Category Archives: Occupy

The Learning To Come: the now future

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

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

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

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

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

EDLMR have also created Red Squared, an online project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Remember September 17

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September 17, also known as S17, is the next major day of action in the OWS calendar. When I referred to it the other day, I had some inquiries as to what I meant. So, with all due allowance for the fact that I speak for no-one but myself, here’s why you should keep September 17 free.

It’s one year of Occupy Wall Street. A year in which we changed the political vocabulary with the phrase “We are the 99%” and the concept of Occupy. A year of consolidating and organizing the vision that another world is possible, outside the atrophied structures of all-money-all-the-time “politics” as usual.

Did we “win”? If you go back to the materials of the time, everyone kept saying the same thing: there are no demands. So “winning” or “losing” cannot be measured by the accomplishment of this or that benchmark. The original call spoke of being encamped downtown for  “a few months.” Perhaps we fell a couple of weeks short but the park was the most intense time in many people’s lives and should not be measured by the calendar.

So this year once again there will be a call to assemble in New York on September 17. As S17 is a Monday, there will be major events on the preceding weekend and in the week afterwards. As it happens, S17 is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. But the NYSE is open, as are most financial institutions.

What exactly is going to happen and what the messages will be are being determined by the usual working groups. There’s a widespread sense that S17 should be the beginning of a new phase of the movement, such as the Strike Debt campaign that I am working with. No one wants to repeat the post-May Day hangover, where we’d organized for months only to not be sure why afterwards.

The reasons to be there are very clear.

  • If anything, the above is more true than it was a year ago.
  • Montreal is still on permanent unlimited strike.
  • Austerity is a palpable disaster, inducing double-dip recessions worldwide.
  • Spain, Greece, Ireland–solidarity with the IMF colonies
  • Capitalism is killing the planet: Greenland and the Arctic are melting, there is a drought in half of all U. S. counties, there are floods in China.
  • No bankers are in jail, even though they have been caught money laundering, fixing interest rates, losing clients’ money and other crimes above and beyond their incompetence and greed.
  • Tens of millions are so in debt that they have become part of the Invisible Army of debt defaulters and strikers.
  • 50 million people have no health insurance in the supposedly richest country in the world.
  • Politics is so obviously for sale to the highest bidder, it has become more brazen than organized crime.
  • {put your own reason(s) here}

If none of that is enough, I guarantee you’ll have a lot of fun, meet some great people and feel better about yourself.

September 17. New York City. Try and come. See you there.

Dis/Occupy the Olympics

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Oscar Pistorius runs in his Olympic 400 metres heat

The orgy of nationalism and sentimentality known as the Olympics has been very much not in my mind. The notoriously awful NBC coverage reduces excitement to boredom–they even showed ads during the middle distance races. There was a moment today, though, for those of us dis/abled or otherwise differently embodied folks, when Oscar Pistorius of South Africa ran in a 400 metres heat. As most people surely know, Pistorius is a double amputee and runs on J-blades. He not only participated but finished second, putting him in the semi-finals.

His charming pleasure in this accomplishment contrasted with the usual Gold! obsession of the Anglophone media. It reminds me that different modes of embodiment  and body presentation continue to have to struggle for acceptance. One of the aspects of the Occupy movement that I love is its attachment and embrace of all forms of self-actualization. Pistorius’s lesson for us is that it’s not just an end to medical debt that we call for: we want everyone to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a signing school for the Deaf, gender reassignment surgery, prosthetics, insulin, whatever: regardless of income.

Pistorius has had to compete not only against his fellow athletes but the extraordinary assumption that running on prostheses might somehow be an advantage. The myth of the Terminator cyborg is perhaps to blame here. Vivian Sobchack long ago dismissed the enhancement fantasy from her own experience with a prosthetic limb. Pistorius himself put it like this:

I think often there’s a lot of debate about the advantages, but there’s not much said about the disadvantages. If this was such an amazing piece of equipment that’s been around for 14 years, then how come thousands of other Paralympic athletes aren’t breaking world records and challenging even a 45- or a 48- or a 49-second 400m?

Here then is the crux: in common with people of color, women and people of non-normative sexualities, the dis/abled are both assumed to be inferior but suspect for any effort that is made to make them/us equal. Pistorius cannot simply be a good runner who lacks lower limbs. He must be a “crippled” runner made into a superhero by his device.

I’m deaf, or technically hard-of-hearing because I can decipher sound using lip-reading and an electronic device. Being deaf is still assumed to be a personal failing by mainstream normative culture, who celebrate the occasional exception like the fabulous Marlee Matlin, but presume deafness to indicate stupidity as a rule.

Marlee Matlin in The L-Word

Consequently, the 50 million people with hearing loss in this country are a totally ineffective lobby because we are unwilling to identify ourselves. Signing Deaf people, who defend Deaf culture vigorously, are the exception we should learn from.

For example, an odd editorial in the New York Times presented hard-of-hearing people yesterday as being at a disadvantage in noisy spaces because their devices amplify all noise, making it unbearably loud. This was true for analog hearing aids, but digital devices all use a compression curve and most that cost as much those the article cited (about $3000) will have a setting for noisy spaces that eliminates background noise. So I find myself at an advantage compared to my “hearing” middle-aged friends in such spaces.

The issue here is in fact one of insurance. If you have good insurance, as I do through New York State (thanks to my partner Kathleen), devices are covered. If not, you have to pay for them, and for hearing tests, and they are very expensive. So although hearing is considered the indispensable attribute of the human, because of music and spoken language, hearing aids are part only of what is known sneeringly as “Cadillac” plans. All politicians now agree such luxuries must be dispensed with. Prosthetic devices like those used by Pistorius and myself will be for those who can afford them. Some have disparaged Occupy as being “medieval” but what could be more medieval than that? Free universal health care is not a demand. It’s a right.

 

Hands On

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A group of us had fun today trying to dream up some new images for the movement using the words “imagine” and “resistance.” We came to think about hands, as a symbol for the movement and as a means for its enactment. It’s a hands on process and that tells us something–about how we have reclaimed the hand as a tool but also about why the movement unfolds organically, rather than virally.

From the facilitation question “if you can hear me, clap once,” to the standard-Occupy issue notebook, it’s all about hands. 

The discussion began with the role of graffiti in the Syrian uprising. People simply wrote their names, a reclamation of the self that is fundamental to graffiti. Autocratic regimes arrogate to themselves even the power of the name. And, as Banksy puts it:

The interface of the hand with the wall produces a form of reclaimed public space, even though walls are designed to exclude and mark the limits of property.

Using stencils, Banksy has been able to expose the separation strategy of the military-industrial complex with this piece on the Israel-Palestine separation wall. The real Palestinian boy on the foreground confronts his graffiiti-ed counterpart and the illusion of open space.

On the other hand, as it were, graffiti artists operate in secret, concealing their identity. They are answerable to their audience, of course, in terms of reception but not directly. The reclamation of the self through Occupy was clearly different in that it was face to face but related in that it was a conversation of hands and eyes. There were the famous gestures of the GA and other meetings. I think here more of the hand-held video cameras, the clinking of the casseroles, painting signs, chalking, gardening, writing, cooking, knitting, and other hand-driven actions of Occupy.

In feudal law, and indeed in marriage, we give our hands to others. In the British navy, ordinary sailors were known as “hands,” as in the command “all hands on deck.” From there, it became a way of describing industrial and plantation workers (meaning slaves) as early as the seventeenth century.

We reclaim not these hands but the hand of the artist visible in her work, the hand offered in applause, the hand noted for its craft or skill and so on. For all our digital communications, this is an artisanal movement, passed on from person to person, hand to hand. It’s a touchy group, meaning that people touch, not that they are short-tempered. Without a “party” to join or other mass form of adhesion, Occupy is a manual process.

I’m reminded of 19th century craft anarchism and socialism of the William Morris variety here. While his pursuit of hand-made high quality materials (above) later seemed wildly out of touch with “ornament is a crime” varieties of modernism, I see people looking again at E. P. Thompson’s classic biography of Morris–here’s a quote to whet the appetite:

In the next few years a rash of Anarchism was to appear in one major city after another. It took all sorts of shapes and colours: there was the sober group around Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, which published Freedom; there was the studious and restrained old friend of Morris, the tailor, James Tochatti … who (after 1893) edited Liberty; there was the old Autonomie Club, in Windmill Street, where foreign refugees hatched real conspiracies: the Jewish Anarchist Club in Rathbone Place; the Christian Anarchists, the Associated Anarchists, the Collectivist Anarchists, Socialist Anarchists, the followers of Albert Tarn and those of Benjamin Tucker. Papers published, on blue paper, red paper, and toilet paper, ranged from the Anarchist, Commonweal, Alarm and Sheffield Anarchist, to the Firebrand, Revenge, British Nihilist and Dan Chatterton’s Atheistic Communistic Scorcher.

Now there’s a reading list to conjure with! And a forgotten set of histories to remember and fit into our sense of what this movement might be. Let’s give ourselves a big hand.

 

The Debt Vultures

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From three corners of the debt square–education, housing and health–come stories to answer two repeated questions about Strike Debt: is this the right theme for OWS? And is this in any way different to standard issue capitalism? In short, yes and yes. And I think they might serve as an answer as to what to call predatory debt: I’m going for vulture debt. Because a group of vultures is known as a committee (true).

First, education. Student debt has been questioned by some as an elitist preoccupation or as too easily eliding with right-wing attacks on higher education. Today, a US Senate report of all things exposes for-profit higher education institutions, so beloved by the right-wing, as predatory loan garnishing machines. They exist solely to generate money with instruction as an afterthought:

Among the 30 companies, an average of 22.4 percent of revenue went to marketing and recruiting, 19.4 percent to profits and 17.7 percent to instruction. Their chief executive officers were paid an average of $7.3 million

80% of their revenues come from Federal grants on average. Here’s one specific example of why this is vulture debt:

The Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit college, got $1.2 billion in Pell grants in 2010-11, up from $24 million a decade earlier. Apollo got $210 million more in benefits under the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill. And yet two-thirds of Apollo’s associate-degree students leave before earning their degree.

The more you read, the worse it gets. These “colleges” are more expensive than not-for-profit institutions, yet graduate far fewer of their students. In terms of debt:

Students at for-profit colleges make up 13 percent of the nation’s college enrollment, but account for about 47 percent of the defaults on loans. About 96 percent of students at for-profit schools take out loans, compared with about 13 percent at community colleges and 48 percent at four-year public universities.

These institutions are the right-wing solution to higher education: supposedly vocationally-oriented market-driven education, rather than the supposedly wasteful liberal arts schools. They are nothing but debt vultures.

Housing. I noted recently that student debt is getting noticeably worse for older people. Now it seems that foreclosures are biting the over-50s hard:

one and a half million Americans over the age of 50… lost their houses to foreclosure between 2007 and 2011. Of those, the highest foreclosure rate was for homeowners over 75.

In this report from the AARP it emerges that these are prime loans, not the marginal sub-primes so often discussed. Seniors are being affected by declining pensions, collapsed property values, rising medical costs, shrinking investment values and (although not mentioned in the report) the need to support children and grand-children. People who have been making payments since the 1960s are now being evicted. Whose interest does this really serve? How much is enough? For a vulture, that question makes no sense.

Finally, and most repellent, medical debt. Please don’t be eating while you read this. The major medical debt collector Accretive has been banned from Minnesota and fined $2.5 million. Why? Well, it did things like this:

Carol Wall, a 53-year-old Minnesota resident, said “a woman with a computer cart” told her she owed $300 as she was “vaginally hemorrhaging large amounts of blood” at an Accretive-affiliated emergency room.

The repellent company has issued the usual generic statement claiming such cases were  exceptions, and so on, and so on. Even the New York Times didn’t buy that:

Accretive Health contracts with some of the largest hospital systems in the country to help them recoup money on unpaid bills that have piled up during the financial crisis and the economic downturn.

In other words, this is how medical debt works: the system knows people can’t pay and has a mechanism to deal with it. Here the debt vultures are literally preying on the weak, requiring patients to pay before they can even see doctors, against all rules and regulations.

So: is debt a proper subject for OWS? I’d say that predatory, criminal enterprises that place profit before people and are fundamentally incapable of saying “enough is enough” are the prime target of Occupy. Further, the unique quality of the movement is to bring together issues that are deliberately kept apart so that we can see how things really are. The minor “fixes” that pass for policy from the political parties are helping almost nobody–this is statistically as well as morally true. From student debt to housing and medical debt, the debt vultures have shown that this is a fight to the death. Only social movements like Occupy can help.

Is this a different form of capitalism? Technically, the switch to debt as the dominant aspect of the money form is different. Certainly, rapacious capitalism is far from new, as a quick glance at Engels’s 1845 classic The Condition of the Working Class in England will show. However, the present delusions about the virtues of the rich have become so attenuated that it is considered daring  to suggest that government or society have any role in wealth creation whatsoever. The idea that government should mitigate the impoverishing effects of capitalism for any except the capitalists themselves is now “socialism.” When neo-liberalism emerged, Stuart Hall and others called it “Thatcherism” and were widely castigated for saying that capitalism had changed. But it had. And it continues to do so.

Debt servitude is predatory and relentless. It has shifted the target of neo-liberal expropriation from Heavily Indebted Poor Countries to Heavily Indebted Poor People. Fanon suggested that fascism was the application of colonial techniques to colonizing nations. We can say today that neo-liberalism is the application of neo-colonial techniques to all populations. No longer is there a “wages of colonization” (to adapt Du Bois’s concept of the “wages of whiteness”) in which being a citizen of the neo-colonial powers protects you. We are all targets now.

Certain scavenger species can eat themselves to death, unable to stop. The debt vultures are one such species. We have to stop them before it’s too late.

 

After Visual Culture

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Remember when being interdisciplinary seemed cool? if you’re under 30 you won’t. There was a time in academia when crossing the formally defined boundaries of established disciplines was transgressive in and of itself. So when visual culture set itself up as a field about 1991, it was so exciting to challenge fusty old fields like art history and link to the-then new areas of film studies and cultural studies.

So exciting that we failed to notice the way in which new modes of visualization were being deployed in the Revolution in Military Affairs that was transforming global military strategy after the Cold War. In fact, some would argue that it was the RMA that ended the Cold War by making the Soviet Union and its allies feel compeled to invest massively in information technologies that could not compete with their Western counterparts.

A Visual Culture Reader that I edited appeared in 1998. Its opening section was a careful attempt to measure how critics had moved away from art history under the influence of feminism and Marxism. The book was used widely at first only by studio artists, who were and are far more open to new ideas than most academics. When the book was planned in 1996, I was using a browser called Mosaic and the Internet was not considered as important as the imagined future of Virtual Reality.

Second edition

Of course, very soon that was clearly a mistake. In 2002, a second edition of the Reader was issued that was conceived as addressing the Internet revolution and moving on from the disciplinary debates into the greener pastures of “the new interdisciplinary field of visual culture,” as the back cover had it. Just as I was drafting the introduction 9-11 happened. Visual culture became belatedly aware of its connections to militarization and the decade that followed was often known as the “war of images.”

The mantra

9-11/ Shock and Awe/ Abu Ghraib/ Hurricane Katrina

came to express the rationale for the field as well as constituting the core of any class or syllabus. So for a long time a Reader formed in the moment when the Cold War became global counterinsurgency served its audience very well.

VCR3 cover

Today a new Reader came out. It’s one that sets aside aspirations of transforming universities from within and returns to a perhaps older project of connecting to social movements outside and across universities. Motivated by a sense that it no longer served its contemporary moment, this new Reader was compiled as the Arab Spring was sowing the seeds for the Indignados and Occupy. So other than the last comments added in to my Introduction, the essays don’t directly address Occupy.

That said, many of the writers have been significantly involved in the movement in many different ways. And we all came together in agreement that when the police said to us “Move on, there’s nothing to see here,” we knew that they were lying. So in this volume, the concern is with visualizing and who has the authority to claim to visualize. How do we claim the right to look, prior to and outside of all law? What autonomy is there to be found in the mutual invention of each other? We decided that the collective name for these questions would be critical visuality studies. It’s an open name for an ongoing project. Given the current state of higher education, there won’t be university departments or degrees and perhaps that’s a good thing. Can we say, our eyes are open now? (not literally, in case the trolls are reading).

Just as with each previous iteration of this Reader, it has emerged into a moment of transformative change in which it may help some people see further and help them imagine what to do next. There won’t be another print version of the book. The time for bulky volumes is over. So we really went to town on this one with lots of pictures, full-length essays, photo essays, and fifty contributions, mostly written new for this book.

From here, the participants are taking up the challenge of the times by setting up militant research projects in New York and Los Angeles that will begin with the questions that the movement has posed to artists, critics and writers and work them out together.

Back to Organizing

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After a couple of long-distance weeks, I headed into New York for the Strike Debt organizing meeting today. I had the slightly surreal experience of reading David Graeber’s excellent anthropological study Direct Action on the way in and then meeting the author himself in a meeting that was in part about direct action. It’s interesting to compare the two moments in autonomous politics.

Today we gathered to discuss Strike Debt  and what it might do over the course of the first year anniversary on September 17 and thereafter. For a project that only came into existence in a horizontal discussion in Washington Square Park less than two months ago, it’s impressive to see the range of activities people are planning.

While there’s plenty of other activity being organized for S17 and after, it’s interesting to see a range of action around a thematic project. There are a set of publications being worked on: the Five Theses of Strike Debt that will summarize the movement; a Debtor’s Manual providing practical advice for people burdened by debt; and a longer Declaration that will provide a fully-fledged analysis of the debt crisis. All are being crowd-written. All will be available via a website that is being constructed.

One of the most intriguing projects is the Rolling Jubilee, a project in which OWS will buy up debt that is in default, easily available for pennies on the dollar, and then abolish it. It turns out that the only complicated part of all this is notifying credit agencies and indeed the debtors themselves that the debt has been annulled. Which tells you a good deal in itself.

There’s a project to create a “Telethon” to raise funds for the Jubilee at a venue in New York, which will be live-streamed and include presentations and performances.

A group is creating guerilla videos for the Invisible Army, those who are already in default whether by choice or necessity. These will publicize the extent of debt default that I think of as a wildcat debt strike.

A direct action group is proposing public defiance of debt, whether by burning bills in echo of the draft card burnings of the 1960s, or by shredding.

All of these were decided to fall under three main organizing headings:

  • Structural Change: broken down into Abolition and Reconstruction
  • Mobilization and Community
  • Changing Rhetoric

So all of this made me consider how the organizing we’re doing compares to that of the global justice movement. There’s a great deal of overlap of course, from people to process. All the mechanics of facilitation, consensus and hand-gestures are the legacy of the global justice people–although as Graeber points out, they in turn owed much to groups like the Quakers. So autonomous politics has a long history.

Perhaps the differences are more to be seen in the political culture. There’s much discussion in Direct Action about disputes with the International Socialist Organization. It’s possible that they continue–and I have seen more than a few sectarian disputes on and off line. In Strike Debt, we hear plenty of Marxist rhetoric, of course, but there’s no enthusiasm for a vanguard party or the like.

Another contrast would be that despite the permanent awareness of police infiltration, it was possible for activists to get right up to the security wall at the Quebec summit in 2001 without being challenged by police. The saturation policing that Occupy has had to learn to take for granted had not quite come into being, despite the experience of Seattle.

Finally, the obvious lesson is that, despite the enthusiasm of last September, local uprisings are not going to change capitalism overnight. At the moment, it’s doing more to damage itself than any activist ever could. Less than a year old, Occupy has learned from the past and is now learning from its own past. This is the long game we’re playing here.

And to judge by the way that David takes notes in meetings, which was, I now learn, how he wrote the last book, you should have the opportunity to find out what he thinks has been learned before too long.

 

Year Two: Mutual Aid

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What if the second year of the social movement in the U. S. was more radical than the first because it concentrated on social change by means of mutual aid? The direct democracy that attracted so much attention last autumn was not in fact particular to Occupy, although it was new to those like myself who had not been involved in the global justice movement. This movement also practiced, as many alternative groups have done, mutual aid as a means of self-sustaining, while also advocating it as a tactic. Perhaps seen in the wider frame, the implications of mutual aid are more radical still.

To be clear, I am not arguing for passivity and I am not against direct action. I am saying we need to challenge not just the economic results of neo-liberal capital but the basic cultural assumptions on which it is predicated.

It was the second year of the French Revolution that really made it unpopular with the world’s bourgeoisie. It was the year of the price maximum, of the abolition of colonial slavery, of the end of aristocracy. In order to make people forget that radicalism, history has concentrated on violence, forgetting the spectacular torture of the monarchical state and slavery to concentrate on the guillotine, which was in fact designed to minimize physical pain. Lost in this discussion was the possibility of a society based on equality as a fundamental principle, rather than the freedoms of the market.

This should not be unfamiliar, even if the historical details are new. What the police in the broad sense try to do is to turn all new forms of dissent into a question about violence. Even and especially when the movement is non-violent, as with the Civil Rights Movement or Occupy.

The classic source for discussions about mutual aid is Kropotkin’s 1902 treatise of that name. He argued against the Social Darwinists of the period like Thomas Huxley that Darwin’s concept of the “survival of the fittest” did not entail a violent struggle within or even across species. As he put it:

We have heard so much lately of the “harsh, pitiless struggle for life,” which was said to be carried on by every animal against all other animals, every “savage” against all other “savages,” and every civilized man against all his co-citizens — and these assertions have so much become an article of faith — that it was necessary, first of all, to oppose to them a wide series of facts showing animal and human life under a quite different aspect.

Again, our own era of evolutionary biology and neo-liberal economics takes the “war of all against all” as a given for all analysis. Often this gets reduced to the concept of genetics as the only conduit for information in non-human species. It may again be necessary to show human and non-human life under different aspects.

Sperm whales socializing

One of the most striking examples  can be seen in the observation of sperm whales by a scientific team led by Hal Whitehead, from which we learn not only that whales are capable of altruism and mutual aid but they do so because they have culture. As Whitehead tells it:

I was studying a group of whales off the Galápagos Islands, looking at their social systems, and found two kinds of sperm whale who were behaving really quite differently. They had different ways of communicating with each other, different ways of using the resources around the island, etc. The initial explanation was that we had two sub-species but there was virtually no difference genetically. So something else was causing these sperm whales to form radically different societies, with radically different ways of behaving. It became obvious that the only explanation was that these whales had different cultures.

Whitehead doesn’t try and draw wider implications but it’s clear that many other forms of non-human from insects to felines and apes have similar forms of culture and mutual aid.

So much of U. S. culture depends on violence as a fundamental organizing principle. We hear Tennyson’s aphorism “nature red in tooth and claw” endlessly quoted as if it were universally accepted, while forgetting that it was written in a poem called “In Memoriam,” written in mourning for Arthur Hallam to whom Tennyson had an intensely homoerotic attachment. Which is just to say, the line says nothing about evolution or the natural.

In short: the market is not “natural.” What we call “nature” is not founded on principles of violent competition. Humans are not that special. Let’s just look after each other. How did we ever get to a place where that seems radical?

 

 

Simple Lessons for S17

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In academia, we are discouraged from taking a straightforward view. Perhaps the most popular academic words are “complex,” “complicated” and “more” when attached to one of the first two. The financial crisis does, however, strike me as straightforward: the blatant crimes of the banks culminated three decades of wealth transfer from poorer to richer. As the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street approaches, this should not be forgotten or set aside.

This point was brought home by seeing some charts produced by the Federal Reserve and published on the Business Insider blog. Here to begin with is a chart showing the value of wages in relation to gross domestic product.

Wages expressed as gross domestic product

It’s easy to see that since the 1973 oil crisis in general, and the beginning of  Reaganomics in 1980 in particular, wages have steadily declined until falling off the cliff in 2008, from which there has been no recovery. Unsurprisingly, therefore personal debt has risen in accordance.

Household debt

In 1973, household debt was negligible. It is now over $14 billion. The apparent slight improvement since 2008 is the effect of record numbers of bankruptcies, foreclosures and credit card write-offs. Corporate and government debt rose in parallel. The consequence can be seen below, where debt is the red line and gross domestic product is the blue line.

Clearly, this is not sustainable: or so you would think. Government has concentrated primarily on reducing its own debt, a largely meaningless affair except insofar as it further impoverishes those dependent on state support or using state-financed health care. Isn’t there a problem with financing all this state debt? Actually, as far as the U. S. goes, no, not at all. Liberal Paul Krugman points out the obvious in today’s Times, namely that markets are

buying government debt, even at very low returns, for lack of alternatives. Moreover, by making money available so cheaply, they are in effect begging governments to issue more debt.

Some U. S. government debt is so cheap, it actually costs investors money to get it.

So it’s clear that you could, if you wanted, do many creative and interesting things with what is in effect free money, like abolish personal debt. If you want to see why this isn’t happening, then look at this chart showing corporate profits:

Corporate profits

After a nasty hiccup in 2008, profits are roaring above all post-war levels, with only the Cold War boom even coming close and then only very briefly. This level of return is very desirable for those we have called the one percent and they are willing to do anything to defend it.

And yet, even this wasn’t enough for them. At Barclay’s Bank, center of the LIBOR scandal, yet more criminal activity has been uncovered. Jerry del Missier, the former Chief Operating Officer of the bank during all this crime has even been handed a $13.6 million  farewell package.

The activism is about changing the way that we imagine ourselves in relation to debt. It means embracing government borrowing at historically low levels to relaunch the economic lives of the 99%–and then making sure neo-liberalism can’t happen again. The outrage, the anger and the sadness comes from the astonishingly brazen theft by corporations and banks for which no-one has yet even shown remorse, let alone be punished.

On September 17, and for the years after it, let’s show that we haven’t forgotten these simple lessons.

 

How Occupy Was Repressed

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The official report into the NYPD abuses relating to OWS is now out. It’s 195 pages long. Written by lawyers and academics from Harvard, NYU, Fordham and Stanford, it’s only the first in a series of seven. If you’re reading this, it’s probably not a wild surprise to you that the police went far beyond the law in their repression. Nonetheless, the full extent of their malfeasance, read in one document is pretty amazing.

For example, look at the table of contents for Chapter one:

Chapter One: Aggressive and Excessive Police Use of Force

1. Bodily Force: Pushing, Shoving, Dragging, Hitting, Punching, Kicking

2. Weapon Use: Batons, Pepper Spray, Barricades, Scooters, Horses

3. Restraints: Flex Cuff Injuries

4. Delays and Denial of Medical Care

5. Unnecessary Police Force Violates and Suppresses Protest Rights

The report notes that about 7,000 people have been arrested across the ten months of the Occupy protests in the U. S., while the number of financial crimes prosecuted is at a 20 year low. 85 journalists have been arrested, 44 in New York alone. There have been 130 reported incidents of (alleged) physical force by the NYPD “that warrant investigation”, according to the report. From my own experience, either that number is very low, or I have happened to witness a strikingly high percentage of these incidents.

There’s a useful history of both the movement and the relevant law that has lots of interesting detail. For example, Zuccotti Park was originally created in 1968 by U. S. Steel in order to get its zoning variances. So the shift of the space from US manufacturer to Canadian real estate company tells a certain story in itself. The extensive footnotes and references make the document a vital source for future research on OWS.

Most of the text concentrates on the suppression of dissent by force. It cites a definition of force:

The International Association of Chiefs of Police defines force as “that amount of effort required by police to compel compliance from an unwilling subject.” Excessive force is defined as “the application of an amount and/or frequency of force greater than that required to compel compliance from a willing or unwilling subject.”

The Supreme Court has far vaguer definitions of “objective reasonableness” versus violence that would “shock the conscience.” What would shock the conscience of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas I wonder? Technically, the NYPD require their own officers to intervene “if the use of force against a subject clearly becomes excessive.” Anyone seen that? Thought not.

Indeed, the report notes that in New York there has been “near-complete immunity for alleged abuses.” The most serious of these include:

hard kicks to the face, overhead baton swings, intentionally applying very hard force to the broken clavicle of a handcuffed and compliant individual

More “routine” allegations, reported nearly 100 times, include:

  • Pushing;
  • Shoving, tackling, or throwing forcefully backwards, to the ground, or against a wall;
  • Dragging along the ground;
  • Hair pulling;
  • Hitting or punching, including to the head and face; and
  • Kicking, including to the head and face

As they indicate, these “minor” incidents have a notable “chilling” effect on  free speech because people feel scared to attend legal protests for fear of suffering assault. What’s particularly useful about this report is that it does not end on November 15 with the eviction of Zuccotti but continues to document police violence as recently as July. Here is a retort to the “nothing to see here” attitude of the mainstream media for the past seven months.

The police themselves have plenty to look at, based on their near total surveillance of OWS. The Tactical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) videos everything. The report notes that one a June 6 march about debt, TARU filmed by-standers in close-up, who came to the windows of their apartments to see what was happening. Medical personnel have been video-ed while treating people. The permanent filming is in breach of the NYPD’s own code of practice. The only upside is that with so much material, there’s not much they can do with it.

Highlighting numerous ways in which the NYPD violate international law, the report recommends a number of perfectly sensible reforms to police practice, none of which will even be considered by Ray Kelly and his self-satisfied leadership. Indeed, the NYPD refused to co-operate with the report and have refused to comment on it. So, the conclusion states:

If New York officials fail to announce a good faith intention to undertake these measures, the United States Department of Justice should exercise its authority to investigate allegations of official misconduct. United Nations Special Rapporteurs with mandates addressing expression, assembly, and human rights defenders should also investigate US practice.

There is precedent here, during the Civil Rights Movement, for such actions. However, one motivation for such investigation was the presence of the Soviet Union, taunting the U. S. with its own contradictions. Now that the U. S. sees itself as the sole global agent of military force, it is unconcerned with international law and its international reputation.