After a couple of long-distance weeks, I headed into New York for the Strike Debt organizing meeting today. I had the slightly surreal experience of reading David Graeber’s excellent anthropological study Direct Action on the way in and then meeting the author himself in a meeting that was in part about direct action. It’s interesting to compare the two moments in autonomous politics.
Today we gathered to discuss Strike Debt and what it might do over the course of the first year anniversary on September 17 and thereafter. For a project that only came into existence in a horizontal discussion in Washington Square Park less than two months ago, it’s impressive to see the range of activities people are planning.
While there’s plenty of other activity being organized for S17 and after, it’s interesting to see a range of action around a thematic project. There are a set of publications being worked on: the Five Theses of Strike Debt that will summarize the movement; a Debtor’s Manual providing practical advice for people burdened by debt; and a longer Declaration that will provide a fully-fledged analysis of the debt crisis. All are being crowd-written. All will be available via a website that is being constructed.
One of the most intriguing projects is the Rolling Jubilee, a project in which OWS will buy up debt that is in default, easily available for pennies on the dollar, and then abolish it. It turns out that the only complicated part of all this is notifying credit agencies and indeed the debtors themselves that the debt has been annulled. Which tells you a good deal in itself.
There’s a project to create a “Telethon” to raise funds for the Jubilee at a venue in New York, which will be live-streamed and include presentations and performances.
A group is creating guerilla videos for the Invisible Army, those who are already in default whether by choice or necessity. These will publicize the extent of debt default that I think of as a wildcat debt strike.
A direct action group is proposing public defiance of debt, whether by burning bills in echo of the draft card burnings of the 1960s, or by shredding.
All of these were decided to fall under three main organizing headings:
- Structural Change: broken down into Abolition and Reconstruction
- Mobilization and Community
- Changing Rhetoric
So all of this made me consider how the organizing we’re doing compares to that of the global justice movement. There’s a great deal of overlap of course, from people to process. All the mechanics of facilitation, consensus and hand-gestures are the legacy of the global justice people–although as Graeber points out, they in turn owed much to groups like the Quakers. So autonomous politics has a long history.
Perhaps the differences are more to be seen in the political culture. There’s much discussion in Direct Action about disputes with the International Socialist Organization. It’s possible that they continue–and I have seen more than a few sectarian disputes on and off line. In Strike Debt, we hear plenty of Marxist rhetoric, of course, but there’s no enthusiasm for a vanguard party or the like.
Another contrast would be that despite the permanent awareness of police infiltration, it was possible for activists to get right up to the security wall at the Quebec summit in 2001 without being challenged by police. The saturation policing that Occupy has had to learn to take for granted had not quite come into being, despite the experience of Seattle.
Finally, the obvious lesson is that, despite the enthusiasm of last September, local uprisings are not going to change capitalism overnight. At the moment, it’s doing more to damage itself than any activist ever could. Less than a year old, Occupy has learned from the past and is now learning from its own past. This is the long game we’re playing here.
And to judge by the way that David takes notes in meetings, which was, I now learn, how he wrote the last book, you should have the opportunity to find out what he thinks has been learned before too long.