Once again, we reflect after an eviction. In the face of violence and violent speech, how do we respond?
The actions by the NYPD yesterday were plain old-fashioned violent (see below). They evicted people from a 24 hour park without stating any offense that had been committed. They erected a barricade around the park that is still up at the time of writing, in contravention of an earlier court decision. They refused medical care to a woman having a seizure. Public transport buses, brought up in advance, were used to take protestors to jail. The message here is very simple: no action that is or appears to be an occupation will be tolerated in New York, legal rationale to follow.
The political culture of New York is macho and violent. It takes its cue from its paymasters on Wall Street. Remember the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities? They became the “big, swinging dicks” in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker and last week the hapless Goldman Sachs apostate Greg Smith described how traders like to “rip the eyes out” of their clients. No wonder there are few women at the top of these firms.
A week or so ago, I happened to be in an open meeting with a senior New York City elected official about a zoning issue where I live. In a clearly studied way, the man became incensed at what he deliberately took to be a provocation and talked about “tearing [us] a new arsehole.” In a more public example, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, when queried by the City Council over the stop-and-frisk policy that led to over 600,000 frisks of people of color last year responded with what even the New York Times called a “pugnacious assault.” Elected officials may not question the police in New York.
Such talk is supposed to indicate an awareness of reality, whether at the elite level of city planning or the street level of minority neighborhoods. To “get things done,” verbal and, if “necessary,” physical violence must be used–the metaphors are of knocking heads, breaking balls and so on.
After a few hours sleep, I headed to Left Forum at Pace University this morning, hoping to get some perspectives on the moment. I found three. My panel on “Environmentalism and Occupy” was, once again, all male. The next time this happens I will just have to make a public protest. It seems that the injunction to respect diversity, so prevalent in 1990s political and academic culture, has been forgotten, except by the Occupy movement. What I initially experienced as Occupy’s continuity with academia looks more like a bridge to past (not always successful, to be sure) efforts. However, at Left Forum the all day prevalence of violent language, shouting, pointed fingers and so on served as reminder of how much remains to be done.
In a more positive vein, both on my panel and the following discussion about the general strike, it was stressed that the place of the global south was central. While the general strike question was mostly discussed in the context of the May Day action in the U. S., Gayatri Spivak stressed the need to think it in relation to the global south. Spivak’s train of thought was multi-faceted and hard to summarize. Her main points were that finance capital is digital so that it cannot be blockaded; further global trade is a relatively small component of gross global product; and that it no longer makes sense to speak simply of “the working class,” in a manner she derived from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.
All that would be to say, then, that the general strike is an impossible demand, not a quantifiable project, whose “success” can be measured by the number of strikers. It needs to “surprise” us (to quote Spivak again).
Certainly, there will be no surprise to find a vast array of police on May Day and every time we step out of the places allocated to us. The repeated representation of that injunction is the arrest of a demonstrator who steps, whether deliberately or by accident, into the roadway.
Claiming our own place will be interpreted as “violence” by the state because it is the language that they speak and understand. Prefiguring a horizontal world not configured by the command means adopting ways of acting and speaking that at once insist on our right to say what our place should be, rather than be allocated one, and to do so in ways that we understand as non-violent. That does not preclude non-violent direct action. It is to say that if another world is possible, we need to start living in it.