Category Archives: Occupy

A Tale of Two Cities: NYC and Cairo

Posted on by

As Occupy activists shake the May Day dust off their feet, the real discussion and decisions over “what next?” are beginning. The calls for global actions are becoming less rhetorical, more substantive. There’s a new form of Occupy emerging, as long assemblies and meetings gather to discuss strategy, tactics and goals in the context of the ongoing global social movements. While the Occupy strategy is of necessity intensely local, its reactivation of the popular claim to public space in conjunction with the European crisis and the continuing Arab revolutions has set in motion the possibility of a globalized countervisuality.

Here’s two report backs from discussions about the movement in New York and in Cairo and how they might relate or interact.

Yesterday, Occupy Theory called an assembly in Washington Square Park on the first hot day of summer. About twenty-five people came and others were drawn into the circle of the discussion as it carried on: unlike the heavily-policed Zuccotti, you can sit down in WSP and no-one seems to mind. It’s the hippy park, after all.

Facilitated by Marina Sitrin, the discussion at first reviewed how people were feeling in general about the movement. There was some expression of unhappiness with May Day’s direct actions, and there were some feelings that without Liberty Plaza, the movement is without direction. Against that, there was a sense that this is a different moment to last September and that horizontalism needs to be reconfigured, that we need to learn from Greece, Spain and Egypt.

A particular turning point was David Graeber’s observation that the real question going forward might be preparing for another, perhaps still more serious collapse of global capitalism. Sure enough, today we’ve seen a wave of nervousness concerning the Grexit–the Greek exit from the euro. That is to say, it’s not so much a question of formulating “demands” in this time of rapidly accelerating change as deciding what principles might guide our choices. There was a stress on developing mutual aid as a form of direct action, in addition to the idea of horizontal learning as direct action.

It was decided to hold a set of thematic assemblies on the Spanish model on successive Sundays. The first one next week will be on climate change and the commons, I’m pleased to say–more on this soon.

Today at the CUNY Graduate Center, an activist from Cairo named only as Mohammed shared his experience of the revolution. As always, you’re struck by the difference in scale at first. Going to a march with hundreds of thousands, seeing people carrying materials to build barricades, or using motorbikes to deliver Molotov cocktails are obviously not daily events in New York. As the discussion continued, I began to see how such distinctions could obscure some important interactions and interfaces of the global movement.

Mohammed mentioned that Tahrir had been designed to be accessible to colonial troops by the British, which also enabled the popular takeover in January 2011. He also suggested that even under the dictatorship there was a certain subcultural street life that was independent, such as the football Ultras whose experience in fighting the police was so crucial in the revolution.

I wonder if there’s a certain fluidity built into the colonial city that paradoxically allows for at least the possibility of the “classic” revolution? Whereas the dispersed, neoliberal, hyperpoliced urban environment requires that (re)claiming public space be the first step towards establishing the possibility of social change? So what is unique about the post-2011 movements is that these challenges to the established sense of authority have coincided, interacted and produced a new sense of the counter-global.

Indeed, as different as Cairo’s revolution was, Mohammed expressed a familiar frustration about the difficulty in sustaining their struggle against a very unified enemy prepared to use whatever violence is (from their point of view) necessary and the move into a “war of positions.” Periods of intense activity are followed by quieter times. Guerrilla art actions have emerged, like women artists holding discussions about sexual harassment in subway cars when denied official space. I don’t think that Occupy and the Egyptian revolution are the “same,” of course, but that, despite the differences in intensity, the different struggles against neoliberalism are paradoxically becoming similar.

In the discussion, these possibilities were drawn out. If there was a focus on the place of neighborhood and local actions from the Occupy side, that is because the more public space is reclaimed as popular space, the greater the sense of disruption to neoliberal business as usual. Then the idea emerged to link Cairo and Tokyo activists over the moving of the IMF meeting in October from the former to the latter–or as it was wittily put, “from revolution to radiation.” It seems that neoliberalist functionaries are running out of places to congregate, that the reclamation of public space has rendered all global cities with Occupies (that is, most of them) so politically toxic that the bankers prefer real toxins.

 

Student debt: stage one accomplished

Posted on by

With a rash of recent publications in the mainstream media, it’s clear that the first stage of the Occupy Student Debt campaign has been accomplished: to raise awareness and make this a national issue. Now it’s time to start working on promoting the solutions to debt that the media still shy away from: Jubilee, free public higher education and transparent private sector financing.

I’m going to give three examples of student debt becoming more visible, two of which are personal in the Occupy tradition of representing yourself first and foremost. My awareness of student debt was raised when Ruth Gilmore, as president of the American Studies Association, challenged us to find out more about how our students worked (for money) and their levels of debt. My eyes were opened to the crisis around me.

Even before OWS, I had crafted what I’d now call a community agreement with my students, stressing attendance and participation, week-long “due dates” on assignments, giving credit for collaborative projects, having no cumulative assessments and so on. I think it has proved very successful, judging from the evaluations. Nonetheless, let’s be clear: debt is  an educational crisis, one in which the experience of financing is the dominant one of “college,” not learning. I’m close to a point where I can’t envisage how to do this ethically at all.

These stories were the starting point for the TEDx talk I gave a few weeks ago. Here’s the video, which you’re welcome to use although the quality of the sound and images is not quite as high as I would have hoped.

The next item across the media transom is an essay by Thomas Franks in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine (paywall). Franks tells the now familiar story of student debt for the mainstream liberal audience of Harper’s. Then he gives it a twist. He quotes an anecdote from David Graeber, in which Graeber describes how one of his former students is now working as an escort on Wall Street to pay back her student debt. She’s literally getting screwed by the system. Franks ends the piece with a quote from what remains the most accessed post in my writing project:

I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

What’s interesting about this citation is that when I used the line at an NYU faculty meeting, Andrew Ross, who’s been a lion-hearted organizer of Occupy Student Debt, took care to point out he didn’t quite want to go that far. Whereas I tend to go for it, Andrew looks to sustaining coalitions–so this is no knock on him. That was a few weeks ago. Now this quote is good enough to go into public libraries all over the country.

And if you have a Facebook you’ll know that the New York Times today published a long anecdotal article on student debt in their “please give us a Pulitzer Prize” format. The piece is fine at the level of showing how difficult it has become for many people to afford college. It’s strong on the J-School 101 theme “personalize the story” with wholesome, middle-class white kids from Ohio being used to illustrate the ongoing disaster that student debt has become.

It’s weak on analysis and deficient on political context. For example, it’s true that 3% of borrowers owe more than $100,000 as the Times says: would it not be more compelling to spell that out? One million people owe more than $100K. There’s a strange formulation about debt patterns at private schools, which range, they say from:

under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Anyone who knows anything about student debt knows that students at Ivy Leagues and elite schools can be just as way over their heads as people at other private institutions. I could give you stories from each of my own classes–see the TEDx above.

Even more bizarrely a federal official is quoted as suggesting that student debt is like the mortgage crisis:

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise.

While student debt can and does ruin lives, it is almost impossible to default on in a permanent fashion. Lenders can and do take money from unemployment benefit and Social Security. There are no bankruptcy provisions for student debt and you can’t be foreclosed on. Default and delinquency rates are up, yes–but the lenders are doing so well out of the interest rates that they won’t ever really lose money.

It’s on solutions that the piece really falls down. It seems to suggest only that the costs of college be made clearer to applicants and that students need to make choices compatible with their resources not their aspirations. There’s a bit of a suggestion that states might want to raise their support for their higher education institutions and some thought from the Republican governor of Ohio that the universities are to blame for wanting to be good in all areas. Funny, I thought that was the point of a university.

Nowhere is there a discussion about activist calls for debt abolition, a Jubilee, free public higher education, a return to education as a top priority in private schools, private school accountability and the other goals of the Occupy Student Debt movement. Now we have to move quickly to advance that agenda so that pious lamentations about student debt don’t become an election year formula, crowding solutions out of public discussion.

 

From Debt to Land: via the Farm and the Forest

Posted on by

Yesterday, I talked with friends about whether it might be possible to do for climate and food justice what David Graeber and others like Occupy Student Debt have done so powerfully with debt–transform it from a guilt-inducing issue to a mobilizing one. In Debt Graeber both refuses to accept that the modern has priority and more simply still talks about a one-word term that has resonance for all of us.

As I write a major university is evicting people who wanted to farm disused land: and I wondered if land might be that word for the set of issues around food, climate, animals, and so on? This is just the beginnings of an idea but here’s my train of thought, FWIW.

Quick background: in Albany, CA, Occupy the Farm took over some land owned by the University of California at Berkeley on Earth Day (April 22) and began to cultivate it as a local farm. Although you might want to see the name as a shortening of “occupy this land in order to make a farm.”

Occupy the Farm

Lesley Haddock, one of the occupiers, specifies:

Since taking over this land, the university has chopped up the original 104-acre plot and sold piece after piece to be developed. Now only 10 acres remain. That remaining plot has been transferred from the College of Natural Resources to U.C. Berkeley Capital Projects, the branch of the university responsible for securing development plans. Five of the remaining acres are already fated to be paved over for a high-end senior complex.

The occupiers have cleared and tilled the land and planted thousands of pre-prepared seedlings on about five acres of the plot. It’s a really beautiful action. The University is using the law and the police to get them out.

It’s easy to see that there is a direct link from debt to land here. UC needs to raise money because the state has cut its funding due to the Republican refusal to raise any form of taxation. Tuition is about as high as it can go, so the privatizing logic goes that it’s time to asset strip.

The land at Gill Tract happens to be Class One soil, perfect for farming. To put that in perspective, compare the urban farmers in Brooklyn, many of whom have to cultivate in planters because the soil is too contaminated, or plant sunflowers to help clean the soil of heavy metals. Even so, such land sells for about $180,000 a square foot, according to the NY Times. While the buildings that UC wants to create could in theory go anywhere, and good urban farmland like this is very scarce, it becomes highly valuable when it converts from land to “real estate.” One rumor has it that there are plans to build a Whole Foods on the site.

Now the cycle of escalating force has begun. First the UC police turned off the water. Today they locked the fence, so people are passing water and food for occupier/farmers over the fence.

Water over the fence at Gill Tract

All this reminded me Hardt and Negri’s reference to the Charter of the Forest in Peter Linebaugh’s Magna Carta Manifesto. So I looked it up and it is very intriguing. Magna Carta is so known because it was linked in 1217 to the Charter of the Forest. According to the British Library,

The Charter of the Forest, 1217

The Charter of the Forest restored the traditional rights of the people, where the land had once been held in common, and restrained landowners from inflicting harsh punishments on them. It granted free men access to the forest (though at this time only about 10 per cent of the population was free).

 

Free men could enjoy such rights as pannage (pasture for their pigs), estover (collecting firewood), agistment (grazing), or turbary (cutting of turf for fuel).

As Linebaugh puts it, the Charter defined the limits to the privatization of the commons. Against the conservative view of the commons as a disaster waiting to happen (because everyone would use them to the maximum), he cites a definition from 1598 that stresses that the common is

a Communitate, of communitie, participation or fellowship.

You might begin to think about this defense of (limited) rights as defining a long period of land use rights from the eleventh century to the eighteenth in which there were two notable attempts to scale them back

The first was back by King John, leading to the Charters of 1217 and then King Charles attempted to revive and extend his feudal rights in the 1630s, leading to the English Revolution. The Diggers and other radicals claimed that they were defending “Anglo-Saxon liberties” against tyranny and you could see the 1649 Digger slogan “the earth a common treasury for all” as being in the spirit of the Charter.

The Marxist historian Christopher Hill used to suggest that when the Diggers called for people to abstain from waged labor and instead till the common land, it was a call for a general strike. There were explicit calls for workers to take “holidays” during the English Commonwealth (1649-1660) that led to the Chartist call for a Grand National Holiday, or general strike, in 1839. Enclosure–the private occupation of common lands– has long been understood as a key moment in the agricultural and industrial revolutions alike. The larger farms produced more food, while the displaced tenants became factory workers.

So it’s perhaps less surprising than it might seem that during the 1999 global justice protests in London, banners were again seen with “the earth a common treasury for all.” Perhaps where the Earth, the global, the environment, ecology and so on have failed to become real abstractions that motivate social movements, land might do it. Just a thought.

 

On Hardt and Negri’s “Declaration”

Posted on by

So Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have published a Declaration regarding the global social movements of 2011 and their implications. If you’ve followed their trilogy from Empire to Commonwealth, there are not too many surprises here but, as ever, some great formulations. Perhaps most usefully they can serve as the lightning rod for the debate over parties and leadership (they’re against) and in starting a new discussion over “commoning.”

Declaration is above all a voicing of support for the social movements and their encampments as offering a clear articulation of the current situation and the beginnings of a way to get past the crisis. It will not be without its detractors within and without the movements but the support is surely welcome.

In the manner of Derrida in Limited Inc., one might start with the inside matter (which is in fact the last page of the Kindle): “Copyright…All rights reserved.” For a project about commoning, wouldn’t a copyleft or Creative Commons license be more appropriate? OK, it’s only 99 cents on Amazon but you have to have a Kindle-friendly device: why not just put out a free PDF? So this post will give a fairly extensive summary of the pamphlet as a form of copylefting.

This isn’t just a cheap shot, I hope. In an early formulation that they return to often, Hardt and Negri (HN) quote Ralph Ellison’s invisible man:

“Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle.

This eloquently speaks to the sense that the social movements articulate in murmurs that cannot be heard by self-declared elites and in media that are not known to them.

To explore these frequencies HN use four main figures:

the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented.

Debt: here HN nicely note that

[t]he social safety net has passed from a system of welfare to one of debtfare.

They suggest that the indebted suffer from an “unhappy consciousness” but, contrary to Hegel, this is a

nondialectical form, because debt is not a negative that can enrich you if you rebel.

They see debt as an end to the “illusions that surround the dialectic,” a phrase that will no doubt get them into trouble in certain quarters, because the indebted “cannot be redeemed, only destroyed.” Perhaps they have ventured here where even David Graeber feared to tread, but it would not have hurt them to acknowledge Graeber’s work in more than an endnote bibliographic reference.

The Mediatized

Given the opening formula, this section is disappointing, sometimes very much so. Time and again, people appear as mere dupes of the media, “hypnotized,” “stifled,” “absorbed,” “fragmented and dispersed.” The theory of the military-industrial-entertainment complex seems more useful as a means of exploring these effects than this lament, to use their own term, for lost reality.

By contrast, “living information” is said to be gained by physical proximity based on a study of an Olivetti factory in the 1960s by Romano Alquati. Thus, at the encampments

the participants experienced the power of creating new political affects through being together.

While that seems clearly true, there’s a hint of Romantic nostalgia in the evocation of the letter over the email and the distaste for social media. Entirely absent here, despite the inclusion of the “image” in their biopolitical production, is any mention of the role of photography and moving image distribution. From the al-Jazeera feeds of Tunisia and Tahrir to the Livestreaming of Occupy, web-disseminated video has indeed created a new way of being together without which it’s hard to understand the formation of global affinities that we’ve witnessed over the past 18 months.

The Securitized

This is a strange usage because it means the production of fear as politics, the “state of emergency” and mass surveillance, rather than referring to the financial securities that caused the crash. Again, HN cite Foucault to support the notion that the prison begins as soon as you leave the house, with no reference questions of digital privacy and surveillance that have recently created waves of activism.

After all, if 2011 began this phase of the global social movements, it did so in part because hackers from Anonymous allowed Tunisian activists to liaise undetected and to evade Ben Ali’s digital surveillance. At the time of writing, Twitter has intervened in support of an OWS activist, Malcolm Harris, whose tweets have been subpoenaed, arguing that they remain his property.

While I completely agree with the substantial focus on the US incarceration crisis that follows, it’s again odd not to see this described in terms of Angela Y. Davis’s notion of the prison-industrial complex, although she is cited later on in relation to prison abolition.

The Represented

The apparent elisions in the preceding figures become clear when we reach this section, which is at the heart of HN’s analysis:

The represented gathers together the figures of the indebted, the mediatized, and the securitized, and at the same time, epitomizes the end result of their subordination and corruption.

The power of wealth, the media and the security apparatus have made representative democracy into the present-day ancien régime, corrupt and incapable of being reformed, leaving the represented with “no access to effective political action.”

The second chapter, “Rebellion against the Crisis,” both seeks to create a theoretical apparatus for, and to give approval to, the rebellions against neoliberalism. The chapter theorizes that

Real communication among singularities in networks … requires an encampment.

By which is meant that the indebted become singular (as opposed to individual) by refusing debt, and learning to communicate outside the mediatized environment, a process that causes them to set aside fear. The encampment becomes the form of the real communication that results. At this point

subjectivities capable of democratic action will begin to emerge.

For HN this is a constituent process, as well as the destituent refusal of the encampments. Words like “must” and “required” get used in relation to this constituent issue, which sounds like another form of saying that there must be demands. At the same time, “constituent action” calls into being “autonomous temporality,” in which the slowness of the assemblies mingles with the acceleration of social change to create an “alternative.”

The alternative takes the form of “counterpowers” and here it’s great to see a strong stress on anthropogenic climate change and planetary degradation set into historical context. Following Peter Linebaugh, HN stress that the Magna Carta, root of Anglophone doctrines of “liberty,” was accompanied by a Charter of the Forest that allowed for sustainable living. In the present, a key question becomes the “transforming of the public into the common,” which they discuss briefly in a variety of contexts including water, banks and communications. They acknowledge the paradox that in such contexts

we set out aiming for the common but find ourselves back under the control of the state.

Following the experience of social movements in Latin America, they suggest we should attempt rather to remain external and

force the mechanisms of government to become processes of governance.

This is a form of organization HN call “federalist,” meaning not a pyramid but a horizontal and plural set of organizing mechanisms, of which the 2011 encampments were an example. In this way, a democratic affect can be generated by the very process of direct democracy.

In sum, HN call for a new “commoning” in which the commoner works on the common. I like the recuperation of commoner, which, in the UK at least, is often used in somewhat derogatory fashion. I like the making of the common into a verb, something that is performed and learned through doing. They close with a salutary warning: it will not be through

ideology or centralized political leadership

that this commoning will be accomplished. To the contrary, they argue, what they call the “traditional Left” (meaning vanguard and social democratic parties alike, I presume) is a significant obstacle:

What a tragic lack of political imagination to think that leaders and centralized structures are the only way to organize effective political projects!

For that, the brickbats will fall on their heads and those of us interested in developing and expanding horizontal direct democracies should thank them. Perhaps a similarly direct approach throughout would have given Declaration a more rousing feel than it currently has, at least on first read. There’s plenty of material for substantive discussion and useful categorization of the past year here. By the very argument of the project, the next steps won’t be found in a pamphlet but in the sometimes arduous, sometimes exhilarating process of commoning.

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry and Politics in Five Pieces

Posted on by

Like many of you I’m sure, I was sent a link detailing the ridiculous prosecution of a poet in California for his alleged part in closing a branch of US Bank on the UC Davis campus after the notorious pepper spray incident. On the Poetry Foundation site, I discovered a set of fascinating meditations by poets about the interface of their work and Occupy. I don’t know much about poetry and these poets in particular–perhaps they are very famous, perhaps not–but I thought the project was really interesting.

First, a note on the scandal. At the request of UC Davis, the district attorney in the area has brought charges against Joshua Clover and eleven students, blaming them for the bank closure. If convicted, the students face serious jail time and fines, and UC Davis will have passed the buck from the suit brought against them by the bank. You can and should sign the petition here.

On the blog section of the Poetry Foundation website, Thom Donovan has recently been soliciting responses to a set of questions about how the Occupy movement has influenced the work of poets. The replies are very intriguing and very different (let me reiterate my ignorance of the relative standing of these poets: I decided against doing Google research and to just react to the writing).

I

To my

great relief–

the world

Anne Boyer

II.

In more or less familiar vein, I started with Brian Ang‘s call for a militant poetry:

By militancy, I mean activism that thinks toward the furthest limits in challenging the social text for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety, and executes actions as necessary toward this goal, often requiring strikes, occupations, and riots.

The somewhat surprising last word of this paragraph indicates how different the sensibility of the Oakland Commune can be to that of (most of) OWS. Also writing from the context of Oakland, David Buuck recalls how

Marx’s “the senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians…” comes alive in the affective experience of bodies socially entangled in struggle, even if only over a single city block.

His example is this video of a contest between OO and the police:

So far, you might think, this poetic response to Occupy is not so distinct to the “mainstream” of Occupy. And that in itself is interesting–that there’s a poetry journal called ARMED CELL (their caps). This identification was not unnoticed by Ang, who became concerned that the

emphasis on immediate praxis made more palpable the radicality-diminishing consequences of unrigorous rejection of knowledges’ political potentials.  This led to the development of “Anti-Community Poetics.”

 

III

In New York, Anelise Chen recalls a very different reaction–a refusal to write at all:

An unexpected consequence of the resurrection: while the occupations were happening, I found it almost impossible to write. Something inside me had come to life, but it did not want to be at a desk.

Chen identifies a strong sense of contradiction in the movement between thinking and doing, which was certainly palpable during the encampment.

That tension is one of the reasons I started this project, to make myself engage in writing, even if the day-to-day requirement to do so has meant that I have not had time to think much about how I’m doing that writing. So I suppose I do it without thinking too much about how I’m doing it, as Chen suggests.

IV

The piece I felt most affinity with, perhaps because she writes under the sign of a certain optimism, was by Jeanine Webb. It’s perhaps the most “poetic” of the posts and as a non-poet, I like passages like this about the collective work of the movement:

We thought a lot about these words: “underwater,” “connectivity,” “surplus value,” “conditions,” “spectacle,” “default,” “visceral,” “crisis,” “friendship.”

If I were to make a similar list about the keywords in this project, I think there would be: “duration,” “performance,” “time,” “debt,” “militant research,” “crisis,” “love,” “dis/ability,” “visuality.” There’s a lot of intersection.

Webb’s post is full of fun links, like this one to a Cut-up Collaborative poem on the Occupy Spring.

Check out the entire piece–this is a Surrealism for the Internet era. Or the link to Lisa Robertson’s essay The Cabins, where she describes life during Occupy:

I read Vila-Matas and Pierre Hadot in a low-rent stone house on the edge of fields in central France. I heat with wood. My neighbours are poor and are out ploughing or threshing til midnight. Everybody knows how to make something, and how to fix what they have. In a certain way capitalism has already left; the countryside’s emptied out, house prices keep dropping, no one can get a mortgage, the cars are old.

Likewise Webb herself riffs on the place of the square as a form:

For my part squares began to proliferate in my own work. Plazas, gatherings, architecture, riot cops, books and book blocs. But also literal squares: square text ornaments and poems in textual blocs. Then, long lines in advancing and receding waves. I began to collage, longing for immediate energies of cutting and pasting and for collaboration,* read Apollinaire again, looked at radical political images of the past, read histories, played a million songs on repeat, thinking of the mashup, thinking of aggregation and interplay, of how to represent the collective, but thinking most viscerally of friends, who I had danced with months before, many who were other poets, being beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested.

I don’t write like this at all but I like the run-on sentences, the aggregation of terms and ideas, the sense of flow from past time–it feels like now but it has such obvious echoes of other thens. To my delight, she then intersects the formal square with the public square and anti-debt politics:

public squares again have begun to hum with energy, and today small red squares made of felt are proliferating on the thoroughways and quartiers and liens of Quebec, on the breasts of thousands of students and their supporters striking and rioting against crippling student debt and fees and cuts to bursaries. Like little safety-pinned echoes of Malevich, the symbol, they say, is a reference to the phrase “carrément dans la rouge”/”squarely in debt” which refers to their state of emergency, their invisible enmirement under weight. These bright squares cover the squares.

That “squarely in the red/debt” badge is a lovely metonym of the crisis. It’s what a lay person would call poetic.

V

On the Christmas of my death when
I swam by myself in the peeling
blue of the pool, and
the pines addressed me, saying:
take me to the riot

Ana Božičević

Change has a name: anti-austerity

Posted on by

The next time someone asks you the “what has Occupy done?” question, you can answer: changed the global political agenda to anti-austerity. A wave of elections across Europe this week has marked a pronounced shift. While elites continue to assert that there is no alternative to continued clampdown, voters have endorsed a new mood of anti-austerity. The content of such a politics is vague and no-one should expect dramatic transformations without continued pressure from social movements. The anniversary of Spain’s May 15 movement will now be the time to claim that such activist pressure has shifted the discourse and to move ahead to its implementation.

French socialists have that Occupy feeling

What is striking is that voters in the European elite nations France and Germany were as notably for change as in the marginalized Greek periphery. Equally, given the continued power of the bond and currency markets, that change is going to be hard to achieve. The euro has already lost 0.5% value by midnight European time, down to $1.30. Expect a major decline tomorrow morning.

It was in Greece that the strongest anti-austerity statement was made. Those parties that signed the “memorandum,” the agreement to the Troika-dictated bailout, are now in the minority. Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, is at the time of writing close to securing second place overall on 16% with 42% counted, up from only 4.6% of the vote in the last election.

The Athens News website translated the post-election speech of party leader Alexis Tsipras as follows:

He said that Europe’s leadership, especially that of Germany, had to understand that the result was a crushing defeat for austerity policies. He also stressed that voters proved through the ballot box that the path out of the crisis did not pass through bailouts and austerity. He said that Syriza understood that its meteoric rise in this election did not reward a party or particular person but a proposal for a leftist government that would arrest the course of austerity policies and bailouts and promised that Syriza would do everything in its power to bring about a government that would terminate the Memorandum and loan agreements.

He hopes to form a left coalition, despite the pre-election declaration by the Communists that they would not participate. His call has been for a New Deal for Europe, which would totally transform the European Union. Consequently, the parties for the memorandum will do all they can to form a government with US and German help.

Whether that can be achieved will depend greatly on the new President of France, François Hollande. He certainly struck the right note tonight, declaring:

austerity is no longer inevitable.

Nonetheless, Hollande is every inch a member of the traditional French ruling meritocracy, having attended all the required grand écoles and served dutifully in the Socialist Party ranks. While this election of a Socialist is only the second in the Fifth Republic, it does not guarantee that anti-austerity can be delivered. Hollande has promised higher corporate taxes, higher income tax on those making one million euros or more ($1.4 million), and a variety of improved social benefits. Whether these can be achieved will depend greatly on the léglislatives, the parliamentary elections coming up.

In more good news, Hollande’s relatively narrow 4% margin of victory and the 80% turn-out suggests that the National Front strategy of calling for a boycott failed. Marine Le Pen looks like a protest vote candidate once more, rather than a serious alternative.

In Greece, however, abstention was massive, nearly 40% of the turnout. The repellent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn benefited from this to claim its first parliamentary seats, with their leader declaring:

I dedicate this victory to the brave guys with the black shirts.

Unfortunately, in a proportional representation system, abstention can let in the thugs–but if this is the best they can do in such a catastrophic moment, they are still a fringe phenomenon.

In the U.K. only 32% of voters participated in this week’s local elections. In German regional elections, none of the established pro-austerity parties improved their votes, with the Green Party and the new Pirate Party improving their positions quite notably in a country allergic to sharp political change for self-evident historical reasons.

The mood in the over-developed world has shifted to anti-austerity. No one party or political formation seems set to benefit from this, although the center-right that implemented austerity is perhaps the clearest loser. Days of action like May 12 in the U.K. and May 15 globally are vital to reassert the anti-austerity theme.

In the U. S., the implications are interesting. Should Obama continue to use empty slogans like “Forward” without specifying an anti-austerity agenda that has bite beyond his bits and pieces ideas currently on offer, he may well be defeated by the “if nothing else, vote the bums out” rule of thumb.

Movements like Occupy, the Indignados and the social movements in Greece are not electoral formations or political parties. We’ve suggested that another world is possible. It seems that even in the mainstream people are listening, or at least willing to listen.

 

Mindful Occupation

Posted on by

The name of this post is also that of community of radical mental health activists. Funded by Kickstarter, they have produced a new publication called Rising Up Without Burning Out. The project seeks to direct the movement’s attention to the normative mental health standards that police the boundaries of the social, to challenge those norms, and to think about how the movement should care for itself. It made me think about the sustaining of the movement, about the history of radical movements and radical mental health, and some lessons that these histories might provide for our “mindful occupation.”

Radical mental health differs from standard psychiatry in not seeing people as divided into “normal” and “pathological” mental states. The American Psychiatric Association, meeting this weekend in Philadelphia, produces the massive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual containing thousands of conditions and diseases for which the extensive pharmacopeia of psychotropic drugs can be prescribed. It’s huge business from the $500 an hour consults to the billion dollar annual revenues of drugs like Celexa and Lexapro.

By contrast, radical mental health first sees a person, not a set of brain chemicals or even, for those who can afford therapy, sets of personal histories, but as a place of

convergence of social, emotional, cultural, physical, spiritual, historical and environmental elements….We don’t have to see ourselves as separate beings, but rather in terms of relationships.

It would remind us that psychiatry classified “homosexuality” as a mental disease as recently as 1973 and that gender-queer and trans people still have to negotiate the psychiatric diagnostic mill. Going further back, there was actually a so-called disease that afflicted the enslaved in the U.S. known as “drapetomania”: the compulsion to run away.

In almost all other cultures, alter conditions of mental health have been afforded respect as part of the sacred, a gift of divination, as contact with spirit worlds, or as possessors of “dangerous gifts.” One mark of the modern “West” is its designation of such people as “insane,” requiring treatment and restraint. Our isolating and cash-mediated society clearly produces the multiple symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that it then medicates into passivity. That does not mean that people do not suffer and experience intense personal difficulties. At the same time, Occupy people are widely called crazy, obsessed, lazy and degenerate–all forms of mental health diagnosis. Evidence of this was claimed to be the prevalence of people in need that were attracted to the encampments and whose behavior did not change when they were there.

As Mindful Occupation points out, one occasion when medications can be helpful is when a person’s symptoms have gone unaddressed for a long period, like those who made their way to Liberty and other encampments. They also describe how people sleeping outside are likely to become sleep-deprived due to discomfort, light and noise–to say nothing of the cops. As sleep deprivation is widely recognized as a form of torture, it is not surprising that one simple way to mitigate symptoms may be to help the person get sleep, which may require sleep aids. Much of the pamphlet consists of sensible and practical ways to sustain ourselves without “burning out,” that combination of exhaustion and depression which has been a little in evidence post May Day.

Understanding the production of mental illness as a disciplinary mechanism of hierarchical societies has long been a feature of decolonial and radical movements but it has not been prominent in the Occupy movement. Perhaps the very claim to have a more rational understanding of political economy and the crisis in some way precludes it. Looking back at some earlier instances of anti-psychiatry can suggest what there might be to gain by developing such a project.

Working as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, the Caribbean radical Frantz Fanon enacted what were then untried therapies in his hospital at Blida. At the time, colonial psychiatry held that Algerians were, to quote a 1952 textbook a

primitive people [that] cannot and should not benefit from the advances of European civilization.

Fanon decolonized his building by allowing everyday North African activities to happen as normal, meaning here also as if they were normal, in contrast to the French presumption they were not. There was a café, a newspaper and even a mosque for people in therapy. The traditional segregation between “patients” and “medical staff” was ended, with everyone eating together. Fanon even ran a cinema evening.

The creation of this “safer space” was without precedent in colonial Algeria. When the revolution began in 1954, it was attributed by the leading colonial psychiatrist to “xenophobia against the occupying race.” Fanon had to leave for Tunis, where he created a clinic for Algerian refugees that made use of visualization techniques for children that are now regarded as standard.

Drawing made by an Algerian child in Fanon's Tunis clinic 1961

The drawings show violence, even torture. While some were typical child’s drawings as above, others were more experimental as in this cutout

Cut out showing searches and torture

The point here is two-fold. What can seem extremely radical in one moment can come appear entirely unremarkable not long afterwards: the idea that children’s drawings are therapeutic and reveal the source of their trauma is now a Hollywood cliché, after all. At the same time, Fanon’s clinic was militant only in its acceptance of the right of those he worked with to choose their own everyday experience over one that was expected of them.

Lecturing in Tunis, Fanon described those classified as insane as

the ‘stranger’ to society..an anarchistic element.

In this view, the psychiatrist worked as “the auxiliary of police” in these situations. Fanon sought to create a “sociotherapy”:

a society in the hospital itself.

What matters, then, is that Occupy create a validating form of the social that allows the anarchic to remain anarchic by means of enacting our own everyday. That’s why mutual aid, food, education and other such axes of every day sustaining have been so vital to the movement. None of these should be institutionalized, even the occupation tactic, until we can decolonize them.

The Media and the Message

Posted on by

Yesterday I left one significant May Day lesson off my list: the mainstream media in the United States cannot be seen as a means for the movement to develop. It’s not enough to say that the sparse coverage that appeared was lazy and predetermined. It means accepting that the military-industrial-entertainment complex (MIE) uses the same strategy in its entertainment “wing” as it does for military interrogations. The goal is to produce a state of perceived helplessness in the detainee/spectator in which the only source of redemption is the interrogator/media authority.

Counter-spectacle cannot expect the MIE to broadcast our discourses of “truth” any more than the interrogator is likely to suddenly agree with his prisoner. That said, the MIE is not monolithic, is not subject to a single directing authority. and currently has very little sense of what narrative to offer. It’s precisely that crisis that gives us our opportunity.

Certainly, we should be careful of conspiracy theories. Yesterday, many of us found our inboxes filling with emails about planned activities for May Day. Some quickly assumed that there had been some cyber-skullduggery, delaying the messages until they were irrelevant. Given the pre-event raids by the NYPD on Occupy activists, it did not seem impossible. Quickly, however, it emerged that the list administrators had been too overwhelmed with work to approve all the messages.

So we should not assume that all the media directly conspire against Occupy. If the New York Times City Room stopped covering May Day events after 5.25pm, my guess is that the one employee working on it went home at that time, rather than there being censorship. On the other hand, some media certainly do fabricate their narratives. There were no less than four hostile pieces in the New York Post, a Murdoch tabloid. The editorial entitled “Goodbye, Occupy” opined that the protestors’ “ranks, as usual, were largely made up of union members, dispatched by their leaders after their workday ended.” In fact, union turnout was low but this was not reporting.

Meanwhile, in the business section a “May Day inspires markets” piece lets us know that “Wall Street celebrated May Day by driving the Dow to its highest level in four years.” That coincidence has been followed by a sharp decline, not attributed to the success of the day’s demonstrations. It’s hard to give a rational explanation as to quite how the same people who have told us for years that all markets are globally interactive can maintain this confidence in the face of the double-dip recession in Europe. In Spain there are now 5.6 million people out of work, a staggering 24.4% of the population. Greece is close behind at 22%. In both countries, youth unemployment exceeds 50%. Across the Eurozone as a whole, the unemployment rate is 11%, kept that “low” only by countries like Austria and the Netherlands.

There are two aspects of this crisis to notice. First, despite the dogma that only markets let people survive, Southern Europe has not had a social collapse, despite very real suffering. As ever, people help each other “against” their purported self-interest. Second, U. S. commentators have recently chosen to celebrate the “success” of 8.2% official unemployment here, a rate that is certainly comparable to Europe’s given the different means of accumulating data, which they will do right up until they begin attacking Obama again for his “failed economics.”

Here it’s hard not to think of David Graeber’s claim that neo-liberal economics has in fact been primarily directed to political ends:

it’s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

That is to say, the extraordinary efforts devoted to overkill policing on May Day and derogatory media coverage afterwards can be understood as component parts of a collective movement against the possibility of imagining a different way of being. As Graeber puts it:

So what is this obsession they have with us never feeling we’ve actually accomplished something? And I thought: everything in neoliberalism can be thought of in that sense.

I would want to frame that learned hopelessness in the context of the MIE. What Paul Virilio calls “the admininstration of fear” takes place in the counterpoint between the persistent identification of permanent global and domestic insurgency. Over and again, domestic security tries to frame Occupy as insurgency.

It has nonetheless notably failed to convince people of that equation, even as various security agency engineered “plots” have secured court convictions of their hapless fall guys. For Occupy has been able to generate its own counter-narrative, using the Internet as a mass medium. From countless individual projects like this one, to aggregator sites like Occupied Stories and Occupy.com, to a panoply of Tumblr sites stemming from the iconic We Are the 99 Percent, not to mention all the videos and photographs, Occupy has forged an effective counter-narrative.

The various government efforts to censor the Internet and to monitor web traffic are not unconnected to this movement. Such clumsy stratagems have run into the immense corporate influence of Google and Facebook, causing a stalemate. In the academic context, this is what I have called the crisis of visuality: authority is not fully able to visualize itself in such a way that it appears that its narrative cannot be questioned. In the political context, it means that the Law and Order view of the world, in which the police are always right, has been reduced to its Special Victims Unit, a ritual excoriating of a series of cartoon villains. That is the message of the media: authority is always right. Can the Internet be subjected to that authority? As long as the answer to that question is not clear, there’s a chance for the current wave of global social movements.

 

What we learned

Posted on by

I’ve been meeting and talking with my Occu-buddies and while everyone is still tired, there seems to be some agreement about the lessons learned on May Day. Without presuming to speak for the movement as a whole, as ever, here’s my set of takeaways, for what it’s worth.

Get up! Get down!

  • The People’s Assembly was amazing and did not have a chance to get beyond its opening statements. Let’s have more!
  • Occupy now knows how to engage public space with disruptive and challenging non-violent direct action in ways that the police cannot prevent, like the 99 Pickets, the Guitarmy, street art and performance. Marches are great to emphasize our numbers but the actions are what we remember.
  • It may not be the best goal of the movement in New York City to aim for a permanent occupation in public space. Salon reported–whether accurately or not–that Marisa Holmes and others were frustrated at the way the People’s Assembly at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park turned into a discussion about an occupation. I remember a series of challenges at the Assembly by certain self-styled leftists to live up to the legacy of the Zapatistas and so on. I’ve been to Chiapas. It’s a place with a 500 year-old history of resisting colonial occupation and an indigenous population with substantial reason to engage in personal risk to do so. Sleeping in a New York City park is not the same thing.
  • That’s not to say we give up on occupation! Pop-up occupations like that in Bryant Park on May Day are beautiful and energizing. A building might be another way to approach this issue, as Lisa Fithian has suggested. An outdoor occupation could be mobile, on the river (why not?), or in disputed space.
  • At the same time, the reason why such a strategy might not work is the incredible willingness of the NYPD to use overwhelming force on a basis that they know will later be held to be illegal. It’s important to know and make visible how spectacular police repression is in the supposed capital of the free world.
  • Free University! This was a fabulous success and was the part of May Day most reminiscent of Liberty Plaza in its day-to-day mode of permanent discussion. There’s already impetus to sustain the energy for more sessions. There don’t have to be full-blown courses, as OccU has already pioneered that strategy. It’s more about a place of intersection for academic and movement knowledges, a mutually reinforcing moment.
  • The connection to immigrant rights and movements is a vital step, as this excellent video shows:

Such coalition building is hard work but most positive.

The impetus now is given by the May Pole: all our grievances are connected. May 15 is the European day of action–May 1 being so “normal” a holiday–and with elections in France and Greece likely to increase pressure on the all-austerity-all-the-time program, we need to work in conjunction with their social movements. There is increased tension in Egypt and uncertain outcomes ahead in their presidential election that may generate further momentum in the Arab world revolution. This is and was always a planetary movement, in which one sector now leads, then follows.

On the march downtown, I measured the response to the chants launched across the varying crowds I marched with. Clear winner:

Get up! Get down!

There’s a revolution in this town!

Is there? Not yet, of course, in the sense of 1789 or 1917. Mostly social change does not happen like that, however, as the very few dates available for such citations suggest. It often happens unevenly in response to people changing their own circumstances or to external forces beyond local control. I wonder if that isn’t what’s happening now?

On the Eve

Posted on by

I’ve been nervous all day, as if I was organizing a conference or a public event. It’s silly really, but I can’t shake the feeling. It’s the same question: will people show up? Other than the Occupy crowd, that is. It’s been a day of running into people who are getting their last minute things done, looking forward, feeling excited and edgy.

It feels like much is riding on this one day, perhaps inevitably, given that months of organizing have been directed here. The cops have apparently also been practicing on Rikers Island with fake protestors. It’s frustrating to learn that the weather is forecast to be wet all morning for the first time in ages–the gods are not surprisingly in the one per cent it appears.

So here’s my schedule for tomorrow.

8.30 am: 99 Pickets. There are pickets being established of 99 corporations and other institutions of the one percent. While we’re on strike, they need to see that there’s opposition. Some of these have been announced but most have not, so it’ll be interesting to see how this tactic plays out.

10am to 3pm. Free University!

There will be over forty teach-ins and appearances including David Graeber, David Harvey and Frances Fox Piven. You can learn about drama, yoga, Take Back the Land, anthropology, urban space and more. Enjoy Radical Recess. I’m helping out and about 2pm I’m part of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign reading performance of Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay! We have real performance people in the other roles, so I’m hoping not to make a fool of myself–luckily the play is a farce so maybe it won’t be noticed!

Around this point, the rain is supposed to stop!

4pm Rally in Union Square

5.30 March downtown with the Occupy contingent

7.30pm on: Occupy after-party TBA

There are great actions going on all over the city. There’s public art everywhere and guerrilla libraries. One thousand guitar players will march in the Guitarmy from Bryant Square to Union Square. High school students are planning to walk out in solidarity in the Bronx.

From time to time, there have been disagreements about tactics or even whether having a May Day event was a good idea. Now I think we can all just agree to hope that what’s happening across the country tomorrow goes really well, that no one gets hurt and that no one who does not choose civil disobedience gets arrested.

One of the later suggestions for tomorrow is: No Data! So there will be no post on Occupy 2012 tomorrow. Good luck everyone and have a great May Day!

See you back here May 2