Category Archives: future

Hope, Crisis and Love: Part Two

Posted on by

Four years ago, there was a financial crisis. People put a huge effort into electoral politics around the theme of hope. Many of those hopes were imprecise, just a sense that things could only get better. A year ago, people took to the squares to renew their hopes by direct democracy. Again, the issues were imprecise but this time by design. The Presidential election this year was not about hope. Perhaps the difference now is that it is the nature of the crisis that is unclear. Is it about energy and climate? Debt? Democracy? The answer that frustrates people is probably the right one: all of the above. So what is the affect of this multi-dimensional crisis if it’s not hope? For Occupy, it’s love.

One of the most dividing terms in the Occupy movement has been “love.” Movement people like to talk about it as a key motivator and form of social engagement. Critics ranging from Zizek to Thomas Frank have looked down on the idea, and warned against the movement falling in love with itself. In other words, what we call love, they saw as narcissism, or masturbation. Trust two middle-aged white guys to tell everyone who they should fall in love with.

To be fair, their follow through was very different. Frank was comparing Occupy to the Tea Party and their “success” in having Ryan nominated as Vice-President. As a grouping resistant to representation, this kind of goal was never mentioned in Occupy. Zizek’s critique was that we could not imagine the future that we wanted. Perhaps that would have been an investment in hope, which predicts a better future. Love is a less certain emotion–it might be great, it might not, but your choice is to go with it because at some level you feel you must.

Psychoanalysis wants to tell you that not only do you not know what you want, what you think you want is a displacement of something else. There’s no doubt that the mechanisms of displacement and disruption (the slip of the tongue) are part of the present mental apparatus. How does this work politically? When the students of 1968 pushed Jacques Lacan on this question, he famously sneered back at them

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new Master. You will get one.

His meaning was the “revolution” would end up as a new form of reaction. Less noticed has been the exchange in which Lacan admitted to the students that the Oedipus complex on which such negations are based was itself a colonial imposition. It is that complex that disrupts the individual’s claim to know itself by a disruption from the Real. But this Real isn’t really real: it’s a colonial construction of a reality that was certainly experienced as such but, like all constructions, can fall down.

Decolonizing is, then, first a personal project of deconstructing and then reconstructing a mental apparatus that can be something other than the “individual” presumed by the patently collapsed neoliberal economic market. This reconfigured means of relating to others would be what we have struggled to call “love.” We’ve seen a great deal of it in the disaster zone this past week.

The debate is now over how this remaking of a sense of community can be made more permanent and how it can be scaled to a larger arena. The European-Mediterranean movement is ahead of us here. Their continent-wide organizing and community building is much more established and I’ll report back on this tomorrow. In this, there is hope. If a continent so radically divided by religions, languages, politics and history can forge a common movement, then hope is a way to do politics in the present, not some future to come.

And do we need it, the next storm is headed to NY and NJ with tens of thousands still without power, with coastlines totally vulnerable to storm surges, tunnels still flooded.

The Many Futures of Occupy

Posted on by

In its first year of life, Occupy has transformed the American political landscape by opening a space for radicalism. By radicalism, I mean a questioning of the fundamental ways in which life is lived. It has done so by defining and executing a form of political practice that is a hybrid of grass-roots organizing, direct action and digital-era networking. The new radical opening created by Occupy is now proliferating in four main directions that were represented by the four “zones” of action on September 17: debt, the ecological crisis, education and the 99%. There are, then, many futures for Occupy.

A year ago, the tactic of occupation brilliantly visualized what has become Occupy’s signature gesture: to put bodies into public space where they are not supposed to be. In so doing, Occupy called attention to exclusion and inequality in public affairs in a manner that had become unsayable in American life. By making themselves visible, the occupiers made it possible to speak once again about the extraordinarily divided society in which we live.

To realize what a difference this has made look at this New York Times editorial on Mitt Romney, which uses language unthinkable a year ago:

The shame is not that those people don’t pay income taxes. The shame is how many poor people there are when the top 1 percent can amass uncountable fortunes fed by tax breaks and can donate tens of millions of dollars to political candidates to keep it that way.

If, as seems likely, this video moment turns the Presidential election from a close-run race to a canter for Obama, Occupy can take a slice of the credit.

Occupy now sees itself as a “movement of movements.” These were represented in the different clusters that took action around Wall Street. Let’s look at these futures.

Debt

In the past two months, a key theme for many activists has become what economists call “household debt,” meaning the range of personal debt from credit cards to mortgages, student loans and medical debt. Fully 75% of Americans are in debt. The other 25% are mostly too poor to qualify them for credit, excluding them from access to everything from airplane tickets to home ownership. 14% of Americans are being pursued by debt collectors. So it’s not surprising that The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual published this weekend by the Strike Debt collective has become an instant hit. The Manual gives detailed practical information on how to deal with debt and what to do if you can’t. As yet another bailout for the banks was announced by the Federal Reserve with its purchase of $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities, there has still been no debt relief for the 99%. Expect to see a debt refusal movement in the US, following the precedents of Quebec, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Ecological Crisis

Nowhere is the gap between the planetary crisis and the current governing solutions more in need of radical rethinking than the environment. As scientists struggle to get their heads around the enormity of the acceleration of global warming, which now suggests that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer very soon, all global government can do is squabble over drilling for yet more hydrocarbons in the newly-revealed land. While the Obama administration is mocked by Republicans for wanting to slow the rise in the oceans, they have given all possible encouragement to Shell’s efforts to drill for oil in the Arctic, even after the company failed to complete its safety devices. In the face of this consensus, direct action is the only option remaining, such as that taken by Greenpeace when it occupied an Arctic drilling rig, or the successful encircling of the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Carbon-based capitalism is now a threat to life itself and Occupy can make the connection to create a politics of the living.

Education

From all sides, we hear that education is the key to success in the global economy. Unfortunately, someone seems to have changed the lock. In K-12, neo-liberal education seeks to inculcate data for multiple choice tests, rather than educate people to evaluate. The measure of their success is precisely that climate-change denial continues to flourish. Higher education is presented as a customer-driven, goal-oriented service economy. Hard to reconcile this with $1 trillion in student debt, 41% of the class of 2008 in default on their loans, and mass unemployment of graduates. The Bar Association is actually recommending students not to go to law school because of the combination of debt and unemployment. In Quebec, students took strike action against tuition hikes and won. In Chicago, teachers have just ended their strike against teacher evaluations based on tests with a deal whose terms are as yet unclear. In Chile, high school and university students continue to revolt against tuition-based secondary and higher education. The goal is now clear: a free public system that educates for life, rather than indoctrinates for work.

The 99%

On September 17, the 99% action centered on the slogan “money out of politics,” perhaps Occupy’s most impossible demand yet. There are plans to occupy the Presidential debates. If the White House race becomes  a done deal, look closely at what happens in Wisconsin, where electoral activism has been the focus of the movement. Activists in Madison have long claimed to have started the Occupy movement with their action at the Capitol building. The occupation resulted in the recall of Gov. Walker but he was able to win re-election, seeming to set the movement back. Now Rep. Tammy Baldwin is in a close race for US Senate against former Governor Tommy Thompson. If the Republicans win, even greater gridlock is the likely outcome of the Obama second term. So what happens in the Dairy State may be a good indication of whether there’s a significant role for Occupy in electoral politics.

These are the fundamental issues of our time. Occupy’s many futures will continue to make radical solutions visible and sayable and thus newly possible.