Category Archives: Occupy

Student Debt Crisis Intensifies

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Student demonstrations in MontréalThe new refusal of the student debt crisis first evidenced by the Occupy Student Debt Campaign appears to be spreading and to have good cause. Student strikes are shutting down Montréal, while new evidence makes it clear how serious the crisis is now and how it is going to get worse soon.

In Canada, Quebec has proposed doubling tuition over the course of the next five years. As it currently stands at roughly $2500, state authorities claim that tuition will still be lower than in other states and affordable. Students counter that nonetheless lower-income students will be deterred from college and that once the idea of substantial increases is conceded, they will become the new normal. Their resistance today has included shutting down the port of Montréal and a demonstration that even the media concede is around 100,000.

People there have obviously looked to the American situation. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has released a report giving striking new data showing both U. S. student debt and rates of delinquency reaching new highs. Unsurprisingly students have concluded that either tuition comes down or they will stay away.

According to their calculations, student debt is now at least $870 billion, the largest category of personal debt in the country, surpassing both the total credit card balance ($693 billion) and the total auto loan balance ($730 billion). This was already known but their analysis breaks it down further. $580 billion of the total student loan debt is owed by people younger than forty. About one million people owe more than $100,000. By excluding those people currently in deferral because they are still in education, it can be seen that 27% of debtors are either behind payments or in default.

That percentage is set to increase still further. The Obama administration has changed the regulations so that new federally subsidized graduate student loans will incur interest while a student is still in school as of July 1, 2012. As those loans currently attract 6.8% interest, a student in school for the six to nine years it takes to acquire a doctorate would find their loans had ballooned before they had even graduated.

For a long time universities have believed that they are immune to all protests for two reasons. Student debt is the most secure loan available, one that cannot be mitigated by bankruptcy, unemployment or old age. Loan companies can and do garner Social Security. Combined with what administrations believe is the unquenchable desire and need to gain degree qualifications for work, this security has given universities the confidence to raise tuition to the current levels.

Now the first sign has come that students are no longer lured by the Pied Piper of the career path. Applications for the Law School Aptitude Test, required for admission to law school, dropped by 16% this year. The combination of insane debt and 40% unemployment amongst newly-qualified lawyers was enough to deter nearly a fifth of potential candidates. What if other students are thinking the same way? High tuition schools without an endowment to back them up will become the Lehmanns and the Bear Sterns of the student debt bubble.

If we decided that higher education was “too big to fail,” it would cost $70 billion a year to make all public higher education free. Once that would have seemed like a lot of money. After the last few years, it seems like the bargain it is.

 

 

And the lid comes off Bloombergistan

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Just like that, the One Per Cent Emirate of Bloombergistan lost control of the streets. A day that began with news of the re-eviction of OWS from Union Square unfolded into a re-occupation with more people by midday.

Re-occupied: banner appears at 2pm

In the early evening, it became the scene of an extraordinary gathering in memory of Trayvon Martin, the young man killed in Florida. Union Square was packed with people and the crowd was majority minority.

Rally for Justice for Trayvon Martin

There was a strong undercurrent of controlled anger that in 2012 a police-sanctioned vigilante killing of a totally innocent child could not only happen but be excused by a ridiculous “law.” George Zimmerman, the murderer, had recourse to the “Stand your ground” law that allows people to use guns if they feel threatened and that’s the end of it. Except here, he was the stalker and the aggressor, while Trayvon had nothing more than some Skittles and an iced tea. Both were much in evidence at Union Square, with packets of Skittles flying across the crowd.

During the speeches, people stood respectfully. There were some emotional moments when Trayvon’s parents, showing enormous dignity under the appalling circumstances, addressed the crowd. His mother’s voice broke a little but she came back to call for justice. As the rally ended, the Square circulated with mic checks and calls for a march.

Taking the streets

With OWS people in the front, people poured into the street, closing down 14th St in minutes. As thousands joined in, police attempts at blockades were swept past at the corner of Sixth Avenue, where we went north.

Occupied Sixth Ave tonight

Similar efforts at 20th St, similar results. The march headed uptown for a while and then doubled back to Union Square. There were more people on the streets than at any time since N17 last year–estimates of 10,000 seemed about right. No doubt the New York Times will say 500.

From there people headed in a variety of directions. As I write there are people in Times Square, Union Square and downtown on Broadway. The silly bull statue on Broadway was liberated from its barricades and is now surrounded by police. Zuccotti has been surrounded by police in riot gear all night, the perfect visualization of Bloombergistan.

Zuccotti, new capital of Bloombergistan

Now Union Square has apparently been cleared because of a “suspicious package” and the arrests are beginning as the marches thin out and people disperse.

None of that is the point, although it will form whatever headlines there are for this march. What was striking about today was to see the way that the Union Square occupation merged and integrated with a much wider section of New York’s 99 per cent with mutual goodwill and respect. The sense that enough is enough, which has been so notable since the demonstrations of the weekend, has struck a chord across New York. As we marched down the streets, many people joined in and even more waved, gave clenched fists or other gestures of support. There were more people of color on the streets and in downtown than I can remember and I have never felt safter. The locked-down, hyper-policed, segregated money machine broke down for a few hours and out of the cross-hatched space that emerged, you could see the outlines of a new city. I liked it. I would like to live there.

Why We Refuse What We Resist

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At Left Forum over the weekend the debates could be summarized as follows: is the current system a new form of capitalism or not? What was striking was those from Occupy all agreed that this was a new formation, while many others, who wanted to see a continuity with existing forms of analysis and organizing, did not.

As it happens, I’ve been here before. In the late 1970s and early 80s, cultural studies intellectuals and activists began to identify Thatcherism as a distinctly new phenomenon that cut across existing class lines. Although New Left Review and others later came around to accepting this analysis, at the time it was greeted with howls of outrage. So both past and present experience lead me to side with the sense that we are again experiencing a new intensity of capitalism, creating divides and antagonisms that did not previously exist.

This divide is what I call “autoimmune capitalism,” a capitalism that destroys its own hosts, human and non-human life, whether by intent or by accident. Food poisoned by pesticides, a climate increasingly inhospitable to life, the ongoing great extinction of non-human species, one billion people worldwide hungry and the massive failure of overdeveloped nations to sustain employment within neo-liberal economies are all symptoms of this syndrome.

Like AIDS–Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome–this autoimmune capitalism is a syndrome not a disease. There is no single cure or response. By the same token, it can only be stabilized by introducing a radically different “economy,” in the sense of a balanced regimen.

Anarchist meeting in Union Square May 1, 1914.

It makes sense, then, that the compelling new “Spring back” from Occupy centers around refusal. The May Day action is a set of negatives–no work, no school, no chores, no banking. no shopping. But even “on holiday,” how many of us have lived a day like that, except as privileged children? The May Day from 1914 (above) is amazing both for the fact that you could fill Union Square with anarchists and that they are all (apparently) white men in hats. There is an echo but it’s not a repetition.

For the interface of autoimmunity is with autonomy, self-rule. To claim that “self” requires a certain kind of refusal: abolition. I’m going to use a perhaps unexpected example to make this point: the Haitian Constitution of 1805. I do so in part because for the first time, a copy of that Constitution, the only one known to survive, is on display in New York at the New-York Historical Society. I like to think that it’s abolition energy is spreading around the city.

Printed version of the Haitian Declaration of Independence

Having fought for independence from France for fourteen years, the new nation declared:

Slavery is forever abolished.

In four words, the sentence encompasses past, present and future (abolished/is/forever). It provides no authority for the abolition, even the tautology of holding it to be “self-evident.” Because those “truths held to be self-evident” did not include abolition. That short sentence is a world-historical revolution.

Having abolished the primary political distinction between “free” and “slave,” Haiti then made itself into the scandal of modernity by decreeing in Article 12:

No whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein.

This clause undid colonialism, neo-colonialism and segregation. If the rest of the document reinscribed other masters and proprietors, it nonetheless insisted, against the highly complicated racial hierarchy of miscegenation created by slavery, that all such persons were to “be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.”

The point here is that abolition and refusal are in fact creative tactics by which we can make a different social order and it has been done in the past. More recently, the refusal of Rosa Parks to move to the back of the bus, supported by a non-violent direct action group, transformed the United States to such an extent that she has had to be reimagined as a solitary heroine of American exceptionalism. In Ireland, people are refusing the new tax put in place as part of the Troika-inspired austerity.

85% support refusing to pay the new tax in Ireland

However, the full diversity of what we are now refusing cannot be simply legislated out of existence. As with AIDS, we need a diversity of tactics to oppose the new capitalism including direct action on the ACT UP model; a “cocktail” of curative measures to begin addressing the damage done to human and non-human bodies; and the elaboration of a regime of prevention. The first step in prevention–just say no.

 

 

 

 

A-Anti-Anticapitalista! Welcome to the Resistance

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In people’s comments about M17, the six-month anniversary of OWS, you can see a broad agreement that there’s a new feel to the movement. It’s epitomized by the gradual shift in chant preference from “We Are the 99 Per Cent!” to “A-Anti-Anti-Capitalista!” The former is a statement. The latter expresses the new resistance.

AAAC–as we’ll call it–is also inherently danceable with a 1-2 2-2-3 rhythm built in. It helps that it’s in Spanish, it feels global and properly hemispheric. Not that anyone has consciously thought this out I suspect. On Saturday at Liberty, when hundreds were celebrating what felt like the re-occupation by singing AAAC, a young woman leaned over towards me and asked “What does it mean?” When I told her she smiled in a way that indicated both pleasure and relief–it was what she thought it was and that felt good.

At the General Strike panel at Left Forum, Mike Andrews–one of the leading figures in the May Day planning group–told a similar story. He described how he had seen a group of teenagers jumping up and down shouting “General Strike!” As he said, it’s unlikely that any of the events remembered by left archivists, whether Seattle in 1919 or Britain in 1926 were in their minds. It’s possible that they didn’t even really know what general strikes have been in the past. Right now, as Mike put it, it means for them: “Fuck my shitty job”–and the desire for something better. Some were clearly surprised by this choice of words but it rang true to this precarious generation.

Natasha Lennard, writing for Salon, also turned to this theme:

There’s no adequate explanation for why, for example, on Saturday, it was beautiful to go back to one of the dreariest slabs of concrete that lower Manhattan has to offer and find nearly a thousand other bodies — dancing, chanting “a-anti-anti-capitalista,” catching up and dashing off into spontaneous street marches.

It’s that “magic” feel of Occupy, the sense of making something different, something resistant to commodification that is the distinguishing factor here, especially from the shouting soap-box orators of the traditional left.

To add my own story, a couple of weeks ago I was in Arizona to give a talk at Arizona State, a place where the University President is aggressively neo-liberal and has hiked tuition dramatically. My hosts were very nervous about the attendance, expecting they said perhaps 12, maybe 20. Much to their surprise, about 150 people showed up for the talk because the word “Occupy” was in the title. After the traditional academic introduction, I looked at this group and said, “Hi, my name is Nick and I’m part of Occupy Wall Street.” The whole room smiled–not for me, of course, but for the idea of Occupy. So we consensed to occupy the room for the next hour and a half.

What you can feel here is the pleasure of resistance, not simply refusing to move on, but claiming the right to look at what there is to see here. Look back at September 2011 and there was of course plenty of outrage at the banks and at Wall Street–which is why, after all, it was Occupy Wall Street and not Occupy Lincoln Center. Some of the ideas being floated back then by Adbusters and others included reintroducing the Glass-Steagall Act, creating a one per cent tax on financial transactions and so on. You don’t hear much about those kind of ideas now, although they would have been sensible reforms.

In China Miéville’s photo-essay London’s Overthrow [by the way, the New York Times excerpt cut out all the politics, big surprise, read it online}, he writes

The lion looks out from its apocalypse at the scrag-end of 2011. London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliché than a truism. This place is pre-something.

Pre-figuring is going on all day, all week. Here’s the logo from Occupy the Movie, currently being advertised online:

Occupy The Movie

The parody of Emmanuel Leutze’s corny Washington Crossing the Delaware was well-timed. This morning the Metropolitan Museum of Art used the painting for a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating their corporate sponsors, including all the usual criminals from Goldman to Citibank and Bank of America.

They don’t get it. Do you? Do you feel the change?

How to Think During an Eviction

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Once again, we reflect after an eviction. In the face of violence and violent speech, how do we respond?

The actions by the NYPD yesterday were plain old-fashioned violent (see below). They evicted people from a 24 hour park without stating any offense that had been committed. They erected a barricade around the park that is still up at the time of writing, in contravention of an earlier court decision. They refused medical care to a woman having a seizure. Public transport buses, brought up in advance, were used to take protestors to jail. The message here is very simple: no action that is or appears to be an occupation will be tolerated in New York, legal rationale to follow.

The political culture of New York is macho and violent. It takes its cue from its paymasters on Wall Street. Remember the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities? They became the “big, swinging dicks” in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker and last week the hapless Goldman Sachs apostate Greg Smith described how traders like to “rip the eyes out” of their clients. No wonder there are few women at the top of these firms.

A week or so ago, I happened to be in an open meeting with a senior New York City elected official about a zoning issue where I live. In a clearly studied way, the man became incensed at what he deliberately took to be a provocation and talked about “tearing [us] a new arsehole.” In a more public example, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, when queried by the City Council over the stop-and-frisk policy that led to over 600,000 frisks of people of color last year responded with what even the New York Times called a “pugnacious assault.” Elected officials may not question the police in New York.

Such talk is supposed to indicate an awareness of reality, whether at the elite level of city planning or the street level of minority neighborhoods. To “get things done,” verbal and, if “necessary,” physical violence must be used–the metaphors are of knocking heads, breaking balls and so on.

After a few hours sleep, I headed to Left Forum at Pace University this morning, hoping to get some perspectives on the moment. I found three. My panel on “Environmentalism and Occupy” was, once again, all male. The next time this happens I will just have to make a public protest. It seems that the injunction to respect diversity, so prevalent in 1990s political and academic culture, has been forgotten, except by the Occupy movement. What I initially experienced as Occupy’s continuity with academia looks more like a bridge to past (not always successful, to be sure) efforts. However, at Left Forum  the all day prevalence of violent language, shouting, pointed fingers and so on served as reminder of how much remains to be done.

In a more positive vein, both on my panel and the following discussion about the general strike, it was stressed that the place of the global south was central. While the general strike question was mostly discussed in the context of the May Day action in the U. S., Gayatri Spivak stressed the need to think it in relation to the global south. Spivak’s train of thought was multi-faceted and hard to summarize. Her main points were that finance capital is digital so that it cannot be blockaded; further global trade is a relatively small component of gross global product; and that it no longer makes sense to speak simply of “the working class,” in a manner she derived from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

All that would be to say, then, that the general strike is an impossible demand, not a quantifiable project, whose “success” can be measured by the number of strikers. It needs to “surprise” us (to quote Spivak again).

Certainly, there will be no surprise to find a vast array of police on May Day and every time we step out of the places allocated to us. The repeated representation of that injunction is the arrest of a demonstrator who steps, whether deliberately or by accident, into the roadway.

Claiming our own place will be interpreted as “violence” by the state because it is the language that they speak and understand. Prefiguring a horizontal world not configured by the command means adopting ways of acting and speaking that at once insist on our right to say what our place should be, rather than be allocated one, and to do so in ways that we understand as non-violent. That does not preclude non-violent direct action. It is to say that if another world is possible, we need to start living in it.

M17: Liberty Plaza ReOccupied and ReEvicted.

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The Occupy Banner back in place

Today was the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Activists gathered at Zuccotti Park to turn it back into Liberty Plaza. The mood was one of increased radicalism. In the late evening, hundreds gathered from Left Forum and in response to texts: the Plaza was reoccupied.

During the day there had been sporadic confrontation. A symbolic tent appeared. Brookfield’s top cop, dressed in paramilitary-style black clothing from head to foot, rushed into the Plaza with a dozen acolytes to tear the small plastic tent to pieces. Next the drumming on garbage cans had to be stopped because one person from the neighborhood complained about the noise. Drumming in the street at four in the afternoon–on St Patrick’s Day, the rowdiest day of the year–is now prohibited. A man dancing on the wall around the park was deemed illegal and arrested.

Late afternoon, people began discussing the fact that Michael Moore the filmmaker was giving a speech at Left Forum at Pace University on the subject of the Future of Occupy–even as the park was being occupied. It seemed ridiculous and so a group set out to mic check and challenge Moore to come to the park. There were some confrontations with security at Pace, who sought to keep the left away from the left but in the end Moore readily agreed to encourage the audience to head down to OWS at 9pm.

Meanwhile we had a great General Assembly, like the early days–no disrupters, no nonsense, no financial questions and breakouts full of enthusiasm and ideas. Tweets started to come in towards the end about the march being on the way, even as other texts were heading out calling people to come to reoccupy. A group of us headed off in search of the march and soon found it.

March from Left Forum to Liberty

It was an excited and raucous crowd that by-passed police lines and made its ways into the Plaza to cheers, chants and dancing everywhere. For perhaps an hour, the celebration ran free as original Occupiers, long-time activists and new people came together in a very special moment. It’s easy to see that nothing concrete was established but the morale boost and the energy of the assembly was real.

The Plus Brigades began training people in park defense, while well-organized people were bringing in blankets, setting up the People’s Library and a Medical station. The Plaza continued to fill as more people responded to the text and Twitter feed.

I had to leave to supervise a teenage sleepover. As I walked down Broadway, there was no traffic and it was clear the NYPD were planning an immediate eviction. As I write it’s already underway–so the park can be cleaned, although all day OWS people were picking up trash. Or trespass. Or whatever.

In order to keep to my pledge to post every day, this is going to have to go up. It seems that a lot of arrests are taking place, over a hundred. I can see people I know on Livestream. It’s a nasty spectacle to set against the mass drunkenness taking place across the city. It’s Zuccotti Park again, full of NYPD

 

M17: Why Occupy is Hunger, Climate Change and GMO food

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Storm over GMO corn

OWS and the campaigns against hunger, against GMO food and against climate change are different ways of saying the same thing: capitalism is an autoimmune disease that is now threatening the viability of its host. Occupy signifies here that these issues cannot be contained, let alone solved, by the normative political process, whether at national or interstate level.

It’s important to recognize how far things have gone in the past year. Harper’s magazine tells us:

  • there has been a 33% decline on newspaper mentions of “global warming” and “climate change” in 2011
  • Obama used the phrase “climate change” once in the State of the Union but mentioned “energy” 23 times.

Autoimmune capitalism believes it can afford the planetary degradation that is now under way worldwide and is indifferent to it. European airlines filed this week to be exempted from the EU carbon levy because of a possible trade war with China: in short, climate can only be a priority if it has no impact on capital.

By the same token, there was barely a ripple when Climate Central reported on sea level rise this week:

At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.

There’s a 1 in 6 chance that the Battery in New York City will flood– not far into the future but by 2020. Zuccotti will become waterfront. You can only assume that people either think that these reports are false or that when they happen, there will be benefits because 5 million people will need new homes.

As I’ve often argued, the reason there’s a global movement of which Occupy is the U. S. variant is the interface of climate change and hunger. In 2008, a global food crisis was caused by the interplay of climate-change induced drought;  the switch to biofuels caused by climate concerns reducing the food supply; and the creation of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Futures Index.

This index was allowed to trade in futures as of 1999, on the principle “long only,” i.e. that prices would always rise. Investors included: Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Foreign Affairs magazine commentator Frederick Kauffman notes:

In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

What that means is an 80% price rise from 2003-8 that has kept moving upwards. One half of the world’s population spends 50% of their income on food. The real consequences were so-called food riots in 37 countries–they should have been called anti-autoimmune capitalist riots.

From here we can summarize:

•2008 food crisis added 40 million to world hungry list
•2008: 943 million hungry
•2009: One billion hungry
•2008: 100 million Africans move into poverty
•A one-meter sea level rise, now regarded as inevitable, will destroy the Nile Delta
This already disastrous situation is now being exacerbated by the intervention of genetically-modified plants into Africa. The African Center for Biosafety, based in South Africa, reported this week:

Between January 2008 and January 2012, the cost of a 5kg bag [of] super maize meal increased by a staggering 83%. In 2007, the poorest 30% of the population spent approximately 22% of their monthly income on food, including on maize–a staple. The latest figures from January 2012 put this at nearly 39%.

In South Africa, Monsanto has cornered 77% of the seed corn market that generated over R1 billion in revenues, while one in four South Africans is “food insecure,” or hungry, in plain English.

 

In Europe this week, researchers showed that both the genetically modified component of MON810 Bt corn and the Roundup that is sprayed onto that corn kill human kidney cells. So in a particularly telling instance of autoimmune capitalism, the patented seed will either kill you by starvation because you can’t afford to grow it; or kill you by kidney disease because you emmiserate yourself to eat it.

Oh, and by the way? There are plenty of Roundup resistant plants in the U. S. now anyway, about twenty at last count. How could this have been predicted? Because Monsanto found the gene in plants growing downwind of its filthy Louisiana chemicals plant in the first place.

What to do?
For you: do not eat GMO based products–which is likely to mean anything with soy or corn in it, which is to say just about all food industry products. Go organic, go local, grass-fed meat and poultry only.

 

For all of us: be at or with the March Against Hunger tomorrow M17:

 

99 Per Cent Sovereignty

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Looking back over the six-month history of Occupy, it’s surprising to me that one aspect of its project has been understated. The concept of the 99 per cent has been taken to be newly inclusive–and perhaps it is, compared to class warfare of the Stalinist or Republican kind. As a theory of sovereignty, however, it is in fact surprisingly radical.

As the name suggests, sovereignty is the theory of the sovereign, the authorization of the ability to operate power. Its fundamental operation in European modernity has been to produce a singular sovereign, whether a person, a nation or a people. Hardt and Negri call this the “sovereignty machine,” the means by which

The multitude is in every moment transformed into an ordered totality.

[Empire, 87]

Whether the state declares itself democratic or not, modern sovereignty always tends to a single form of power.

Consequently, the authorizing form of the “people,” which is in theory limitless, has in practice been highly circumscribed. When the Declaration of “We, the People” was made in 1776, more people were excluded than included in that frame–the indigenous populations, the enslaved, women and children. The nationalist claim of the “people,” as in the obligatory invocation of “the American people,” is similarly exclusive.

Nonetheless, the constant accusation against democracy as a system of sovereignty has been that it is limitless and places too few constraints on its constituents. In Rancière’s pithy formulation

democracy=limitlessness=society.

The anxiety at work here is that the open-ended nature of “the people” might serve to derail the sovereignty machine in its perfect equation of law with property.

For Hardt and Negri, the “people” that must be reduced to what Hobbes called “one will” is always already distinguished from the “multitude”:

The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogeneous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it [103].

The concept of the multitude has been much criticized for this apparent vagueness. However, theological and apocalyptic theories of sovereignty have been received with open arms, as if the use of Latin terms is enough to bring us back to the Church.

Is the 99 per cent, then, the multitude? Unlike the “people,” the 99 per cent does not claim to be fully inclusive or limitless. It claims a right to authority without producing “one will,” and indeed expects to curtail the perfect mirror relation between law and property. The importance of this rupture far exceeds any quarrel with the limit that has been suggested. It is a theory of sovereignty, not of the practice of direct democracy. That is to say, it is not to be expected that 99 per cent consensus will be, or should be, achieved in all assemblies.

At the same time, this articulation of the divide between the multitude and capital in relation to sovereignty is itself a mirror of the new contempt that capital has for its human agents. The fantasy of a market based on Adam Smith’s “self-love” has been replaced by a slasher capitalism that wants to “rip the eyes out” of its own customers, whom it perceives as “Muppets,” according to the so-called scandalous revelation of Goldman Sachs’ internal culture.

This palpable disconnect renders the “image” component of the nation state’s “imagined community” highly problematic. As all the language of mirroring and specularity suggests, the image of the imagined community operates as a supplement: “I am like the nation and the nation is like me.” Only it isn’t. For “white” America, the impossible choice between the one per cent candidate they are told to want, and the image of the Confederacy they actually want, is playing out as farce, which is not say that it is not dangerous, as supplements always are.

For the 99 per cent, there is a genuinely new task: how to image and imagine multiplicity without producing another version of “one will.”

 

 

This is what Occupy looks like

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Axiomatic: to occupy is to place your body in space, there where it is not supposed to be. That space is three-dimensional but multiply so. Some of these can be evicted, some not. Some are not visible to the empire. But we can see it because power visualizes what it imagines history to be to itself. Let’s look around.

In the first instance, Occupy takes physical three-dimensional space in urban environments. It is attention-generating because the populace in global cities are highly regulated and policed. “Public” space is subject to particularly dense control, meaning that (in the U. S.) public-private spaces, where guaranteed access was the definition of “public,” became the location of choice.

To occupy global city space is also  to intervene in the highly-mediated imaginary of “New York.” Citizen and  professional media alike are so densely configured and adept that actions taken by a relatively small number of people receive immensely multiplied levels of attention. Thus it seemed obvious to state power that removing those bodies from their spaces would end Occupy.

There are multiple spaces available, however, in vertical and horizontal configurations. Conceptually, the horizontalidad of direct democracy is challenged and displaced by the verticality of power and neo-liberalism: and vice-versa. In their trilogy on Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri give some useful ways of thinking about this encounter. Borrowing from the ancient historian Polybius, they suggest that the global empire can be understood as a pyramid with three levels: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The monarch would be the United States, the aristocracy would be the agents of globalized economics, and democracy is associated with what they call the multitude.

Bringing this figure up to date, they adopt the image of the mainstream foreign affairs commentator Joseph Nye, who suggests:

The agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional chess game, in which one can win only by playing vertically as well as horizontally.

His aim was to correct the Washington-speak idea of a “uni-polar” world governed by the US, and replace it with three “boards” representing “classical military interstate issues,” or war. This was placed above the level of “interstate economic  issues,” meaning the global economy. Finally the whole rests on a base of “transnational issues, [where] power is widely distributed and chaotically organized among state and non-state actors.” In some ways, Nye has less respect for the level of the multitude than Polybius but he does realize that power cannot be exercised without its at least passive consent.

Let’s push this a bit harder. The game of Raumschach, literally “space chess” or three-dimensional chess,  was devised in 1908 by Ferdinand Maack in Hamburg. He felt that as chess was a war game, it should now be possible to represent aerial and submarine warfare as part of play. His initial concept was for an 8x8x8 board that looked like this:

8x8x8 "space chess" in 1908

He refined this towering edifice to 5x5x5, the variant now mostly used by the devotees of the game. Pieces can move in three-dimensions: a rook, for example could move from top to bottom vertically, while a knight could move two layers up and a square across. Players use the standard pieces, plus two “unicorns” that can move from corner to corner. The board looks like this:

Raumschach 5x5x5

In short, let’s by all means think of the political as a three-dimensional contest but be aware that it would have more than three layers and the possibilities for interaction are very diverse. Occupy geeks of a certain kind will already have this in mind:

Spock plays 3-D chess against the computer in Star Trek

The future used to be imagined as a liberatory expansion into space of all kinds. If in Star Trek, this expansion was hard to separate from the colonial and Cold War projects of the U. S., the fans were always able to imagine otherwise in slash fiction and other forms.

However, let’s follow Nye this far: the “top board” of global conflict is the one now in chaos. The counterinsurgency doctrine launched with such fanfare in 2006 stands revealed in Afghanistan as the imperialist fantasy it always was–such is 3-D chess, a game of imperial imagination. But with the “monarch” having lost control of the top, the game is now open in a variety of ways.

Vertical power is not just exercised by states or interstate organizations. In contrast to their usual emphasis on immaterial labor, Hardt and Negri point out that

Extraction processes–oil, gas, and minerals–are the paradigmatic industries of neoliberalism.

This “verticality” of this economic power is literal as well as metaphorical: the rewards for mining fossil fuels and other raw materials are spectacular. The sea level rise that results from the resulting acceleration of climate change is by the same token a literal and metaphorical verticality: only those in the “high places,” like the Tyrel Corporation in Bladerunner, can and should survive.

The primary alternative available form of wealth increase in overdeveloped nations at present is privatization and upwards wealth distribution by means of regressive taxation and other measures. In short, the verticalization of what had been made horizontal by political action, such as the former attaining of free university education that is now a market for private loans.

These are nonetheless relatively crass and unsubtle ways to play. If you have sufficient pieces, they may gain an advantage, perhaps some victories. But there are at least two, perhaps five, perhaps many more levels at which our would-be hegemons are not playing because they can’t see them.

Take the horizontalism of direct democracy. In this exchange, each person consents to look and be seen at once. To authority, this exchange is invisible. Formally, authority imagines itself as deploying the gaze with its force of law in which we are the looked-at, the passive object. In this view, direct democracy is just chaos.

By the same token, as I argued yesterday, there are always already spaces of the “primitive” where power is not vertical, disrupting the arrangement of the “boards.” Such spaces are equally invisible to authority because they are not part of its life processes but they are nonetheless present, understood as ghosts, spirits and specters. Indeed, there are places that, in the manner of China Miéville, we might call crosshatched with other pasts, futures and presents, intermittently visible.

On these horizontal levels, you can win the game by playing only horizontally, or by cancelling certain vectors of the vertical by using your “unicorns.” If the unicorn does not “exist,” that speaks to the ways in which magic–understood here as that which exceeds the “rational actor” theory of value–continues to be a real presence. Colonial power always feared the magic of local religions because it knew that it “worked,” meaning that it generated horizontal values and imaginaries, as well as moves to negate the vertical.

That’s why the signs saying “Game Over” in Egypt seemed so right. But this an odd game. You can checkmate the king only to find, like in the horror movie, that it is back in mutant form. The same is true for both sides. If empire has more power, its narrowness of vision means that Occupy has, paradoxically, more space. Game on.

 

 

 

 

Seeing against the state

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One night during the Paris Commune of 1871, Louise Michel found that she and an African veteran of the Papal Guard were the only two defenders of a key fort. To pass the time, he posed the question

–What effect does the life we lead produce in you?

–The effect of seeing a shore we must reach, she replied.

–Myself, he replied, it gives me the effect of reading a book with images.

These replies were in “reverse” order to what a certain modernism might lead us to expect. The African soldier gave a reply moving from print culture towards a cinematic imaginary, whereas the French poet created an image of a panoramic landscape that would exceed any one person’s capacity to see. These are deceptively simple images, then, by which to visualize what the Zapatistas would call the “walk” that the Commune was taking.

By contrast, the anthropologist James C. Scott has highlighted the way in which “seeing like a state” means a certain abstracting, centralizing vision. His first example involves seeing a tree simply as timber, compared to all the other known uses for the wood, bark and even leaves of the tree, let alone its existence as a living ecosystem.

How can we imagine seeing against the state, or better yet as a non-state? In a recently translated collection of the essays of Pierre Clastres, originally published in 1980 offers some perspective from that moment in the 1970s that seems to prefigure our own. Clastres was interested in creating a “political anthropology” and saw what he continued to call “primitive cultures” as being an “anti-production machine.” Rather than understand indigenous societies as pre-capitalist, Clastres presented them as radically different:

When the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive.

As in the example above from the Commune, the point is not to reduce alterity to a single image, as the state would do, but to multiply them.

In this sense, “primitive” society will always exist, as what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls

the force of anti-production permanently haunting the productive forces, and as a multiplicity that is non-interiorizable by the planetary mega-machines.

There is always, then, another possible world and it already exists and has existed for a long time. Clastres asks, if we set aside the hierarchical gaze of ethnography, “how are we to finally take seriously” societies where power is not associated with control?

In this question, there are two loud echoes. One is Derrida’s haunting question at the opening of Spectres of Marx: “I would like to learn how to live, finally.” Might we then understand that “finally” as meaning: at the end of the long Western metaphysic that has, since Aristotle, presumed that a separation of the political is the distinguishing mark of the human? Here the further echo is with Rancière’s concept of the “division of the sensible” that he tends to see as very long-lasting. To live, finally, without control would mean living in such a way that “the political” was not a separate domain.

Clastres points to the conquistadores, newly arrived in what they called the Americas:

Noting that the chiefs held no power over the tribes, that one neither commanded here nor obeyed, they declared that these people were not policed, that these were not veritable societies. Savages without faith, law, or king.

It’s easy to draw a parallel with the Commune and Occupy encampments, whose anti-production machines were held equally intolerable by the police of their own time. Less easy, but now more necessary, is to take that seriously and add what Philippe Pignare and Isabelle Stengers call “a sense of dread” to that comparison.

While it’s clear that Occupy might prefigure anti-control and anti-state ways of being to a certain extent, becoming anti-production (meaning anti-growth, anti-seeing-as-a-wealth-producer) and pro-sustaining, every day the work is at hand of enacting that seriously. In Argentina, some groups withdrew from confrontations with the state after 2001, according to Marina Sitrin, precisely to develop such possibilities. In Greece, many local governments have collapsed themselves back into their communities, helping people to resist the new electricity tax surcharge to pay back the banks. That is to say, they have ceased seeing like a state.

In the US we’re a long way from that kind of crisis–but also from that kind of altermodern “primitivism.” Here we don’t want to replicate the capitalist frenzy against the very collapse of Greek society that they helped to create but to mark the multiplicity of viewpoints that are now tenuously available in the crisis. I’m not sure we can see that yet.

This week the island nation of Kiribati (pronounced Kiri-bhass) [above] announced that it is buying land in Fiji for its people to move to after their islands flood because of climate change. These “South Pacific” (actually West Central Pacific) islands have been the Western “vision” of non-productive but plentiful societies since the first encounter in the mid-eighteenth century. Without dread, we are standing by as they disappear. Not one print or television outlet covered the news. We can’t see this as here and now, only as there and then.

So it’s a great thing to see that M17, the six-month anniversary of OWS will feature a march to the memorial for the Irish Famine and a further challenge to Monsanto and global corporate food. More on that tomorrow. Seriously.