Category Archives: activism

Move on, no crisis to see here

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It seems that there’s a concerted effort at the level of the nation state and the transnational institution to assert that the status quo is assured. The European Central Bank has written a blank check for the Euro, pollsters are predicting a win for Obama and stock markets are back to 2008 levels. The wrinkle comes from Quebec, where forty years of organizing has laid the background for the election of the new Parti Quebecois government, committed to abolishing the tuition hike and the noxious Loi 78.

Mario Draghi, head of the ECB, announced yesterday that it would buy bonds from member nations in unlimited quantities. His action was designed to forestall all rumors that the Eurozone might break up, by restoring liquidity to nation states. For the inflation-shy German central bank this action was held to be

tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes.

And indeed it is. Against neo-liberal economics, Draghi and other central bankers assume that there will be no inflation because consumer demand and wages alike continue to be depressed.

Across the world we see the reasons why. The US economy added no more than a rounding error of jobs last month. The battered Greek welfare state is about to undergo another $11.5 billion in cuts. Portugal increase its social security tax from 11 to 18%. Like all the other money poured by government into banks, none of this will find its way out to people.

Meanwhile, in the NAFTA-zone, Mexico is set to return to the institutional rule of the PRI and Canada remains under the oil-first government of the Liberals. The 538 blog (now hosted by the New York Times gives Obama a 77% chance of victory, which is good news in terms of preventing further neo-liberal and culture wars insanity by the Republicans. Given the low chance of the Democrats taking the House, it will nonetheless mean the continuance of gridlock, with continued impunity for banksters and no risk to the one per cent.

The exception to all the gloom comes from Quebec. After the narrow election win by the Parti Québécois, they smartly decided they did not want to be saddled with the Liberals’ baggage:

“We had a call from the PQ assuring us they will cancel the tuition increase and Bill 78,” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, noting students will also meet with Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois. “They said they will reimburse any students who have already paid.”

 

CLASSE have indicated that the national demonstration of September 22 will go ahead, in the absence of an actual repeal, and in support of their claim for a student grant increase. It will most likely have the feel of a victory party.

There are no doubt questions as to what happens next in Quebec. For now, let’s note their successul formula so far

  • building a radical community over an extended period of time
  • working in alliances, even with groups with whom you have distinct differences, towards specific goals
  • great messaging and symbolism, together with resolute direct action
  • keeping it local.

These tactics resonate with those used by the horizontal and popular movements in the Southern half of the hemisphere. They did not back down, even in the full force of law, and have made a real difference. There’s really something to see there.

“The Will to Justice”

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In her essay in the new Tidal, Gayatri Spivak encourages us to develop what she calls the “will to justice.” This ethical and incremental approach is at odds with what I might call the palpable “will for hierarchy” within certain sectors of the movement. The desire for “wins” sometimes risks overshadowing the very radicality of Occupy’s challenge. For  to be theoretically anti-hierarchy is always and already an organizational imperative–“be the change that you want to see.”

Gayatri Spivak

Spivak’s call reworks Nietzsche’s famous phrase “the will to power” that was so significant for thinkers like Michel Foucault. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche defines

our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will–namely, of the will to power.

Such power, Foucault argued, is not owned or controlled but simply used. It was a challenge to then-dominant ideas about the “conquest of state power” because power would continue to be instrumental, regardless of who was directing it. Spivak also turns away from such “vanguardist” approaches, as she calls them, in favor of

the general nurturing of the will to justice among the people.

There are three distinct threads interwoven in this phrase. Spivak’s mind is so supple that you can visibly see her thinking on multiple levels simultaneously as she speaks. Here she mixes Rousseau, Derrida, feminism and Marxism.

From Rousseau, we get the concept of the “general will,” the base on which social order can be constructed. Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton have shown that

The Occupy movement is an attempt to form the general will in new ways. As such, it is a potentially fundamental contribution to resolving the contemporary crisis of democracy….as a part of saying yes to the possibility of thinking differently about the political consequences of global markets

That is to say, the “counter-democracy” of saying no–to Republicans, to war, to neo-liberalism–has been joined by a means of saying “yes” to new forms of community and democracy. “Nothing can be harder than this,” caution Couldry and Fenton.

Yet Spivak gives the process an optimistic tinge. She links Rousseau to Derrida’s concept of “justice” as that which cannot be deconstructed. Which is not to say it is a simple thing. As the global movement knows, Derrida’s justice

doesn’t wait. It is that which must not wait.

But at the same time,

justice is an experience of the impossible.

Otherwise known as the impossible demand. The will to justice is the deconstruction of the force of law. It is the right to look.

Because the right to look is a consenting exchange between two (or more) it is by definition non-hierarchical. It is also, as Spivak stresses, the responsibility to nurture and care for the other: what we call mutual aid. Emphasizing the feminism of the will to justice, Spivak recasts its imaginative horizon from war or struggle to care and nurture.

With all these concepts in action, Spivak is able to re-energize the much-abused formula of “the people.” It’s important to note that she does so in a planetary framework that emphasizes how neo-liberalism relies on global hierarchy to function:

For financial globalization to work, the world must remain unevenly divided between the global South and the global North, so that there can be constantly fluctuating differences in the value of hard currency and soft currency, so that financialization can operate.

It’s crucial, then, not to replicate this hierarchical “world-making” in our own organization. In addition to this theoretical caution, we also need to be careful that a strategy that produces gains in the global North does not do so at the expense of the South.

It’s easy to be solipsistic here and say, for example, “a win for the Democrats is a win for the South,” even though it’s simply marginally less bad. Take the case of the Marikana platinum miners. While we want to support their claim for a living wage, it must also in the long run be better that they not have to work as miners, both because the labor is so hard and destructive; and because that would mean fewer cars were being built, as platinum is mostly used for catalytic converters. But were that to happen overnight, the result would just be more poverty.

For as Suzayn Ibrahimian puts it on the facing page of Tidal:

We have fundamentally understimated our ability to recreate our own oppression.

She sees the widely-circulating concern with “wins” as a short-term viewpoint that reinforces the “hierarchy of stability.” And so people more or less openly call for vanguardist approaches in OWS, or what are euphemistically called “decision-making bodies.” Of course this could be done and then we would be one more lefty pressure group, hoping that for some reason the Democratic Party might finally change its mind.

It seems that “Occupy” is about to splinter into a coalition of broadly autonomous campaigns like Strike Debt, Occupy Our Homes and Foreclose The Banks that come together for symbolic days of action like S17. If this means of organizing preserves the will to justice that was so visible a year ago, rather than creating new hierarchies, then let’s make it happen.

To return to Spivak, it is only the

building up of a will to social justice

that matters, not the name under which it is done.

 

 

 

 

Debt, Mining and the Global Reconquest

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From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined. The repression of the miners’ strike in South Africa is part and parcel of mineral policy in Australia, oriented as both are to the expanding Chinese market. The intended consequences include ruinous African debt and the inevitable by-product is constantly accelerating climate change.

This interface has been perfectly visible from the South for some considerable time. In 1987, Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso spoke to the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in Addis Ababa. Sankara called for the creation of a United Front Against Debt:

We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave.

Sakara was assassinated a few months after making this call. His policies had also included the nationalization of the country’s mineral wealth. If Sarkana’s warnings had been heeded two decades ago, perhaps Africa would not be in its present crisis, forced to generate materials to produce foreign exchange revenues to pay down its debt.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines:

The democratically elected government has turned on its people. This marquee we are gathered under, the Friends of the Youth League paid for this. The government did nothing for you, we are helping you. Government ministers are just here to pose for pictures. We are here with you, you must soldier on – never listen to cowards. We mustn’t stop until the whites agree to give us some of the money in these mines.

The crowd responded by storming the stage, causing the rapid exit of government ministers and politicians. Police were barred from attending. As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Here in Australia, mining companies are retrenching. Australia has done remarkably well out of the commodities boom, servicing the exploding Chinese economy. While officials continue to forecast a renewed peak in two years, hard-line mining executives have declared Australian coal “non-cash generative.” The blame is placed on the carbon tax introduced at enormous political cost by the current government. No credit is given in Australian media for the climate-positive aspects of the tax. The implication is clear: mining will relocate to countries with a less “burdensome” tax structure–like South Africa.

To understand this, you need to know that before 2005, coal sold for about A$30 a ton. At the height of the boom, it reached A$140. Paul Cleary, a journalist for the right-of-center Australian, writes:

Mining dominates our society, our economy, and even our political system.

Now it sells for “only” A$90, a 300% increase on the price seven years ago, which is apparently not enough. The business pages are awash with articles about the end of the mining boom.

Let’s be under no illusions as to who dominates the agenda in the U. S. The oil giant Shell has been reported to be determined to begin drilling in the Arctic this summer, even though its own safety procedures in case of a blowout are not finished. If this was a movie, you know what would happen: there’d be a blowout, only for the maverick hero to return and cap the well. There are no heroes any more. The drilling has to begin to make sure that, if Obama happens to be re-elected, he does not renege on his sell-out.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

 

 

 

Another World: for slow politics

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Today a symposium at Artspace, Sydney, called Another World drew together art practice and activism. The talk ranged from Sydney to Germany, New York and elsewhere. There was a notable retreat, I’m glad to say, from such terms as “global art” towards questions of politics, debt, ecology and situatedness. We learned about time, to take our time, that this is our time and it is, of course, past time.

Zanny Begg, poster for Lucern

An artists panel in the morning featured an interesting contrast of global and local. Zanny Begg talked about her video with Oliver Ressler What Would It Take to Win? (2008)–the link leads to the entire piece. It covered the global justice movement protests in Heiligendamm (June 2007). What was interesting from the current perspective was to see the force of making no demands: wanting “wins” undermined the global justice movement. Whereas Occupy has been able to reclaim space and, crucially, time.

In that long time that it takes us to get anything done, an aesthetic relation is created between the people doing the action, whatever it may be. A project like the Rolling Jubilee, to buy and abolish debt in the name of OWS, might be an art work. Indeed, the curator Tom Polo mentioned a work in his show There’s a Hole in the Sky, now on in Campbelltown called “Commerce.” The artist purchased items from local bankrupt people, using his art budget, is currently displaying them and will give them away at the end of the show. There’s something very evocative about that action, in a part of Western Sydney that is known for high levels of bankruptcy.

In his afternoon talk, art historian Terry Smith contrasted different approaches to evoking the planetary. He called on Jorge Macchi’s work Blue Planet currently being used as the emblem for the Sydney Biennale as exemplary such refiguration. Macchi creates a “figure of the planetary” (Spivak) by emphasizing the oceans over the continents.

Macchi, “Blue Planet”

Elsewhere in in the Biennale, Smith found little to like with the exception of several projects, such as Jananne Al-Ali’s video project Shadow Sites II (2010) [see below],

a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and manmade activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures.

By comparison, Smith suggested that Documenta 13 in Kassel stresses the multiple temporalities of the contemporary. One claim caught my attention: that being on stage (I would say in public) actually creates time. The exhibition includes historical artifacts on this theme, like Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?,  her immensely powerful treatment of National Socialism.

Salomon, “Life? Or Theater?”

I do worry a bit about this, about always using National Socialism as “history” but the exhibition is in Germany and does feature work describing Kassel during the Third Reich.

The center of the show, according to Smith, is an installation called The Brain, centering on works impacted directly by war:

objects like two wonderful Giuseppe Penone stones, small Bactrian princess figures (2500 b. C.), six Giorgio Morandi still lifes, damaged objects from the National Museum of Beirut, a towel stolen in 1945 from the apartment of Adolf Hitler or masks made from iPad wrappings by Judith Hopf.

They even had a token Occupy space, a segment of the Documenta grounds turned over to a small encampment.

Together with the Berlin Biennale use of Occupy as a sideshow, this represents a clear, if not terribly important, attempt to co-opt the “cachet” of Occupy to render an art exhibition “political.” An occupation that is limited in time and space is just a zoo.

What did I take away? Moving past the politics of the “win” to a politics of transformation is a slow politics. It moves paradoxically quickly but it consumes time, takes time away from labor and leisure time alike. More pertinently, it tries to abolish that distinction. For the artist or the writer, there is no greater pleasure than “working.” A slow politics would allow that privilege to all.

Montréal’s Long Hot Summer

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While the world watches the Olympics and the US roasts in endless heat, Montréal is marking day 175 in the student strike and gearing up for a decisive few weeks. At the start of August, Liberal prime minister Jean Charest called an early election for September 4. While his official platform rests on his climate-disaster $80 billion package of forestry and mining expansion, Charest will also be judged on the student strike.

For students and their allies, the elections mark a time of decision. Some student leaders, like Leo Bureau Blouin, have joined the Parti Quebecois to protest the Law 78. There’s a risk of being co-opted here, clearly. Meanwhile the CLASSE meets on August 11-12 to decide on its next steps,  and how to continue the strikes. There’s an action on August 8th to gather people.

From August 13-17, there’s a key test of the strength of student opinion, as students are supposed to return to class. On August 22, there is a national demonstration, optimistically billed as the largest demonstration in history:

And just for once even faculty are not breaking ranks. The newly formed “Profs Contre la Hausse” (Profs against the Hike) have issued a hard-hitting manifesto, in classic Francophone style, which was published today.

It begins (I’m using their translation):

We do not see ourselves as mere agents of the reproduction of the social order, and especially as not officers of the repression with which Quebec’s state power has decided to contemptuously attack the student community.

The document outlines the absurdities of the new Law that prevents “gatherings” within 50 metres of a class and requires faculty to inform on their students, amongst other provisions that are rightly characterized as “Orwellian.” They conclude with some paragraphs that would probably get about 25 signatures where I teach. They have over 2000:

We refuse to contribute to the production of a world characterised by the war of all against all, by market logic, by mutual surveillance, by informants, self-censorship, and fear.

We reject the idea that respecting the contract between an academic institution and a student, legitimizes the violence exercised by the state against collective political rights – rights to associate, to express one’s opinion freely, to make collective decisions, to strike, and to demonstrate.

We reaffirm that decisions taken in a democratic way, by associations whose legitimacy is recognized by the law, are themselves legitimate.We respect the strike vote of the students. We recognize their right to protest at their educational institutions and to interrupt the activities which are carried out there as the only means by which they have bargaining power.

We would not know how to teach in contravention of these principles.

It is the last sentence that resonates: these educators have reached their limit, the place beyond which they cannot consider themselves still defined by learning rather than police functions. Let us hope their example is contagious.

Back to Organizing

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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.

 

Simple Lessons for S17

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In academia, we are discouraged from taking a straightforward view. Perhaps the most popular academic words are “complex,” “complicated” and “more” when attached to one of the first two. The financial crisis does, however, strike me as straightforward: the blatant crimes of the banks culminated three decades of wealth transfer from poorer to richer. As the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street approaches, this should not be forgotten or set aside.

This point was brought home by seeing some charts produced by the Federal Reserve and published on the Business Insider blog. Here to begin with is a chart showing the value of wages in relation to gross domestic product.

Wages expressed as gross domestic product

It’s easy to see that since the 1973 oil crisis in general, and the beginning of  Reaganomics in 1980 in particular, wages have steadily declined until falling off the cliff in 2008, from which there has been no recovery. Unsurprisingly, therefore personal debt has risen in accordance.

Household debt

In 1973, household debt was negligible. It is now over $14 billion. The apparent slight improvement since 2008 is the effect of record numbers of bankruptcies, foreclosures and credit card write-offs. Corporate and government debt rose in parallel. The consequence can be seen below, where debt is the red line and gross domestic product is the blue line.

Clearly, this is not sustainable: or so you would think. Government has concentrated primarily on reducing its own debt, a largely meaningless affair except insofar as it further impoverishes those dependent on state support or using state-financed health care. Isn’t there a problem with financing all this state debt? Actually, as far as the U. S. goes, no, not at all. Liberal Paul Krugman points out the obvious in today’s Times, namely that markets are

buying government debt, even at very low returns, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, by making money available so cheaply, they are in effect begging governments to issue more debt.

Some U. S. government debt is so cheap, it actually costs investors money to get it.

So it’s clear that you could, if you wanted, do many creative and interesting things with what is in effect free money, like abolish personal debt. If you want to see why this isn’t happening, then look at this chart showing corporate profits:

Corporate profits

After a nasty hiccup in 2008, profits are roaring above all post-war levels, with only the Cold War boom even coming close and then only very briefly. This level of return is very desirable for those we have called the one percent and they are willing to do anything to defend it.

And yet, even this wasn’t enough for them. At Barclay’s Bank, center of the LIBOR scandal, yet more criminal activity has been uncovered. Jerry del Missier, the former Chief Operating Officer of the bank during all this crime has even been handed a $13.6 million  farewell package.

The activism is about changing the way that we imagine ourselves in relation to debt. It means embracing government borrowing at historically low levels to relaunch the economic lives of the 99%–and then making sure neo-liberalism can’t happen again. The outrage, the anger and the sadness comes from the astonishingly brazen theft by corporations and banks for which no-one has yet even shown remorse, let alone be punished.

On September 17, and for the years after it, let’s show that we haven’t forgotten these simple lessons.

 

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.

In search of protest past

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So I had this idea for Memorial Day weekend that it would be interesting to look back at past protest literature from the New York area and see what could be learned, in the manner of all those op-eds about nineteenth-century presidents and Greek wars. I looked again at Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. For all the obvious differences, there’s one clear similarity: the NYPD were awful even then.

Carson’s very title depends on a conceit that I don’t think still works very much. It comes from the idea that because of bird death resulting from the use of the pesticide DDT, there might be a spring without bird song. Although I did have a friend go back to England because he missed the song of the thrushes (a small brown bird), I’m not sure that most of us would register the difference now. I rarely notice birds singing, except when starlings are massing for migration. As we now mostly travel in sealed vehicles, more often than not with ear-buds in place, that interface is less vital than it once was.

DDY being sprayed in 1948

On the other hand, Carson mentions that after the village of Setauket on the north shore of Long Island was sprayed with DDT, a horse drank from a trough in the high street–and died immediately. The toxicity of DDT was its selling point and Long Island was doused with it to try and eradicate the gypsy moth to no avail. In the years since there has been a notorious breast cancer hotspot on the Island. DDT is said not to be a carcinogen and all the studies made have failed to show a link between pesticide use and cancer–except it might be said for the one in real women’s bodies in real space. Rachel Carson died of breast cancer shortly after her book was published in 1962.

But if you Google Carson and DDT, half the entries you will see accuse her of being a murderer. The bizarre conceit is that malaria in the dominated world could be more effectively eradicated with widespread use of DDT and the fact that is not is Carson’s fault. There is a perfectly effective way to prevent malaria, which is to give people treated mosquito nets. It works, it’s cheap and it has no side-effects. But giving money for that would not have the fun of “demolishing” an environmental pioneer.

Jane Jacobs (center) in The White Horse, Hudson St

The New York City described by Jane Jacobs is perhaps even more remote than the world of horse troughs and bird song in Carson’s book. It’s a place where you can leave a key for a visiting friend at the local deli and everyone has an eye out for the kid in the street. In fact, this culture of what she directly calls “surveillance” is a bit creepy: when people encircle a man who is trying to get a child to follow him, it turns out he is her father. She talks off-handedly of a neglected park in Philadelphia becoming a “pervert park,” meaning a place for same-sex assignations in the era of the closet. There’s no street politics in this book, rather a permanent watchfulness that takes its pleasure in seeing that “all is well.”

Jacobs’ view of the mixed use, high density urban space has become canonical now, even if her follow-up thought that “slums” should be left alone has not. Much of her argument against the Le Corbusier influenced city planner now seems a bit slow-going, so thoroughly has the view reversed. On the other hand, she’s completely right when she says:

that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact – they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

You could apply this insight to see why Bloomberg et al. originally left Zuccotti alone to transform itself into Liberty Plaze: because it simply never occurred to them that anyone would be interested, still less want to join in or follow the Occupiers’ example.

Jacobs waged her campaigns by local petitions that she would then take to the Board of Estimate, a land-use body composed of the Mayor, the Comptroller, the Council President and the Borough Presidents. It met once a week and could be petitioned by citizens, until the Supreme Court abolished it in 1989. If this sounds like a democracy gone by, that’s certainly the case. On the other hand, look what happened to Jacobs in 1968:

Jane Jacobs, a nationally known writer on urban problems, was arraigned in Criminal Court yesterday and charged with second-degree riot, inciting to riot and criminal mischief. The police had originally charged that Mrs. Jacobs tried to disrupt a public meeting on the controversial Lower Manhattan Expressway. ‘The inference seems to be,’ Mrs. Jacobs said, ‘that anybody who criticizes a state program is going to get it in the neck.’”

— The New York Times, April 18, 1968

Now that sounds familiar enough: being charged with rioting for trying to express an opinion at a public meeting. So it turns out that some things never change.

Montreal: ça ira!

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In the face of continued inadequate media coverage, let’s keep the focus on Montreal. As numerous tweets had it last night, this has gone far beyond a dispute over student tuition fees, as important as that issue has become. It is now a contest over sovereignty: do the people set the boundaries of the force of law or their “representatives” in the state parliament?

Such questions resonate in Quebec because of the long campaign for autonomy from Anglophone Canada and the history of state repression in the 1970s. Yet they clearly have a global impact in the present crisis in which neoliberal technocracy is struggling to maintain the hegemony of its assertion that there is no alternative to austerity and authority. Montreal is now the focus of this global dispute.

For those catching up with the Montreal strike, this video offers a history:

The loi d’exception, the law of exception, known as Loi 78 gave exceptional powers to the state. The May 22 march of over 250,000 people in a city of about 3 million people was an extraordinary statement of refusal to consent to this domination.

May 22 March. Credit: Justin Ling

The next night saw the first implementation of the law. Demonstrators were kettled in the street, using the orange nets first implemented in London. There were 518 arrests Wednesday night in Montreal and another 150 in Quebec City. Protestors were issued with desk tickets carrying fines of $634. The New York Times mentions this briefly on Friday without a reference to Law 78.

Many protestors took to the streets on Thursday night wearing their tickets.

Demonstrator wearing his fine summons for illegal assembly

Montreal responded by holding a much larger demonstration on Thursday night. Heard on the manif (march) Thursday night: “si la révolution nous suit c’est parce qu’elle nous appuie”/ “if the revolution is following us it’s because it supports us.” This is not (just) a tuition strike any more. The song of the march went:

Illégal, tu me fais faire des bêtises dans les rues d’Montréal….quand le peuple se lève, rien ne peut l’arrêter

Or:

Illegal, you make me do stupid things in the streets of Montreal…when the people rise up, nothing can stop them

Estimates suggested about 1500 people were marching in three separate groups that converged downtown.

Marching in Montreal--illegally

Many performed cacerolazo, a banging of pots and pans as a protest that was carried out not only by protestors in the street–who were risking arrest–but by many others from steps, balconies and sidewalks. A musician has made a song out of the sound already: Guillaume Chartain’s casserole song. These sympathizers extended still further the anti-government coalition and the action took place in parts of the city remote from the downtown demonstrations.

The casserole protest aka cacerola

There were other carnivalesque elements, designed to deter the police from making arrests, like the Plus Brigades in NY. Here’s the AnarchoPanda making his/her rounds:

The police seemed uncertain as to what to do. At one point they started tweeting, apparently to warn people of imminent arrest:

Using the #manifencours like the protestors, the SPVM proclaimed that a siren would be sounded as a sign of escalation. In the end, having already made over 2500 arrests during the course of the protests, the police made a token 4 arrests last night. As I mentioned earlier, there is still a popular state of exception–the mass repetition of events, whether technically legal or criminalized. To have enacted Loi 78 last night, the police would have needed to arrest about 2500 people and they seem to have backed down from that.

This could mark a critical turning point. If the demonstrators can maintain their numbers, and the police continue to show reluctance to mass arrest, Loi 78 falls by default. What outcome do the protestors then want? If elections are called it is by no means certain that the right lose, as Wisconsin Democrats are nervously seeing now. Although Gov. Walker faces a recall election, polls show the race essentially tied.

Meanwhile, the Canadian movement is energizing others worldwide. There was a solidarity rally in Paris for the second day in a row.

A rally in Paris in solidarité

They get it in London finally. Small solidarity events are taking place daily in New York, with a larger event being planned for next week.

As the French Revolution chant used to go:

Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira!

Here we go! here we go! Here we go!