Category Archives: Uncategorized

Self-killing and (the) Depression

Posted on by

The subprime Depression of 2008 to the present has entailed a notable wave of personal depression. At the same time, neoliberal austerity presents itself as a required correction from the superego for the excessive “exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan notoriously called it, of the boom. Yet the formerly exuberant are not the depressed: we are. Depressed about debt, climate change, unemployment, you name it. All efforts to mobilize a political response, even the irreversible step of self-killing, have to be discredited in order to maintain the regime of credit. It is in every sense unsustainable.

A memorial for Dimitris Christoulas

These thoughts were prompted by the observation that the suicide of a 77-year-old man in Syntagma Square on April 4 has now provoked a wave of mitigating journalism. Feeling unable to survive on his austerity-reduced pension, Dimitris Christoulas left a suicide note that was a call to action (I don’t wish to edit this, so the quote is long):

The Tsolakoglou [1940s Nazi-collaborationist] occupation government literally nullified my ability to survive on a decent pension, for which I had already paid (without government aid) for 35 years. I am of an age that prevents me from offering a decent individual response (without of course ruling out the possibility of being the second person to take arms, should one person decide to do so), I find no solution other than a dignified end, before resorting to going through garbage in order to cover my nutritional needs. One day, I believe, the youth with no future will take up arms and hang the national traitors at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did with Mussolini in 1945 [at Milan’s Piazzale Loreto[.

Not unlike Stéphane Hessel, the former French Resistance activist turned writer, Christoulas saw a parallel between the fascist occupation of Greece in the 1940s and the current decimation of social life by the Troika.

In the days following, pieces from Ireland to Italy, Jakarta and now New York have created a new syntagm “suicide by economic crisis,” traveling from newspaper to newspaper. The verb-less fragment gives agency to the economic crisis as the means of self-killing, just as one might say “suicide by hanging.” In today’s New York Times piece, Christoulas is neither named nor quoted. Instead, the lead goes to a debt-destroyed Italian contractor named Giovanni Schiavon with a more familiar message

Sorry, I cannot take it any more.

This “acceptable” message (for those not acquainted or related to the self-killer) is the regime of truth around depression, bipolar conditions and self-killing: it is an individual “tragedy,” which could and should be prevented by medication.

Yet the self-killing to provoke social change has a long history. It was a resistance to empire, as in the suicides of the enslaved, and also its tool in episodes like the suicidal attacks of the First World War. Recently it has been the weapon of asymmetric warfare, most notably on 9-11,  and the last resort of the oppressed, such as the self-immolation of Mohammed Bou’azizi in Tunisia in December 2010. Christoulas was clearly hoping to provide a similar inspiration to that of Bou’azizi and it remains to be seen what may yet happen in Greece.

Earlier in this project, I thought about Antigone as a figure for resistance. She might be said to have suicided by state, in the same way that people today are said to choose “suicide by cop” when they get shot by the police. For she knew that to bury her brother was to incur death at the hands of Creon, and she welcomes it as a path to what she calls “glory” in Sophocles’ play.

In Judith Butler’s telling analysis, Antigone’s story reveals that the carefully policed distinction between the social and the symbolic cannot hold. In the present crisis, it is notable how Antigone welcomes the grave as a “deep-dug home to be guarded forever,” as if suiciding wards off symbolic and social foreclosure. Butler concludes that what Antigone

draws into crisis is the very representative function itself, the very horizon of intelligibility.

Butler notes that those who disagree that the “law” (here as much the psychoanalytic law of the Oedipus complex as state law) must hold accuse her of “radical anarchy.”

Perhaps it’s time to embrace that anarchy rather than foreclose it. Perhaps the crisis of the representative engenders a new horizon-tal, making intelligible what it would be to live in a sustainable social world of degrowth and chosen kinship. For Antigone’s choice puts pressure on all norms of gender, as she challenges the “manly” place of sovereignty. It is telling that all the people said to be affected by debt and depression in this recent flood of articles are men. It seems that the old binary that men work, while women care is still in circulation.

I do not wish to minimize the actual experience of depression and its cognate diseases. Each year there are said to be 30,000 suicides by bi-polar people in the US and an estimated one million attempts. For Franco “Bifo” Bifardi and others in the radical psychiatry movement known as “schizoanalysis,” these conditions are not random but actively produced by a regime that insists on the pure rationality of a market that is nonetheless out of control. Bifo sees a “bipolar economy” that insists on more and more stimulus, leading to the inevitable crash. Even the Harvard Business Review now accepts that there is no “invisible hand” guiding the market, which does not attain the mythical “general equilibrium.” Now it’s generally on Lithium.

What would be the resolution for those so depressed today? It would be literally to get outside, outside the depression but also into different spaces, as Félix Guattari puts it

to get out of their repetitive impasses and in a certain way to resingularize themselves.

As I said on Friday, being at Occupy makes me less depressed. I am certainly aware that the kind of unmet need that the Occupy encampments did much to reveal is not going to dealt with so easily. However, the statistics on suicide make it just as clear that the psycho-pharmaceutical regime isn’t working any better. The desire not “to be a statistic,” as the euphemism for suicide goes, is suggestive. It expresses a hope for the resingularizing of people as non-normatized individuals with a right to the pursuit of happiness that is not measured in consumption patterns.

 

 

 

This is what Occupy looks like

Posted on by

Axiomatic: to occupy is to place your body in space, there where it is not supposed to be. That space is three-dimensional but multiply so. Some of these can be evicted, some not. Some are not visible to the empire. But we can see it because power visualizes what it imagines history to be to itself. Let’s look around.

In the first instance, Occupy takes physical three-dimensional space in urban environments. It is attention-generating because the populace in global cities are highly regulated and policed. “Public” space is subject to particularly dense control, meaning that (in the U. S.) public-private spaces, where guaranteed access was the definition of “public,” became the location of choice.

To occupy global city space is also  to intervene in the highly-mediated imaginary of “New York.” Citizen and  professional media alike are so densely configured and adept that actions taken by a relatively small number of people receive immensely multiplied levels of attention. Thus it seemed obvious to state power that removing those bodies from their spaces would end Occupy.

There are multiple spaces available, however, in vertical and horizontal configurations. Conceptually, the horizontalidad of direct democracy is challenged and displaced by the verticality of power and neo-liberalism: and vice-versa. In their trilogy on Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri give some useful ways of thinking about this encounter. Borrowing from the ancient historian Polybius, they suggest that the global empire can be understood as a pyramid with three levels: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The monarch would be the United States, the aristocracy would be the agents of globalized economics, and democracy is associated with what they call the multitude.

Bringing this figure up to date, they adopt the image of the mainstream foreign affairs commentator Joseph Nye, who suggests:

The agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional chess game, in which one can win only by playing vertically as well as horizontally.

His aim was to correct the Washington-speak idea of a “uni-polar” world governed by the US, and replace it with three “boards” representing “classical military interstate issues,” or war. This was placed above the level of “interstate economic  issues,” meaning the global economy. Finally the whole rests on a base of “transnational issues, [where] power is widely distributed and chaotically organized among state and non-state actors.” In some ways, Nye has less respect for the level of the multitude than Polybius but he does realize that power cannot be exercised without its at least passive consent.

Let’s push this a bit harder. The game of Raumschach, literally “space chess” or three-dimensional chess,  was devised in 1908 by Ferdinand Maack in Hamburg. He felt that as chess was a war game, it should now be possible to represent aerial and submarine warfare as part of play. His initial concept was for an 8x8x8 board that looked like this:

8x8x8 "space chess" in 1908

He refined this towering edifice to 5x5x5, the variant now mostly used by the devotees of the game. Pieces can move in three-dimensions: a rook, for example could move from top to bottom vertically, while a knight could move two layers up and a square across. Players use the standard pieces, plus two “unicorns” that can move from corner to corner. The board looks like this:

Raumschach 5x5x5

In short, let’s by all means think of the political as a three-dimensional contest but be aware that it would have more than three layers and the possibilities for interaction are very diverse. Occupy geeks of a certain kind will already have this in mind:

Spock plays 3-D chess against the computer in Star Trek

The future used to be imagined as a liberatory expansion into space of all kinds. If in Star Trek, this expansion was hard to separate from the colonial and Cold War projects of the U. S., the fans were always able to imagine otherwise in slash fiction and other forms.

However, let’s follow Nye this far: the “top board” of global conflict is the one now in chaos. The counterinsurgency doctrine launched with such fanfare in 2006 stands revealed in Afghanistan as the imperialist fantasy it always was–such is 3-D chess, a game of imperial imagination. But with the “monarch” having lost control of the top, the game is now open in a variety of ways.

Vertical power is not just exercised by states or interstate organizations. In contrast to their usual emphasis on immaterial labor, Hardt and Negri point out that

Extraction processes–oil, gas, and minerals–are the paradigmatic industries of neoliberalism.

This “verticality” of this economic power is literal as well as metaphorical: the rewards for mining fossil fuels and other raw materials are spectacular. The sea level rise that results from the resulting acceleration of climate change is by the same token a literal and metaphorical verticality: only those in the “high places,” like the Tyrel Corporation in Bladerunner, can and should survive.

The primary alternative available form of wealth increase in overdeveloped nations at present is privatization and upwards wealth distribution by means of regressive taxation and other measures. In short, the verticalization of what had been made horizontal by political action, such as the former attaining of free university education that is now a market for private loans.

These are nonetheless relatively crass and unsubtle ways to play. If you have sufficient pieces, they may gain an advantage, perhaps some victories. But there are at least two, perhaps five, perhaps many more levels at which our would-be hegemons are not playing because they can’t see them.

Take the horizontalism of direct democracy. In this exchange, each person consents to look and be seen at once. To authority, this exchange is invisible. Formally, authority imagines itself as deploying the gaze with its force of law in which we are the looked-at, the passive object. In this view, direct democracy is just chaos.

By the same token, as I argued yesterday, there are always already spaces of the “primitive” where power is not vertical, disrupting the arrangement of the “boards.” Such spaces are equally invisible to authority because they are not part of its life processes but they are nonetheless present, understood as ghosts, spirits and specters. Indeed, there are places that, in the manner of China Miéville, we might call crosshatched with other pasts, futures and presents, intermittently visible.

On these horizontal levels, you can win the game by playing only horizontally, or by cancelling certain vectors of the vertical by using your “unicorns.” If the unicorn does not “exist,” that speaks to the ways in which magic–understood here as that which exceeds the “rational actor” theory of value–continues to be a real presence. Colonial power always feared the magic of local religions because it knew that it “worked,” meaning that it generated horizontal values and imaginaries, as well as moves to negate the vertical.

That’s why the signs saying “Game Over” in Egypt seemed so right. But this an odd game. You can checkmate the king only to find, like in the horror movie, that it is back in mutant form. The same is true for both sides. If empire has more power, its narrowness of vision means that Occupy has, paradoxically, more space. Game on.

 

 

 

 

On Optimism

Posted on by

At every forum outside the Occupy movement that I attend, the question of optimism is raised, usually negatively. In academia in particular, you never lose by raising the bet on pessimism, on predicting negative outcomes and highlighting the gaps between stated goals and presumed realities. I get it. There’s a lure to tarrying with the negative and it somehow always seems more intellectual to do so.

At the same time, on a day when I have every personal reason to be a tad pessimistic, I wonder about this. I think back to Stuart Hall, who would deliver amazingly “pessimistic” analyses of the Thatcherite revolution and yet you would feel uplifted by his personal energy and the force of his insight. I’m no Stuart Hall and I’m not making a parallel between us. But his evocation of Gramsci’s old tag about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will is worth revisiting.

What is optimism of the will? It can’t be simple optimism, firstly because it would not have needed qualifying if it were so simple. And in the current conjuncture, to use a Hall-flavored expression, we are all obviously aware of the branding of optimism by neo-liberal politics from Reagan to Obama. Political journalists offer us two incontrovertible “truths” all the time: that positive campaigns succeed and that negative ads work. This polarity expresses the relations of commodity fetishism at work in political marketing: the advertiser sells us what we can’t have (positive), or lets us know we can’t have it (negative).

Optimism of the will would have to be resistant to that fetishism, because it is constantly monitored by the pessimism of the intellect. Despite the term, it cannot be a simple emotion in the William James sense–I think optimistically, therefore I am optimistic. Rather it is the paradox: I think pessimistically, therefore I have optimism. Pessimism has to be distinguished from cynicism, which is a very attractive way to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, just as the logics of capital would want.

It is not, then, just pessimistic to realize that we are everywhere opposed and that the defeat of the immense materiality of capital can seem unimaginable. What’s truly surprising and the grounds for an optimism that is not one is that nonetheless, there is for the first time in a long time, a way of thinking ahead that does not lead to inevitable defeat. This optimism of the will is harder than pessimism because it means you have to insist on that “nonetheless” without the pay-off derived by the fetishist (the je sais mais quand même, I know but still).

Let’s double-back and note that by “fetishism,” I don’t mean here what people choose to do sexually or affectively. I mean the belief that if you buy a new hybrid car, with the immense energy and material consumption that is involved to manufacture such a vehicle, you are nonetheless (quand même) acting for the good of the environment, part of the solution.

Finding alternatives is difficult, slow, full of defeats and without much by way of gratification. That’s optimism of the will. It means going off, as I am about to do, to spend several hours wandering around in the cold and the rain and calling that “Occupy Education,” even though it’s been poorly organized and not well publicized. That’s OK. It’s not without a tendency to a certain Puritanism, I get that. Anyone who has “ambitions” in the emiserated higher education sector has such tendencies, after all. I get that it’s also, in my own case, the very literal expression of a mid-life crisis and for many younger people in the movement, that this is tedious. It is, as they say in New York, what it is, a statement of non-commodified equivalence that is strangely a comfort.

The Cultural Logics of Neo-Liberalism

Posted on by

I’m standing in the street in downtown LA with two friends who are staying at the Bonaventure Hotel, site of Fredric Jameson’s famous rant about postmodernism. But we can’t see the monument although we know we are within two blocks. As they go, I look up and realize that all around me are vast new towers built by banks. Postmodernism got occupied.

Bonaventure Hotel, Interior, day.

Jameson was in LA for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. I’m here for the similar College Art Association, which is the scholarly association for art historians, artists and museum professionals, even though I’m none of these now. Whereas Jameson probably spent his meeting in the Bonaventure, traveling up and down its towers in the exposed lifts (see above) that once seemed so different, I have to traipse down to the LA Convention Center.

LA Convention Center

This is the kind of space for which the words “soulless,” “cavernous” and “gloomy” were designed, although it is of course brightly lit by cheap neon lights, even as sunshine pours down outside, dispelling the winter smog. Everyone feels obliged to comment on how all ambition and optimism is at once stripped away by being in such a space. And this is, you come to realize, its own form of cultural logic. The big box building, which might just as well be a Walmart or a Target, exists to process cultural purchases in the same way a discount chain exists to move low-cost commodities. “Don’t feel special,” the space says. “You’re just another customer.”

The bank towers that shape the LA skyline express this logic all too clearly. They are generic buildings, stalking over the landscape. They are to 2012 what the Terminator was to the imaginary of postmodernism. These artificial intelligences compete effectively with humans for control of space. Like the Terminator, they seem impossible to defeat and prompt a certain despair in their opponents. Is it even possible to fight global capitalism, people ask?

Down at ground level, far beneath the notice of the Towers, a different cultural dynamics can be observed. On the one hand, downtown has revived. There are cool cafés, often using untouched 1940s spaces. At the same time, there’s still no shortage of homeless people and the visibly impoverished, trying to get by among the new plate glass monoliths. Finally, almost unnoticed in this corner of town, the less glamorous Oscar people are arriving. The older actors and directors that no one now remembers are checking-in to their less glitzy hotels. The Biltmore, where I’m staying, is one such, haunted by the ghosts of Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart, who once accepted Oscars here. In Phoenix, I met a woman who danced with Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings (1957). She’s now an Occupy supporter.

Downtown LA is visually hard to separate from similar buildings that I saw in Phoenix. People tell you without prompting that thirty years ago, none of those towers existed in Arizona. If Andrew Ross is right in his new book, they shouldn’t now, and certainly ought not to remain in the climate-changed future present. In Phoenix, they clear land by means of two bulldozers passing across a space with a chain attached to each that tears out all the vegetation. What remains is a flat space, perfect for rapid real-estate speculation. From the air at least, what seems more typical of present-day cultural logics is an empty version of such a space, perfectly geometric, brown and flat, awaiting an exploitation that will now not come. Property values are down over 50% in Phoenix.

Glass towers and geometric spaces of desert cleared for climate-destroying McMansions. Such are the dynamics of neo-liberalism’s cultural logics. I’m off to the Bonaventure for a little nostalgic trip down postmodernism’s memory lane, to try to remember how this once seemed like the worst thing imaginable.

The Future Present of Occupy

Posted on by

Or: Waiting, Watching, Looking.

A summary of where we are so far: we occupy but there is not an occupation (in New York). The movement is now, it is over, it is coming (back). What do we do when we are in this future present of Occupy? We wait, we watch and we look.

If you’ve read any of these writings, you’ll know that I am haunted by the resonant phrase adopted by Jacques Rancière, in which the police say to us “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” Only there is, and we know it and so do they. The question is, who has the authority to claim to “see” the social. In refusing to move on, we claim the right to look.

Occupy will be (future present) so resonant a strategy because it does not just claim the right to look at the abstract level of look-to-look, but it takes over the symbolic space in-between that it reconstitutes as autonomy. I do not have autonomy: we do. It is that possibility from which we were always already supposed to be moving on. Thus the evictions were justified as the hygienic cleansing of vermin, rather than as politics because those who were there had no right to be where they already were: in the political.

”]For Rancière, that would be for the part that has no part to assert its place. I agree. The means by which we register that claim is to recognize one another. In person, we do that by exchanging a look, eye to eye, that oscillates between us and claims that space as autonomous. It is present but as it crosses between us, it anticipates a future that it is come.

Collectively, it registers the sense that democracy will either (have been) direct or will not be. Just as the right to look cannot be represented, nor can the democracy in which all have part be representative in the hierarchical sense. The charge of impracticality leveled against such direct democracy since Aristotle, the defender of slavery, can now be met with the use of horizontal peer-to-peer media and accompanying practice. This really is what democracy looks like, it turns out.

As we will be occupying we will invite the world to watch, as we have done since (in media history) 1968. More directly, the world has watched since the Diggers occupied St. George’s Hill in England in 1649 and declared it a “common treasury for all.” Or when the revolutionaries met in what will be Haiti in 1791 and Boukman declared:

Listen to the voice of Liberty, which speaks in the heart of us all

Koute vwa la libète kap chante lan kè nou

Anon: A contemporary Haitian rendering of Boukman's speech

Not: “I hear liberty” or “some of us hear it” but we all hear it. We have just waited to act on its suggestions.

Yet the world wears as it grows. We must watch the world as well. We Livestream. Uconnect, Facebook, Tweet. Who imagines that this space will be left open by the Guardians for long?

And so we wait. It is a messianism without the messiah, to quote Derrida thinking about Benjamin and Marx. It is that space between “the world can’t wait” and the necessity of Waiting for Godot. We, the tramps of the world, wait and discourse. It has grown dark but Spring is coming.

Against violence, for the general strike

Posted on by

When I first started writing “on violence” after Abu Ghraib, an anthropologist friend warned me that from now on I would find myself characterized by this work. I did not understand what he meant until the very first question on the Abu Ghraib paper was “Why are you showing these to us?” The questioner was in no doubt that, while there were obviously things wrong with the images, there was also something wrong with me for wanting to show them. In the same way that advertising elicits a mimetic response from the viewer (I want that/I want to be like that), it is assumed that critical choice is evidence of preference. So consistent was this response that I later dropped out of a grant project on Abu Ghraib.

Since Chris Hedges’s piece on black bloc, the Internet has been awash with interventions for and against the use of violence that have even reached the comments section of this project. The assumption is the same: if Occupy is violent, and a person likes Occupy, that person must either be violent or “condone” violence. Nowhere is violence defined. A thrown bottle or a broken window count as violence. Calls for context or considerations of police action are ignored.

Just after the failure of the Spartacist revolution in Berlin in 1919, Walter Benjamin wrote a dense essay that sought to define violence in other ways. He quickly set aside the “casuistry” whereby ends and means are permanently debated in favor of the “historico-philosophical” interrogation of the law’s “monopoly of violence.” He saw that the goal of this restriction was not the preservation of “legal ends” but “the preservation of law itself.” Later he would come to call this condition the “state of emergency,” the permanent claim that in order to save the law, it must be suspended.

The clearest example of this distinction for Benjamin was the “class struggle” and the right to strike:

the right to strike constitutes in the view of labor, which is opposed to that of the state, the right to use force in attaining certain ends. The antithesis between the two conceptions emerges in all its bitterness in face of a revolutionary general strike…however paradoxical this may appear at first sight, even conduct involving the exercise of a right can nevertheless, under certain circumstances, be described as violent. More specifically, such conduct, when active, may be called violent if it exercises a right in order to overthrow the legal system that has conferred it

Ironically, German workers in 1919 did have the right to strike lacking for so many in the U.S. today, despite it being enshrined as a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In this view, while the general strike was a contradiction within the system, it was not in itself illegal, even if the state perceived it as violent.

However, Benjamin understood the general strike to be different from an ordinary strike “in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that the strike not so much causes as consummates.” In this way, Benjamin saw this vision of revolt as not being violent but rather as “deep, moral, and genuinely revolutionary.” We can in fact go further than he did. Given that late capital has made a great show of the irrelevance of labor to its process, it is clear that the extensive legal prohibition against striking is not due to the “essential” nature of the workforce but rather the need to reinforce its subjection to the force of law.

Of course Benjamin also did describe such strikes as “anarchist” at this time, and he saw himself as a “theological anarchist.” Can we see Benjamin in a bandanna and a hoodie? I tried but my Photoshop skills aren’t up to it.

Call for A Day of Generally Striking

Since January, Occupy nationally has been involved in preparations for a general strike on May 1, May Day. Today, rather than attend a New School conference with excellent speakers like David Graeber and Rebecca Solnit, I spent a long afternoon in a basement working out some details of how this might happen. A substantial group discussed solidarity actions with people organizing in the Bronx over the recent police killings, especially that of teenager Rahmarley Graham. Much time was spent devising a way to interact with the labor unions and other groups that also want to observe May Day in a way that respects their process and that of OWS. Consensus was found. Nobody mentioned the black bloc.

In all the recent criticism, little has been said about the global context. It might be worth noticing that in addition to all the Iran panic, Israel has just had a general strike. Greece has also observed a two day general strike, while even mainstream reporting sees the country on the verge of collapse. On the streets, the view is a little more dramatic:

Grafitto in Athens 2-11

Yes, they’re talking to you.

The New Eugenics

Posted on by

As 100 million people sit down to watch the only one per cent union members, professional sports players, give themselves brain damage in a state that rushed through anti-union legislation just in time for the “Superbowl,” I’m still thinking about the National Park Service mobilized a new eugenics to evict Occupy DC. This is not the eugenics of forced sterilizations, let alone exterminations. It does, however, seek to separate and control populations on grounds of hygiene and the word “deportation” is being freely floated on the right.

it’s worth debunking the hygienist claims for a moment. The much-announced “explosion” in rats around Occupy DC was amazingly widely reported, as was the comment from some minor city official that the encampment resembled a refugee camp in the underdeveloped world. How many journalists bothered to do a Google search which quickly reveals that DC has had a long-term rat infestation problem? Remember the rat-infested Taco Bell in New York? There are at a minimum 250,000 rats in New York, perhaps tens of millions, no one really knows.

The arrival of haz-mat protected workers recalls some not so distant history of right-wing rhetoric and practice. In October 2005, French youth of color erupted in unrest so serious that the then government reauthorized legislation first passed during the Algerian revolution (1954-62) to give itself extraordinary powers. The relatively unknown minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, made himself notorious for his remark that he would take a “Karcher”–a power-washer–to the minority neighborhoods. The overt gesture to extreme-right sentiment stood him in good stead in the presidential election in 2008. Now Sarkozy has twice been by-passed: U. S. cities have implemented his power-washing strategy against the Occupy encampments. And there is even a chance that in April, he will be eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election by the extreme right National Front.

Hygienic repossession

Such casual deployment of highly charged language and practice to find a trumped up justification for the exercise of power is troubling, to say the least. Left economists have been pointing to the contradiction that global capital no longer has a need for as much labor as is available in the developed nations, even for the low-wage service professions. Youth unemployment in particular makes a worrying spectacle in Europe and the US:

If Spain tops the list at 50%, U. S. youth unemployment rivals levels in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the revolutions in those countries. Occupy does not feel like a revolution but it seems that some on the official side are finding cause for concern. The new authoritarianism has been tempted to use the new eugenics as a pre-emptive strategy against any manifestation of dissent, not as a sign of strength but of its weakness. The hoses can clean the streets but no such tool exists to dispose of mass unemployment.

 

 

J18: Occupy 2012 joins the web strike #SOPA

Posted on by

In solidarity with the Internet strike called over the SOPA and PIPA bills currently under consideration in Congress with the support of all media moguls, Occupy 2012 is “dark” today: this project will be one of those made impossible if SOPA/PIPA, or any version of them concoted in the future, should pass. Occupy the Internet.