all but a means of enabling the possibility of autonomous citizens. To get there, we have to imagine not just a world without student debt, but one in which you are not a loan. A life to be lived rather than a credit rating to be lived up to: debt strike!