Category Archives: Occupy

Responses to “I Fought the Law”

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Yesterday I wrote about a sense that Occupy was under triple attack from academia, the police and the Law. There were a good deal of mostly hostile responses on Facebook. While I don’t agree with most of them, as you’ll see, I thought it was fair to post them in the interests of transparency. They are long but all the more reason not to limit the audience.

There was a great deal of discussion about Jodi Dean’s New School keynote, its use of theory and her questioning of the organization of Occupy. The length of these comments suggest that a nerve was touched–or, to be fair, that I was wildly wrong.

Rhetorics aside, at the heart of it is a central issue: does the horizontal leader-less strategy of Occupy continue to be beneficial (we all agree it was so at first, I think) or not? I continue to think that the process is the energy of the movement. If leaders are appointed, Occupy becomes just another political party or a pressure group like Moveon.org. And it would just disappear into the fringe. Others seem to be repelled by the process. Late in the thread you’ll see a comment that Occupy’s current procedure is “kafkaesque,” which Dean agrees is “very well put.” So we disagree.

We also disagree on whether appointing leaders, whether in a party format or some other frame, would be a way to prevent some of the issues that have arisen. It’s not as if hierarchy has not been tried, I would say. Or you can call this the “tyranny of structurelessness.”

How you read these posts will most likely depend on your own view of Occupy: it is nonetheless clear that we can agree that we disagree. And that marks a shift, one that I for one do not welcome.

Comments were made on this excerpt from my post:

“[T[he academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek.”

Jodi Dean [JD}: ‎”The Holy Trinity”–not the kind of label that signals comradely engagement.”

Daniel Spaulding [DS]: Eh, but in the spirit of comradely engagement: I, too, am confused where Jodi’s piece leaves us. Given that there isn’t a credible vanguard party or anything resembling such, where does the structure come from? It strikes me as a little idealistic to say that what we need is more organization when the dominant subjective or affective structure on the left is currently stuck between anarchist laissez-faire and an emergent collectivity of class struggle. Of course horizontalism is the mirror-image of neoliberalism, I grant that – but we start from where we are, immanently, and look for the dialectic, no? So, do we all become Leninists or is there some other horizon?

JD: Well, people can recognize that the strength of the movement is in division and collectivity. This leads to questions about actions that make division more visible and strengthen collectivity. At the end of the piece, I suggest acknowledging leaders and making them accountable and subject to recall. I also mention diagonal and vertical structures, which suggests possibilities for delegating and combining that don’t involve “everybody”. Broached from a different vantage, if the movement learns from the disfunction that led to the collapse of Spokes and the GAs, and led to a great deal of frustration and ultimate dissolution of some groups, what should it learn? Maybe what it should learn that leaders will emerge, but they need to be accountable and recallable. Another example: since there was not a list of movement participants, there wasn’t a quorum for GA. So this made it sometimes feel like it couldn’t make decisions and sometimes made people who weren’t there feel like the decisions weren’t legitimate. Ultimately, though, my concerns are less with process than with the rhetorical and ideological self-understanding of the movement.

DS: Fair enough. I think those are good suggestions.

Nick Mirzoeff [NM]: If there are leaders subject to recall, how would these people be nominated? Who would determine those eligible to be nominated? Who would participate in the determining process? Who would vote? My worry was that by invoking a very widely sanctioned set of theorists these extremely difficult and practical questions were not being addressed. I think it would be almost impossible to organize Occupy like this and for it still to be Occupy, as I said later in the post.The issues with the GA and the Spokes were complicated: there were some disruptors, perhaps some infiltrators, a good deal of financial problems, burnout, cold, and so on. I don’t think the problem was a lack of direction. I don’t at all see an attitude of “wait and see if anything happens”–I see people working very hard to try and keep events moving. I think that any failures in that regard are more to do with the battering from the police than of organization or theory. If it is held to be taken for granted that horizontalidad is the mirror of neo-liberalism, then that in turn is not tremendously supportive/comradely of those who are trying to create a different movement.

DS: What I should have made clear is that horizontality being the mirror of neoliberalism isn’t, for me, a (or “the”) problem, because it’s only predictable that an anti-capitalist movement would, dialectically, approximate the form of the most current capitalism. Not to do so would be formalistic, i.e., sticking to an idea of correct organization at the expense of the real movement of history. So that’s my issue with Jodi and Badiou alike, although obviously the complaint is different with the latter. [Quoting NM] “I think it would be almost impossible to organize Occupy like this and for it still to be Occupy.” I read this as partly what Jodi wants: to make Occupy more like a party, specifically. Maybe I’m wrong about this. . .

NM: I understood the idea to be that Occupy becomes something like a political party as well. Without being uncomradely, I don’t support that and I just think that if that is the proposal it should be made directly and transparently. If the little joke at the expense of the master thinkers annoyed people, I’m sorry

JD: he specific procedural questions with which you begin can be answered in multiple ways. As you know, there isn’t one answer. Spokes was one attempt; it didn’t work out well. But there are other possibilities if people want to undertake them. One possibility: active working groups select a working head of the group to take responsibility for specific things. They also select delegates to other groups and to a broader assembly. Meetings could begin by asking whether people want those previously selected to continue to serve or not. A preliminary process might begin with the active people who put together the Spring Awakening and delegates to working groups to suggest a general structure and see what people think about it. Like I said, though, my primary interest isn’t procedural. On wait and see if anything happens: I’ve heard that in discussions of the general strike as well as the direction of the movement this spring. That some people are working very hard on some projects doesn’t mean that others aren’t saying, wait and see. On the police front: yes, this is demoralizing. But it’s not the whole of the movement. The frustrations in Facilitation and Housing, for example, can’t be attributed to the battering of the police. They can be attributed in part to problems with an ideology of leaderlessness that makes it difficult to work around toxic people.

I don’t understand what you mean when you say ‘invoking a widely sanctioned set of theorists’ these difficult and practical questions were not being addressed. If you are saying that I don’t provide a procedural blueprint–yes, that’s true. I didn’t claim to. I would be surprised to hear you say, though, that theory is irrelevant and we can’t learn from theoretical insights.

[To DS] my point is that structures need more than one dimension to be strong. Horizontality by itself becomes a fetish object/line and not an organization. If by more like a party you mean more organization and accountability, yes, definitely. Of course, there are different models of parties…

[To NM]: there isn’t anything undirect or untransparent in what I’m saying; I don’t use the word party in this talk because I don’t know what a new party form would like or whether that is the right term here.

Kailesjh Benengeli: leaderlessness can breed its own kafkaesqueness where if you don’t understand the tacit ideological rules for socializing you aren’t “in the know” or know the “right people” you’re functionally excluded.

JD: that’s very well put, clearer than I put it in the talk.

NM: Many things to say! I would like to put these comments into a post so that those who don’t see this FB can benefit. If the primary concern is not procedural, then it was not clear to me. I felt the criticism of the horizontal process was rather central: and I felt that as another attack, rather than as support, or constructive criticism. Again, my post was not about your paper so much as my feeling that academia has decided that it’s time to move on and give up on Occupy. Specifically: To what end are we to adopt a representative system? The energizing experience of Occupy has so much been about the chance to participate as an equal. More organization: presumably this means more effective organization as there is no shortage of meetings etc. It depends whether we feel that the goal is to intervene as directly as we can in the current system or to build an alternative, accepting the necessary time involved. The problems of disruptors, those with unmet needs and other issues that did much to complicate Housing and Facilitation are not, to my mind, primarily problems of leadership or it’s lack. The police did have something to do with that, as they sent disruptive people to Liberty from other locations. As I have written in other posts, the enormous issues these problems revealed surely show how much damage has been done by the neo-liberals.

On theory: of course, I think it can help. I am not clear how those affiliated with a very different process would be likely to be good resources to work through the issues that we have, as opposed to being citations to reinforce an existing desire for more leadership etc: which is exactly what I’m seeing here. For example, the explanation of the horizontal discussion process is standard Occupy procedure and, while I am not one of those who knows “the right people,” I have always felt able to participate if I wanted to do so. That is, the rules are explicit–in democratic centralism, that’s really not so much the case.

On another FB:

JD: Kinship? That seems like a weird leap to me. I don’t say not to strike on May 1 at all–I note the fact that there has been criticism of that plan (I don’t go into the criticisms but a significant one comes from women and the nature of childcare). It’s funny that you haven’t come across any activists frustrated over non-accountability in the movement, over the emphases on horizontality and leaderlessness; I have heard people invoke Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness” with fair frequency. I’ve heard women criticize the domination of men in the movement, different people criticize the insidery-ness in the movement.

NM: I’ve talked a good deal about the place of women and child care in the movement in the Occupy 2012 project. It’s my understanding that Mutual Aid at Bryant Park and Union Square do intend to offer child services as does the Free University. Parents for Occupy Wall Street also have plans. However, there’s an absolute forest of state law when you offer formal child care. Getting city permission to offer child care would be, shall we say, unlikely.

 

I Fought The Law

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Today is the seven-month anniversary of OWS. It coincides with a remarkable ratcheting up of pressure on Occupy from authorities of all kinds–personal, police, professional. At the place where these three roads meet is the Law, saying: “enough, time to concede.” The reply is given: “I prefer not to.” But it’s getting much harder.

Now some of my friends  and colleagues give me a look: “Occupy? Still?” As if you had just discovered deconstruction. So, yes, I am a bit obsessed. Since when was that a bad thing in professional life? and it’s been seven months, not years.

Federal Hall. Credit @mollyknefel

By unrelenting hostility and willingness to improvise the terms of the law, the police do now have the upper hand in the streets. The NYPD yesterday determined that you may not have “moveable property” on the sidewalk in New York– and that did apparently include a dog that one of the occupiers had on Wall Street. The primary target of the police is the cardboard sign, now that the tent has been outlawed. The revived “sleepful protest” has  been driven onto the steps of the Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights was first introduced. It is supposed to feel like a last stand. While I don’t think it is, I feel the pressure.

The Federal pen

As mentioned yesterday, the academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek. Here’s her summary:

Bluntly put, some of the ideas that most galvanized people in the fall—those associated with autonomy, horizontality, and leaderlessness—have also come to be faulted for conflicts and disillusionment within the movement.

I haven’t heard this criticism, except in what you might call the academic wing of the movement, but there you hear it all the time.

I can’t get into a full analysis of this paper because she asks us not to cite it, so you’ll have to read it yourself. In short, she argues that Occupy should accept its own condition of “lack” in relation to the “lack” it has identified in the political system (The Big Other) and thereby set about representing the overlap created. While I’m not fully sure what to make of this, I take it to mean that if Occupy is to create a form of collectivity, it has to respect the laws of kinship or disintegrate. Occupy should thus negate its own negation of the political system. I can’t help but feel that it would no longer be Occupy were that to happen and in considerable part that transformation would come from a reassertion of the traditional authority of the Law, as Lacan would have had it. Not to mention the law as the cops have it. What we could gain by the strategy is opaque to me.

Is this Law unchallengeable? By chance, I’ve been reading Judith Butler’s lectures on Antigone, where she discusses the possibility of a “post-structuralist” form of kinship that would not be dependent on the Law of the Oedipus complex. She notes that in Oedipus at Colonnus, none other than Oedipus himself berates Antigone and her sister for being out of place, even as they take care of him instead of their brothers, “in their place.” Even Oedipus gets to castigate Antigone for asserting a willingness to “live out of doors.” His curse on his children/siblings is the re-assertion of the necessity of staying in place. That is to say, anyone transgressing their alotted role will be punished. The place one must be is the place where three roads meet and Oedipal destiny is enacted.

What if the incest taboo is not the only form of establishing kinship? What if kinship is not destiny? As the results of incest, Antigone and her siblings all embody the failure of the Law and, while they are punished for this, they also claim glory and honor of their own. Butler interestingly footnotes here the enfant terrible of anthropology Pierre Clastres. Like Sahlins, Clastres refused to equate power with kinship. Clastres asserts that the kinship system tells us almost nothing about the social life of a people. He further argued that the Amazonian peoples he studied were determined to prevent the emergence of permanent inequality by means of careful safeguards.

These arguments have been developed by David Graeber, who also notes that Clastres’ romantic over-investment with the Amazon prevented him from discussing the widespread use of sexual violence in these same “egalitarian” societies. He astutely concludes

Perhaps Amazonian men understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, backed by force, would be like because they themselves wield that power over their wives and daughters.

The point of the Antigone myth and the Amazonian egalitarians is, then, not that we want to be like them, but that these moments show cases where the “universal” Law does not apply, and is therefore not universal at all, but particular and backed by force of various kinds.

That’s why “I Fought The Law” is a counterculture classic: not because it celebrates a victory–the law won–but because it discovers that, unlike Bartleby who negates himself in the end, you can fight the law. And, yes, you can lose.

Murmuring

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And the whole Congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wildernesse.

Exodus 16: 2 King James version 1611

I.

They sat in an “assembly.” They mike checked Moses. And Aaron.

And Moses said, This shalbe when the Lord shal giue you in the euening flesh to eate, and in the morning bread to the full: for that the Lord heareth your murmurings which ye murmure against him; and what are wee? your murmurings are not against vs, but against the Lord.

[yes, the text is right. It was before copyediting–u and v are interchangeable, so it’s ‘give’ in line 1 but ‘us’ in the last line]

So the leaders always say. Your murmurings are not against us, but against the Lord, against the Authority of Authority. Moses bought off the anarchism of the people with the appearance of “manna,” or free food. Nice trick.

A murmuration of birds

The murmur is the voice of the multitude. Its form is the murmuration, which cannot be policed.

II.

Rancière tells a story about ancient Rome. It varies a bit depending on where he tells it but the gist is that once the people approached the Aventine Hill, where the Senators lived, intending to make a set of claims on the Republic. But the senator Appius approached them and explained that he could not hear them, for while he could tell that they were speaking, all he could perceive was noise, the murmuring of the multitude. Shut out by the division of the sensible, the people retreated.

III.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin listened for the sound of the time in which social nonconformism was intertwined with the proletarian revolution. But he was not naive:

In the flaneur, one might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his interlocutor. Only, there is no longer a Socrates. And the slave labor that guaranteed him his leisure has likewise ceased to exist.

Leisure is schole in Greek, the root of scholarship. The dialectic method depends on that slave being there for the master. Benjamin was, as Adorno liked to point out, no Marxist scholar. He was, however, aware where you might hear the revolution:

the muse herself turns away from the poet to whisper words of inspiration to the air.

Who was listening, there in the air? The ragpickers, the street-walkers, the revolutionaries, the flâneurs: the people of the street.

IV.

In an interview published in 2011, Rancière responded to a question about whether he was an anarchist:

At a fundamental philosophical level my position can be called anarchist stricto sensu since I hold that politics exists insofar as the exercise of power does not rest upon any arkhê.

The murmur rises–no authority, no hierarchy, no scholarship.

V.

Once again, though, the loud chatter raises itself: Occupy is corrupted, the anarchism must be eliminated. Murmur back: there is no Occupy without the anarchism of the streets, the claims that must not be heard. There is no more manna to hand out. Perhaps the murmur might be heard a little more clearly now.

Car 59, where are you? The voice of the police, of arkhê, of authority is loud. It does not want to talk. But there’s this noise, it makes it hard to hear. How they long for quiet, the return to leisure, to scholarship and the dialectic. Sorry about that.

OWS Spring Training

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After spending a somewhat dreary week in academic salons, being told that there was no song and dance at Occupy or that there was no point to the General Strike, I chose to skip another round of conferences and head downtown for OWS Spring Training. These weekly Friday sessions have been happening since March but, for one reason or another, this was the first one I could attend.

Photo credit: Eva Destruction

It was an energizing relief after all the talk to be doing something. I was at once impressed with how much things have moved along in the street organizing. Following the influence of the excellent +Brigades, there’s a good deal of co-ordination, tactics and wit back in the actions. Extra energy came from last night’s successful Sleep to Protest, in which about a hundred people managed to sleep overnight on Wall St itself, despite the sudden desire of the city to clean sections of the street for hours on end. There were also lots of “new people,” by which I mean faces I didn’t recognize, and a noticeably wider age range.

After some tactical training by the +Brigades, we set off for a set of Bank of America branches where supporters were planning to close their accounts. Along the way, despite my academic colleagues, a nice range of old and new songs and chants kept the mood light. Protestors have identified the short-tempered white-shirt police officer assigned to OWS marches and when he appears, they set up a drawn-out mocking chant of his name. He didn’t seem to like it. OWS organizers were making sure that the marchers took up no more than half the sidewalk to deny police the pretext for arrests. The obvious good humor of the event and the interest of many downtown passers-by mitigated the chance for mass arrests.

When we arrived at the banks, those who closed their accounts were hoisted shoulder-high and spoke via people’s mic about how hard BoA made it to do so. After properly denouncing the vampire squid, they then ceremonially cut their debit cards in half to loud cheers. One closer was a Democratic official of some kind.

Then we dispersed in order to make our own way to the Stock Exchange. Just as well, because the police had placed a checkpoint at the Broadway entrance to Wall Street, permitting only those with workplace IDs to enter. Luckily downtown has many byways and it was a simple matter for those who wanted to do so to congregate on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial. At a signal, we congregated into a large cluster and sounded the People’s Gong, closing the Stock Exchange for violations against the people. Proceedings were closed with an exuberant chant of A-Anti-AntiCapitalista, with a new twist: after a couple of choruses, we went quieter and quieter, lower and lower, jumping up at the end in full voice.

All quite silly in some ways but it prevented Mr White Shirt from the mass arrest he was clearly itching to orchestrate by catching a lot of public attention and not being demonstrably an offense, as no signs were displayed. There were just a lot of people there at the same time doing the same things. Needless to say, perhaps half-a-dozen were arrested for no apparent reason.This exercise has been going on for a few weeks now. It’s creating new energy, new songs, new ways of being in space. So much for academia.

 

Learning Outside/Outside Learning

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Occupy in Union Square

Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting at the first Open Forum at Union Square. Open Forum was a daily event at Liberty Plaza during the encampment in which an invited presenter would talk at 6.00pm. It was interestingly different to do it at Union Square and to think about the ways in which learning outside and outside the official realms of learning have changed in this intense movement time.

When you presented at Liberty, you usually did it on the stairs on the East side of the Plaza, not least because the drummers often made the West side a talk-free zone. The unusual architecture of this space, designed to be overlooked or at best passed through on your way somewhere else, gave it an oddly private feel. When you stood on the steps and looked down at the group, it felt intimate, whether it was a few dozen as it was when I did it, or when it required two relays on the human mike as it did when Angela Davis was there. The policing came to reinforce that sense of separation, as cops would require people at street level to move on, meaning that if you wanted to be part of OWS you had to step into the Plaza.

Union Square is very different. It’s flat and open but also well-used as a venue in its own right. Yesterday there were a group calling for Free Tibet and an assembly of mostly African-American young people using a subcultural dress code that was very striking but not legible to me. So you present in a circle that is constantly changing as people come and go, stay for ten minutes and leave, as well as those who intended to be there. You’re open to the city in a different way, meaning that I could use a nearby Bank of America tower as a prop but also that the inevitable police sirens very much intrude. In short, it’s the difference between Zuccotti/Liberty as a proscenium space and Union Square as a theatre in the round.

As much as I regret Liberty Plaza and loved being back there on March 17, there’s also a sense in which Union Square feels more grown up. Liberty was like our own private space, literally and metaphorically our bedroom, whereas Union is downstairs, a public space. There’s also a new openness. We were talking about student debt. Two people present were working on projects about debt. One young man, who didn’t tell me his name, did tell me that he was “six figures” in debt for his Columbia degree. That would not have happened last September.

It’s still absurdly policed, so that we were told that you can’t put cardboard on the pavement now. Some Occupiers are now sleeping on the streets outside banks and have made a sign detailing how in the case of Metropolitan v. Safir, the U.S. District Court covering New York City ruled that

the First Amendment of the United States Constitution does not allow the City to prevent an orderly political protest from using public sleeping as a means of symbolic expression.

It has, at least for the time being, stymied the cops.

There is a dynamic to being outside in this hyper-policed city. It’s given expression by the Trayvon Martin case. If Trayvon had been in a car, Zimmerman would never have attacked him. Just as a woman in public in the nineteenth century was literally called a “street walker,” so is anyone on the street automatically a criminal suspect to the policing mentality. We are supposed to stay in our gated communities, in our buildings, or in our cars and not be outside.

In the Politics and Visual Culture Working Group, we’ve noticed this as well. When our meetings are outside, whether in a park or as part of an action, there’s a very different and more vibrant dynamic then when we are in an NYU classroom. Just to reinforce this, NYU’s new expansion plan calls for 70,000 sq. ft. of classroom space–underground, in what is now a parking garage, with access only from a security-controlled building. The institution tells its debtors to park their minds and pay their bills.

It’s going to be warm this weekend–get outside!

 

The Debt-Prison System

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Debt is prison. Few debtors, whether dealing with students loans, credit cards or mortgages, would disagree I imagine. By this phrase I intend not a metaphor but a description: debt is a systemic way to limit options, impose unfreedom and sustain the unfree labor market on which capitalism depends. In the United States, this debt-prison system is necessarily intertwined with what Angela Y. Davis calls the post-slavery prison-industrial complex. Resisting debt servitude in this country is a central part of extending and completing the Civil Rights movement.

The old face of the new refusal

This is a proper concern for Occupy for any number of reasons. As I mentioned a while ago, Wall Street was the site of New York’s slave market. Combine that with its role as a barrier against the indigenous population (hence the name) and as a site of financial speculation and we begin to understand what the symbol “Wall Street” really means. So while what I have to say here may sound like a history lesson, it’s very much a history of the present that enables us to see what how high the stakes are in the apparently technical problem of student debt.

Transatlantic slavery was a system dependent on debt financing. The slavers borrowed money for the costs of the voyage and the trade good they exchanged for human property in Africa. These goods were far from worthless and developed into a money form based on copper. The enslaved were purchased by American planters buying on credit. It was only with the sale of the products of the plantation back in Europe that true profit entered the system.

But this profit was spectacular: a ship called the Lively left Liverpool, England, in 1737 with cargo worth £1307 and returned with £3080 in cash plus a cargo of sugar and cotton. In short, a profit of at least 500%, unavailable anywhere else in the early modern financial system. Don’t take my word for it: here’s Adam Smith, inventor of the concept of the market in his 1776 Wealth of Nations: “The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known.” Haiti was the wealthiest place on the planet when its revolution began in 1791.

Just as the factory system described by Marx was not participated in by anything like a majority of workers but was typical of its time, the slave system was the hallmark of American capitalism. Today I would argue it’s the debt-prison system that marks out the peculiarity of the United States. Debt servitude, racialized segregation and mass incarceration of those so racialized are thus the true American exceptionalism–while debt is central to capitalism worldwide only in the United States do we have such a peculiar and networked system of debt as racialized punishment.

US slavery persisted much longer than in Europe, as we all know. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the enslaved enacted a general strike against slavery in which half a million people moved away from plantations to the North. The South claimed that millions of its capital were, so to speak, contained and hence “lost” in the bodies of the enslaved in 1863. The period known as Reconstruction (1865-77) was a struggle by the formerly enslaved to escape being, as it were, recouped by the planters into the debt-prison system. In so doing, the freed used many of the tactics we continue to deploy today from occupying to marches and strikes. It failed because of a Wall Street real-estate speculation crash that produced the typical binary form of US racism in its wake.

The freed claimed their own land to farm. If the Freedmen’s Bureau would not give it to them, they occupied it. The concept was simple: a small group of people would create sufficient food for themselves and a surplus to trade with. It was a sustainable anti-poverty system that did not rely on wage labor. But as David Graeber puts it:

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

The idea that the freed would work freely was abhorrent to the planters and to Northern capital alike. Instead, they were to be compelled to work for their former owners.

All the new labor systems that were developed to this end were, as Angela Davis puts it, “dramatic evidence of the persistence of slavery.” That is to say, share cropping, tenant farming, the scrip system and the convict lease system of imprisoned labor all depended on a new series of connections between debt, labor and prison. Share cropping meant that the farmers were entitled to a share of the crop they produced, usually a third. However, as this meant they were paid only once a year, they had to make purchases on credit for the rest of year at the notorious crossroads or company stores. Very often the annual payment would not cover this debt meaning that the sharecropper could never escape the land. In fact, wage laborers were often not paid in cash but in scrip, a paper form allowing you to buy things at inflated prices in the company store.

Even this labor was too expensive for the planters. So the new Black Codes passed in the South after the Civil War criminalized minor financial transgressions. In Mississippi any person who “handled money carelessly” could be declared a vagrant and imprisoned. Simple theft, whether of bread or an animal, was turned into a felony and those convicted were imprisoned. The new African American prisoners were turned into a virtually free labor force by the convict lease system in which employers could use convicts to work for almost nothing. Even today, the University of California gets its office furniture from prison workshops.

The freed resisted these innovations. In South Carolina, the legislature attempted to borrow money to buy land for the freed. Wall Street would not buy their bonds. The laborers organized and called strikes for waged field labor. In Louisiana, workers refused to labor for their former owners, organized and marched. One freed organizer named John J. Moore testified that planters said  to them: “if you do not let politics alone you will get killed here.”

But in 1873, Wall Street crashed, having speculated wildly in railroads and real estate. It took down the Freedmen’s Bank and with it about $3 million of deposits made by the formerly enslaved. Emboldened by the crash, known then as the Great Depression, planters reduced wages where they were paid, as in Louisiana, from $18 plus food to $13 only a month. When the Hayes-Tilden compromise withdrew Federal troops from the South, the political gains of Reconstruction were rapidly overturned and the convict lease labor system swung into full effect.

Even now, the freed were not willing to give up. In 1887, a major strike on the sugar plantations of Louisiana was repressed only by armed force, in which about thirty strikers were killed and hundreds injured. Although the strikers came from all backgrounds, the planters defined them as “black” and themselves as “white.” It was three years later that the “Separate Car Act” enforced racialized segregation on trains in Louisiana, leading to the infamous 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson case at the Supreme Court that declared “separate but equal” facilities to be legal.

In short, the debt crisis that has generated over one trillion dollars of student debt, $700 billion in credit card debt, 4 million foreclosed homes, 6 million other homes in danger of foreclosure is part and parcel of the system that has placed over two million people in jail.

The consequence is simple and challenging: there will be no making the debt system better, or less burdensome. Even today, sub-prime lending was reported to be on the rise again. Graduate student loans accrue interest immediately as of next year so that someone working on a PhD will have eight years of interest at a minimum of 6.8% by the time they graduate. Debt is so central to what we are trying to occupy when we Occupy Wall Street that it cannot be separated out.

I do not think this is depressing but rather it shows that Occupy continues to advance our understanding of the tasks that lie before us. It should be remembered that it was once said to be impossible to abolish slavery, and not long ago it was supposed to be inevitable that there would always be segregation. It’s not inevitable that we agree to live in debt, accept debt as our punishment for not having been born wealthy and apply for opportunities to get more and more in debt. The first step is refusal, which is why the new slogan going the rounds is Bartleby’s rejoinder to a Wall Street banker:

I would prefer not to.

Me too.

Occupy or Affinity?

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How does the Occupy movement now do its work? When the encampments began in 2011, the General Assembly was clearly the central decision making body. With the dispersal forced by the evictions and Northern winter (even its climate-changed moderate form), the affinity group has emerged as the main unit. The question now coming into the open is: occupy or affinity?

In New York, the experience of the General Assembly (GA) last year was for many of us the moment that led to greater involvement with the movement. It was, as many have testified, a really affirming experience and, at its best (as on March 17) it still can be. Too often the GA was bogged down with details of financial expenditures or unable to proceed because of the actions of disruptive individuals. Perhaps this was inevitable because Manhattan, especially downtown, did not lend itself to the creative possibilities of the Neighborhood Assemblies that have flourished in Spain, elsewhere in the US and indeed even elsewhere in New York City. Some Occupy locations, like Toronto, have recently restarted the GA, hoping to recapture the energy of direct democracy.

An affinity group is a set of people who decide to do something together, in this case, for the Occupy movement. Decentralized and autonomous, as the movement always claimed to be, the affinity group (AG) is something of a “back to the future” project. That is to say, while the AG is very flexible and responsive, it can also be invisible. In fact, that’s part of the point: with many being concerned about police infiltration, the AG allows for civil disobedience or other disruptive actions to be planned and carried out.

The Education and Empowerment Working Group of OWS, where I entered the movement, is now considering whether to formally disband as its affinity groups like Occupy Student Debt and the Occupy University are flourishing, so much so that people don’t have time for the extra meetings of Education and Empowerment itself. I’m one of those people and yet I still worry about this, it seems that we would be losing something important.

The issue, then, can be more clearly stated as how the new energies of the affinity groups can be made visible as a coherent movement, rather than as a set of issues in the now familiar (and ineffective) rainbow pattern. Global days of action are one such means to maintain visibility. At the same time, affinity actions bring new risks.

In New York, there was a recent action on the New York subway in which the gates at some stations were chained open allowing people to access the system without paying. Cleverly-faked notices were posted, appearing to authorize the free fares.

MTA spoof poster

It was asserted by some that this was either an OWS action or an action in sympathy with Occupy. Almost at once local police and media began a blitz of publicity denouncing these “crimes,” including lead items on the local TV news and video from CCTV posted on the New York Times website. There was also a good deal of internal recrimination about the action, which was apparently likely to lead to disciplinary action for MTA staff. However, the CCTV showed that, whoever did this, they were not wearing MTA uniforms or working with MTA employees. In the end, then, no harm done but it’s clear that NYPD and their friends in the media are now as ready for affinity actions as for attempts to occupy.

Thinking about such issues, Stephen Collis of Occupy Vancouver  proposed an action recently under the slogan

“system change not climate change” and indigenous solidarity — by announcing a one-week climate occupation, with daily workshops, teach-ins, information-sessions, and actions all around the task of defending this planet from capitalist and colonial plunder.

His focus on climate was intended to be Vancouver-specific, pointing out local priorities on logging and indigenous issues. On the other hand, the Democracia Real Ya! movement in Spain is calling for a day of global action of May 12 (or 12M12), in addition to the existing calls for May Day and for the anniversary of the indignados movement on May 15.

It’s probably not a question of either Occupy/or Affinity Groups, so much as both/and. For OWS, there’s going to be a need to think past May Day, as much as we will have enjoyed ourselves. Once the arrests have been highlighted by the media and the numbers on the march have been similarly downplayed, the future may well belong to the affinity groups. Perhaps the way to maintain the visibility of the movement as a whole is precisely to keep having such periodic mass days of action.

 

Movement Time

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I’m revising two pieces that I’ve done about Occupy, one from last October, the other from January. It’s odd how long ago they seem to have been written, while at the same time making me realize how short a moment this really has been. Movement time is like that: it extends the present, makes new pasts available and yet questions the future.

Raqs Media Collective "Strike" (2011)

I began thinking about this when I illustrated the piece about Sarai with the Raqs Media Collective’s work “Strike.” On a sheet of stainless steel is written: “IT IS THE MOMENT TO STRIKE AT TIME.” The slogan seems entirely conventional until the last two words: how do we strike at time? Who are the strikers and who would be their target? There have been many strikes about time, usually time to be worked in exchange for a wage. There are those Spanish Civil War anarchists, evoked by Benjamin, who shot at the clocks that made their alienated labor measurable. Back in the 19th century, people had to be taught how to regulate their lives by the clock, that they could not sleep in “work time,” let alone drink.

Then there’s the steel, shiny enough to be reflective but, at least in the photo, not without distortion. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s a formal resemblance to Anish Kapoor’s work here. It made me think of the complexities of steel as a form of labor. I’ve been following the strike and occupation by steelworkers at the ArcelorMittal in Florange, France. Last Friday, 17 workers from the plant completed a symbolic walk from Florange to the Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris and modernity, built from Lorraine steel. Everyone knows this is going to end with them being made redundant but officialdom continues to prevaricate until the elections are over. New polls show the National Front winning among young people. Meanwhile, as covered before,  Kapoor is creating a new monument for the 2012 Olympics paid for by Lakshmi Mittal in London, the Eiffel Tower for autoimmune capital.

Raqs also have another piece referencing steel and shipyards. The elegiac image above shows cranes being dismantled in the famous Swan Hunter shipyards of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England, prior to being sent to India. The enigmatic title of the seven-screen installation “For the Knots That Bind Are the Knots That Fray” has been proved right recently, when the purchaser of the cranes, Bharati Shipyard in Bangalore itself appeared to face bankruptcy, unable to pay its debts.

Behind such iconic modern forms lies a long history of the strike. On Glasgow’s Clydeside, the steel and shipyards formed the heart of the British labor movement. In a 1917 pamphlet called Industrial Unionism, the Industrial Workers of Great Britain visualized their situation as a battlefront.

The Class Battlefront

The Working Class and Master Class were mirror opposites, as if anticipating the shiny reflection of Strike. The IWGB was a branch of the IWW, and called for the abolition of wages, direct action, rent strikes and eventually in 1926 Red Clydeside was a key player in the General Strike of 1926.

Fast forward to 1971: after fifty years of class struggle, the workers at the Upper Clyde Shipyards on Clydeside faced redundancy as the government sought to close the yards in what can now be seen as the first wave of neo-liberalism. Instead of the expected traditional strike, which would have led to a lockout and acceleration of job losses, the unions occupied the shipyard, did no damage, and in the famous words of Communist shop steward Jimmy Reid, there was “no hooliganism, no vandalism and no bevvying (drinking).”

1971 Glasgow: Upper Clyde Shipyards Occupation

A placard in this photograph prefigures the 1984-5 miners’ strike that would be the turning point of Thatcherism: the “Jobs Not Dole” slogan on the far right clearly anticipates the later “Coal Not Dole.” The shipyard workers staged a march of 80,000 people, gained worldwide support, including that of John Lennon and used public opinion to save thousands of jobs. With the possibility of Scottish independence on the horizon with the referendum of 2014, and as jobs disappear at the behest of the bankers, such histories seem newly meaningful. Yet while two shipyards were saved, the departure of heavy industry from the U. K. and the construction of a permanent underclass was just delayed.

But none of the imagined futures in these strikes against time have quite come to pass. While the 1926 General Strike was repressed, its victors were themselves defeated when the 1945 Labour Government implemented the welfare state. Its creation of free state higher education, for example, lasted over fifty years. Nor do the Indian capitalists who dismantled the Swan Hunter yard look so clever now, a mere two years later.

So if the victory of the “Master Class” is shorter now, there’s also a longer rhythm at play, in which the anarcho-syndicalist demands of the IWGB for the abolition of the wage-system by direct action once again feels right. The proper lesson, then, is the future will be seen as the future precisely when something happens that we don’t expect or anticipate. To that extent, the future is always ours, not theirs, because the way it happens now is how they feel it always ought to be.

Occupy Passover

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Why is tonight different from all other nights?–and all other Passover nights? Because tonight we don’t say “next year in Jerusalem.” We say “next year in Cairo.” Tonight we do not think about Occupy but about the ongoing colonial occupations around the world that continue to oppress. And tonight we hope for another future.

In the traditional Passover service, the gathering say “Next year in Jerusalem,” the utopian wish of the diaspora. The “Jerusalem” of the Haggadah (the text used during the service) was interpreted by many modern progressives in the manner of Blake as a place without slavery, the place of emancipation.

The Liberation Haggadah

Often, such affinities are felt to have been expressed by the work done by Jews during the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, noted for its beautiful illustrations was the exemplar of how the book could also mobilize cross-cultural alliances. It was hidden and protected from the Nazis during World War II by local people, including a Muslim cleric. Later it was again saved from damage during the devastating “ethnic” civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

These affirmative histories feel remote from modern Jerusalem as it is ruled under what is, to use Jimmy Carter’s telling phrase, a “new apartheid.” In Jerusalem, Orthodox Jewish men actually send Jewish women to the back of the bus, as if to say that they want to erase the Civil Rights history.

So today the anti-slavery “Jerusalem” is somewhere much more like Cairo after the Tahrir revolution than it is the city of that name.

Perhaps no visual example is more telling than this picture:

The "separation wall" in Bethlehem.

It shows the city of Bethlehem, named as the birthplace of Jesus, a city of importance for Jews as the seat of King David and long part of the Arab Caliphate. Now it is divided by the separation wall that epitomizes the key tactic of global counterinsurgency: once you have identified your insurgent, separate them from the “good” population.

There’s so much writing about the disastrous consequences of Israeli policies, above all from progressive Israelis like Ariella Azoulay, Eyal Weizman and Adi Ophir, that there’s perhaps no need to dwell on them. Except that it has now become clear that Israel has embarked on a “necropolitics,” a sovereign determining of who it is that must die, which now extends to other nations. The entirely unsurprising “October surprise” of the 2012 election will be the Israeli attack on Iran, telegraphed and planned by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Obama might be enough to get him on the Supreme Court. Just because we can see this coming does not mean it will not have most serious consequences.

Not least will be a renewed clampdown on all anti-militaristic, anti-hierarchical politics. It should be remembered that the tent city in Tel Aviv was evicted long before Liberty Plaza. Only you can’t call it the Israeli Occupy because that already exists.

Looking back, as one does on ceremonial days, I reflect on the opportunity that the Oslo Accords appeared to present in 1993. Among them was the possibility for a secular Jewish identity that was not linked to Israel and also not shamed by it. At the time, the late lamented Edward Said indicated that Oslo was going to be a disaster. Along with many others, I could see that but hoped that it would lead to something better. It did not and the possibility to play with being “Jewish” disappeared as well. Israeli officials do so much in the name of “Jewish” and not just Judaism that it would be sophistry to do otherwise.

Nonetheless, there is of course a new Haggadah this year, translated and commented upon by earnest, bearded young men from Brooklyn of the Jonathan Safran Foer kind. Actually, it is edited by Foer.

The Haggadah says that

in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt

I don’t want to do that now. I want to stay in the “Egypt” that we’ve seen since 2011, the Egypt of Tahrir. I want to decolonize Palestine and finally bring an end to slavery. L’chaim.

Militant Research–Madrid

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It is one thing to call for activist research, it’s altogether something else to carry it out. There are a number of interesting existing models. They seem to have in common a willingness to work outside the formal structures of the university, to work on projects, rather than within disciplines, and to publish their work freely and open source on and offline.

One example is the Madrid collective Observatorio Metropolitano [OM from now on]. Their work was presented last night at 16 Beaver by Ana Méndez de Andés, an architect and urban planner who teaches Urban Design at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. In the announcement for the event, OM were described as:

a militant research group that utilizes investigations and counter-mapping to look into the metropolitan processes of precarious workers, migrants, and militants taking place in Madrid, brought on by crisis, gentrification, speculation and displacement.

In her presentation, Méndez de Andés described how the group had come together in 2007 at the height of the speculative building boom in Madrid to try and discover exactly what was happening in the city. With disarming wit, she commented that it was an advantage that Madrid was seen as a provincial city, lacking the cosmopolitan identity of Barcelona, because it was easier to examine the city’s changes.

The group was intellectual but not academic, interested in carrying out what she called “militant research,” which she distinguished from activism. In their Manifesto for Madrid, OM define this as being [these are my no doubt dreadful translations: do consult the originals before quoting!] :

Militant investigations which will bring the knowledge and policy tools necessary to address these enormous processes of change. To build a communication space between members, technicians and stakeholders, and above all between small projects (or embryonic projects) of militant research already occurring in the city and the social movements.

Méndez de Andés joked that she herself was not very good at organizing events, so she had stuck to analysis. Their research generates both substantial books, 400 pages long, and short, accessible pamphlet-length works available free as PDFs. The Manifesto strikes the signature note for OM projects in its denunciation of

the destruction of the elementary bases, which make possible common life (la vida en común) in a city like Madrid.

Written at the height of the boom, the Manifesto was able to visualize the transformation of Madrid into a global city at the expense of the creation of a marginalized class of people living precariously, the undermining of social provisions for health, environment and education and (as we all now know) spectacular debt.

Banner from Traficantes website

The related open-source copyleft publishing venture, Traficantes de Sueños does not define itself as a publisher:

It is, however, a project, in the sense of ‘commitment’, which aims to map the constituent lines of other forms of life.

Central to this venture is “freedom of access to knowledge.” All publications are available either as downloads or as books. Some people buy all the books as a means of supporting the project, regardless of whether they intend to read them. Publications are generated rapidly so that they can contribute to the ongoing discussion and debate within the social movements, rather than reflect on them later (I was recently asked by contrast to contribute to a collection on OWS, bearing in mind, as the call put it, that Zuccotti Park will be ancient history by the time of publication).

In La crisis que viene (The Coming Crisis) [March, 2011] OM see the the financial crisis as a prelude to the unrelenting privatization of the commons across Europe. For OM, there is:

a constant underlying all measures: interest and financial benefits go first. Although this will cost the immediate and future welfare of entire populations. Although this will involve the dismantling of pension systems and the decline of social rights acquired over decades. Although such policies will cause the whole economy to slide, limping along the path of stagnation. The next decade offers us no more than a new round of privatization of services and social guarantees, a greater decline in wages, and a social crisis which is still known only in its embryonic stage.

By October 2011, this pessimism was offset by the possibilities of the new social movements across Europe. Crisis and Revolution in Europe argues that, to quote the poet Holderlin,

“there grows what also saves.” The antidote has been accompanied by citizens’ movements now extend across most of the continent. This is the 15M, the movement of Greek squares, the French strikers and the indignados in a growing number of countries. It is in this work in progress of political reinvention, where you can find a social outlet to the crisis, in addition to rescuing that which really matters: democracy and European society.

Their analysis is now being translated into Portuguese, English, Greek and Italian in order to create a transEuropean dialogue about the crisis and build towards transEuropean social movements, perhaps even strikes.

No-one yesterday asked the quintessential Anglo question about funding. I took it that there the project was sustained by a mix of commitment, donation and the blanket subscriptions.

While there are many nascent publishing ventures using online and low-cost publishing in the Anglophone world, I don’t think we have anything to quite match this: though I would love to be corrected! Too many of the new digital publishing ventures spend so much time accommodating the demands of tenure, the one per cent of academia, that the online virtues of speed and accessibility get lost. Too much of the Occupy research is about the vicissitudes of Occupy and not the collective issues that brought us into the movement.

That said, where the Spanish have led the way before, we have also followed from the “Take the Square” movement to Occupy Wall Street. Of those who are still reading at this point, I bet many of us are intellectuals of one sort or another. How about it? A collective militant/activist research project(s)?