Category Archives: Occupy

On message, on messaging

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“We interrupt this writing project to bring you this message.” How our relationship to advertising (or messaging) has changed. When I began a course in visual culture or media studies, one of the exercises I used to perform would be to ask people in the group: who felt that they were influenced by advertising? Normally, hardly anyone raised their hand. Then I would ask who felt that other people or “ordinary people” were influenced by advertising and everyone would raise their hand. It was supposed to be learning moment. When I have tried this exercise since the rise of social networks, the mask has fallen. Everyone raised their hand and accepted that they were influenced by ads.

One index of this change has been the shift in “must-see” TV for media studies people. While The Wire had its day (2002-8), complexity, urban politics, crime and long-form narrative seemed to have migrated from 1970s cinema to the television drama. The past five years have belonged to Mad Men, a TV show about advertising relying on advertising revenues, in which the sexiest moment is “the pitch.”

That is to say, the moment when Don Draper (Jon Hamm) presents his narrative of a commercial seduction to the clients. There’s much more in the pitch than the ad itself. While the series is soap-like in its narrative format, these moments are lingered over lovingly. Half of the last series hinged around the pitch to Jaguar cars, for which one character prostitutes herself, another commits suicide, still a third comes to existential crisis, while a fourth quits the company.

What was this magical tag line: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.”

Don Draper pitches to Jaguar

This kind of message has a weird form of overlap with Occupy messaging. It uses a direct address to the viewer and it claims beauty. While Occupy would never associate beauty with a one percent commodity like this car, the interface should not be denied. After all, the Mad Men screenwriters have 2012 mentalities.

Compare an actual 1968 Jaguar ad:

Jaguar ad from 1968

“Finally,” it says. “The kind of car you dream about owning.” In 1968, year of global revolution, a tweedy self-satisfied young man looks at the viewer in the ecstasy of ownership. The motif of sexualized domination is there but subliminal. The ad addresses men as men without referencing unavailability. In 2012, a year of global social movements, that element needs to be foregrounded to give “nostalgic” satisfaction. So successful has this “pitch” moment been that AMC have commissioned a reality to follow Mad Men called The Pitch, featuring two advertising companies competing for a client.

Against this layered moment of actual messaging with faux-sophistication–sexism in the 1960s is supposed to show “we’ve come a long way, baby” while also indulging the presumed male viewer in its pleasures–how can a social movement address those it would like to participate? Most seem to think that simplicity and directness are the key. Certainly, the “We Are the 99%” meme moved Occupy to the front of media attention.

The difficulty is that we don’t want people to buy something but to do something. Recently I sat next to a friend watching TV when one of the NY State anti-smoking ads came on, featuring people with horrific post-surgical disabilities caused by smoking. She shied away from watching, which I presumed was revulsion at what might happen to her as a smoker. But in fact it was because any ad that mentioned smoking made her want to smoke and she’s trying to quit. Here of course the State gets to have the best of both worlds: it can claim a public health campaign that looks effective to the non-smoker, while encouraging its smokers to consume and thereby raise state tax revenues.

What made “We Are the 99%” so effective was, then, precisely that it did not have content. Each person could decide how it worked for them, just like any effective message. What happens once a tag has circulated endlessly across a show-me-the-money culture for over a year? On September 17, we’ll find out. We may be surprised.

 

“We Are All Children of Algeria”

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This is the name of an online multi-media project that I made in collaboration with design intellectuals Craig Dietrich and Erik Loyer that went live today. The project looks at how to decolonize visuality; or, to put it affirmatively, how to visualize a society after colonialism. It uses the central example of Algeria and its decolonial struggle from 1954 to the Arab Spring. Here I want to talk a bit about how this project both laid the ground for my involvement with the Occupy movement and for the shape that Occupy 2012 has taken since. While this is a tad narcissistic, this is a blog a) and b) there might be relevance for other people thinking of taking on similar work.

In this project, “Algeria” is also a metaphor for the contested border between North and South in the formation of financial globalization and thus exists in many places other than the geographic space known in English as Algeria, in French as Alger and in Arabic as al-Djazair. In the book, I wove a tight narrative that tried to hold these pieces together across about forty pages. When I came to make this section into a digital project, I thought it would be a simple task: cut the text into pieces and add the films, photographs and other images.

At the first meeting I had in LA with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which designed the software used for “We Are All Children of Algeria, they asked me a  question that threw all that out of the window: how did I want to design the project? What was the concept? I didn’t think I had one but I found myself saying that it was about a demonstration. Or what is called a march in the US. This was, it turned out, what you might call a retrospective realization about where the work was actually going.

So I took the title from chants used at French anti-fascist marches that I had been on as a student in Paris back in the 1980s. As part of solidarity, crowds chanted “Nous sommes tous enfants d’immigrés” or “We are all children of immigrants.” French anti-fascism was not notional: then and now the National Front were racist and violent. Their targets were “Algerians,” meaning any person who is from or descended from North Africa–or in any way sympathetic to them.

When I began the project in the summer and autumn of 2010, I felt that I needed to justify the very idea of marching, or simply putting bodies into public space, as not being totally outmoded. Now of course it seems that this tactic, far from being redundant, has been key first to the extraordinary movements in North Africa and the Middle East and now to Occupy. So that in and of itself seemed to prepare me for Occupy and to be part of the movement.

Although I got involved fairly early, I at first felt that I did not want to make academic work about Occupy at all. When I decided that as part of a strategy to develop my own sense of commitment and understanding that I did want to write about it, I took the performative or artistic model of the durational project, rather than just say “I’m writing [yet another] book about Occupy.” I wouldn’t have done that before thinking how to make a digital project.

It’s also enabled me to do something to the way that I write, which, when it works, seems now to be able to speak to both activists and academics. Again, I say this not to claim some spurious status for myself but to encourage other, younger artists, writers, performers and intellectuals to embrace the challenges of such cross-platform projects. As this way of thinking and imagining is so much more familiar to you, you will do far more exciting and ground-breaking things than I can conceive.

There’s so much lazy reluctance in academia to be involved with either the intellectual or political forms of the present moment. I can count the other (full-time tenure track) faculty that I see at Occupy events or meetings where they are not speaking–well, let’s just say easily. On the other hand, the design and programming group involved in ANVC are all in different ways productive intellectuals and engaged activists. Enough said.

 

Given Time: Debt and the Impossible

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“Let us begin by the impossible.”

A fourth Strike Debt Assembly today in New York found itself in a problem that it defined as organizational: what to do next? Or first? Or in what order? If you were there you would have heard people say many things related to time, such as “Time is of the essence.” Or, “We have no time.” There was a sense of repetition, we’ve been here before. It was experienced as frustration. I would suggest that it is, as befits an Occupy Theory project.  more of a theoretical problem.

Any economy is a distribution and a sharing of what there is, according to the law (nomos) within a household (oikos). In Roman law, the holder of authority is the auctor, precisely the person that decides this distribution. By definition, that person was a patriarch, the male head of the household, whose word controlled animals, slaves, women and children.

There is a certain frustration, then, in giving time to a leaderless association like Occupy that refuses authority and does so in part by refusing to meet inside (oikos) and by challenging the distribution of what there is to be seen and said. This is, then, a gift that cannot make itself present. Or a present, even.

And in the matter of debt, what is taken is also time. Debt is measured in time: a 30-year repayment perhaps, a monthly minimum, a daily calculation of interest. It is circular and it is  without end. In my own case, I have come to realize that the debts that I have will be resolved by my own death, the end of my given time. An uninsured chef suffering from leukemia, cited in a Times Op-Ed today, hoped for his own death so as to spare his family debilitating posthumous debt.

So we are faced with an impossible equation: we give time to something that cannot accept it in order to reclaim some of our given time. These are, then, the reasons for the impossible demands of Strike Debt. Debt has to be abolished, not forgiven. For if it is “forgiven,” an obligation remains on those so forgiven to live up to forgiveness. We see intense resistance to such apparently unearned gifts that were part of the formation of the so-called Tea Party, when a white guy from Chicago railed against people of color getting mortgage support. So there is now an automatic mediatization of radical right demands that no time be given to anyone who has not “earned” it.

Yesterday in Bed-Stuy we talked about abolition in terms of the abolition of slavery: how slavery appeared to be essential to the economy right up until the moment of its abolition; how Reconstruction reimagined the place of the public in ways that we still have not lived uo to 150 years later; and how Stop-and-Frisk continues to inscribe certain people as inherently criminal and part of the economy only on sufferance. We reminded each other that, just as enslavement was social death, so too is debt that treats lives as disposable but banks as eternal.

Today I am reminded of the means of “forgiveness” inherent to slavery. When a slaveowner died, he would sometimes free those of the enslaved he liked or had fathered. These emancipated folk had to carry papers at all times to prove that they had been freed, papers that were not always given credit. You do not make demands on systems like this, systems that discount people from their status as people to being chattel or criminal.

You recognize that impossible demands require a given time: a breaking, a fracturing of the normal course of time. It comes when you least expect it, as it did in Tunisia. Or it comes when those who are subsumed into the impossible category of chattel, debtor, criminal, strike that concept and step into a place in which they are not supposed to be. So the enslaved moved themselves from the slave states to the Union and became not free but “contraband,” or stolen property. They had, impossibly, stolen themselves. Impossibly, they had abolished enslavement.

 

Strike Debt: an emerging consensus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Night of the Living Debt

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

 

Twas The Night of the Living Debt

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With apologies to whomever it was that wrote Twas the Night Before Christmas.

Max Liboirox, “Ceci n’est pas un riot 2”

Twas the night of the Living Debt

Twas the night o’ the Living Debt,  I know for a fact

Not a creature was stirring, not even a rat.

The man-traps were laid by the chimney with care,

In hopes that debt-collectors soon would be there;

Occupiers nestled all snug in the streets,

While visions of anarchy made dance in their feet;

And she with her tattoos, and I with my beard,

Had just settled down in the long summer weird,

When out in the park there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the tent to see what was the matter.

Away to Zuccotti I went in civilians,

Tore down the barricades, exhorted the millions.

The neon shining on the new-fallen trash

Gave the shine of desire, as if it were cash.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But wandering debt zombies out in the clear,

With a nasty debt driver, so fetid and rank,

I knew in a moment it must be Big Bank.

More rapid than eagles his debtors they came,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

“Now, Student! now, Medical! now, Housing; for shame!

On Credit, On Store, On Debit! You cards all know your name!

To the top of the ratings! down the credit ranking score!

Now debt away! debt away! debt away more!”

As bank notes that before the wild hurricane fly,

When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,

So up to the houses the zombies they flew,

With a van full of writs, and Mr Big Bank too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard first the banshee,

The roaring and sighing of each fierce zombie.

As I joined in the march, and was turning around,

Out the paddy wagon came Big Bank with a hound.

He was dressed all in black, from his head to his boot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with pepper and soot;

A bundle of debtors he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a slaver turning the rack.

His eyes — how they glittered! his frowns were so deep!

His breath was like Hades, his mind fast asleep!

His foul mouth displayed wide like a whirlpool,

And the beard of his chin grew grey and cruel;

The stump of a gas pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;

He had fat face and a huge round belly,

That shook when he howled, like a bowlful of jelly.

He was muscled and plump, the evil old elf,

And I cried when I saw him, in spite of myself;

The look in his eye and a twist of his head,

Soon gave me to know I nothing but debt;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

And took all my possessions; then turned with a jerk,

And laying his finger aside of his nose,

And giving a nod, across the city he rose;

He sprang to his van, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they flew, shredding judgments of dismissal.

But I heard him exclaim, as he drove out of sight,

“Night of the Living Debt, there is no good night.”

Night of the Living Debt

June 22

7pm Washington Square Park

Occupied New York City

Living in the Contradiction

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It’s been over 100 degrees for much of the day in New York City. The streets have that stunned, surreal feel of extreme weather. Your body and mind feel radically distinct. It’s a good moment to not think but experience what it means to live in the contradiction. There’s a sense of mourning among Occupy ranks as the possibilities seem to recede, even as others open up. Mainstream liberals are freaking out as they realize that in an advertising dominated election Mr Bipartisan is going down. Can you feel it?

There have been the usual quips about global warming–this is, after all, only the first day of summer. It doesn’t go anywhere. You may or may not be aware that this is the second day of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. It’s supposed to commit governments to action on the environment. Having wasted months if not years of preparation, the NGOs have withdrawn from the proposal process already. Absolutely nothing at all will come from this gesture, other than another round of appeals for donations.

The arrest of Mark Adams and the stresses of activism have produced a wave of anxiety in OWS. And then this appeared

Direct communication no. 1 is meandering across the Internet, hanging outside subway stations, being handed out at meetings. It rallys the moment.

Our work now focuses on how to undo this mess.

The problem is not the internal question of tactics, momentum or depression. The issue is that we live in the intense contradiction whereby, to take a not random example, any debt incurred by a bank must be made whole for the public good, while any debt incurred by an individual at the behest of one of those banks must be restored by them for both the public and the private good.

Occupy taught us that our best work is mutual aid in the widest sense. What is that sense? It is what we can call the right to look, the common, democracy to come, whatever. The direct way to put it, which I would not usually say out loud, as it were, if the blood were not boiling in my head, is love. By love I mean when I give to the other what I do not have to give. It is not, necessarily, simple. How can I give you the gift of ending your debt? Excluding the paternalistic charity of monetary exchange, that is. There’s a complex philosophy and anthropology that meets at this place. Another time, I’ll get to it.

For now, I’m depressed, anxious, overheated. By the way, Obama is not going to win. That doesn’t make me happy either for all his endless disappointment. I’m also hopeful. Because hope is hard, not a crappy slogan. We’re all working at it because that’s what mutual aid, or Occupy, or even that other thing, really means.

 

On Church and State: the case of Mark Adams.

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The Anglican Church is the established religion in the UK, meaning that it is the official religion of the country. Formed by Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic church in 1531, it has long been known as “the establishment at prayer.” In New York City, Trinity Wall Street is the Episcopal church on Wall Street, part of the Anglican Church. For nine months it has tried to pretend that it supports Occupy Wall Street, without ever doing too much to alienate Wall Street. Now it’s clear that Trinity is truly Anglican, siding with state over populace.

For the charges it has leveled against OWS activists have lead to eight convictions, including that of retired Bishop George Packard. Shockingly, OWS stalwart Mark Adams has been sentenced to 45 days in jail on Rikers Island. His offense? Gaining access to a patch of open land, known as Duarte Square on December 17, 2011, which is owned by Trinity Wall St based on a 1705 land deed. Because he allegedly used cutters on the fence, Mark was charged with possessing burglary tools. So keen was the judge to endorse this concept that he sentenced Adams to 15 days more than the prosecution asked for.

Mark Adams

Mark is a non-violence activistand  person of color, who is homeless by choice as a form of protest. As a result he has a long black beard, like many a Brooklynite, but which may have activated the anti-Islam reflex in downtown Manhattan. In short, he makes the perfect target for punitive action in Bloombergistan.

Trinity is no ordinary church. It is a major landowner managing 6 million square feet of real estate in Hudson Square and distributes millions in philanthropic grants to nonprofits around the world. However, since the Reverend James Cooper has been in charge, the church has moved away from helping the poor, closing its homeless drop-in center in 2009, and towards a twee PBS view of the church. One indication of the change is that Trinity overspent its music program by $800,000 while donating only $2.7 million to international philanthropy.

Cooper has taken good care of himself, however, making:

demands for a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, an allowance for his Florida condo, trips around the world including an African safari and a fat salary.

To be precise, Cooper gets a $1.3 million compensation package, including a salary of $346,391 and deferred compensation of $507,940, plus over $115,000 a year “housing allowance” to cover his other place in Florida.

Half the church’s board of directors has resigned in the past six months in disgust at a variety of policies implemented by Cooper, such as:

lavishly overspending church funds on Bach concerts and other events, and planning an opulent overhaul of the church’s office space at 68-74 Trinity Place rather than focusing on his ministry and helping the poor.

In light of all this, it comes as no surprise to read Cooper opine in relation to the convictions:

While we are sympathetic to many of the OWS protestors’ stated goals, we do not support the seizure of private property.

Seizure? Adams, Packard and the others simply climbed the fence to walk onto land marked with a sign saying “open to the public.”

George Packard climbs the fence at Duarte Square, 12-17-11

If Adams and others hoped to start a new encampment there, it would be consistent with the “stated goals” of OWS to do so. It says, “Occupy Wall Street,” not “write a genteel letter to the editor about Wall Street.” But Trinity had only wanted to gain the veneer of progressive activism, not back it up with actions and Cooper has now remade the church in Wall Street’s image.

Alas, poor Occupy. The state is against it, the church is now against it. Some local press have wasted no time with the usual “Occupy is over” pieces. Someone forgot to tell OWS. A 45 day vigil began today outside Trinity. Bishop Packer was there.

Amin from OWS (left) with Bishop Packer

There was music.

Ari plays a violin solo for Mark Adams

Because Occupy is not about church or state. It’s about mutual aid, about a different way of being there for each other. It doesn’t win or lose.

What’s the Word?

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I seem to have spent much of my life engaged with words that people find mystifying or enraging from punk to acid jazz, visual culture and now Occupy. It’s the very flexibility and floating nature of these terms that gives them their ability to motivate and empower people. So no doubt it’s just a coincidence that the new Occupy debt campaign has been greeted with two pieces from the mainstream media declaring, yet again, that Occupy is dead.

Adbusters posted a not particularly helpful blog that quoted an anonymous “Zucotti” to the effect that Occupy has consolidated into forms of power:

“This translates into ideological dominance and recurring lines of thought. We are facing a nauseating poverty of ideas.”

This phrase was immediately taken up as a headline by a blogger for Forbes, whose expertise appears to be that he once lived in Brazil. There’s very little more to the piece than this. It even ignores the remainder of the Adbusters post that talks positively about initiatives like Occupy Farms. It’s designed to be tweeted, posted and used as a FB status.

Meanwhile a Reuters journalist has also become worried about the survival of Occupy. Apparently we failed to change our tactics, if you look from Harvard:

“Most of the social scientists who are at all like me – unsentimental leftists – … think this movement is over,” said Harvard University professor Theda Skocpol, a liberal academic who wrote a book on the Tea Party.

Skocpol’s analysis rests on two comparisons with her favored Tea Party: that Tea Party activists are mostly 45 and over (and white and male, which she doesn’t say). And that they had influence in the Republican Party. I am not sure why it’s preferable to have older people rather than young. For what it’s worth I fit Skocpol’s frame. Again, as Stuart Hall has always emphasized, the neo-liberal right has consistently radicalized itself since 1975 and shows no sign of stopping until the entire capitalist machine collapses. Further, it’s always easier to work with the grain of the dominant system than against it.

Reuters offer an analysis of Twitter that claims to show that OWS peaked as a hashtag on October 1, the day of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests. If that is true, it shows what a disconnect there is between social media and social movements. Most people would see October 1 as the beginning of the viral spread of Occupy, not its peak. The article concentrates on tweet numbers and citations in the traditional print media as an index of influence.

The spread of Occupy into its own media such as nycga.net, the use of Google groups, the Facebook pages, the print publications, the affinity groups, let alone the direct actions: none are mentioned. By the same token, the failure of many Tea Party candidates in 2010, costing the Republicans control of the Senate, and the patent disregard that Mitt Romney has for them other than as pawns is not mentioned, Of course, the way that the Democratic machine co-opted the Wisconsin occupation to negative results is ignored.

When a new way of expressing experience emerges, it at first confuses and then mobilizes resistance from within and without. Punk was called dead in the first fanzine Sniffin’ Glue in 1977. Visual culture was dismissed by October magazine in 1996. Yet the DIY ethos of punk obviously informs both some digital culture and Occupy, while the Now! Visual Culture conference showed that this much smaller frame of analysis is alive and well.

In the film The Future is Unwritten, Clash guitarist Mick Jones rolled his eyes when remembering hordes of black leather jacketed young men demanding power chords wherever they went for years after 1977. Now it’s media hacks demanding that OWS occupy a park or be declared dead. If it’s a choice between being the Tea Party or being dead, I’d rather be dead: or better yet, undead a spectre haunting the collapse of capital.

After Wisconsin, Occupy.

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It was somewhat expected but still not great news from Wisconsin last night. It does suggest that, despite many prominent voices to the contrary, Occupy has had the better read on tactics after all. As we should have learned, there’s no short-cut here. Would a Democratic governor even have been able to abolish Walker’s law, let alone improve things? The hope remains with the social movements, even if that seems attenuated now,

As no one will need reminding, the 2010 elections returned Scott Walker as Governor of Wisconsin. In the manner of George W. Bush, he swung hard right after the election and introduced one of the most sweeping anti-collective bargaining laws anywhere. Led by students, organized labor quickly moved to resist, occupying the Capitol building.

The Madison occupation of February 2011 was a great moment. It claimed the right to be taken into account and the right of the people to actually be present in what is known as “the people’s house,” the Capitol building. In what became a precedent for later public space occupations, the occupation was ended by quasi-legal force of law after only a few weeks.

March 9, 2011 Madison WI

Late in 2011, unions and the Democratic Party decided to attempt to recall Gov. Walker. In a very short space of time from November to January 2012, a million signatures were gathered, a remarkable accomplishment by any standards. There were those who thought that the Occupy movement as a whole should pursue such electoral goals.

However, when I was in Madison in April, you could already feel a sense that the situation had slipped out of the movement’s control. The Democrats failed to coalesce around a candidate and held a divisive primary as late as May 8, choosing the same man, Tom Barrett, who had lost to Walker in 2010. Whatever Barrett’s merits, the election looked like a replay, rather than a referendum on collective bargaining rights or democracy.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the nascent global social movements, skilled in the “local” work of holding public space, demonstrations and organizing their own have proved less accomplished in mass electoral theater. Almost by definition, movements that take their energy from direct democracy don’t transfer to mass manipulation, sound bites and fund raising, the very cynical maneuvers they are against.

The Egyptian Presidential election is a case in point, where pro-revolutionary candidates gained the majority of the votes but failed to make the run-off. The Wisconsin election showed almost no change from the 2010 precedent. I don’t think it was the money or anti-union bias, so much as a sense that what Walker had done fell within the purview of electoral democracy. His Thatcherite neo-liberalism recalls precedents like Reagan firing the air-traffic controllers in 1981 or Thatcher abolishing the Greater London Council in 1986. Both were clearly extensions of what had hitherto been considered standard practice but they did not breach the letter of the law.

So what we are seeing is an extension of electorally-validated authority beyond what is taken to be the norm. Precisely because such norms are largely unspoken, there is very little preventing someone who wants to do so from extending their authority, as long as they can corral the necessary votes. In the UK, this elected force of law has long been standard via the “whip” system, in which parties require their members to vote as they want them to do, or face expulsion. What gives the current US system its peculiar feel is that its mechanics are so based on consensus within a narrow ruling elite that it is surprisingly easy for a determined party, whether formally in government or opposition, to drive the agenda.

The simple lesson for social movements is that you can’t win battles against those who have defined the very way that battles should be fought. You have to change the way, not that battles are fought, but the way that people think about their relationship to the social. If it’s about battles, those without the monopoly of violence tend to lose. If it can become about changing how we understand ourselves, what the purpose of life might be and how to enlarge the possibilities for all, then sometimes very surprising things can happen.

What happens next depends very much on whether finance capital manages what it has so far been unwilling or unable to do: to restrain and reform the banks and their markets. The Eurozone crisis suggests that the mechanisms of debt on which the endless circulation of capital is based are so flawed as to be beyond repair within the present neo-liberal framework. The US economy is slowing to halt, even China and India supposedly exempt from market cycles because of their endless supplies of free labor have slowed. Don’t be depressed: imagine something completely different. And go and make it happen.

Debt Strike: Make Debt Public

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There’s a growing call in OWS for a debt strike. What does that mean? It means using the call to refuse debt as a means to make debt public. There should be a public discussion about how endebted we all are within the debt square that has replaced the public square. It means overcoming our shame at being locked in the debt square. And it means taking the debt public set people free. That last is not a demand because we all know no legislature at present is going to enact it. Look at Montreal, though: the government has not listened to the popular will and the people have not backed down. It’s public.

What is the debt square? It is the space defined by the four corners of modern US life:

  • student debt ($1 trillion)
  • mortgage debt ($14.6 trillion)
  • credit card debt ($800 billion)
  • medical debt (unknown)

Mortgage debt has declined slightly from $14.6 trillion in 2008 to $13.4 trillion at the end of 2011. The real change is in the amount of mortgage debt held by the federal government in various ways. From $725 billion in 2007, it’s now over $5 trillion. That means that the Feds control close to 40% of mortgage debt.

You hear less now about foreclosure because banks are short-selling houses and taking a loss:

All told, 233,299 bank-owned homes or those in some stage of foreclosure sold in the first quarter, making up 26 percent of all U.S. home sales in the period

As for credit cards, it’s what you already know: debt is rising, as are interest rates. Credit card debt snuck over $800 billion last year, even as interest rates rose to over 12% on average. The average credit card in households that have them is now over $15,000. Fewer people do have cards, as credit is being denied more often, but people who have credit cards have 3.5 each on average.

Increasingly, people are using credit cards to “pay” their medical bills, which is the third corner of the debt square. One in three households are struggling with medical bills and eighty per cent of those questioned for a PBS Newshour survey were having issues with financing health care.

If that seems a little abstract, here are some hard numbers:

As of 2010, 73 million people reported problems paying their medical bills or were paying off medical debt, up from 58 million in 2005. An estimated 44 million people were paying off medical debt in 2010, up from 37 million in 2005. (Source: Press release, The Commonwealth Fund, March 16, 2011.)

The least surprising news story of June 2012 will be the Supreme Court decision to revoke the Affordable Health Care Act, setting back even those modest improvements to health care affordability. But note that the Commonwealth Fund also found that

Sixty-one percent of those with medical debt or bill problems were insured at the time care was provided.

There is little available recent data on medical debt and no collated national figure that I could find.

Student debt has been the most widely discussed form of debt here. Today NYU President John Sexton announced:

Undergraduate tuition, fees, and room and board – For the 2012-13 academic year, we have budgeted an increase of 3.8% in tuition and mandatory fees, and 3.5% in room and board; the aggregate increase in the cost of attendance will be 3.8%.

So that $1 trillion of student debt is going to keep rising beyond the rate of inflation yet again.

The debt square defines the aspirations of most citizens: health, education, shelter, consumer goods. It defines them as things you need or want but renders the means of obtaining them into an object of shame. Who hasn’t stayed awake at night worrying about one or other of these debts? The answer to that question is now simple: the one per cent.

What is the answer to the prison of the debt square? To make it public. As we can see with mortgages, the so-called free market wants to move non-prime debt to the public sector anyway. With public money so cheap, the government could take on all private debt and have us reimburse them at the one percent rate it charges banks. Or it could just abolish the debt altogether.

That government is not this government that we have now. It is the government that the students in Quebec want. It is, more exactly, not a government at all but a means of enabling the possibility of autonomous citizens. To get there, we have to imagine not just a world without student debt, but one in which you are not a loan. A life to be lived rather than a credit rating to be lived up to: debt strike!