Category Archives: tactics

No Spectators

Posted on by

Over the last few days, the idea of the “wild” has, as it were, “accidentally” cropped up repeatedly, from questions of climate change, to Beasts of the Southern Wild and gaga feminism. That’s one of the intriguing things about a durational project of this kind, how ideas arise unexpectedly that you would not otherwise have spent much time on. So what would happen if we bring the three figures of wilding, walking and occupying together? You would not be spectating, that’s for sure.

Occupying is not in itself walking but it is moving in both senses. It creates (a) movement and it is emotionally stirring. The Zapatista koan of “walking while asking questions” has seemed a good way to describe it. If “walk on the wild side” evokes the subcultures of the 1970s, Occupy is not quite that. Subcultures had codes that were recognizable to themselves but mysterious or off-putting to others, from Oscar Wilde’s queer green carnation to punk safety-pins. They invited people to look but not to understand the internal dynamics of the subculture.

Both during the encampments and the “movement of movements,” Occupy has sought to change people. Or more exactly, people have made the Occupy movement into a vehicle for change. For many of us, this is the most important aspect of the project, like feminist, queer and other variants on “the personal is political.” In this case, the dynamic was intended to change those already there and draw others in.

Writing in the fifth edition of Occupy!, filmmaker Astra Taylor describes how this has worked for her as a stepping off the sidelines that

has stripped me of the self-righteousness and surety that comes with being a spectator.

As a filmmaker who has worked with Zizek we can safely assume that Taylor is not unaware of gaze theory. Yet she puts herself into the place of being looked at as part of her decision to be involved in the process, realizing that

people are complicated, that the way to achieve profound political change is not clear, but that we must move forward nonetheless, adapting our thinking and our strategy along the way.

This may not sound “wild” but that’s what it is– a refusal to define a “line” that we must follow, to make the now infamous demands, or to assume that clarity is the greatest of virtues.

By resisting the politics of representation, we have found, almost by accident, a performative practice that is unplanned, unscripted and seen only by the other “performers.” It couldn’t be further from the currently hegemonic vogue for Marina Abramovic-style staged performance, putting the self-styled artist fully in control. To occupy, to be wild, or to walk with questions is instead to perform the right to look, in which I invent you and vice versa, a fully mutual engagement.

So far, so hooray for us. Doing “not spectating” has worked for a year. We’ve countervisualized to good effect. What we have not yet done is get fully beyond the militarized tropes of visuality. We march. We lay siege to Wall Street. We do this in the name of direct action as opposed to symbolic action.

But it’s all symbolic. After all, very few of the one per cent actually work on Wall Street itself: they’re in mid-town or Connecticut but everyone gets why shutting down Wall Street is symbolically powerful. Better yet are symbols that do not rely on a rhetoric of power and force and do not mimic military tactics. They exist: the Occupy Town Square events, the Free University, guided walks around Wall Street to tell people hidden histories of the financial district, and many more. Within and without the movement, though, there is a sense that these are not “real” actions and that confrontation equals realness. As Lady Gaga can tell you, realness is way overrated.

 

 

 

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.

 

How to organize dual power: 12M

Posted on by

Five Reasons to Occupy

In New York, the General Assembly has been in effect suspended for some time because Facilitation has withdrawn its support for a process that had become increasingly dysfunctional. As we look at the impressive mobilizations across Spain today for 12M (European style dates), it might be worth taking a look at the ways in which they have structured the events. I’m looking only at a few public documents, of course, and I have not been part of any discussions.

But whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. There’s a sense of a real dual-power structure in Spain and above all in Greece, where the elections have confounded the austerity consensus.

Democracia Real Ya, the prime movers of the M15 occupations a year ago, has recently registered as an association, causing some strong dissent among its supporters. Its themes for M12M15 as outlined above nonetheless seem to have been adopted quite widely. The basic themes were elaborated by the Assembly in Barcelona into six themes for discussion:

1. Not one more euro to rescue banks. Citizens’ debt audit. We will not pay illegitimate debt created by those who caused the crisis.

2. Education and health financing and public management, free and of quality. Do not cut public spending, no to the privatization of public services. No repayment.

3. Fair distribution of work and wealth. No to precaritization. No to retirement at 67. Withdrawal of the Labor Reform. Valorization of reproductive, domestic and care labor.

4. Guaranteed right of access to decent housing. Retroactive payment in kind. Spaces for affordable socializing housing. Promotion of housing cooperatives.

5. Tax reform to redistribute wealth fairly, which we all, men and women, produce together. Universal basic income for all people.

6. Defense of the rights to assembly, demonstrate, strike, unionize and all civil liberties including the right to control one’s own body.

These might be said to be principles more than demands, as there is no chance that the current Spanish government will implement them.

The Assembly has created a set of levels of organization for the discussion in the General Assembly that are more detailed than those normally used in New York.

Facilitation (3 people): Responsible for the dynamics of the assembly.

Containment (6 people): Responsible for managing the people who want to speak to the assembly urgently, questions of process, and specific incidents

Take the floor (6 people): Organize one aisle and recognize speaking order evenly across the space. We suggest carrying an identification poster.

Meeting minutes (2 or 3 people):  will be taken into Castilian and Catalan. After the assembly, minutes to be pooled and scanned to get a summary to post on the web. Will seek to record the sound of the assembly to complete the written record.

Timing of interventions (1 person): Controls speaking time with a stopwatch and will signal the speaker to remind them when 1 minute remains (requires sign).

Collection of information (2 people): Charged with collecting and sorting the names of the collectives that want to participate in block 3B and explain the dynamics of this block. This information will be passed to the communicators with facilitation. Will be next to the calendar or poster information to fill in the days during interventions.

Communicators with facilitation (2 persons): Gather information and communicate with facilitators.

That’s a team of 23 people to run the assembly. It’s true that for the most part, Occupy in the US has had no need of such complex structures, as we have not had the numbers. It also shows what the challenges would be to get from where we are now to such a place.

After the People’s Assembly on May Day, which I would guess was about 700 people, Marisa Holmes and others publicly (FB status=public, right?) expressed frustration that the Assembly had lost the opportunity to hold the kind of focused discussions envisaged in Madrid, Barcelona and other Spanish cities. If that Assembly had been able to issue a set of six articulated principles like those formulated by Barcelona, that would have been very interesting.

Because although New York’s movement is much smaller in numbers, it benefits from what you might call global media sensory ratios. Marshall McLuhan suggested that cultures have sensory ratios by which they determine the relative priority of the senses, so that in some cultures hearing is central, whereas in others it might be vision. Of course, all the senses are in fact mixed together so it’s somewhat arbitrary how these ratios are defined.

By global media sensory ratios, I mean something much simpler: how much media “noise”/”spectacle” does an event have to cause to be noticed worldwide? Here events in New York have a very low threshold, whereas a similar event in Spain has to be, as we’ve seen, about ten times the size, and one in a dominated nation like Indonesia larger still. On the other hand, if it suits, a small protest like yesterday’s in Moscow, can make global headlines–in this case, to keep pressure on the BRIC nations.

In Madrid, the gathering has been substantial throughout the day and has met the threshold for coverage as the lead item on the BBC News website at 19.00 Eastern. No sign of the events whatsoever on the New York Times front page, or even on its World page. Moscow’s protest is right there on page one.

Puerta del Sol in the morning

By midnight in Madrid, the time the permit for the rally officially expired, the crowd was immense–full details in El Pais here. No sign of anyone leaving and no sign of a police effort to evict the Indignados. It’ll be interesting to see whether they try and establish an overnight camp or not. If they do, and succeed, that would be a direct assertion of the movement’s power over government edict. It’s clear at any rate that they could do so–the question is whether to risk violence.

Sol around midnight

Around the same time, efforts to form a new government in Greece had to be abandoned because Syriza stood by its principles on refusing the Troika’s conditions and would not join in a coalition. So the 12M organizing is working–on a transnational basis so far but there are bound to be repercussions in Spain if Greece renegotiates its deal or simply defaults. One year in and things are just beginning to get interesting.

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?