Monthly Archives: February 2012

F29: Against Trapezocracy

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Yesterday the Dow crossed 13,000 for the first time since the crash of 2008. Things have not gone so well for the 99%. Today was a global day of action against the rule by banks. Rendered into Greek, this becomes “trapezocracy” from “trapeza,” ancient and modern Greek for bank. Rule by and for the “banks,” meaning the transnational neo-liberal financial order is what Occupy makes visible and challenges.

Today’s OWS protest in New York made visible several pillars of trapezocracy. The first stop was Pfizer, key player in Big Pharma, followed by a teach-in and rally outside the Bank of America Tower. The NYPD chimed in helpfully by barricading off the otherwise anonymous glass towers and saturating 42nd St with an overkill presence, including lots of men on motorized scooters. This isolating strategy made the corporate invisibility visible in a way that simple protest would not. The trapezocrats came out of their little cubicles to photograph us, although they might want to consider that cell-phone photos from long range behind glass don’t come out all that well.

The “trapeze” in trapezocracy indicates nicely the wild market swings that neo-liberalism has made its trademark, in which they sell overpriced products like derivatives on the upswing, even as they bet against them with by “shorting” the market (a bet that prices will fall). The new OWS  Plus Brigades, dressed as clowns, superheroes and other circus performers, visualized the comedy of errors very nicely.

Standing across from BoA in the cold rain this morning, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone reminded us that it is a profoundly corrupt institution, surviving only because of enormous tax payer support. Its miserable stock price would have brought any other company into bankruptcy but it survives because markets believe the government will always support it.

Matt Taibbi addresses the crowd at Bryant Park

Some of the details he was impressively able to recall were remarkable: the sub-prime bonds that banks issued against mortgages were ranked as AAA: only four corporations in America have AAA rating. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway with over $20 billion in capital is AAB. But a set of bonds drawn against random people’s mortgages, many of whom were shuffled through the process in the most negligent way, were AAA. One Bank of America employee alone recalled forging 8000 documents a month to facilitate creating more mortgages.

Meanwhile the administration has encouraged BoA to move its corrupted $73 trillion in derivatives from the speculative end of the bank to the federally-insured depository side. Now every taxpayer in America owes for BoA’s speculative bets. But should a student or homeowner ask for rescheduled debt, lower interest or reduced principal, the cry of moral turpitude goes up all around.

Elsewhere in his magazine today, you can read the Wikileaked document from the Department of Homeland Security on OWS:

The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests.

As RS point out, why is the onus on “controlling protestors” as opposed to the criminals in the banks? Good for them–but is anyone else a tad troubled that a music magazine is doing the most incisive reporting on the crisis?
Let’s do a quick review of some other actions against the Trapezocracy:
In Arizona, a small group of protestors shut down a G4S privately-owned detention and deportation “facility” by direct action. As Angela Davis has long reminded us, the prison-industrial complex is the negation of abolition democracy, as well as a highly profitable privatized “enterprise.” By the way, if you are a university employee with a TIAA-CREF pension, you are a shareholder in G4S. The company resorted to cutting down their own fence to get out!

Picket at Acelor Mittal, France

Across the Atlantic, at the occupied Acelor Mittal steel furnace in France, a joint union picket closed all operations down for 24 hours beginning yesterday morning French time, in defense of their jobs. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that turnout for the anti-austerity F29 protest in Paris was higher than expected, about 15,000:

Rally at the Place de la Bastille, Paris F29

And the indignados, who never went away, turned out all over Spain where unemployment is 23% and over 50% among 16-24 year-olds.

Barcelona Student March F29

This student march in Barcelona in defense of the public universities was matched by similar rallies in Madrid, Valencia and across the country.

Finally, the Greek “parliament” today rubber-stamped the demands of the Troika, the very embodiment of Trapezocracy, cutting pensions and the minimum wage for a country deep in Depression. There were only symbolic protests, as people know the sell-out was done. The market responded by putting Greece into default anyway but the European Central Bank saved the Trapezocracy by opening yet another slush fund. This story is not even beginning to be over.

Tomorrow: M1 Occupy Education!

 

 

Abolition Democracy–Visualizing Occupy

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As part of the build-up to May 1 and beyond, I’m going to devote a series of posts to the concept of the general strike and abolition democracy as the means by which we might visualize Occupy. Over the next few weeks, I want to delineate a genealogy that draws its energies from the abolition crisis in the Atlantic world (1861-77), triangulated by the abolition of US slavery, the Paris Commune and Reconstruction. In a moment where we are so often told it is impossible to imagine the end of capitalism, let’s draw energy from the overthrow of a much longer-lasting means of production–chattel slavery.

While these events are of course remote from present-day concerns, the unexpunged energy of that moment can inform and illuminate our own. Just as Walter Benjamin looked back to the formation of Empire from 1830-71 to understand its crisis in the moment of European fascism (1923-45), so too might we imagine the resistance to the present crisis of the military-industrial complex by considering the resistance to the crisis of the plantation complex. In short, this is the work that an intellectual and historical materialism can contribute to visualizing Occupy as a movement in and across time as well as space.

In affiliation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Angela Y. Davis, I think of abolition democracy as the radical transformation of democracy both so that all have a part in its process and so that social institutions designed to exclude designated sectors of the population from that process should be abolished. In his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois saw that “the true significance of slavery” was the question of democracy:

What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black and white, became free, were given schools and the right to vote, what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men [sic] regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship would rule, and how would property and privilege be protected?

If Occupy has a signature issue it is economic justice, but its signature as a movement is the commitment to a renewed democracy that reopens such questions. The force of abolition democracy is its capacity to at once visualize what needs to be transformed and what might result from that transformation. It is therefore realist in the sense that it envisages the real difficulties of the present, that which must be made sense of, but also is aware of real possibilities for future alternatives.

In the nineteenth century, the dynamics of abolition, colonization and revolution formed a new realism that I call “abolition realism.” Abolition realism brought together the general strike and the Jubilee (the end of slavery and debt) in order to forge a refusal of slavery, such that abolition was observable, and capable of being represented and sustained. Consequently, it needed to be legible to others as “real,” as well as to those involved in making it.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx summarized the dilemma of revolutionary change as “the creation of something which does not yet exist.” Such creation took two forms. First it was necessary to name what was being created and then to give it visualizable and recognizable form. In short, this was a task of imagination.

Timothy O'Sullivan, Untitled (former 'slaves', nr. Beaufort, S. Carolina), 1862

The enslaved in the United States engaged in this representative labor immediately at the outbreak of the Civil War. As soon as hostilities commenced, the Sea Islands of South Carolina were captured by Union forces in 1861, causing the plantation owners to flee in disarray. With the Emancipation Proclamation still two years off, the status of the enslaved Africans left behind was unresolved, in a kind of juridical no-man’s-land or interregnum. It was clear to many African Americans that this kind of freedom was better than none and many made their way there. We can now say that they occupied the Sea Islands.

For Du Bois, this mass migration was not a casual activity but a general strike of the enslaved, a decisive move to end forced labor:

This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps half a million people.

Even today one can read historical accounts by Ivy League historians claiming that the abolition of slavery had been inevitable since 1776, as the logical end point of the Declaration of Independence. Du Bois and many others, insisted to the contrary that slavery was ended by the enslaved themselves.

Timothy O’Sullivan, who later became famous for his photographs of the American West, captured the “general strike” against slavery as official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. At the Old Fort Plantation, Beaufort, O’Sullivan took a group photograph of well over a hundred African Americans (above). The group represented a mix of those on the move during the war and those to whom the war had suddenly arrived where they were already located.

There were African Americans illegally volunteering for the Union army, known as “contrabands,” wearing soldier’s caps (most clearly at extreme left, third row back.) The term was a legal fiction, reinforcing the paradox that these soldiers fighting for freedom were not free and had “stolen” themselves. The camera was placed high up on the roof of a former slave cabin in order to get everyone into the shot in a bright, sharp light that produced some strong contrasts leaving some faces in “white-out,” others too dark to see. Others moved before the exposure was complete, creating a “ghost” at the left edge and many blurred expressions.

The long exposure time prevented any displays of celebration but the very event of the photograph itself suggests that all the participants were aware of the historical significance of the moment. There was no leader present, or a suggestion of a hierarchy. Men, women and children are gathered together in a collective assertion of their right to look and therefore be seen.

Under slavery, the enslaved were forbidden to “eyeball” the white population as a whole, a law that remained in force in the Carolinas until 1952 and is active in today’s prison system. So the simple act of raising the look to a camera, and engaging with it, constituted a rights claim to a subjectivity that could engage with sense experience. The photograph can be seen, then, as depicting direct democracy, the absence of mastery.

On the Sea Islands, the space between regimes became a space without regime, democracy. Their occupation hails ours across time, one space of temporary autonomy to another. See them.

Seeds of Democracy and the Smog of Law

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Today was the inaugural Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park seed swap and seed library. Just to be sure we got the point, a federal judge rejected a class action lawsuit by organic farmers against Monsanto. Chemical culture got a boost from the UK government who decided that their own Parliamentary recommendations on clean air are too expensive, even though the pollution is acknowledged to kill thousands a year. To adapt Gandhi, we might say that Western democracy would be a very good idea.

Seed swapping at Liberty/Zuccotti today

Occupy the Food Supply’s day of action began outside the Stock Exchange and then marched to Liberty. We heard from David Murphy (below), an Iowa-based activist with Food Democracy Now! about the threat posed by Monsanto’s aggressive patent campaign for its genetically-modified corn. He held up an ear of Oaxaca corn that he had acquired at the recent California seed swap (covered here).

Murphy with indigenous corn

Because it has been decreed by agribusiness that corn is yellow and that other forms are therefore not corn, this green cob is a biological misfire in their view. In fact, Monsanto used the food crisis to push GMO corn into Mexico:

After originally denying authorization for a pilot program to cultivate its GM corn in Sinaloa last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) just gave the company the green light to plant genetically modified yellow corn resistant to the herbicide glyphosate as a part of a pilot program in Tamaulipas’ current agricultural cycle. According to the National Commission for the Use and Understanding of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Tamaulipas is home to 16 of the 59 remaining strains of native corn.

The risk of contamination between the GMO corn and native varietals is clear to everyone except agribusiness and their allies, who don’t care. Nonetheless, Monsanto also aggressively sue farmers who find themselves accidentally growing Monsanto’s patented pesticide-resistant plants because of seed dispersal. That is to say, they not only patent life, they sue it.

The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and several other growers and organizations filed a counter-suit against Monsanto to prevent the company from taking such hostile action. Regrettably but unsurprisingly, today we learned that:

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a “transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists.”

The hard lesson here is that seed democracy is unlikely to be fostered by a legal system whose prime function is the defense of “property” rights.

Against this grim background, Liberty was filled with would-be urban growers collecting and swapping seeds. The organizers had sensibly brought an extensive collection, which they gave away in packets and then encouraged us to sub-divide amongst ourselves.

Seed distribution

The promise exchanged was that everyone who grew plants should let a portion run to seed and bring them back to the next seed swap, or to create a seed library. On the way downtown, I happened to read an essay by Jeff Sharlet about OWS in which he spoke of the “joyousness” and “beauty” of what he called “the physical democracy” of Zuccotti during the encampment. In the more confrontational atmosphere post-eviction, we sometimes forget what that was like and how good it felt. This event reminded me and gave me hope.

And in case you wondered why we occupied in the first place, a quick look over the Atlantic shows why. In November 2011, a Parliamentary committee reported that air pollution caused over 30,000 death in 2008. EU air quality standards are being flouted wildly in London, whose air is notorious.

Welcome to London

Yet today the appalling heirs to Mrs Thatcher (another quick boo for Meryl Streep here, please) in power in the UK dismissed the issue as generating “disproportionate costs.” Disproportionate to whom? Certainly not to the one in five Londoners whose deaths are attributable to the pollution, a figure the government did not dispute. And, let’s see, who thinks we’ll have a debate about London air quality before the Olympics in the way that we did before the Beijing Olympics?

These two issues are linked biologically as well as conceptually. Aldo Gonzalez, a Zapotec engineer who has led the struggle against GMO corn in Mexico, points out that indigenous varietals evolved over 10,000 years in a great diversity of climates and altitudes. It may very well be literally life-saving to have some of these hardier plants at our disposal once the neo-liberals have had their way with the climate.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When the Occupy movement began, the Very Important People wanted to know what our demands were. When the courts and the representative governments reject basic claims to life–except should one happen to be a foetus–there was and is no point in making demands to them. You have to sow democracy.

 

 

Occupy the Oscars: Our Top Hated Nominations!

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I spent the day on a plane from LA to New York reading the papers about the Oscars and watching films in the back of the seat in front. So it seems proper to offer a guide to Occupy The Oscars (OTO) with our top hated nominations! Let’s note: there is going to be an actual Occupy the Oscars action (or so I heard), so I respect their initiative. Also: we hated lots of non-nominated films and didn’t see many of the films released since September because of Occupy.

Here’s the opening monologue: the main reason OTO hates the Oscars is that the Hollywood film industry has somehow managed to generate an entire roster of nominations that makes not even the slightest allusion to the crisis that began in 2008. I don’t expect, or even want, Occupy: The Movie, or more Orientalist films about the Arab Spring.

But would it be too much to ask that the dominant culture industry–and one of the dominant industries period–in the US make some acknowledgement of the Depression? The one that’s happening now, that is, not the one in the 1930s? Or are we set for a repeat of the Tinseltown movies of the post-1929 crash in which everyone is just about to play tennis before heading off to the Copacabana? The mythology of liberal Hollywood turns out to be a slight preference for the left of centre, unwilling even to acknowledge one of the great social events of its time. So misty-eyed and nostalgic are the Oscars this year that they even brought back Billy Chrystal and, yes, I’m afraid he’s going to sing.

Which brings us to the first OTO most hated nomination: The Artist! Not because it’s much-touted photography is in fact mediocre; or even because the vamping and mugging that passes for silent-screen acting is such a bore. But because the afore-mentioned 1929 crash is reduced to a bit part in the predictable character development of Valentin, with a few picturesque Skid Row types thrown in as background color (I am also going to hate when he accepts the Oscar with a silent performance). So even the displacement of the Depression into the past cannot be fully acknowledged.

It’s traditional to have a few minor nominations next, so let’s note the OTO hated all the original scores and best songs as usual. And even the industry has noticed that the documentaries and foreign films categories are a joke–although one spot of non-hate is The Separation.

Next up: OTO hated Midnight in Paris! Although not hated as much as some of the other top hated nominations, the silly romanticization of a Paris where there are never any African diaspora people, let alone any hint of the radical politics of 1920s Paris made us tired. Mostly we hate Woody Allen movies these days because of his sad lusting after actresses like Scarlett Johansenn–it’s very bad for the Jews.

Moving on: OTO really hated War Horse! Here we can’t abide the way that all the lush photography, hyper-realistic period detail and swelling music renders aesthetic the obscenity of the First World War that the film is supposedly criticizing. This is not the trivial point that it may seem. The militarization of US culture throughout the military-industrial complex has depended on what Fanon called “an aesthetic of respect for the status quo.” This aesthetic is not directly about beauty so much as a sense that things are right, or as they should be, epitomized and embodied by the military trappings of uniform, flags and drill. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was also nominated in this category for perpetuating the 9-11 mythologies.

Next category: movies that OTO wished had thought it through a little better. First in this category: The Descendants! As much as I quite liked the film, the central drama of whether or not to sell the family land for a resort is far less compelling post-2008 than when Kaui Hart Hemmings novel was published in 2007. Present-day Hawai’i has seen a major decline in tourism following the recession, as well as a resurgence of the Native Sovereignty Movement. Also nominated here: Moneyball! This film wants to tell a story about small-town grit triumphing over the Big City but it doesn’t hang together. Billy Beane applies Ivy League neo-liberal economics to baseball to middling effect: it gets him out of the baseball basement but not into the World Series. In exactly the same way, a tech company (say) might rise quickly but to become hegemonic, it needs a deal with Google or Facebook.

And now: the moment you’ve all been waiting for: OTO‘s most-hated nomination of all: once again, in a cake walk, the nomination of Meryl Streep for best actress in The Iron Lady for playing Margaret Thatcher!! Maximum hate on all levels!!! Thatcher is portrayed by Streep as a modified feminist hero, battling against evil men, as if there had never been women in British politics before–let’s just remember Tony Benn’s mantra: The Diggers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes. Worse yet, the film airbrushes precisely the form of ruthless neo-liberal politics that have generated the present crisis. OTO did of course refuse to see this film but sat through the apparently endless trailer and is unanimous in awarding La Streep the most hated nomination of 2012!!

All opinions expressed in this commentary are not necessarily the opinion of Occupy Wall Street. If you experience anger or rage while reading them, please consult your bartender.

Please turn off the Oscars and watch almost anything else except Downtown bloody Abbey.

 

Horizontal Writing and Abolition Publishing

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Over the course of a long day at CAA, we debated with artists and art historians as to the value of open source, open access digital media projects. For many in the audiences, the question at stake was one of professional development.  Personally, I feel a synergy between the horizontalizing work I have been developing in new media, including on this blog, and the pressure for a direct or abolition democracy in which horizontal process is a central tactic. Merge the two and you might get: abolition publishing.

A horizontal “writing” is always on our side, whether that writing be text, code, or a drawing. It is simple, as in the sign drawn on cardboard, as well as complex. As the technology of the right to look it goes backwards and forwards between its authors and its audiences, constantly affirming consent. It worries about the “author” in “authority” from the place of its claim for autonomy.

This in-between is the place of the spectre, the place of revolt. In terms of today’s discussion, this is the in-between space of “revolt” in the art history of the 1970s and 80s that got me involved in questions of the visual, beginning with feminist questionings of the gaze, moving via a Marxist interrogation of the “popular” image, to an engagement with the social that produced visual culture. More recently, there has been the widely discussed “revolution” of digital humanities, especially in the 2008-9 period, even though many are distancing themselves from these rhetorics now. And now these spectres are confronted by the real revolutions of 2011 and the challenges of 2012.

As I have often observed here, this circulation of information and ideas has been enabled by a public/private interface from the Privately Owned Public Spaces like Zuccotti to the interface of Facebook, Twitter and bodies in space symbolized by Tahrir. It is now time to think about sustaining those exchanges in the common space that we can produce together. As we have seen, we cannot rely on occupying the interstices, the in-between. We need to be bodies in space where they are not supposed to be. Such bodies are writing in places they are not supposed to: in the most vertical of institutions that is the university, the most vertical of all verticalities is publishing. Direct democracy in publishing exists, is needed, and can be whatever we all want it to be. It would be abolition publishing for an abolition democracy.

The need is well-known—debt epitomizes it, whether in the crisis of student debt, university debt for neo-liberal expansion, or the debt presumed to be owed by authors to publishers. Last year, scientific publishers Elsevier generated $3.6bn revenue of which 36% was profit—that’s a billion dollars of profit on academic labor. This isn’t market forces, it’s extortion.

Alternatives exist from the open access publishing of Open Humanities Press to the non-hierarchical multi-media platform Scalar. These formats allow for an exploration of autonomy. I call it non-hierarchical in the formal sense: every entry is equal, whether you think of it as a page, a tag, media or whatever. Thus Scalar is not so much non-linear—because we tend to use it to tell stories, just ones that are recursive and looped—so much as it is non-hierarchical. This is a counter-visuality to the authority which insists on the viewpoint of the hero or great man. So whereas projects like the excellent Vectors were vanguardist, like the Leninist party, Scalar is horizontal like Zapatismo or horizontalidad.

These alternatives can enable us to do what we want. My sense of working within this open-ended project for the past couple of years has been of a reboot consisting of a new openness, a sense of flow, and the thinking of the interactive/interdisciplinary as activity. We learn what we want by doing it, whether in the academic form of horizontal writing, or the horizontal democracy of Occupy. These are not simply equivalents of course: the latter carries a far higher degree of engagement and risk than the former (though the writing is not without professional risk for those in less secure situations than mine). They have been transforming when interactive. Occupy 2012 has by its durational form allowed me to explore and instantiate some of what I think might be meant by solidarity and horizontalidad.

So when David Graeber highlighted the most critical development of 2011 as a transformation of the imagination, how might we apply this to academic and writing contexts? In other words, how does it begin to become possible to visualize a writing in which the economic is not the dominant value?

In terms of the horizontal imagination, imagine what was once the case: a public education from pre-K to PhD that is entirely free. This long-time position of abolition democracy needs to be insisted upon not in terms of accounting–that people need degrees to get jobs and so on–but in terms of democracy: a direct democracy needs citizens who are critical, knowledgeable, resourceful and autonomous. And they would get that by using the products of abolition publishing from the tweet to the long-form text: open-access, open source, live.

 

The Cultural Logics of Neo-Liberalism

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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.

Seeds of Change

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A seed is a dense amalgam of bioinformation. SInce Darwin did his first experiment on seeds, they have also been subject to biopolitics in the most direct sense. As Monsanto and other corporations seek to privatize the genetic commons, it’s time to join the seed revolution.

Sow Seeds Not Greed

Charles Darwin’s first published experiment was called “Does Sea Water Kill Seeds?” This apparently innocuous question concealed a major biopolitical contest. Darwin sought to prove whether or not seeds could germinate after being soaked in sea water. As he observed in his essay:

such experiments…have a direct bearing on a very interesting problem, which has lately, especially in America, attracted much attention, namely whether the same organic being has been created at one point or on several on the face of our globe.

Darwin spliced two related issues here: first, the debate prompted by British geologist Edward Forbes who asserted that Europe’s landmass had been far more extensive in the relatively recent past so as to account for the spread of plant varietals to islands like the Azores.

For the “common sense” of received science said that sea water killed all seeds. Therefore, if the same species was observed in different places, then it must have been “created” separately. Pro-slavery apologists used this argument to propose that there were distinct and different forms of the human species and it was therefore acceptable for white North Americans to enslave Africans.

Darwin’s simple test demolished the theory: seeds germinate perfectly well after an immersion in salt water, meaning that they could be disseminated by the ocean across the planet. Species thus originated once and not repeatedly. But other interesting questions opened:

But when the seed is sown in its new home, then comes the ordeal: will the old occupants in the great struggle for life allow the new and solitary immigrant room and sustenance?

Darwin’s language here is fascinating and provocative, showing that five years before the formal publication of Origin of Species, he was already thinking far down the road. His experiment did not, of course, demolish slavery’s logic but it removed one of its purported strands of “empirical evidence.”

Fast-forward to our own day, and the occupants are making very little “room and sustenance” for the “immigrants” in all senses. As the chart below shows, only 4% of the commercial vegetable varieties being grown in 1903 are still in cultivation today.

The decline in seed varieties charted

Whereas there were nearly 500 commercial varieties of lettuce in 1903, now we must choose from only 36–if you’ve ever wondered why your “Mesclun” always tastes the same, here’s your answer.

The reduction in variety is part of the effort to commandeer the food supply. Monsanto now  controls 93% of the soybeans and 80% of the corn growth in the United States by its seed monopoly and produces 27% of all seeds sold. Many of these, especially the corn and soy, are genetically manipulated and have worked their way into the entire food chain.

Activists have had some signal successes against this monopoly in Europe where France and Hungary recently joined Germany, Austria, Peru and Luxemburg in banning GMO seeds. Hungary insisted that sprouted plants from genetically-modified seeds be thoroughly destroyed.

French beekeepers demonstrate against GMOs at Monsanto HQ

In the US, while the seed industry remains in charge, organizers have created a brilliant alternative strategy: the seed library. The seed library stocks seeds of all kinds, “lends” them to a library user, who then “returns” them once the crop is harvested. One of the founders of this movement was Gary Paul Nabhan, co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH.

Seed libraries are formal and informal, sometimes actually taking space in public libraries next to books as in Richmond, VA. The action combines two of the best internal projects of the Occupy movement: to offer nutritious, organic and non-genetically modified food to the Occupiers and others; and to create libraries.

On February 27, there is a day of action for Occupy the Food Supply. More exactly, following Darwin, the project is to un-occupy food, seeds and thereby our bodies. Their coalition of organic farmers, farm laborers, urban farmers, seed activists, librarians, foodies and all those concerned with personal health reaches far beyond the stereotype of Occupy.

Join them, support the action, plant heirloom seeds, join a seed library–it’s all fun and it’s all radical in the old sense: it goes to the root.

Why there will be a Greek Revolution this year

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The cut-up XtraNormal video says it all–the “deal” is a mess and is not going to work. The details of what ordinary Greeks can expect were revealed late yesterday:

The measures include nearly €400 million ($530 million) in cuts to already depleted pensions. Health and education spending will be reduced by more than €170 million ($225 million), subsidies to the state health care system will be cut by €500 million ($661 million), and health care spending on medicine will fall by €570 million ($754 million). And some €400 million ($529 million) will be lopped off defense spending — three quarters of which will come from purchases.

And no one expects this disaster to work:

The draft law also drastically revises the 2012 budget, changing the government deficit target to 6.7 percent of gross domestic product from an initial forecast of 5.4 percent. Even worse, plans for a modest primary surplus — which excludes debt servicing costs — have been scrapped and Greece will instead post a primary deficit of nearly €500 million ($661 million), or 0.2 percent of GDP.

If you wonder whether people might not just feel they have to accept this, here’s Ilias Iliopoulos, general secretary of the Greek civil servants’ union Adedy, not one of the more radical groups as you might expect: “I don’t rule out a popular revolt.”

Some nuggets suggest why:

  • Greek bank shares are down 10% this morning.
  • The “Socialist” party that brought in the crisis is running at 12% in the polls.
  • Greek debt was cut from CCC to C by the Fitch agency, which equals default.
  • As the New York Times speculated this morning, that would mean Credit Default Swaps start to be activated: do banks have the money to cover them? What do you think?

Unsurprisingly, what the Times does not mention is that the left is resurgent:

Left-wing parties that oppose the next round of cuts the coalition government is promising are meanwhile surging. A relatively new party, the Democratic Left, is nipping at Pasok’s heels, with 12 per cent, twice as much support as it had in December. Another, the Coalition of the Left, has 8.5 per cent support, and the communist party, KKE, has 9.5 per cent.

In the event that these parties were able to form a Popular Front against the Troika, they would win an election, as the Conservative Party that the Times claims is “heading” for an election win is polling at 19%. Even a coalition without the dogmatic Communists would win on these numbers.

The defense cuts might make us nervous about a military coup: which brought to mind Costa Gavras’s classic film Z (1969) about the repression that led to the Greek dictatorship of the colonels (1967-74). The title of the film is not explained until the very end. It is not a letter: it stands for zei (he/she/it lives).

In the context of the film, this is taken to refer to the lead character, who has been assassinated by the secret police. His identity is clearly that of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, killed in 1963. The list of those things to be banned include zei, which we might now want to read as “it lives,” that which was supposed to be long dead, interred and forgotten–the revolution.

Debt Servitude and (Micro)Fascism

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IMF leader Lagarde to Greek PM Papademos: "Do something for the poor? that's hilarious!"

The widely-circulated photographs of the Troika laughing it up as they imposed their settlement on Greece reflect their triumph at imposing a neo-liberal colonization of Europe. As Frantz Fanon noted in 1963:

What is fascism but colonialism at the heart of traditionally colonialist countries?

The debt servitude being imposed on mass populations in the interest of transnational capital represents a neo-colonialism, in which the colonial powers like Portugal, Spain and Italy will be recolonized after the long-term Ottoman colony Greece.

It’s worth rehearsing the breath-taking Treaty-of-Versailles-style conditions imposed on Greece. According to the Guardian:

the European commission will present proposals for “an enhanced and permanent presence” of debt inspectors in Athens later…Greeks have already suffered a 30% cut in wages and can look forward to steep cuts in the minimum wage as well as pensions…Eurozone finance ministers have demanded that the Greek Constitution be revised to give debt payments top priority in government spending.

The money for the bond markets will be placed in a charmingly named “segregation account,” as if to remind everyone of the fascist neo-colonialism that has been created.

There was an alternative: an 2001 Argentina-style default, with a relaunched currency. From this crisis emerged the practice of horizontalidad that has been so influential across the Occupy movement. In Occupy!#3, Marina Sitrin quotes Neka from the unemployed workers movement near Buenos Aires:

it was a sort of waking up to a knowledge that was collective…It was like each day is a horizon that opens before us

This “horizonism” is the direct opposite of debt servitude.

Towers of Debt at NYU

Today I was reminded that such servitude is local as well as global, a microfascism to match the global neo-colonial project. At my institution, NYU, there is currently a plan to build 6 million square feet of new office and residential space in a series of skyscrapers. As well as destroying the character of Greenwich Village, and making Washington Square a building site for 20 years, this plan will cost $6 billion.

When asked where this money would come from an official replied: “NYU is not afraid of debt.” Given the enormity of the sum–twice the entire endowment of the university–and the crisis of debt worldwide, you wonder why. I asked a friend who works at Credit Suisse–in the compliance department that makes banks abide by regulation–and she replied “Money is cheap.” Which is to say, the interest rates on the bonds will be so low that the investment makes perfect sense to a Board of Trustees filled with people from JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Paulson, Met Life and so on.

Who will repay the money? According to NYU4OWS and the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, the only possible answer is students–via their tuition fees, financed in turn by student debt. Student debt is about to surpass one trillion dollars and is the largest single sector of consumer debt, even exceeding credit cards. NYU is already top of the league for student debt per capita. What is especially heinous about this exchange is that money borrowed at less than one per cent interest is likely to be repaid by loans carrying interest in the range of eight to ten per cent. Student debt cannot be liquidated, meaning that even people who are bankrupt, or on social security have to repay it. As a powerful essay in the Village Voice last year showed, many NYU grads have to abandon ideas of careers serving the public good for corporate positions in order to make their payments.

What can be done about this servitude? Horizontalism insists that there is no point in applying for redress to leaders–as you can see above, the very idea makes them laugh. Yesterday at an event in New York City, David Graeber argued that one of the most critical developments of 2011 was a transformation of the imagination. In other words, it began to become possible to visualize a world in which the economic was not the dominant value.

In terms of debt, this would mean refusing the demand that debt repayment is the highest form of morality. When debts are imposed or exacerbated beyond any realistic possibility of repayment, the ethical approach is to move beyond the horizons of money. You can pledge to refuse to repay your loan if one million other people do so here: and decide whether you’re actually going to do that when it gets into the high 900,000s–for now it’s about pressuring for change. For faculty supporting debtors, pledge here and for family and others supporting debtors pledge here: this is important to show that the community supports debt refusal, but demands little more than a few clicks for now.

In terms of the horizontal imagination, imagine what was once the case: a public education from pre-K to PhD that is entirely free. This long-time position of abolition democracy needs to be insisted upon not in terms of accounting–that people need degrees to get jobs and so on–but in terms of democracy: a direct democracy needs citizens who are critical, knowledgeable, resourceful and autonomous.

That won’t happen overnight but here’s what we can do now: stop using economic metaphors for the critical projects that we engage in. Stop asking “how’s your work going?”, or using metaphors and scales of productivity, or otherwise commodifying the common intellect. In work using digital technologies in particular, leave aside notions of “rich” data, “robust” platforms and all the other quasi-market metaphors.

Stop thinking like a market. A market likes an investment (a beginning), a time of production (the middle) and, above all, profit, aka the end. This is why Occupy insists on the primacy of the everyday because it needs doing every day, like child care, sustenance, farming and other forms of sustaining.

Try it. It’s fun.

Occupy France, Occupy Global Steel?

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One conspicuous absentee from the Occupy movement has been France, despite its long radical heritage. At a meeting in November 2011 in New York, French intellectuals expressed disdain for the ideas of consensus and the indignés as being insufficiently rigorous. Now French steelworkers have occupied their plant and put up tents.

French steel unions occupy

A coalition of French unions has set in motion an occupation at the ArcelorMittal plant in the north-eastern town of Florange in the Moselle, following a decision taken at a general assembly of workers. The plant employs about 5000 people and several hundred workers have set up in the offices to prevent management from permanently shutting down the plant. They hope for a government intervention as the last hope of saving their jobs.

ArcelorMittal is the self-declared leading global integrated mining and steel production company with revenues of over $94 billion in 2011 and outlets in 60 countries. However, the firm has recently shut down plants in Belgium and Madrid, leading the workforce to distrust assurances that this will be just a temporary shutdown. Perhaps the fact that CEO Lakshmi Mittal is on the board of Goldman Sachs fails to inspire confidence in the workforce?

Their strategy is to maintain political pressure on the government with actions on at least a weekly basis until the end of the French presidential elections in May. In the last election, Sarkozy promised to keep a neighboring steel plant at Garange in production but has failed. In fact, over 350,000 industrial jobs have been lost in France in the last four years. However, the leader of the Left Front,  Jean-Luc Mélenchon, reasserted today that “democracy is not a matter of consensus,” in the context of his entirely appropriate opposition to the fascist National Front. Mélenchon might want to think about a form of modified consensus as a means to mobilize anti-fascist unity, but his statement seems more like a form of political maneuver for percentage points in the election than a strategy.

The industries of primary extraction and manufacture–coal, oil, gas, steel, etc.–seem to recur far more often in the narrative of Occupy than one might have expected in a movement concerned with the financial crisis. We are often told that “old” industries of this kind are irrelevant in today’s post-industrial economy. Yet as the expansion of other Indian-led deunionized steel firms like Jindal Steel has shown, the primary motivation is reducing costs not ending production. The French unions point out that global steel production surpassed 1.5 billion tons last year for the first time, hardly a sign of lack of demand.

In their classic Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued that Marx’s theory of the “primitive accumulation” of capital via “looting, enslavement and murder” was not a once-and-for-all moment. Rather, this primitive accumulation stage is inherent to all capitalist development. Their stress on “immaterial” accumulation needs to be supplemented with these accumulations of basic extraction. Lost within the many takeovers of Mittal Steel, for example, is the remnants of Bethlehem Steel, one of the former great industrial powers of the U.S. The spatial relations of inside and outside mapped by primitive accumulation now seem still more complex. Mittal Steel was founded in India in 1976 and became Ispat International, based in Sumatra, in 1989. When this group absorbed the US steel remnants in 2004, Mittal was formed only to merge with Arcelor in 2006. Their accountants are Deloitte, mentioned earlier this week.

The French steelworkers believe that the company is directed from London. In corporate terms it is headquartered in Luxemburg but has industrial presence on every continent. It works in the tightly orchestrated pattern of globalized finance networks that are directed by firms like Goldman Sachs and Deloitte. As Hardt and Negri put it:

Informational accumulation destroys or at least destructures the previously existing productive processes, but it immediately integrates those productive processes into its own networks and generates across the different realms of production the highest levels of productivity.

Inside and outside reverse and re-reverse at such speed that it is hard to keep the process in sight. A supposedly powerful nation state like France is no more able to constrain this process than weakened locations, such as Greece. The French workers have tried to make this network visible to themselves and to others by means of their occupation. Occupy asserts a presence in space that the networks of accumulation seek to render invisible and irrelevant.

It remains to be seen if this step will produce an Occupy theory of political economy in France or if it was merely a move in the political theatre of the election. In any event, bienvenue chez Occupy, Français et Françaises!