Category Archives: May Day

On the Eve

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I’ve been nervous all day, as if I was organizing a conference or a public event. It’s silly really, but I can’t shake the feeling. It’s the same question: will people show up? Other than the Occupy crowd, that is. It’s been a day of running into people who are getting their last minute things done, looking forward, feeling excited and edgy.

It feels like much is riding on this one day, perhaps inevitably, given that months of organizing have been directed here. The cops have apparently also been practicing on Rikers Island with fake protestors. It’s frustrating to learn that the weather is forecast to be wet all morning for the first time in ages–the gods are not surprisingly in the one per cent it appears.

So here’s my schedule for tomorrow.

8.30 am: 99 Pickets. There are pickets being established of 99 corporations and other institutions of the one percent. While we’re on strike, they need to see that there’s opposition. Some of these have been announced but most have not, so it’ll be interesting to see how this tactic plays out.

10am to 3pm. Free University!

There will be over forty teach-ins and appearances including David Graeber, David Harvey and Frances Fox Piven. You can learn about drama, yoga, Take Back the Land, anthropology, urban space and more. Enjoy Radical Recess. I’m helping out and about 2pm I’m part of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign reading performance of Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay! We have real performance people in the other roles, so I’m hoping not to make a fool of myself–luckily the play is a farce so maybe it won’t be noticed!

Around this point, the rain is supposed to stop!

4pm Rally in Union Square

5.30 March downtown with the Occupy contingent

7.30pm on: Occupy after-party TBA

There are great actions going on all over the city. There’s public art everywhere and guerrilla libraries. One thousand guitar players will march in the Guitarmy from Bryant Square to Union Square. High school students are planning to walk out in solidarity in the Bronx.

From time to time, there have been disagreements about tactics or even whether having a May Day event was a good idea. Now I think we can all just agree to hope that what’s happening across the country tomorrow goes really well, that no one gets hurt and that no one who does not choose civil disobedience gets arrested.

One of the later suggestions for tomorrow is: No Data! So there will be no post on Occupy 2012 tomorrow. Good luck everyone and have a great May Day!

See you back here May 2

Other Histories: The Ancient General Strike, for example

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In remembering the general strike we also need to remember the historical world-view of the general strike. We have to replace the idea that all progress was modern and Western with a decolonial perspective that reshapes time as well as space. We should set aside the fictitious genealogy that runs from ancient Greece and Rome to Christianity and then modernity, even in thinkers as profound as Foucault, with an awareness of how much more varied and interesting the historical record has been.

So let’s consider the ancient world with this in mind. The oligarchic “democracies” of Western Europe and North American in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries first defined themselves as descended from ancient Greek democracy, a rhetoric that is widely deployed today. Against that pose, anarchists and radicals of the period produced a history of the ancient general strike.

Athenian democracy was in any event nothing like our present-day representative system. It was limited to non-slave men of adult age who had completed military service, a minority of approximately 10% of the population of Athenian slave-labor society. Most free Athenians “owned” at least one slave. Within the structures of the Assembly, officials were  selected not by voting but by lot, on the presumption of equality. So while the Assembly proceedings were decided by majority vote, this was a direct democracy of the minority, contrary to the usual representations. A look around any Western capital city will confirm that ancient Greece and Rome nonetheless became the archetypes for the modern imperial capital.

By the same token, European and North American radicals identified themselves as the descendants of Roman slaves in ongoing resistance to classicizing aristocrats. So the proles (child or minor) of Rome had engendered the “proletarian” of the industrial revolution. These researches into ancient class struggle were, according to History Workshop scholar Raphael Samuel,

the principal site on which the claims of historical materialism were advanced.

Among the most influential of these publications was a remarkable two-volume opus called The Ancient Lowly (1888) by C. Osbourne Ward, a member of the New York based People’s Party.

The Ancient Lowly

Ward did extensive original research in keeping with the then-latest methods of studying ancient inscriptions. In all other ways, he broke with academic convention. He self-published and later worked with co-ops to get his work out. He described his findings as “news,” like today’s “history of the present.” He called attention to ancient rebels and resistance fighters like Eunus, Achaeus and Cleon, who led what he called “general strikes” against Rome. Cleon, for example, headed an army of 200,000 rebel slaves in Sicily around 140 BCE. Under Eunus the formerly enslaved dominated the entire region for over a decade from 143-133 BCE, defeating numerous Roman armies.

You probably still haven’t heard of these people but you have most likely heard of Spartacus (109-71 BCE),  revolutionary leader of the enslaved. His story was told in the classic movie from 1960, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas as Spartacus.  Now the film is mostly remembered for its camp homoerotics and for the claim by all the captured rebels: “I am Spartacus,” a form of mike check.

There’s a sex-and-sandals TV show about Spartacus out in the wilds of cable-land even today.

These popular culture forms are the cultural echo of the long radical tradition of seeing the ancient period as one of radical class struggle, in which the enslaved often won victories against their oppressors. Indeed, seen in the historical long-run, you might argue that they won outright. Around 600 CE, slavery disappeared from the former Roman Empire in the West. While there are many views as to the cause, the modern radicals would have had no doubt that it was the final victory of a seven hundred year struggle. Against the view that slavery had existed everywhere prior to its European abolition, this argument can point to eight hundred years without slavery from c.600-1492. With such perspectives in mind, early twentieth century radicals recast the Bliblical story of Exodus as the Israelites general strike against dictatorship.

So how do we know that another world is possible? Because people have remade worlds over and again, overturning hierarchies that were supposed to be divine and eternal, first for days and years, then decades and centuries.

Striking New Relationships

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Why do we strike on May Day? What is that strike? We strike in solidarity with global labor, our own histories and with each other. The action of striking is not just a withdrawal of labor but what Marina Sitrin calls “striking new relationships.” The actions of refusal to play the part expected of us, in whatever way we can, and imagining other ways of relating to each other are what will constitute a day of generally striking, a striking day.

Let’s review the call for a Day Without the 99 percent:

  • No Work: for many there is no need to respond because they have no work. For others, refusing to work is legally impossible or would endanger them too greatly. Those of us who can do so will withdraw our labor in solidarity with the precarity and dangers suffered by those who cannot.

  • No School: in Bloombergistan, only 13% of African-American and Latin@ students graduate high school ready for college. Those who make it find that the ticket to employment literally comes with a mortgage: one million people now have student debt of over $100,000 or more. We leave school to insist it is a right not a privilege and, for a day, those of us who can will offer classes freely to all who care to attend to prefigure the learning that is to come.
  • No Housework: domestic labor continues to make the world liveable, and as harmonious and possible as it can. The women, children and (some) men who perform that labor have to endure the insult of one percenters like Ann Romney claiming their dignity. We will not engage in this invisible labor for one day in order to reclaim it and to show solidarity with those who are compelled by neoliberalism to act as full-time carers without support, whether for elders, children, the dis/abled or  others in need.
  • No Banking: here we refuse to participate in the system of financial distribution and exchange that has so impoverished us all and yet has been allowed to carry on as if nothing happened. The financialization of everything and everyone has made it difficult to withdraw entirely from the banking system, as many used to be able to do. We can plan to move our money to credit unions and other co-operatives.
  • No Shopping: consumers dictate the success or failure of the one percent. By refusing to shop for things that we do not need, we can show how the concept of permanent growth is unsustainable.

What we will do is more important than what we will not do. We will share ideas, skills, food, music, art, friendship, solidarity and space. We will assert that striking new relationships is living, while working for life is not. Over the course of four months of planning, Occupy has become the autonomous, decentralized movement that was promised in September 2011. The combination of mutual aid, direct action, direct democracy, affinity groups and the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, enabled and facilitated by digital technologies, has changed many lives already. This “internal” process of transformation is now ready to reach out to many others.

Will capitalism fall on May 1? No. But it’s doing a good job of collapsing on its own at the moment. The more we refuse to come to its aid, the quicker that moment may come.

Will cities grind to a halt on May 1? No. Transport workers are not on strike, so that people can easily get to the events and so that those who have no choice but to work can do so.

Will there be more life, more laughter, more music, more creativity, more confrontation, more raising of awareness, more solidarity: in short, more love? Yes, she said, yes, yes, yes.

These new relationships will reconfigure our relationship to U. S. history and to the rest of the world. It was in Chicago in 1886 that May Day strikers called for the eight-hour working day. The demonstration ended with a bomb being thrown that culminated in the notorious Haymarket Affair and the execution of four people, none of whom had been shown to be responsible for throwing the mysterious bomb.

From that event, May Day has become the global festival of labor. For many years, unions in this country have refused to participate in May Day events for fear of being labeled Communists. Now, more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, labor, immigrants and Occupy activists are coming together to act in solidarity with the global 99%.

Why post this today rather than May 1? Because I will be striking on May 1 in whatever ways I can and it’s not too late for you to think of some way in which you can as well. Please join us.

Diversity of Occupy

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I’m in Madison, Wisconsin, for a few days and finding out the different history of occupation and Occupy in what many people think of as the home of the movement. Here, I’m hearing about the ways in which the legacy of the occupation at the Capital have in fact mitigated the impact of the Occupy movement.

In some ways, what’s happened in Wisconsin is an interesting test case for those looking for demands, structure and leadership from Occupy. When Gov. Scott Walker launched his assault on public sector unions, the Teaching Assistants Association and other unions organized a response that galvanized thousands in February 2011. No one is quite sure how the occupation began–one version was that it originated with a queue to speak. But the energy of that protest has driven an extraordinary campaign that culminated with the ratification of a recall election for the governor and some state senators.

Nonetheless, matters are now poised. Polls show an even divide between Walker and his yet-to-be-decided Democratic opponent. Conversations here are centred around the elections, from Tammy Baldwin’s run for US Senate to the Madison House of Representatives seat currently held by Baldwin, and of course the recall. The difference with the decidedly unconcerned perspective of OWS in regard to the 2012 elections is noticeable and thoroughly understandable. Were I still a Wisconsin resident, as I once was, I would be electorally committed.

Occupy Madison turns against the town mayor Soglin

As a result of this unusual pattern, Occupy Madison is a very different phenomenon than elsewhere. For one thing, it still has an encampment.  The tents stand on a disused parking-lot on the less favored East side of town. The encampment houses about 60 to 100 homeless people. The occupiers-by-choice are no longer part of the movement. While the occupiers have a GA and use the vocabulary of the movement, they are being considered by local authorities as a social services issue, rather than a political one.

Nonetheless, it was a surprise to many in Madison that the local mayor Paul Soglin, a long-tine Madison liberal who has held the office off and on since 1973, evicted Occupy Madison last Friday. His grounds were contractual: he had given a permit to the occupiers until April 30 and their efforts to extend the encampment were in breach of this agreement. From the account in  the Isthmus, the local alternative paper, written by Joe Tarr (4/20/12: 5), the issue came down to how the movement was perceived. For Soglin, the campers were homeless people and Madison feels itself at risk from transient homeless people, who, it is believed, journey to the city from Chicago in search of benefits and other amenities. For others, even in the Common Council, this was a social movement even if the participants happened to be homeless.

So here’s the irony. In Madison, the city that many rightly think of as the origin of the Occupy movement in the US, with its inspiring occupation of the state Capitol, May Day will see the eviction of Occupy Madison, even as 115 other cities are marking a Day Without the 99%. Downtown, you can see shops like “Amsterdam,” better known for its fetish gear, with a window full of Occupy materials, general strike posters and T-shirts recalling the Wisconsin movement.

The stakes here are interesting, considerable and very different to New York. People are hoping to replace a very right-wing governor by means of an electoral coalition that includes all the public sector unions from the students to the police and the corrections officers. Perhaps that’s a viable working model of the 99%. Should that election fail, it may be the end of that model. Or it might be the beginning of a new version of it. Keep an eye on Wisconsin: for once the rhetoric of bell-weather state might be right.

The Renewal of Occupy

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I began writing every day about the Occupy movement both as a commitment to that movement and to be able to take its measure from my own perspective over time. Whatever anyone else makes of it–and many thanks to those of you who do take the time to read it–it has often surprised me. I find myself again surprised today as I look at the movement renewing itself, as a very different project than when I first published online about it back in October 2011.

Whatever happens on May Day, it’s now clear that on May 2 the movement will be closer to its goal being autonomous, decentralized and, yes, horizontal. Even if, as I suspect may be the case, the police in New York succeed in kettling protest to Union Square and a few other locations, the mobilizing for May Day now appears to have set in motion a transformation. Back in October, we were explaining the hand signals of the global justice movement and thinking about the General Assembly as a model. Now, autonomy is reinventing itself, not as a set of institutions but as “a process without end,” as Bifo has described it. Even ten days ago this pattern wasn’t evident–perhaps because I have not been able to be as active myself in the crunch period of semester–as it now appears to be.

With the continued sleepful protest in the vicinity of the Stock Exchange, the occupation aspect of Occupy has become both more pointed and less complex. It points directly at the scandal of Wall Street’s continued insanity: even Citibank shareholders protested the other day, when they refused to endorse a $15 million base salary for CEO Vikram Pandit. At the same time, it is not so difficult to sustain as the full encampment. It involves a fluid and revolving population of sleeping protestors, who are not required to abandon their political project to support themselves.

This version of occupying has attracted notable sympathy in the city, including from such unlikely sources as the free Metro newspaper.

Since January, the May Day organizing has generated a number of innovative approaches. Most notable, perhaps, is the 4×4 co-ordination of the rally in Union Square and joint march downtown. The four groups present are the trade unions, the Immigrant Workers Coalition. the May 1 Coalition and OWS. The first three groups send delegates. OWS send four spokes and as many May Day working group members as can attend. When a decision needs to be made the OWS delegates consult with the people present and report back the sense of the group. While many might think such a system to be unworkable, it has gone smoothly so far and there has been some interest from trade union rank-and-file as to how they might adopt a similar process.

Mirina Sitrin today reports back from the Brooklyn Court House, where many Occupy people congregated to prevent a series of foreclosure hearings from proceeding:

[W]ith tons of others, preventing foreclosures by singing, well, I have chills and tears from our power, so I am sharing again. I, along with dozens of others did not even get into the courtroom since it was full half an hour early

Such actions make no media waves but do make a real difference in people’s lives, people directly affected by the crisis.

Next, I got a copy today of the OWS Project List, reporting on all the different activities going on around the city. It’s in eight folio-sized pages of three column news and activities, ranging from an oral history project to the Feminist General Assembly and the Stop the Empire Tour. People are working with or without wider attention to create a space that they would like to live in and create new ways of interacting. It all looks like fun.

Finally, there has been much gloom and doom about the General Assembly and how to co-ordinate the movement. This Saturday, there’s a May Day Assembly in Union Square. It’s a way to share all the different things that people have been doing, to give others who have not yet taken on a project a chance to join in and for an open discussion that does not have the burden of taking collective decisions. Volunteers are out leafleting and fly-posting all over the place. As ever, I feel humbled by the amazing energy of the young people in this movement.

I can’t vouch for all these activities because no one person, however busy, could possibly go to them all, let alone be active in them. That’s a very good sign. Obviously, I’m having an “up day” in the whole bi-polar pattern of what it is to be involved with this whole project. In the beginning, there was a hope for decentralized autonomous projects. Now it begins to look like coming to reality. Some are small, some attract national attention. It’s so interesting.