Category Archives: Montreal

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 Learning To Come: the now future

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There are things going on. Learning is changing even as the debt apparatus tries to commodify the entire process into what it probably wants to call something like education capital. In the quiet of summer, some events emerge to show us what is to come (à venir) and that the future (avenir) is now. The àvenir is the future to come. It is Montréal. It is Free University. It is the Interference Archive. It is now.

The AVENIR piece above is the work and concept of a young group of Quebecois artists, who call themselves Ecole de la Montagne Rouge, the School of (the) Red Mountain. Their name evokes both the legendary Black Mountain art school and the Mountain, as the most radical faction of the French Revolution were known. EDLMR articulate a philosophy of radical learning:

We and thousands of other students across Quebec believe that education is a right, not a privilege reserved for the well-off. The tuition increase jeopardizes access to higher learning for our generation and future generations. Sensing that an unlimited general strike is looming, many protest movements and pressure tactics are being organized across Quebec. This is an opportunity for all students to show solidarity, defend our points of view and get involved so that we can create a balance of power in relations with the government. Our victory depends on the daily efforts made by each and every one of you.

They are in New York on Thursday, hosted by the fab Interference Archive. EDLMR produce conventional art work like these posters:

While those of a certain age will recognize the graphics of 1968 here, that was nearly fifty years ago. They are new to many younger people and in any event continue to have a striking visual and political impact.

EDLMR have also created Red Squared, an online project.

The site has everything from film to graphics, documentation of demonstrations, music and art. Check this out for example. Be sure to find the project on The Social Contract.

The event is hosted by the Interference Archive, whose importance is described by Cindy Milstein:

If we’re committed to making a better future, that also means saving, remembering, and scrutinizing our past (and present-day) struggles to get there, and doing so outside those hierarchical and privatized institutions that either don’t want us to remember — because that can be mighty subversive — or only allow certain privileged individuals access to that knowledge.

No new archives, no new learning. In an era obsessively dominated with memorials to trauma, how great to have an archive of the àvenir. Interference Archive works with OWS and Quebec. By the way, they could use some help.

Today, the next iteration of the fab Free University of New York City was also announced. The first major event was on May Day in Madison Square Park and there have been meetings throughout the summer, intertwined with All In The Red and other solidarity actions for Montréal. Now the Free U is calling for a full week of actions from September 18-22, following S17. You can propose an idea, or help or both. Do it.

The future is now, now is the future, it is come, it is to come.

 

 

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.

Strike Debt: an emerging consensus

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For a long time, Occupy was a combination of radical affect, method and principle. It did not have a central subject. Readers will have noticed that debt has increasingly become a key theme in this project. And now it’s perhaps becoming the theme in OWS as well. A growing consensus is emerging that the next major day of action will be orchestrated around debt. This will be Black Monday, or September 17, Occupy Wall Street Year One.

In a sense, this is overdue. After all, OWS’s own David Graeber is the author the global best-seller Debt. But just as the 2011 protest lagged behind the worst of the bailouts, it’s only now that the full extent of the debt crisis is becoming apparent.

There are three main factors at work here. One is the exemplary resistance in Montreal to the privatization of higher education and the refusal of endebted futures. Here is a direct challenge to the idea that morality means debt. Quebecois consider that they have already paid for education via direct and indirect taxation, one. And, two, they see a moral society as one that educates its citizens as a public good.

“I fought nazism. I fought fascism. I detested Duplessis. I didn’t make it to 94 for this. NO to law 78.”

Next, and perhaps resulting from this rigor, is the new refusal of student debt that I’m seeing. I’ve met several graduates who are talking about going directly into default from graduation, confronted with apparently long-term unemployment. Many others have moved home with family to a very different future than the one they envisaged when matriculating.

Finally, the macro-economic picture continues to worsen. Spanish banks can’t even calculate how much bailout they need. And this, incidentally, is one of the many reasons why the parallel between family budgets and financial institutions doesn’t work. If the EU came to me with an offer to bailout my debt, I could work it out in about half an hour. Yet giant Spanish institutions with highly qualified staff offered a spread of between 20 and 62 billion euros. So the real amount needed is probably 120 billion.

Major US banks had their credit ratings cut on Thursday so that Citigroup and Bank of America are now two notches above junk bond status. The only upside for their customers is that these banks have so maximized their fees and penalties already that they have run out of room for more.

In his European travels, David Graeber has been saying that the question now is, not if there will be some form of debt abolition, but how it will happen. In Iceland, the state has decided:

to forgive [mortgage] debt exceeding 110 percent of home values.

This forgiveness has affected between 15 and 20% of mortgages to a cost of at least $1.6 billion (in a country where the population is only about 300,000) and has had a dramatic turnaround effect on the economy.

Here banks have moved to a new tactic to their own benefit alone: short-selling, in which a house is not formally foreclosed but the bank accepts a sale at a loss. A striking 233,000 homes were sold this way in the first quarter of this year, a quarter of all such sales. That’s a million people who have had the banks sell their homes for them. Thus the headline-making foreclosure sales are technically down, at just over 20% of the market. Banks still own nearly 700,000 homes and the same number are in some stage of foreclosure: over 5 million more people are confronting homelessness.

The housing crisis is an invisible reason the student debt situation has worsened, I suspect. Parents and other financial supporters no longer have home equity to draw on to sustain ever-rising tuition costs, as universities assumed they did until 2008. That’s me right there.

And next week the Supreme Court is going to overturn health care, which, as flawed as it is, represented at least a chance that medical debt might be contained. In today’s New York Times, a couple with two health insurance policies are reported to have found themselves with a $90,000 bill after a fall led to an unexpected set of surgery and nursing home stays. A consultant reduced the costs by $22,000–but charged 25% of that as a fee.

So when the Montreal solidarity march last night took the theme “Night of the Living Debt,” it really made sense to people. It might as well be zombies spreading the debt crisis because it would be no more out of control than it is now.

Night of the Living Debt

Today, a group called “Free Bed-Stuy” had a great Free University-style event in a lovely park in deepest Brooklyn (I forgot to take pictures because I was doing a teach-in). An urban farm next door housed chickens, pigs and vegetable plots: and also a serious sound system that was luckily far enough away from the event that we could hear ourselves talk. No cops. And a comfortable curious crowd, who were eager to hear our ideas about linking debt to prison, slavery and stop-and-frisk. Tomorrow, the fourth Strike Debt assembly in Washington Square Park, 12pm. I’ll report back.

 

The rhythm of the global movement

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The new wave of global protest is inventing public space in global cities. Global capital likes space to be isomorphic and consistent–like a McDonalds hamburger, it should look, taste and feel the same wherever you actually happen to find yourself. In this world-view, there is no such thing as public space in global cities. The global precariat–meaning precarious workers, or everyone who doesn’t benefit from capital investment– is inventing it. It’s a globally mediated combination of certain sounds and certain actions. The “movement” is about learning how that goes and what to do about it.

Since 2011 we’ve seen a wave of efforts to reimagine bodies, spaces and lives resistant to, or outside of, the flows of finance capital. The first tactic was “take the squares,” a specific effort to reinvent the space of circulation into one of belonging. It flowed from Tahrir to Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti, St Paul’s, Pershing and many more. Zuccotti was the exception that proved the rule, a fragment of striated space in the frictionless smooth zones of hyperpoliced finance capital’s capital. Otherwise these spaces were well-known locations in historic centers of power. As such, they were in many cases all too easy for determined police to retake with the obvious exception of Tahrir. Indeed, since the revolution, the military regime has isolated the revolution “in” Tahrir, that is to say, the conceptual space of the movement.

So when we say that the movement is about “bodies in space,” we’re saying a set of interrelated things that we’re learning to understand as we go along:

  1. That the body is any body, not one (un)marked by codes of ethnicity, race, gender, able-ism, sexual orientation etc.
  2. That this body “moves,” both literally in the ways that it can depending on its age, capacities and desires, and also conceptually in that it refuses to stay in its “place,” the place allocated to it by authority.
  3. That this movement, which is also a refusal to “move on” as the police want us to do, invents mediated public space that did not previously exist, whether by occupying, marching, dancing, or displaying.
  4. That this movement is not any movement whatever but has a rhythm, one that is altogether different to the metronomic beat of capital’s 1-2-3-4.
  5. That this rhythm reclaims and invents the time that gives the new public space dimension.
  6. That these interactions are disseminated globally by video/photo/MP3 using social media and that this mediation is constitutive of resistant global space.
  7. It is unlimited/illimité/ilimitado.

In this video from Montréal that everyone loves, you can see this process at work. Filmed two days ago, edited yesterday, a global talking point today:

What if you don’t happen to have a thousand people available? Since 2008, the Spanish anti-capitalist activist collective flo6x8 have been reterritorializing the “any space whatever” of global capital. They use Spanish regional music and dance to disrupt its smooth flow with rhythms and sounds that cannot help but recall their North African origin.

Yesterday they intervened at a branch of Bankia, the nationalized amalgam of savings banks (thanks to Matthew Bain for pointing this one out to me).  Bankia announced that the 11 billion euro bail out they need is more like 19 billion. While this sum may seem minimal to those of us accustomed to the staggering amounts handed over to US and UK banks, in Spain, caught as it is between falling revenues due to the crisis and European Union-mandated austerity, this is a real number.  flo6x8 adapt a flamenco to lament this and to draw bank customers into their dance:

Here, just for fun, is an action from February this year in Barcelona, where the bank customers really get into it:

OWS is starting to work in this frame. It’s important to point out that the Spanish actions have roots in the long anti-fascist struggle and the depth of Spain’s financial crisis since 2008. Canadian organizers have been pointing out that their student strike is the result of two years hard work and the historical situation of Quebec.

The “New York” that is imagined as the epicenter of neo-liberal finance capital has visualized itself outside of historical space and time since its neo-liberal reinvention in the 1980s. Activist movements have been localized and divided. So OWS was, as many have pointed out, enabled in considerable part by the global experience and diversity of its activists. We still have much to learn.

Starting today, OWS is holding Summer Disobedience School at a variety of locations in Manhattan, combining non-violent direct action training with skill shares and teach-ins.

I’m going to go even though I don’t do many of the disruptive direct actions because what the rhythm of the movement from Montreal to Mexico City is teaching me is simply that we have a lot to learn.

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!

 

 

The Media and the State of Exception

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You won’t be reading this in the mainstream media but there are social movements challenging the status quo from Canada to Mexico–the North American Free Trade Association is kicking back. In Mexico, the media are directly the target of the movement. In Canada, you’ll get a completely different story depending on whether you’re Francophone or Anglophone. And in the US, silence reigns.

On the way back into my building last night after the solidarity march, I met a neighbor who asked me why I was all dressed in red. So I explained and she was genuinely surprised: a New York Times-reading, PBS-watching liberal with literally no idea this had happened. This morning I checked the online media and there was no mention of events in Quebec in either the Times or the London Guardian, which I tend to think of as more progressive. There was a video deep down on Le Monde‘s website.

So is this a classic case of what Noam Chomsky called “manufacturing consent”? There’s a good deal of that certainly. At the same time, media professionals are consciously following their own sense of what makes news. Underneath these familiar, if frustrating, patterns, something else can be glimpsed–the possibility that this is in fact turning into an exception to the “business as usual” relation between media, elites, and people.

Clearly, media outlets want to cover things as “news,” what’s exceptional from the everyday. Once things become “normal,” even if they are protests at what is taken to be normal, they drop back into the blur of the everyday. So even if journalists believe themselves to be doing a good job of representing the “news,” social movements are going to find it difficult to feature without “victories.”

It’s intriguing that the newest student-led social movement in Mexico is directed precisely against media bias, in the anxiety that media collusion is helping the chances of the PRI to return to power, over a decade after the long-term single party was voted out. Even the Wall Street Journal has noticed:

“The protest movement has already achieved the impossible: forcing Televisa to cover an insurrection by young people,” political analyst Sergio Aguayo wrote on Mexico’s Animal Politico website.

Students drove the PRI candidate out of a university, leading to allegations that they were not really students. 131 students posted their identities to Facebook and as a result the Twitter hashtag is #yosoy132, “I am 132.” The movement’s goal is free elections and equality of information, which would be a social revolution. 50,000 marched in Mexico City this past weekend. Can social media lead a challenge to entrenched broadcast media and political power in the Americas, as well as in North Africa?

Montreal raises the bar still higher. Anglophone media have treated Loi 78 as normal legislation, or at best a Special Law, meaning that the protests against it are not significant. The Francophone media has quite correctly called it a “loi d’exception,” a law of exception. Such a law is, as many emphasized during the second Bush administration, a law that suspends the normal operations of law in order to defend the force of law. That is, those in power see the existing legislation as insufficient to enforce consent and pass a law giving them exceptional powers. The paradox here is that the law of exception reveals the force at work in the “normal” law at the point when people cease to consent to obey it.

The particular force of the Montreal law is that it undercuts the one space of exception left to the dominated. Standard law does not expect or provide for the repeated defiance of a particular piece of legislation. Thus New York public-private spaces were open 24-7 as a hedge against the private owner closing the space for their own purposes. It had not been considered that a group of private citizens might choose to occupy the space 24-7. It was, after a duration of time, intolerable to city authorities, who realized that their ability to enforce consent was being challenged. The evictions were done as sheer force with the flimsiest of justifications.

In Montreal, the repetition has been of the right to strike and the right to march. As the strike continued towards 100 days and the nightly marches reached into the 20s, a form of panic seems to have set in among state government. After the initial outcry, they fell back on the strategy of claiming that the law was in fact “normal” because other cities like New York and London had similar laws. Despite their penchant for violence, the Montreal police do not so far seem inclined to use their new powers. Talk of negotiations has surfaced at once.

It matters a good deal how this ends. If the students agree to some deal that leaves the law of exception in place, the state will have gained notable, if formal, new powers. It will also set a precedent that other cities like New York might look at with interest. That is, it will be said that the law brought about an end to the crisis. Canadian conservatives are claiming that this is now a movement “about nothing” and the law is perfectly reasonable in the main.  A media narrative of the power of the exception is in the making.

On the other hand, the Montreal movement currently has dual power. Unlike, exceptionally, many other such movements globally, it has not yet chosen to exercise that power except in calling for an end to the neo-liberal policies of the Quebec administration. Should they take exception at the way their self-evident mandate is received, that might change. Normally, in North American societies, that doesn’t happen. Whatever this is, it isn’t normal.

So-so-so-solidarité: austerity vs. education

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Ceci n'est pas un riot/This Is Not A Riot

From Spain to Canada, the U.K. and U.S., student debt and education funding has become the defining issue of austerity. States have responded with violence and by accusing activists of being violent, a wonderfully Orwellian twist. Above, Canadian artist Max Liboiron visualizes the Red Square protests with the title “This Is Not A Riot.”  Sadly a fully representative scene would have to show charging riot police. The recent police violence changes how we think of Canada, formerly thought of as a more humane version of the US–see below.

The passing of Loi 78 does not seem to have deterred many of those involved. A new website “Arrest me, somebody/Arrêtez-moi quelqu’un” borrows from the 99% meme:

Céline Magontier

Text reads: ” I disobey Bill 78″

Clémence Boisvenue

“I don’t listen to my parents, much less Bill 78.” By identifying themselves and indicating their intent to disobey, these people are technically already in breach of 78.

One student union CLASSE (Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) has already indicated that they will not abide by Loi 78 and made a public declaration to that effect yesterday in Montreal.

However, the mainstream student unions did supply a route plan to the police and the march was therefore permitted: and enormous.

Montreal May 22--red everywhere!

Without playing the numbers game, this presence makes it clear that Loi 78 is not going to end the strike or undermine its support.

The contest between education and austerity maps the boundaries of the latter. On Tuesday, educators from kindergarten to university levels in Spain went on strike to protest cuts and tuition increases–student fees have been increased by 50%. Conservative provinces controlled by the ruling Popular Party have implemented the cuts, while other regions struggle to minimize the impact. So when you read pieces about the euro worrying about the budget deficits in the Spanish regions, this is the real agenda: austerity vs. education. Of course, austerity affects other areas of life as well but it’s here that transatlantic resistance has been mobilized and it’s here that the issue will be decided.

So in NYC, where education is in a mess from K-16, a day of solidarity efforts and perhaps a realization that, at least for the present, the centre of the global movement is Montreal. It was an object lesson, though, in why past left tactics don’t work in the new climate and the still-vibrant sense of possibility generated by Occupy.

At 2pm a handful of people gathered for a traditional picket of the Quebec government offices in Rockefeller Plaza. Police compelled protestors to march in a small circle in the street behind barricades, while a sentorian-voiced RCP organizer bellowed slogans. It was totally depressing, relieved only by the excitement of three Quebecois teenagers on a trip to New York.

Free University Washington Square Park

At five, we gathered in Washington Square Park for Free University. A crowd of about one hundred arrived in a warm, conversational mood. The Free University had about five classes on offer but the crowd spontaneously split into two groups: one focused primarily on the events in Canada and the other on issues of counterinsurgency, debt and violence. After a while both groups ended up in a free-flowing discussion about what next for Occupy, with some stringent self-criticism as well as some affirmation. Free University has hit a nerve, supplying the need for an open exchange of ideas that used to be the hallmark of Liberty Plaza. If it’s not yet drawing in many new people, it is allowing those who have been involved for a long time to discuss and rethink our strategies.

Unlimited Strike/Grève Illimitée

At 8.30, the time that the students hold their marches in Montreal, a few hundred people left Washington Square Park on a wildcat march up Broadway across town on 13th around and about a bit and into Union Square.

A qui la rue? A nous la rue!

Traffic was terrible anyway so I’m not sure how disruptive it was but it was fun and a morale-booster. There was even some dancing in the street.

A-Anti-Anticapitalista!

Some victories have been accomplished–Cooper Union students have fought off efforts to introduce tuition at their historically free institution, at least for two years. Like the Quebecois, they understood that it’s the moment when tuition is introduced that is the one serious opportunity to defeat it. For the moment, we say:

Avec nous, dans la rue!

On est plus de cinquante!

In short, it seems that it’s Montreal’s turn to shift the dynamics: solidarité!

 

Sovereigns to Students: Debt Enforcement as Law

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Occupy Montreal! 5 21 12

A qui la rue? A nous la rue? Or as we say down here: Whose streets? Our streets! As ever it sounds better in French, smarter even. Tomorrow is the 100th day of the student strike in Quebec that has now been the subject of the state of exception Loi 78. In a way, we can be grateful for this resort to violence because it clearly reveals that the use of state-sanctioned force in defense of debt extends from sovereigns to students.

The student resistance is remarkable both for its foresight into the disaster of student debt and its fortitude against police violence. There were 308 arrests yesterday and tonight’s action is just getting underway.

The acceleration of this repression has come in synchronization with the increased drumbeat against Greece. Increasingly, it is said by “sources” that Greece must leave the euro, perhaps even the European Union, should it dare to consider debt abolition. Such discourse seeks to transform the moral discourse of debt into sovereign enforcement. It relies on the absurdity that Greece should cut its social services in order to borrow more money to repay debts incurred at the suggestion of the very bankers who now cry foul. Canadian students are now subject to this violence in advance–they are being compelled to accept future debt at the cost of present violence.

Perhaps we have not fully recognized the value of this struggle until now. Making up for lost time, there has been an impressive rallying of solidarity actions in the past few days.In New York tomorrow, there is a rally at the Quebec government offices at Rockefeller Plaza (access from 48th St) at 2pm. This will be followed by a march leaving from Washington Square Park at 8pm.

The Free University group happened to be meeting yesterday evening and it was quickly decided to hold a Pop-Up Free University tomorrow in the time in-between. So there’s banner and sign-making at 5pm in Washington Square Park and teach-ins, open forums, skill-shares and other events from 6-8pm.

First and foremost, there’s the opportunity to learn more about what’s happening in Quebec.

I’m leading a discussion for Occupy Student Debt on the connections between the student debt crisis and the state of exception. We’ll reflect on how student debt has metamorphosed from an issue of personal responsibility and morality, discussed only in private, into a matter for the exercise of the supreme force of law. Loi 78 gives the Quebec state the power to claim all actions that question debt feudalism.

In this action, Quebec has highlighted the close proximity of debt and state violence, as  David Graeber has pointed out:

Modern money is based on government debt and governments borrow money in order to finance wars.

This apparatus has been vastly expanded since the end of the Cold War to no very good effect internationally. Even in the Counterinsurgency New York Times, there has been a more-or-less open recognition recently that the war in Afghanistan is an expensive and pointless failure. It was in Chicago that it is “working,” insofar as it has exercised overwhelming force against public protest.

Chicago 5 19 12. Credit: Sarah Bennet.

Quite rightly, Occupy Theory will be holding an open forum on these counterinsurgency tactics tomorrow.

What alternative could there be to the regime of permanent debt, consumerism and anxiety? OWS Sustainability have a number of skill shares happening at Washington Square Park that suggest some possibilities. There’s one on how to create a worker’s cooperative, not as the “solution” but as part of what they’re calling the “transition economy” from the present disaster to something more offering more possibilities to people, and less destructive to non-human life. Then we can learn about permaculture, sustainable forms of culture that are not subject to the market requirements of built-in obsolescence.

Debt claims to be morality but is always violent in theory and in practice. The pattern that is emerging tells us that the creditors are worried. Show them they should be–attend, like, tweet, support the Quebec strike, the solidarity rallies and your own local debtors.

 

Going viral, going unmentioned: global Occupy

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After May Day, there was some internal discussion in OWS as to both the success of the actions and the press coverage. If the goal of May Day was to give a boost to actions worldwide, it’s beginning to look as if it succeeded (without claiming that OWS or Occupy “caused” any non-Occupy events). It feels like something is happening, there’s a new wave of actions and certainly a new wave of repression. Media is another matter.

On Friday, there was a very substantial demonstration in the northern mining town of Calama, Chile, demanding a greater share of the revenues produced by the copper mined there. The town was blocked by barricades and there was a communal cacerolazo, the banging of pots and pans with spoons and forks.

Calama

Yesterday I saw barricades all the way along Union Square and University Place for some kind of march and there were needless to say cops everywhere. It turned out it was for the annual Union Square Dance Parade and some intrepid Occupy folks had got in on the event. Video by Randolfe Wicker:

In Chicago last night after the highly dubious arrest of three protestors as “terrorists,” a peaceful marcher named Jack from OWS was run over by a police van. There are many pictures on the #nonato twitter feed of injured people.

Today what even the Chicago Tribune, no leftist paper, called “a massive anti-war protest” culminated in a return of medals by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that had many in the audience in tears.

Frankfurt 5 19

In Frankfurt yesterday, 20,000 protested the austerity regime after police mass arrested over 400 people on Friday. Note signs in Greek, German and English in this one photo, evidence that participants see themselves as part of a global movement now, even in Germany, anchor of the European austerity policy.

Montreal--"Crime: To Have an Opinion"

In Montréal, police used their new law against last night’s student demonstration, declaring it illegal as of 9pm and following up with 69 arrests. Student websites have closed to be replaced with anonymized sites that formally advise people not to attend the events that they list. The Quebec Liberal Party and the state Education Ministry websites were down for much of the day: it was inaccessible when I tried to access it. Who do we know that might have done such a thing? Hint: think Guy Fawkes.

Tonight, reports of concussion grenades and mass panic from the Montreal Gazette.

So here in New York a day of intense discussion and action following all this. The Occupy Theory Climate Assembly was a wide-ranging discussion that provided an interesting snapshot of the current state of the movement–it will be discussed at greater length another time.

Eagle in Washington Square Park for Occupy Theory

There was an eagle there, though, which must be some kind of a sign, right?

It turned into a discussion with Direct Action of how to call attention to the weekend-long series of dramatic events.

Soft circle in Times Sq. Credit: Lisa Sabater

OWS met at Fox News, the Military Recruiting Station in Times Square and at the nearby police station, soft linked arms and mic checked a statement, which read in part:

We are all Chicago, / we are thousands in the streets! / We will not be terrorized into silence / as we protest the illegitimate power / of financial and military elites / from the G-8 and NATO.

 

Mic Check! / We are all Montreal, / we are thousands in the streets! /we refuse the draconian emergecy law / invoked by the government; / we will continue to rise up / and strike against tuition-hikes. / Free education is a right!

 

Mic Check! / We are all Frankfurt, / we are thousands in the streets! /We stand against the globalization of austerity /and the punishment of the people / for the crimes of the bankers. / Another world is possible, / and she is on her way!

On Tuesday May 22 in New York there is a rally at 2 pm in support of Montreal on the 100th day of the Quebec Student Strike, outside Quebec government offices, 1 Rockefeller Plaza.

There will be a pop-up Free University in Washington Square Park from 5-8pm, with discussions on the situation in Canada, historical precedents and what it means for the movement.

At 8pm, March Against Repressive Anti-Protest Laws Worldwide leaves from Washington Square Park.

How much of this will appear in mainstream media outside the towns in which it has happened? If recent history is anything to go by, relatively little. Even OWS media advisory people felt that there was no new story on May Day without huge numbers of protestors (although I would argue that 50,000 people is an event) or arrests. Perhaps a truly global movement might merit a mention? Let’s get on it.