Category Archives: Occupy

Debt, (new) media and academia

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Now! Visual Culture spent a day thinking about the intersection of debt, academic knowledge, old and new media in the anti-disciplinary frame of visual culture.

A very well-attended first session on debt and academic labor set the tone. Magda Szczesniak (University of Warsaw) told us that the corporatization of university practice is developing  in Poland but students there are not yet in debt, while not being well-funded. She noted that the university system is still in effect “feudal,” depending on personal influence and obligation. Can the so-called deficiencies of this system be made into a virtue? For example, the failure of Polish academic publishing to generate any profit might make it easier to introduce open-source publishing.

Pamela Brown from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign outlined the terrifying statistics, generating despairing laughter. She explained the corporate structures that underpin the debt machine: 94% of elected officials have won their campaigns by being the most efficient fund-raiser, mostly coming from the financial industries. No fewer than four bills reforming bankruptcy laws have failed. The current debt forgiveness proposal in Congress is rated as having a one percent chance of success.

She recalled a debt-strike in Co-Op City in the Bronx during 1976, when 15,000 people refused payment for over a year because they felt they were supporting the debt burden of the management corporation. However, there are no indexed images of the event online, indicating a structural absence in the collective image bank and the beginnings of an explanation for the insistence that debt refusal is immoral and unprecedented. It also suggests an important research opporunity.

Ashley Dawson argued that student debt is itself a crisis of visuality. It is hard to visualize, unlike foreclosure, for example. In particular, how do we visualize the underlying moral contract? There have been attempts to represent the size of the debt, or the de facto indenture of student loans, but credit itself is hard to visualize. He recalled the history of the establishment of the open admission and free tuition policy by direct action in the 1970s at CUNY, where he teaches. President Nixon was afraid of the production of an “educational proletariat” and Republicans used the bankruptcy of the city in 1977 to end free tuition. CUNY was a harbinger for the casualization of the academic workforce, which is now half the size of its 1975 benchmark. Columbia is the third largest employer in New York but is tax exempt.

McKenzie Wark pointed out that activists often make the best researchers, citing David Graeber. He also noted that this isn’t capitalism “it’s something worse.” There is now a problem of representation in general because the mechanisms of capital are so abstract. The humanities should now be doing this kind of important work rather than sticking to the tried-and-testd because it would both make a contribution and be more likely to generate employment.

In the next session on new media publishing, Tara McPherson argued that we can’t visualize just the screen, we need to understand the machine. Databases normalize data and abstract them from that which they index. That point reflects back on the questions of economic visualization discussed earlier. For example, the graph itself was created in synchronization with the idea of the market as part of eighteenth century mercantilism. As many people observed in the debt panel, these forms don’t tend to be convincing when you’re arguing against neo-liberalism. In this context that becomes less surprising. Graphs abstract people into a positivist database. As McPherson put it, “technological systems are weighted in favor of positivism and control,” but they don’t have to be. We need to actively engage the form not just receive the content.

The insistence from the student debt campaign on naming and identifying debt as a personal and political issue rather than as an abstract data point is, then, a countervisuality to the dominance of the “market.” Talking to people about debt is in itself a form of resistance and politicization. The same point can be made in relation to digital media studies. Humanities scholars have embraced digital technology as a form of very large data analysis, a move away from affect. By contrast, Occupy Student Debt links data to narrative. Paradoxically, certain sectors of humanities new media scholarship might be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.

Deborah Levine’s extraordinary Scalar project called Demonstrating ACT UP (not yet open access) uses the affinity groups of ACT UP as an organizing strategy. By tagging individuals, the tag cloud allows you to visualize a vast database of ACT UP materials at a human and personal level. Because it relies on the affinity groups that drove the project, this organizational strategy is both horizontal and political.

In the afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, who made some key films for the Occupy movement in its earliest days, talked about collective film making.

This seven-minute film was edited in ten hours, moved from conception to release online in ten days–compared to the average edit of seven minutes in two weeks. It was so widely seen that it came to have a life of its own as a guide to Occupy.

BFC actively try to challenge the hierarchical structures of the industry and its mantra: FILMMAKING IS A BUSINESS, focusing instead on passion projects. “Collective” here means everything from close working together to a community of filmmakers meeting together and sharing work for collective criticism in a weekly critique workshop. Their films are very different in form, production and content.

The film Spoils deals with dumpster diving in Brooklyn, a central part of Freegan culture. Here the film was made in fairly traditional way with a director in charge.

Welcome to Pine Hill on the other hand was collectively made and produced in a non-budget context, meaning time and materials were donated. The film has won prizes all over the place, including at Sundance, so it’s no hindrance to the reception of the film. In a similar fashion, the Meerkat Media Collective work non-hierarchically, share tasks and make sure that people get experience in tasks that are new to them. They reminded me of Mosireen from Cairo, who have been working in similar ways.

Academia is still uncertain about these new ways of working. Horizontal ways of working and thinking are still emerging and still contested. As the weekend continues, it’ll be interesting to bookend conclusions tomorrow with the Occupy Theory Debt and Education Assembly in Washington Square Park on Sunday.

Now–the right to look

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Today was the opening of a conference that I helped convene in New York called Now! Visual Culture. It’s not an Occupy event as such but it takes place in the context of Occupy and many people attending are involved in the movement. It’s in my academic area, the anti-discipline of visual culture.

Now! Visual Culture

It turns out that we know a good deal about what visual culture is now. It’s a performative network, by which I mean a network created by the actions of those humans and non-humans within it. There are visual subjects and objects within a regime of visuality. The visual object, something that is looked at in all senses, has its own set of desires, powers and possibilities. The visual subject can be human, a person that looks or visualizes, or non-human, such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or an imaging satellite. These latter devices are the agents of necropolitics, visualizing those who must die, even if a human takes the decision whether or not to fire on the visualized target– no visualization, no decision.

The interplay of visual subject and object takes place in a situation that is not of their choosing, which I call the regime of visuality. A given regime attempts to classify what there is to be seen and to separate those so classified into the groups that it creates, such as insurgents and host population; settlers and natives; black and white. At present, we can, as it were, see this regime. So when the police say to us, as they have so often in the past eight months, “move on, there’s nothing to see here,” we reply: “I would prefer not to.” It turns out, then, that visual culture has not become a discipline (with departments and so on) because it is foundationally anti-authoritarian.

And so we occupy, physically and mentally. In so doing, we find each other. We invent each other. We claim the right to look. We have now seen each other face to face, on livestream, on Twitter, on Facebook, on social media and in hearing the call of the other, in its murmuring, its casseroles, its chants. And now the question becomes, what should we do with that right to look?

We began to address that question today with 15 five minute presentations, or lightning talks, a format I borrowed from new media conferences. People from France, Norway, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany and the US presented. Presenters ranged from graduate students to professors, artists, and new media practitioners. They were more or less self-selected people who had asked to present. Yet four clear themes emerged

  • Now: Occupy from the US to Canada and Nigeria
  • Why: War, trauma and memory
  • Where: Interfaces in digital and analog culture
  • Here: Segregation and the (trans/post)national

I hate to single out any one moment but the image that stays with me in the context of this project was this extraordinary photograph taken in Lagos when the entire city of 14 million people rose up to Occupy Nigeria in protest against IMF/World Bank inspired gas price rises.

Lagos, Nigeria. Courtesy Awam Amkpa.

I had heard of Occupy Nigeria via Twitter but I had no idea what it had really been. Even Montreal seems “small” by comparison.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the horizontalism that I first experienced at unconferences organized by hackers, and is now the process of Occupy, was well received by the people at the event. What was pleasantly surprising was the large turn-out, requiring people to stand and sit on the floor in the largest auditorium we have available. More exciting than that was the positive atmosphere, the sense of excitement that I have felt so missing in academic life. Perhaps, as horizontalism disseminates away from the sites of occupation into the disciplinary institutions it can work a form of internal revolution by anti-discipline.

More follows.

How to do horizontal learning: two projects

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Sometimes I feel that it would be useful to be an anthropologist. I’ve spent the past day oscillating between organizing two different kinds of horizontal learning projects, one with Occupy, the other in academia. It would be great to be able to analyze why and how the projects get constrained. So here’s my amateur take. Both are trying to work horizontally with different sets of constraints. In academia, there are some financial resources but a lot of vertical bureaucracy. In Occupy, there is the possibility to do whatever we want but it all must be done in the gaps of people’s personal and professional lives. It’s not as simple as Occupy: good/Academia: bad. The question in both instances is really: why do we do all this anyway?

Yesterday was the beginning of OWS Summer Reboot. If that sounds a little familiar, there was indeed a similar process back in January. If the sense then was that different groups needed more autonomy within the architecture of the movement, now people are concerned that we lack co-ordination. Without a GA or spokescouncil, and with announcements of events coming over Facebook and other social media to which not everyone has access, it can be hard to determine what’s going on–as we shall see!

There was an impressive run-down of all the activities people are involved in now. OWS may not have the mass movement of Quebec but there is so much interesting work happening. Facilitation broke these activities down into breakouts and there was one on education and the student movements that I attended. While some of us had been involved for a long time, there were also people from Occupy Latin America (yes, I know it’s already been occupied but these people are from there, can we move on?) and Canadian students brought in by the recent events.

The result was a great meeting in which we talked about connecting all the different actions going on around our areas by means of a hemispheric emphasis and talking about education as a whole from K-21 (ie kindergarten to grad school). In practical terms, we discussed an aggregating website to pull together all the different threads of education activity, and it turns out OWS Tech Ops has already made tools we can use. We decided to hold assemblies to begin a discussion as to what values we place on learning as we go forward. There’s been so much negative talk about debt and unemployment that it sometimes can feel unclear why we do this at all. And then we want to start planning for September so that when the school year begins we have plans in place.

Everyone left with great enthusiasm for the new project. I had a flashback to the moment when back in September I went to the Liberty Plaza information tent–there was one! next to the Red Thing–and asked where the Education meeting was, and the slightly scary looking person gave me excellent directions to 60 Wall Street. Only eight months ago, it feels a lot longer. Anyway. We all then went off and organized three separate events for this Sunday in Washington Square Park. A mad round of emails and calls later, the assemblies were consolidated for 12pm Sunday and it’s going to be very interesting. There’s some serious co-ordinating and web work to be done to prevent this kind of organizing chaos from recurring–it was not a disaster but it took a lot of time, which is a resource most of us don’t really have.

My academic project on the current state of visual culture is a participation event, meaning a conference that emphasizes participation over papers, no keynotes, lots of short presentations, workshops and discussions. There are sessions on debt and academic labor and a general assembly, none of which would  have happened before the Occupy movement. There’s training in digital skills, which, as we can see, we definitely need.

The real question hovering over us is more substantial. For a long time we got credit, or gave ourselves credit, for being “interdisciplinary,” which is not that hard to do, and even more so for being “political.” This usually meant saying things hostile to the Bush administration that troubled them not very much at all–again, this is self-criticism, yes.

Now we face a dual challenge. On the one hand, conservatives have started open calls to shut down departments that don’t send students into well-paid jobs. This is close to government policy in the UK. At the same time, debt model of financing has become unsustainable and immoral. On the other hand, we need to be taking part in the messy, horizontal discussion of what we now mean by politics and by education, a conversation in which our hard won credentials don’t count for much. We’re going to need some humility and openness, qualities not often associated with academia. Nonetheless, the thousands that are demonstrating across the hemisphere believe in the value of what we do, and it’s time to reclaim that from the bureaucrats.

Will either of these projects work? Watch this space over the next couple of days.

Never Mind the B@#$%^&*, Here’s the Real Jubilee

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My country of origin, the UK, is about to make a global fool of itself over the monarch’s so-called diamond jubilee, commemorating the apparently endless “reign” of Elizabeth Windsor. Altogether forgotten in all this noise has been the devastating report of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which shows the much better side of the country. Established in 2000, the campaign has had some success in debt cancellation. Now it reports that things are getting worse.

Once again, then: No to a royal jubilee and yes to a global debt jubilee.

The key facts from the report make the case for debt abolition in themselves:

In the 1950s and 1960s the number of governments defaulting on their debts averaged four every twenty years. Since the 1970s this has risen to four every year….

 

The current First World Debt Crisis has led to debts in impoverished countries increasing. Their government foreign debt payments will increase by one-third over the next few years.

 

The Mozambique, Ethiopia and Niger governments could be spending as much on foreign debt payments in a few years as they were before debt relief.

These are countries where the Gross National Income–which is not what the average person earns but an estimate based on all final goods and services–is less than $1005 per person per annum. Even a High Income country averages only $12,276 or more. Compare that to the high-rollers on Wall Street.

A 2011 research paper for that well-known left organization the Bank of England demonstrated that, compared to the Bretton Woods system:

The current system has coexisted, on average, with: slower, more volatile, global growth; more frequent economic downturns; higher inflation and inflation volatility, larger current account imbalances; and more frequent banking crises, currency crises and external defaults.

In short: neo-liberalism is a disaster for everyone except creditors. The rhetoric of the one percent used by Occupy is more or less accurate in fact as well as emotional force.

Debts need to be cancelled. The Jubilee campaign has some practical suggestions to this end. They call for a system of debt audit and an international debt court with powers to arbitrate between creditors and debtors and/or cancel debt as they see fit.

However, in 2011 the IMF and the World Bank brought to an end the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, the sole international system for dealing with debt crisis, having given “aid” to only 32 countries in 17 years. Some countries ended up spending more on debt repayment after involvement in the process than they were before. On the other hand, Jamaica is considered too “rich” for debt relief due to its GNI of about $6500, which, if you’ve ever seen anything of the country outside the resorts, beggars belief. In 2011-12, one-quarter of government revenues were spent on foreign debt payments. There has been a 20% drop in the number of children completing elementary school in Jamaica since 1990 down to 73% from a former 95%.

This is the pattern for the global majority: increased debt, increased poverty, declining services. The IMF and World Bank themselves reported in March that of 68 low and middle income countries (GNI of $12,275 or less):

  • 5 are in default on at least some of their debt payments
  • 15 are at high risk of not being able to pay their debts
  • 23 are at moderate risk of not being able to pay their debt
  • 25 are at low risk of not being able to pay their debts

So there are no countries not at risk of default in the world’s poorest nations. Loans are increasing, often to repay earlier loans. Speculative loans are widespread.

The Jubilee campaign does not report on high income nations so here’s some data from a random search of today’s financial media:

  • Germany sold bonds for 0.07% annual interest last week. Spain, however, has to pay 6% and is insisting that this is intolerable. Italy sold bonds at 6.504% today. The bonds in my retirement account are making 1.76%.
  • Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, pays no tax on her salary of $467,940 and has a built-in pay rise every year of her contract. Sporting a deep tan, Lagarde last week told Greece “it’s payback time,” arguing that all Greeks had to pay their taxes.
  • Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin took citizenship in Singapore to avoid $67 million in capital gains tax, because paying 15% tax is too much for the one per cent.
  • Meanwhile law professor Alex Tsesis is quoted in the Times as being “skeptical about the ability of a retail purchaser to be able to play on a level field in the market.” The poor chap lost $2200 on Facebook shares rather than making the instant cash-in “investors” feel entitled to get.
  • Told that New Jersey faces a $1.3bn budget deficit thanks to his tax cuts for the rich, Gov. Chris Christie called the auditor the “Dr Kevorkian of the numbers.”
  • Russian oil magnate Mikhail Fridman has taken his TNK corporation out of  BP: it generated $19bn in dividends to its UK parent since it was created in 2003. Steal oil in Russia, spill it in the Gulf: BP.
  • When shareholders vote on executive pay, companies used their block votes so that “less than 3 per ended up losing the votes.”
  • Retail sales in Spain are down 11% on the year and a staggering 25% over a five-year period–since the end of the housing boom in other words.

In short, we all need a Jubilee: not a grey-haired German lady taking a ride in a horse-drawn carriage with an irascible Greek aristocrat, but a debt jubilee that returns the financial system to a level of decency. That would be the sensible, NGO-style demand that could be made. But the Jubilee Debt Campaign has been making this case brilliantly for years and the situation just gets worse. No demands. No royals. But I think a quick listen to the Sex Pistols might be in order.

Decolonizing the Imagination

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How can we develop David Graeber’s insights into the importance of the imagination as a tool of resistance? Regular readers with good memories may recall a discussion about the Charter of the Forest (1217) that came out of my reading of Hardt and Negri’s Declaration. What gives me some pause about this intersection is that, while the Charter did inscribe some freedoms, it does so in the context of feudalism. While that might ironically be congenial to the present-day neo-feudalism of rents and debts, it’s not a platform for the current global social movement.

On the other hand, I have long thought, in the tradition of Tony Benn and Christopher Hill, that the Diggers do have something to offer here. So on a quiet day, I thought I might develop the thought for what it’s worth. It turns out to pose some interesting questions about the tension between the direct and the representation.

During the English Revolution (1642-49), a range of radical sects saw the end of Charles I’s monarchy as the beginning of new era and the end of slavery. Their goals were exemplified by the Diggers, inspired and led by Gerrard Winstanley (1609-76), a sometime Baptist and itinerant preacher. Winstanley was working as a cow-hand when he felt himself called upon:

As I was in a trance not long since, divers matters were present to my sight, which must not here be related. Likewise I heard these words, Worke together. Eat bread together; declare all this abroad.

If Winstanley understood this as inspiration, it is also what we would now call imagination, a vision of collectivity at a time of social, economic and political crisis, following the execution of the king. He was inspired to send a letter to General Fairfax, the army commander, asking

Whether all Lawes that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King’s head? We affirm they ought.

This remarkable radicality was typical of his style, which insisted on following through first principles, all of which can be derived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group were beginning to reclaim the common and waste land on St George’s Hill, Surrey:

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury for all.

It’s worth looking closely at this sentence. Divinity was expressed as rationality, present in each individual, not as an external deity, as the forces of “vision, voice and revelation,” a trinity of the imagination. “Earth,” or land, is assumed to be the common property of all, the treasury of a land without a state. Notably, Winstanley wrote “common” not “the commons.” Having experienced the Absolutist monarchy of Charles I, he would have been very aware of the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and the setting aside of certain spaces as “the commons” did not satisfy his understanding of all land as common.

His vision was a relay of divine inspiration, internal rights, and righteousness to be grounded in a common sense of equality. Although the Diggers claimed to be restoring justice to its condition before the Fall of Man, their actions were practical and modern. By cultivating land on an equal basis and denying the possibility of exclusive ownership of the land, Winstanley envisaged sustainable small-scale cultivation as the basis of social life. His non-violent form of resistance was to advocate that workers refuse to labor for others, a refusal of the wage system at its beginnings. Historian Christopher Hill called this action the first general strike. Indeed, in a manner familiar to present-day social movements, Winstanley declared: “Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”

It was in response to such theories of radical direct democracy that Thomas Hobbes defined the state as Leviathan (1651). The Leviathan was the figure of the commonwealth, the social contract by which individuals arrogate their right of governance to the sovereign. Of the three possible modes of commonwealth—monarchy, aristocracy and democracy—Hobbes was convinced that monarchy was by far the most effective.

Frontispiece to Leviathan

So the figure seen in the famous frontispiece to his book represents the monarchy as a living form of the social contract. The body of the King is composed of hundreds of other bodies, his subjects, combined to make the whole known as Leviathan. Hobbes imagined the Leviathan as a demi-god, like Hercules and other creatures of legend. He was interested in such “compound creatures” as he called them, as a special instance of the power of imagination, or Fancy. This was not simply an artistic or creative attribute:

whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the workmanship of Fancy.

Representational images are created by this “fancy” meaning:

 any representation of one thing by another.

So for all the fact that his Leviathan was filled with little people, Hobbes was civilized because he adhered to the principles of representation, whereas the “savage” believes in the direct, whether in democracy or image making. So Hobbes places a challenge: all representation is colonial.

So we might want to look into “direct” forms of acting and making, as we have of course been doing, “Direct” imaging might include photography, video, performance and other media where there has been a question about whether it is “mechanical,” or “simply” imitative or other phrases that tend in the direction of the colonial critique like “slavish” (as in imitation) or “apeing” as in copying but also as in simians.

Does this mean we must jettison all media that represent? Certainly not–but we do have to think about how to decolonize them, to disadhere them from the elite privilege they have long held, and, yes, I am thinking about painting here.

For the state colonized the land but also the faculty of imagination itself as representation. It designated sovereignty and colonial authority in and as the power to represent. Representation was a matter of sign formation, for Hobbes distinguished the mark, which is recognizable only to its maker, and the sign, which is legible to others. The opposite of authority was not, then, the primitive pre-social contract condition of the fictional “war of all against all” but the opposite of representation, which is to say, direct democracy. These ideas became equated with madness, which Michel Foucault called the “colonizing reason” of the West. By 1660 the British monarchy was restored and the first law code for the enslaved was published in the British colony of Barbados in 1661. Winstanley had called the revolution, the “world turned upside down.” Plantation monarchy restored it. Nonetheless, the common had preceded it.

The rhythm of the global movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Céline Magontier

Text reads: ” I disobey Bill 78″

Clémence Boisvenue

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

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

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

Montreal May 22--red everywhere!

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

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

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

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

Free University Washington Square Park

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

Unlimited Strike/Grève Illimitée

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

A qui la rue? A nous la rue!

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

A-Anti-Anticapitalista!

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

Avec nous, dans la rue!

On est plus de cinquante!

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

 

Sovereigns to Students: Debt Enforcement as Law

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Occupy Montreal! 5 21 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicago 5 19 12. Credit: Sarah Bennet.

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

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

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

 

Going viral, going unmentioned: global Occupy

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

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

Calama

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

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

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

Frankfurt 5 19

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

Montreal--"Crime: To Have an Opinion"

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

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

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

Eagle in Washington Square Park for Occupy Theory

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

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

Soft circle in Times Sq. Credit: Lisa Sabater

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Civilians in the Red Square

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One of the Plus Brigades tactics taught to people at OWS Spring Training was “civilians.” It means breaking up the mass of demonstrators and disappearing into the New York city foot traffic, only to recongregate later at an arranged spot. It’s a good way to get onto Wall Street for example. In light of the on-going militarization of North American cities and the right to assembly, it begins to take on other meanings. It can be resistant simply to claim civilian status, to act like a civilian, to demand that law enforcement treat this as peacetime.

I had been wondering if Occupy’s tactic as a whole might be “civilians,” a returning into the social fabric with challenges to its normalizing operations punctuated by resurgences on selected days–the next “day” is targeted in New York as September 17, the one year anniversary.

Red Square of solidarity hangs over a union in Montréal

What has happened in Chicago and Montréal makes it clear that “civilians” is every bit as much about resisting the militarization of everyday life. In Chicago three activists have been arrested for alleged terrorism offenses: based on the presence of a home-brew kit. Supposedly the bottles indicated preparations for Molotov cocktails. As might my recycling. Now those arrested are subject to the full panoply of anti-terrorism legislation. As the day has gone on, the police have dramatically amplified their charges, while defense lawyers are suggesting yet another operation co-ordinated by police informants.

Anti-NATO demonstrators at the statue for the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886

In Montréal the hasty legislation passed through Québec’s parliament yesterday was a veritable State of Emergency. Known as Bill 78, it’s extraordinary. In addition to ending the academic year forthwith and requiring students to return early next semester (what happens to those trying to graduate I wonder?), the law then criminalizes protest in a new way:

any gathering of 50 or more people must submit their plans to the police eight hours ahead of time and must agree to any changes to the gathering’s trajectory, start time, etc. Any failure to comply will be met with a fine of up to $5,000 for every participant, $35,000 for someone representing a ‘leadership’ position, or $125,000 if a union – labour or student – is deemed to be in charge. The participation of any university staff (either support staff or professors) in any student demonstration (even one that follows the police’s trajectory and instructions) is equally punishable by these fines.

So my entire class last semester would have had me liable for draconian fines, given that we attended OWS actions (by consensus and in ways determined by group members). They’re not finished though. You can’t cover your face with a mask, scarf or hood–in Canada, with its mild winter climate.

Passages like this make it truly State of Exception legislation, a new low for North American civil liberties post-Cold War:

Anyone who, by act or omission, helps or, by encouragement, advice, consent, authorization or command, induces a person to commit an offence under this act is guilty

You could be accused of giving advice for teaching radical texts, be accused of omission for not reporting an activist student to the police–this is truly unpleasant catch-all legislation.

The overreaction stems from the anxiety that anti-austerity is on the move. Counterinsurgency doctrine holds that the first element of defeating insurgency is to quarantine it and then cut it out for fear of contagion. So it’s not the hundreds of activists in Chicago, or even the thousands in Montréal, that are causing the panic–it’s the idea that this might go viral from Athens to Paris, Chicago, Montréal, Frankfurt–and then where next? This is Contagion: The Reality Show only it’s not funny.

So civilians, yes: people with civil rights, who should be presumed to be acting as civilians not insurgents, who have the right to assembly, free speech and self-presentation. These are very fundamental propositions and for those of you who have been standing back from the movement for any of the usual reasons, now is the time to get back involved. Like it or not, this involves you now.

In New York, there’s a meeting in solidarity with Montréal on Sunday at 3pm in Union Square by the Gandhi statue. Hope to see you there.