Category Archives: Tunisia

Strike Everywhere

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If you live in these peculiar United States, you might almost believe that the most important thing in the world is how many times Mitt Romney lied in the debates (trick question: he always lies). Unreported and undiscussed, a wave of strikes is spreading across the regions of the world that were most affected by the global social movement. The shift from Occupy to Strike is underway.

Tunisia

This is where it all kicked off. Today, the entire journalistic profession went on general strike to pressure the government to accept laws passed in the first weeks of the Arab Spring guaranteeing freedom of the press, following months of demands. And won. While these laws have perhaps to-be-regretted state of exception clauses, they are detailed and extensive, covering all areas of intellectual, journalistic and artistic expression. Light years ahead of where the American-backed dictatorship of Ben Ali had been, these laws are comparable to any liberal democratic state.

Egypt

Just as with the Arab Spring, the strike wave has extended to Egypt. In the forefront here are doctors and other medical personnel. After a series of assemblies last May, doctors called for one day strikes on May 10 and 17. Their demands are simple: effective pay scales for all medical staff, an increase of the health share of the national budge to 15% from its current 4.5%, pay increases and free public health care. Watch this excellent video from Mosireen that explains the new strike that began on October 1 and is set to continue until demands are met:

It discloses a shocking lack of facilities, armed attacks on hospitals, and that the salary of a 30 year veteran hospital consultant is only $200 a month. Emergency rooms are still open and people needing surgery are being treated: without charge.

Doctors now plan a mass resignation of 15,000 physicians to compel action–like some Occupy actions, they are waiting until that many have committed before launching the resignation tactic. The ethical nature of the strike is noticeable: just as Tunisia called for the right to free expression, Egypt advances the concept of health care as a human right.

Spain

This wave of rights-based activism has spread to Spain. Unremarked in all the discussion about austerity and the euro in the business pages has been a series of drastic education cuts amounting to €6.5 billion. School students are fed up and are planning a general strike this Thursday, like their peers in Chile, who have been striking for the right to an education for the past two years.

European General Strike

Today comes news of a co-ordinated general strike against austerity of all workers that has spread first across the Iberian Peninsula and now around Europe. Spanish unions today joined the Portuguese call for a general strike on November 14. Later,  unions in Greece, Italy, Belgium, Malta and Cyprus have joined them. Let’s hope the connections are made and anti-austerity is presented as a political claim for fundamental democratic and human rights.

United Kingdom

A weekend march planned by the Trades Union Congress against the austerity measures and cuts in the UK has morphed into a call for a general strike. Legal prohibitions on striking put in by Thatcher and Blair have limited options for the unions but The Guardian reports:

A leading industrial relations barrister, John Hendy QC, argues that a general strike against government policies …can take place under the European Convention of Human Rights…. Steve Turner, Unite’s director of executive policy, said: “This will be a political strike. There will not be any ballots and it is our view that political strikes are not unlawful.”

No doubt the Tory government will take a different view…but a major union calling for an explicitly political strike is, well, striking.

Estados Unidos

And will the wave carry here? N14 would be after the elections and if, god forbid, there’s a President-elect Romney, it would be a great time to make a statement. It’s not at all likely. There is some agitation building up in New York about yet another rise in public transport costs that could see some actions. It’s not likely to be the labor movement that answers the European call, not least because there’s really no precedent. There are those that have been more responsive…

 

Mindful Occupation

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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.

Working Out Autonomy in the Street

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The emergence of Photography 2.0 is itself now in process. Its “darkroom” is not in a studio but on the street. Its transitional form is so-called “street art,” aka graffiti. Like that precursor, street art may be just a transition to a marketable art form. For the time being, it helps think through the paradox that autonomy eludes representation.

In Tunisia, the French “artivist” (artist/activist) who calls himself JR realized a transformation of photography was happening.  He organized an “inside out” visualization of the people as portrait photographs of random individuals, printed in poster size and posted as graffiti.

A JR poster replaces the portrait of Ben Ali

The project was called “artocracy.” This photographic commons turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past. Working in conjunction with Tunisian bloggers and using all local interlocutors and photographers, the goal was to create a series of one hundred portraits of people who had participated in the revolution.

The photographs were the large-scale head-and-shoulder closeups in black-and-white that have become JR’s signature style. Printed as 90x120cm posters, they were flyposted across four cities in Tunisia, including startling examples in the former secret police commissariat (below)

JR in the Police Commissariat

oron the façade of one of Ben Ali’s former houses (below).

Yet as the documentary posted on JR’s own website indicates, even this open access project was subject to intense criticism in Tunisia. “Why only a hundred?” was the common refrain. For the revolution is widely held to have been the work of the people, not a sub-set of heroes. No-one wants to replace autocracy with artocracy, even as a joke.

In Cairo, the contingency artist Ganzeer—his self-definition—who produced a widely-used PDF pamphlet on how to conduct a protest during the revolution, is now attempting the marathon project of street portraits of all 847 people who died in the revolution, the martyrs.

Ganzeer, "Martyr Portrait"

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who are running Egypt, persist in painting over these memorials so Ganzeer, and his fellow street artists like Keizer  and Sad Panda [more on them tomorrow] are using the Internet as an archive of their work. A Google maps mash-up indicates where and when the work was posted. Users are invited to “like” the link on Twitpic and Flickr but not Facebook, which is now too carefully under surveillance. Ganzeer had only accomplished three of these portraits as of last summer, making it unlikely that his martyrology will ever be accomplished.

The street art process centered on the individual, even when decentred and distributed, taken out of the gallery into the street, is not yet equal to the visualization of autonomy. I have argued that one person cannot convey the right to look: the interface between two or more people as they look at each other and allow the other to invent them even as they invent the other. In his essay that coined the phrase droit de regards, which I translate as “the right to look,” Jacques Derrida, the Algerian, insisted on precisely this incapacity of photography to convey the look into another’s eyes, whether literal or metaphorical. For the autocrat the answer is the same as it has ever been: “they cannot represent themselves: they must be represented.” So SCAF is as determined to push through a “representative” parliamentary democracy as it is to retain effective power.

The nub of the issue, then, is how, once autonomy has been claimed by the anonymous, they might visualize that autonomy as something that goes beyond transition. Street art has some components right–the value of the project is judged by the “street,” the anonymous. It perhaps overvalues the secrecy of its means of production as an end in itself–“how did s/he tag there?” is a great question under autocracy, less so as a means to autonomy. Its capacity to spontaneously generate new forms, however, is a striking way to think through how these issues are being worked out and worked over.

Continued tomorrow with the work of Sad Panda, Keizer and Ganzeer,

 

J19 History of the Anonymous: Steps to Direct Democracy

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Oliver Ressler "We Have A Situation Here" (2011)

To the anonymous, as I’ve often said, the police declaim: “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” To form a subject capable of enacting a different history, the anonymous claim at once the right to look and the right to be seen. When I was writing my book, I found it difficult to even imagine this scenario under the pressure of the neo-liberal state of exception. Now it’s possible to think about breaking that process down into a set of steps.

Take the emblematic case of Mohammed Bouazizi, the fruit-seller whose self-immolation on December 17, 2010, set in motion the Tunisian Revolution and from there the global Occupy movement. He lived in a small town called Sidi Bouzid, the epitome of anonymous for many even inside Tunisia. Some 80,000 people live there, and work centers on huge new olive groves planted by the state (M 15) [for references, see below]

Sidi Bouzid to Gafsa (Tunisia)

About 100 km south-west of Sidi Bouzid is Gafsa, a major phosphate-mining town. In the 1970s, the first cultural dissent against the regime began there, with the formation of an alternative theatre group, including performers like Fadhel Jaziri and Jalila Baccar (M 146). The mining company was given over to members of the ruling clan, specifically relatives of Leila Trabelsi, Ben Ali’s legendarily corrupt wife (G 51). So extreme was the corruption that the entire city rose up on January 5, 2008, protesting unemployment, corruption and repression. Although the occupation lasted for six months, there was a total news blackout. The one journalist who did report it was jailed for four months.

So Mohammed Bouzazi was unlikely to have been as politically naive as he was often presented. Western reports first claimed that he was an unemployed graduate–like many others–but soon retrenched to saying he was a simple fruit-seller. According to Martine Gozlan’s book on the 2011 revolution, the truth was in-between. Mohammed had dropped out of high school to support his family but did want to go to university. One of those he supported, his sister Leila, was in her third year of university ( G 16). For Gozlan, the family epitomized the clash of the “two Tunisias.” There was a high degree of university training with 34% of the population having a degree. On the other hand, the economic crisis since 2008 had led to price rises in basic necessities, mass unemployment and the withdrawal of state ownership in favor of privatization.

However, one year earlier in the city of Monastir, a young man selling doughnuts had also had enough of the police and immolated himself in front of a state building. Nothing happened (M 40). A year later, Mohammed Bouzazi repeated the act, whether in conscious imitation or not, and Tunisia moved to a revolutionary situation. Hamadi Kaloutcha, who blogs as Sofiane Belhaj, is clear that the difference was simple: the diffusion of Facebook and other forms of peer-to-peer communication (M 31, 41). It’s quite unpopular in digital circles here to make this case but Sofiane is not saying that Facebook caused the revolution, only that it allowed for the dissemination of information.

It’s interesting to see that, as the revolution got under way, some of the signature gestures of Occupy were already being used. On January 9, 2011, striking students at Sousse held a general assembly (G 36). In Tunis four days later, key phrases from the national anthem were repeated across the length of the massive demonstration in the manner we now call the people’s mic (G 43).

Back in Gafsa, the workers occupied the phosphate mines again, creating a tent city,

and there were demonstrations, including Che Guevara banners.

By now we should be learning to be careful to make claims of originality. But the emerging story of the Tunisian revolution suggests the following pattern for the emergence of direct democracy:

  • economic crisis combined with government and corporate indifference and/or corruption
  • a dramatic difference in rhetoric and practice–human rights were taught in all Tunisian schools but not even minimal press freedom existed before 2011
  • state violence to repress dissent
  • peer-to-peer electronic communications to alert people to what’s happening
  • a generalized use of horizontal tools that have been used by a few in specific locations and circumstances

Looking at the list, it’s interesting to see how closely the pattern has been replicated in Western capitalist countries. Let’s hope it does not take more violence for people to want to make a generalized use of direct democracy here.

references:

G: Martine Gozlan, Tunisiee, Algérie, Maroc: La colère des peuples (Paris: L’Archipel, 2011)

M: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Printemps de Tunis: La métamorphose de l’Histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).