Monthly Archives: May 2012

Now–the right to look

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Today was the opening of a conference that I helped convene in New York called Now! Visual Culture. It’s not an Occupy event as such but it takes place in the context of Occupy and many people attending are involved in the movement. It’s in my academic area, the anti-discipline of visual culture.

Now! Visual Culture

It turns out that we know a good deal about what visual culture is now. It’s a performative network, by which I mean a network created by the actions of those humans and non-humans within it. There are visual subjects and objects within a regime of visuality. The visual object, something that is looked at in all senses, has its own set of desires, powers and possibilities. The visual subject can be human, a person that looks or visualizes, or non-human, such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or an imaging satellite. These latter devices are the agents of necropolitics, visualizing those who must die, even if a human takes the decision whether or not to fire on the visualized target– no visualization, no decision.

The interplay of visual subject and object takes place in a situation that is not of their choosing, which I call the regime of visuality. A given regime attempts to classify what there is to be seen and to separate those so classified into the groups that it creates, such as insurgents and host population; settlers and natives; black and white. At present, we can, as it were, see this regime. So when the police say to us, as they have so often in the past eight months, “move on, there’s nothing to see here,” we reply: “I would prefer not to.” It turns out, then, that visual culture has not become a discipline (with departments and so on) because it is foundationally anti-authoritarian.

And so we occupy, physically and mentally. In so doing, we find each other. We invent each other. We claim the right to look. We have now seen each other face to face, on livestream, on Twitter, on Facebook, on social media and in hearing the call of the other, in its murmuring, its casseroles, its chants. And now the question becomes, what should we do with that right to look?

We began to address that question today with 15 five minute presentations, or lightning talks, a format I borrowed from new media conferences. People from France, Norway, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany and the US presented. Presenters ranged from graduate students to professors, artists, and new media practitioners. They were more or less self-selected people who had asked to present. Yet four clear themes emerged

  • Now: Occupy from the US to Canada and Nigeria
  • Why: War, trauma and memory
  • Where: Interfaces in digital and analog culture
  • Here: Segregation and the (trans/post)national

I hate to single out any one moment but the image that stays with me in the context of this project was this extraordinary photograph taken in Lagos when the entire city of 14 million people rose up to Occupy Nigeria in protest against IMF/World Bank inspired gas price rises.

Lagos, Nigeria. Courtesy Awam Amkpa.

I had heard of Occupy Nigeria via Twitter but I had no idea what it had really been. Even Montreal seems “small” by comparison.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the horizontalism that I first experienced at unconferences organized by hackers, and is now the process of Occupy, was well received by the people at the event. What was pleasantly surprising was the large turn-out, requiring people to stand and sit on the floor in the largest auditorium we have available. More exciting than that was the positive atmosphere, the sense of excitement that I have felt so missing in academic life. Perhaps, as horizontalism disseminates away from the sites of occupation into the disciplinary institutions it can work a form of internal revolution by anti-discipline.

More follows.

How to do horizontal learning: two projects

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Sometimes I feel that it would be useful to be an anthropologist. I’ve spent the past day oscillating between organizing two different kinds of horizontal learning projects, one with Occupy, the other in academia. It would be great to be able to analyze why and how the projects get constrained. So here’s my amateur take. Both are trying to work horizontally with different sets of constraints. In academia, there are some financial resources but a lot of vertical bureaucracy. In Occupy, there is the possibility to do whatever we want but it all must be done in the gaps of people’s personal and professional lives. It’s not as simple as Occupy: good/Academia: bad. The question in both instances is really: why do we do all this anyway?

Yesterday was the beginning of OWS Summer Reboot. If that sounds a little familiar, there was indeed a similar process back in January. If the sense then was that different groups needed more autonomy within the architecture of the movement, now people are concerned that we lack co-ordination. Without a GA or spokescouncil, and with announcements of events coming over Facebook and other social media to which not everyone has access, it can be hard to determine what’s going on–as we shall see!

There was an impressive run-down of all the activities people are involved in now. OWS may not have the mass movement of Quebec but there is so much interesting work happening. Facilitation broke these activities down into breakouts and there was one on education and the student movements that I attended. While some of us had been involved for a long time, there were also people from Occupy Latin America (yes, I know it’s already been occupied but these people are from there, can we move on?) and Canadian students brought in by the recent events.

The result was a great meeting in which we talked about connecting all the different actions going on around our areas by means of a hemispheric emphasis and talking about education as a whole from K-21 (ie kindergarten to grad school). In practical terms, we discussed an aggregating website to pull together all the different threads of education activity, and it turns out OWS Tech Ops has already made tools we can use. We decided to hold assemblies to begin a discussion as to what values we place on learning as we go forward. There’s been so much negative talk about debt and unemployment that it sometimes can feel unclear why we do this at all. And then we want to start planning for September so that when the school year begins we have plans in place.

Everyone left with great enthusiasm for the new project. I had a flashback to the moment when back in September I went to the Liberty Plaza information tent–there was one! next to the Red Thing–and asked where the Education meeting was, and the slightly scary looking person gave me excellent directions to 60 Wall Street. Only eight months ago, it feels a lot longer. Anyway. We all then went off and organized three separate events for this Sunday in Washington Square Park. A mad round of emails and calls later, the assemblies were consolidated for 12pm Sunday and it’s going to be very interesting. There’s some serious co-ordinating and web work to be done to prevent this kind of organizing chaos from recurring–it was not a disaster but it took a lot of time, which is a resource most of us don’t really have.

My academic project on the current state of visual culture is a participation event, meaning a conference that emphasizes participation over papers, no keynotes, lots of short presentations, workshops and discussions. There are sessions on debt and academic labor and a general assembly, none of which would  have happened before the Occupy movement. There’s training in digital skills, which, as we can see, we definitely need.

The real question hovering over us is more substantial. For a long time we got credit, or gave ourselves credit, for being “interdisciplinary,” which is not that hard to do, and even more so for being “political.” This usually meant saying things hostile to the Bush administration that troubled them not very much at all–again, this is self-criticism, yes.

Now we face a dual challenge. On the one hand, conservatives have started open calls to shut down departments that don’t send students into well-paid jobs. This is close to government policy in the UK. At the same time, debt model of financing has become unsustainable and immoral. On the other hand, we need to be taking part in the messy, horizontal discussion of what we now mean by politics and by education, a conversation in which our hard won credentials don’t count for much. We’re going to need some humility and openness, qualities not often associated with academia. Nonetheless, the thousands that are demonstrating across the hemisphere believe in the value of what we do, and it’s time to reclaim that from the bureaucrats.

Will either of these projects work? Watch this space over the next couple of days.

Never Mind the B@#$%^&*, Here’s the Real Jubilee

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My country of origin, the UK, is about to make a global fool of itself over the monarch’s so-called diamond jubilee, commemorating the apparently endless “reign” of Elizabeth Windsor. Altogether forgotten in all this noise has been the devastating report of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which shows the much better side of the country. Established in 2000, the campaign has had some success in debt cancellation. Now it reports that things are getting worse.

Once again, then: No to a royal jubilee and yes to a global debt jubilee.

The key facts from the report make the case for debt abolition in themselves:

In the 1950s and 1960s the number of governments defaulting on their debts averaged four every twenty years. Since the 1970s this has risen to four every year….

 

The current First World Debt Crisis has led to debts in impoverished countries increasing. Their government foreign debt payments will increase by one-third over the next few years.

 

The Mozambique, Ethiopia and Niger governments could be spending as much on foreign debt payments in a few years as they were before debt relief.

These are countries where the Gross National Income–which is not what the average person earns but an estimate based on all final goods and services–is less than $1005 per person per annum. Even a High Income country averages only $12,276 or more. Compare that to the high-rollers on Wall Street.

A 2011 research paper for that well-known left organization the Bank of England demonstrated that, compared to the Bretton Woods system:

The current system has coexisted, on average, with: slower, more volatile, global growth; more frequent economic downturns; higher inflation and inflation volatility, larger current account imbalances; and more frequent banking crises, currency crises and external defaults.

In short: neo-liberalism is a disaster for everyone except creditors. The rhetoric of the one percent used by Occupy is more or less accurate in fact as well as emotional force.

Debts need to be cancelled. The Jubilee campaign has some practical suggestions to this end. They call for a system of debt audit and an international debt court with powers to arbitrate between creditors and debtors and/or cancel debt as they see fit.

However, in 2011 the IMF and the World Bank brought to an end the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, the sole international system for dealing with debt crisis, having given “aid” to only 32 countries in 17 years. Some countries ended up spending more on debt repayment after involvement in the process than they were before. On the other hand, Jamaica is considered too “rich” for debt relief due to its GNI of about $6500, which, if you’ve ever seen anything of the country outside the resorts, beggars belief. In 2011-12, one-quarter of government revenues were spent on foreign debt payments. There has been a 20% drop in the number of children completing elementary school in Jamaica since 1990 down to 73% from a former 95%.

This is the pattern for the global majority: increased debt, increased poverty, declining services. The IMF and World Bank themselves reported in March that of 68 low and middle income countries (GNI of $12,275 or less):

  • 5 are in default on at least some of their debt payments
  • 15 are at high risk of not being able to pay their debts
  • 23 are at moderate risk of not being able to pay their debt
  • 25 are at low risk of not being able to pay their debts

So there are no countries not at risk of default in the world’s poorest nations. Loans are increasing, often to repay earlier loans. Speculative loans are widespread.

The Jubilee campaign does not report on high income nations so here’s some data from a random search of today’s financial media:

  • Germany sold bonds for 0.07% annual interest last week. Spain, however, has to pay 6% and is insisting that this is intolerable. Italy sold bonds at 6.504% today. The bonds in my retirement account are making 1.76%.
  • Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, pays no tax on her salary of $467,940 and has a built-in pay rise every year of her contract. Sporting a deep tan, Lagarde last week told Greece “it’s payback time,” arguing that all Greeks had to pay their taxes.
  • Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin took citizenship in Singapore to avoid $67 million in capital gains tax, because paying 15% tax is too much for the one per cent.
  • Meanwhile law professor Alex Tsesis is quoted in the Times as being “skeptical about the ability of a retail purchaser to be able to play on a level field in the market.” The poor chap lost $2200 on Facebook shares rather than making the instant cash-in “investors” feel entitled to get.
  • Told that New Jersey faces a $1.3bn budget deficit thanks to his tax cuts for the rich, Gov. Chris Christie called the auditor the “Dr Kevorkian of the numbers.”
  • Russian oil magnate Mikhail Fridman has taken his TNK corporation out of  BP: it generated $19bn in dividends to its UK parent since it was created in 2003. Steal oil in Russia, spill it in the Gulf: BP.
  • When shareholders vote on executive pay, companies used their block votes so that “less than 3 per ended up losing the votes.”
  • Retail sales in Spain are down 11% on the year and a staggering 25% over a five-year period–since the end of the housing boom in other words.

In short, we all need a Jubilee: not a grey-haired German lady taking a ride in a horse-drawn carriage with an irascible Greek aristocrat, but a debt jubilee that returns the financial system to a level of decency. That would be the sensible, NGO-style demand that could be made. But the Jubilee Debt Campaign has been making this case brilliantly for years and the situation just gets worse. No demands. No royals. But I think a quick listen to the Sex Pistols might be in order.

Decolonizing the Imagination

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How can we develop David Graeber’s insights into the importance of the imagination as a tool of resistance? Regular readers with good memories may recall a discussion about the Charter of the Forest (1217) that came out of my reading of Hardt and Negri’s Declaration. What gives me some pause about this intersection is that, while the Charter did inscribe some freedoms, it does so in the context of feudalism. While that might ironically be congenial to the present-day neo-feudalism of rents and debts, it’s not a platform for the current global social movement.

On the other hand, I have long thought, in the tradition of Tony Benn and Christopher Hill, that the Diggers do have something to offer here. So on a quiet day, I thought I might develop the thought for what it’s worth. It turns out to pose some interesting questions about the tension between the direct and the representation.

During the English Revolution (1642-49), a range of radical sects saw the end of Charles I’s monarchy as the beginning of new era and the end of slavery. Their goals were exemplified by the Diggers, inspired and led by Gerrard Winstanley (1609-76), a sometime Baptist and itinerant preacher. Winstanley was working as a cow-hand when he felt himself called upon:

As I was in a trance not long since, divers matters were present to my sight, which must not here be related. Likewise I heard these words, Worke together. Eat bread together; declare all this abroad.

If Winstanley understood this as inspiration, it is also what we would now call imagination, a vision of collectivity at a time of social, economic and political crisis, following the execution of the king. He was inspired to send a letter to General Fairfax, the army commander, asking

Whether all Lawes that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King’s head? We affirm they ought.

This remarkable radicality was typical of his style, which insisted on following through first principles, all of which can be derived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group were beginning to reclaim the common and waste land on St George’s Hill, Surrey:

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury for all.

It’s worth looking closely at this sentence. Divinity was expressed as rationality, present in each individual, not as an external deity, as the forces of “vision, voice and revelation,” a trinity of the imagination. “Earth,” or land, is assumed to be the common property of all, the treasury of a land without a state. Notably, Winstanley wrote “common” not “the commons.” Having experienced the Absolutist monarchy of Charles I, he would have been very aware of the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and the setting aside of certain spaces as “the commons” did not satisfy his understanding of all land as common.

His vision was a relay of divine inspiration, internal rights, and righteousness to be grounded in a common sense of equality. Although the Diggers claimed to be restoring justice to its condition before the Fall of Man, their actions were practical and modern. By cultivating land on an equal basis and denying the possibility of exclusive ownership of the land, Winstanley envisaged sustainable small-scale cultivation as the basis of social life. His non-violent form of resistance was to advocate that workers refuse to labor for others, a refusal of the wage system at its beginnings. Historian Christopher Hill called this action the first general strike. Indeed, in a manner familiar to present-day social movements, Winstanley declared: “Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”

It was in response to such theories of radical direct democracy that Thomas Hobbes defined the state as Leviathan (1651). The Leviathan was the figure of the commonwealth, the social contract by which individuals arrogate their right of governance to the sovereign. Of the three possible modes of commonwealth—monarchy, aristocracy and democracy—Hobbes was convinced that monarchy was by far the most effective.

Frontispiece to Leviathan

So the figure seen in the famous frontispiece to his book represents the monarchy as a living form of the social contract. The body of the King is composed of hundreds of other bodies, his subjects, combined to make the whole known as Leviathan. Hobbes imagined the Leviathan as a demi-god, like Hercules and other creatures of legend. He was interested in such “compound creatures” as he called them, as a special instance of the power of imagination, or Fancy. This was not simply an artistic or creative attribute:

whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the workmanship of Fancy.

Representational images are created by this “fancy” meaning:

 any representation of one thing by another.

So for all the fact that his Leviathan was filled with little people, Hobbes was civilized because he adhered to the principles of representation, whereas the “savage” believes in the direct, whether in democracy or image making. So Hobbes places a challenge: all representation is colonial.

So we might want to look into “direct” forms of acting and making, as we have of course been doing, “Direct” imaging might include photography, video, performance and other media where there has been a question about whether it is “mechanical,” or “simply” imitative or other phrases that tend in the direction of the colonial critique like “slavish” (as in imitation) or “apeing” as in copying but also as in simians.

Does this mean we must jettison all media that represent? Certainly not–but we do have to think about how to decolonize them, to disadhere them from the elite privilege they have long held, and, yes, I am thinking about painting here.

For the state colonized the land but also the faculty of imagination itself as representation. It designated sovereignty and colonial authority in and as the power to represent. Representation was a matter of sign formation, for Hobbes distinguished the mark, which is recognizable only to its maker, and the sign, which is legible to others. The opposite of authority was not, then, the primitive pre-social contract condition of the fictional “war of all against all” but the opposite of representation, which is to say, direct democracy. These ideas became equated with madness, which Michel Foucault called the “colonizing reason” of the West. By 1660 the British monarchy was restored and the first law code for the enslaved was published in the British colony of Barbados in 1661. Winstanley had called the revolution, the “world turned upside down.” Plantation monarchy restored it. Nonetheless, the common had preceded it.

In search of protest past

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So I had this idea for Memorial Day weekend that it would be interesting to look back at past protest literature from the New York area and see what could be learned, in the manner of all those op-eds about nineteenth-century presidents and Greek wars. I looked again at Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. For all the obvious differences, there’s one clear similarity: the NYPD were awful even then.

Carson’s very title depends on a conceit that I don’t think still works very much. It comes from the idea that because of bird death resulting from the use of the pesticide DDT, there might be a spring without bird song. Although I did have a friend go back to England because he missed the song of the thrushes (a small brown bird), I’m not sure that most of us would register the difference now. I rarely notice birds singing, except when starlings are massing for migration. As we now mostly travel in sealed vehicles, more often than not with ear-buds in place, that interface is less vital than it once was.

DDY being sprayed in 1948

On the other hand, Carson mentions that after the village of Setauket on the north shore of Long Island was sprayed with DDT, a horse drank from a trough in the high street–and died immediately. The toxicity of DDT was its selling point and Long Island was doused with it to try and eradicate the gypsy moth to no avail. In the years since there has been a notorious breast cancer hotspot on the Island. DDT is said not to be a carcinogen and all the studies made have failed to show a link between pesticide use and cancer–except it might be said for the one in real women’s bodies in real space. Rachel Carson died of breast cancer shortly after her book was published in 1962.

But if you Google Carson and DDT, half the entries you will see accuse her of being a murderer. The bizarre conceit is that malaria in the dominated world could be more effectively eradicated with widespread use of DDT and the fact that is not is Carson’s fault. There is a perfectly effective way to prevent malaria, which is to give people treated mosquito nets. It works, it’s cheap and it has no side-effects. But giving money for that would not have the fun of “demolishing” an environmental pioneer.

Jane Jacobs (center) in The White Horse, Hudson St

The New York City described by Jane Jacobs is perhaps even more remote than the world of horse troughs and bird song in Carson’s book. It’s a place where you can leave a key for a visiting friend at the local deli and everyone has an eye out for the kid in the street. In fact, this culture of what she directly calls “surveillance” is a bit creepy: when people encircle a man who is trying to get a child to follow him, it turns out he is her father. She talks off-handedly of a neglected park in Philadelphia becoming a “pervert park,” meaning a place for same-sex assignations in the era of the closet. There’s no street politics in this book, rather a permanent watchfulness that takes its pleasure in seeing that “all is well.”

Jacobs’ view of the mixed use, high density urban space has become canonical now, even if her follow-up thought that “slums” should be left alone has not. Much of her argument against the Le Corbusier influenced city planner now seems a bit slow-going, so thoroughly has the view reversed. On the other hand, she’s completely right when she says:

that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact – they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

You could apply this insight to see why Bloomberg et al. originally left Zuccotti alone to transform itself into Liberty Plaze: because it simply never occurred to them that anyone would be interested, still less want to join in or follow the Occupiers’ example.

Jacobs waged her campaigns by local petitions that she would then take to the Board of Estimate, a land-use body composed of the Mayor, the Comptroller, the Council President and the Borough Presidents. It met once a week and could be petitioned by citizens, until the Supreme Court abolished it in 1989. If this sounds like a democracy gone by, that’s certainly the case. On the other hand, look what happened to Jacobs in 1968:

Jane Jacobs, a nationally known writer on urban problems, was arraigned in Criminal Court yesterday and charged with second-degree riot, inciting to riot and criminal mischief. The police had originally charged that Mrs. Jacobs tried to disrupt a public meeting on the controversial Lower Manhattan Expressway. ‘The inference seems to be,’ Mrs. Jacobs said, ‘that anybody who criticizes a state program is going to get it in the neck.’”

— The New York Times, April 18, 1968

Now that sounds familiar enough: being charged with rioting for trying to express an opinion at a public meeting. So it turns out that some things never change.

The rhythm of the global movement

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The new wave of global protest is inventing public space in global cities. Global capital likes space to be isomorphic and consistent–like a McDonalds hamburger, it should look, taste and feel the same wherever you actually happen to find yourself. In this world-view, there is no such thing as public space in global cities. The global precariat–meaning precarious workers, or everyone who doesn’t benefit from capital investment– is inventing it. It’s a globally mediated combination of certain sounds and certain actions. The “movement” is about learning how that goes and what to do about it.

Since 2011 we’ve seen a wave of efforts to reimagine bodies, spaces and lives resistant to, or outside of, the flows of finance capital. The first tactic was “take the squares,” a specific effort to reinvent the space of circulation into one of belonging. It flowed from Tahrir to Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti, St Paul’s, Pershing and many more. Zuccotti was the exception that proved the rule, a fragment of striated space in the frictionless smooth zones of hyperpoliced finance capital’s capital. Otherwise these spaces were well-known locations in historic centers of power. As such, they were in many cases all too easy for determined police to retake with the obvious exception of Tahrir. Indeed, since the revolution, the military regime has isolated the revolution “in” Tahrir, that is to say, the conceptual space of the movement.

So when we say that the movement is about “bodies in space,” we’re saying a set of interrelated things that we’re learning to understand as we go along:

  1. That the body is any body, not one (un)marked by codes of ethnicity, race, gender, able-ism, sexual orientation etc.
  2. That this body “moves,” both literally in the ways that it can depending on its age, capacities and desires, and also conceptually in that it refuses to stay in its “place,” the place allocated to it by authority.
  3. That this movement, which is also a refusal to “move on” as the police want us to do, invents mediated public space that did not previously exist, whether by occupying, marching, dancing, or displaying.
  4. That this movement is not any movement whatever but has a rhythm, one that is altogether different to the metronomic beat of capital’s 1-2-3-4.
  5. That this rhythm reclaims and invents the time that gives the new public space dimension.
  6. That these interactions are disseminated globally by video/photo/MP3 using social media and that this mediation is constitutive of resistant global space.
  7. It is unlimited/illimité/ilimitado.

In this video from Montréal that everyone loves, you can see this process at work. Filmed two days ago, edited yesterday, a global talking point today:

What if you don’t happen to have a thousand people available? Since 2008, the Spanish anti-capitalist activist collective flo6x8 have been reterritorializing the “any space whatever” of global capital. They use Spanish regional music and dance to disrupt its smooth flow with rhythms and sounds that cannot help but recall their North African origin.

Yesterday they intervened at a branch of Bankia, the nationalized amalgam of savings banks (thanks to Matthew Bain for pointing this one out to me).  Bankia announced that the 11 billion euro bail out they need is more like 19 billion. While this sum may seem minimal to those of us accustomed to the staggering amounts handed over to US and UK banks, in Spain, caught as it is between falling revenues due to the crisis and European Union-mandated austerity, this is a real number.  flo6x8 adapt a flamenco to lament this and to draw bank customers into their dance:

Here, just for fun, is an action from February this year in Barcelona, where the bank customers really get into it:

OWS is starting to work in this frame. It’s important to point out that the Spanish actions have roots in the long anti-fascist struggle and the depth of Spain’s financial crisis since 2008. Canadian organizers have been pointing out that their student strike is the result of two years hard work and the historical situation of Quebec.

The “New York” that is imagined as the epicenter of neo-liberal finance capital has visualized itself outside of historical space and time since its neo-liberal reinvention in the 1980s. Activist movements have been localized and divided. So OWS was, as many have pointed out, enabled in considerable part by the global experience and diversity of its activists. We still have much to learn.

Starting today, OWS is holding Summer Disobedience School at a variety of locations in Manhattan, combining non-violent direct action training with skill shares and teach-ins.

I’m going to go even though I don’t do many of the disruptive direct actions because what the rhythm of the movement from Montreal to Mexico City is teaching me is simply that we have a lot to learn.

Montreal: ça ira!

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In the face of continued inadequate media coverage, let’s keep the focus on Montreal. As numerous tweets had it last night, this has gone far beyond a dispute over student tuition fees, as important as that issue has become. It is now a contest over sovereignty: do the people set the boundaries of the force of law or their “representatives” in the state parliament?

Such questions resonate in Quebec because of the long campaign for autonomy from Anglophone Canada and the history of state repression in the 1970s. Yet they clearly have a global impact in the present crisis in which neoliberal technocracy is struggling to maintain the hegemony of its assertion that there is no alternative to austerity and authority. Montreal is now the focus of this global dispute.

For those catching up with the Montreal strike, this video offers a history:

The loi d’exception, the law of exception, known as Loi 78 gave exceptional powers to the state. The May 22 march of over 250,000 people in a city of about 3 million people was an extraordinary statement of refusal to consent to this domination.

May 22 March. Credit: Justin Ling

The next night saw the first implementation of the law. Demonstrators were kettled in the street, using the orange nets first implemented in London. There were 518 arrests Wednesday night in Montreal and another 150 in Quebec City. Protestors were issued with desk tickets carrying fines of $634. The New York Times mentions this briefly on Friday without a reference to Law 78.

Many protestors took to the streets on Thursday night wearing their tickets.

Demonstrator wearing his fine summons for illegal assembly

Montreal responded by holding a much larger demonstration on Thursday night. Heard on the manif (march) Thursday night: “si la révolution nous suit c’est parce qu’elle nous appuie”/ “if the revolution is following us it’s because it supports us.” This is not (just) a tuition strike any more. The song of the march went:

Illégal, tu me fais faire des bêtises dans les rues d’Montréal….quand le peuple se lève, rien ne peut l’arrêter

Or:

Illegal, you make me do stupid things in the streets of Montreal…when the people rise up, nothing can stop them

Estimates suggested about 1500 people were marching in three separate groups that converged downtown.

Marching in Montreal--illegally

Many performed cacerolazo, a banging of pots and pans as a protest that was carried out not only by protestors in the street–who were risking arrest–but by many others from steps, balconies and sidewalks. A musician has made a song out of the sound already: Guillaume Chartain’s casserole song. These sympathizers extended still further the anti-government coalition and the action took place in parts of the city remote from the downtown demonstrations.

The casserole protest aka cacerola

There were other carnivalesque elements, designed to deter the police from making arrests, like the Plus Brigades in NY. Here’s the AnarchoPanda making his/her rounds:

The police seemed uncertain as to what to do. At one point they started tweeting, apparently to warn people of imminent arrest:

Using the #manifencours like the protestors, the SPVM proclaimed that a siren would be sounded as a sign of escalation. In the end, having already made over 2500 arrests during the course of the protests, the police made a token 4 arrests last night. As I mentioned earlier, there is still a popular state of exception–the mass repetition of events, whether technically legal or criminalized. To have enacted Loi 78 last night, the police would have needed to arrest about 2500 people and they seem to have backed down from that.

This could mark a critical turning point. If the demonstrators can maintain their numbers, and the police continue to show reluctance to mass arrest, Loi 78 falls by default. What outcome do the protestors then want? If elections are called it is by no means certain that the right lose, as Wisconsin Democrats are nervously seeing now. Although Gov. Walker faces a recall election, polls show the race essentially tied.

Meanwhile, the Canadian movement is energizing others worldwide. There was a solidarity rally in Paris for the second day in a row.

A rally in Paris in solidarité

They get it in London finally. Small solidarity events are taking place daily in New York, with a larger event being planned for next week.

As the French Revolution chant used to go:

Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira!

Here we go! here we go! Here we go!

 

 

Public Intellectuals: wrong on debt, wrong on climate.

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Like many NYC residents, I get a lot of magazines and journals in which the self-styled public intellectuals get to hold forth on the state of the world. As these people get a great deal of access to the media, we hear much insistence on their importance. Today I read two leading articles from either side of the Atlantic that made me question whether we do in fact still need or want such public intellectuals. In addressing two of the main themes of the moment, student debt and climate change, these pieces both decide that their subjects have been overblown on grounds that are clearly tendentious. Another journalism is possible–I would say necessary.

Writing in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard grad (1976) and president of Harvard Crimson, doesn’t see too much to do about student debt. Over at the London Review of Books, Malcolm Bull of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, agonizes over climate change ethics. Both are worryingly wrong, albeit from very different political perspectives. Lemann tends to quote Obama, Bull prefers Lenin. Both stress a highly partial account of their topic to get to their conclusions.

Nicholas Lemann: Mr One Percent

 

Lemann contrasts the “apocalypse mode” of writing on student debt with the good sense of Obama, speaking at UNC:

“In today’s economy, there’s no greater predictor of individual success than a good education. Right now, the unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. The incomes of folks with a college degree are twice as high as those who don’t have a high-school diploma.” These figures communicate the over-all reality of the situation better than do the anecdotes about heavily indebted graduates who can’t find jobs.

In fact, Obama is being cute with his stats here. While it’s unsurprisingly true that college graduates over the age of 25 have better employment than high-school dropouts, it’s also true that

Thirty five percent of unemployed college graduates and those with advanced degrees have been without a job for more than a year, the same rate as unemployed high school dropouts.

And here’s the real kicker. According to a recent study by Northeastern University of Labor Department reports:

about 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed last year.

So what Obama said is true but it’s highly selective with the truth. I wonder how many of those unemployed graduates are part of the one million people who owe over $100,000 in student debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

He continues to err when he suggests that

Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions.

As Chris Newfield and others have shown, humanities programs tend to be net profit makers for universities because their tuition charges easily cover their costs. Science labs, run on national grants, are loss makers because their overheads are not fully covered by those grants. A report from the University of California showed that UC lost $720 million on overheads when “winning” $3.5 billion in science grants–in a year when the system had an $813 million shortfall. In other words, almost all the budget crisis in California was due to underfunded science labs.

Lemann ices the cake by concluding:

Where higher education is actually underpriced is in the top-tier schools. That may sound offensive, but price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and the top twenty-five or so schools in the country could charge even more than they do.

I don’t think even the Ivies are making that kind of an argument. All this is supposed to lend force to Lemann’s support for the continuation of “lower” student loan interest at 3.4%. In fact, all that is lower is the rate of extortion, because the Federal Reserve loans money at a steady 0.1% at present. It only costs the government notional dollars that it might have extracted from students. Let’s think instead about the cost of unlevied taxation on capital gains, all subject to ceiling of 15% tax and realize the absurdity of this argument.

More puzzling is the lengthy discussion of climate justice in the LRB by Malcolm Bull. Bull appears to want to make a Left case for being a climate skeptic, although his piece takes a carefully weighted path. His LRB editor got the tone right with the headline: “Must we save the world?” There’s a very English cleverness and irony there that serves to wash over some worrying positions.

At the outset Bull asks of global warming: “Are humans causing it? Almost certainly.” Almost? There’s no reputable source that holds otherwise any more, even if there are well-funded climate skeptics at the Heartland Institute and elsewhere to give the illusion of debate. In the US alone, 15,000 temperature records were set this March. Bull asserts that warming is being offset by the “the protective effect of sulphate aerosols.” That sounds nice doesn’t it? These aerosols, which Bull speculates “could in theory be pumped into the atmosphere indefinitely for the sole purpose of reducing global warming,” are very toxic. You’ll know them better as things like sulfur dioxide, a by-product of burning coal that are well-known to cause asthma, emphysema, bronchitis and other respiratory conditions with potentially fatal effects. So perhaps not such a good idea after all.

This is the tendency of the writing here: not transparently refutable but taking a path of most resistance to climate change analysis. Bull concentrates solely on temperature increase as the index of climate change, while most in the field now look at parts per million of carbon dioxide, changing pH levels in the sea, ice melt, desertification and so on.

This tactic causes much of the analysis in the piece to be off target. There is an extensive discussion of the ethical relationship between present emissions policy and the future. This misses the point that climate change is now, it’s already happening and it’s too late to reverse, as Bill McKibben graphically puts it in his book Eaarth:

We’re not going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 30 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue.

Or if you think that’s corny how about this: according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2009

changes in surface temperature, rainfall and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide levels are completely stopped.

Writing in 2012, Bull prefers to put it this way:

As for rises in sea level, the 2007 IPCC projections range from 18 to 59 centimetres – which is not enough to submerge anywhere other than the lowest-lying areas.

Which is to say, Pacific islands, Manhattan, Pakistan, Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas: too bad. And to ignore how sea level rise affects the salinity of the soil, the magnitude of storms.

Flooding in Koror, Palau--"move on, nothing to see here"

In the end, I don’t think such outcomes are Bull’s central concern. Like some others, he worries most about the political future:

what climate change most conspicuously undermines is not the nation-state but democracy, for it requires supranational institutions at a time when there is no supranational democracy, and allows that at a national level the interests of future generations might take precedence over those of the current one.

This is the carbon dictatorship theory–that in order to control what is now out of control extraordinary measures will be required and they could only be dictatorial.

I would say that the global social movements have shown a very different set of possibilities. It is just as conceivable that a move away from the high consumption, fossil-fuel driven, debt accumulating permanent crisis might occur. Such a scenario would make it imaginable that carbon debt be taken as seriously as bond market debt. Direct democracies might be thought of as our last best hope, which could certainly do no worse than any of the current social systems. If we’re going to get from here to there, then quite frankly, we’re going to need a different kind of intellectual to help us think how to do it.

 

 

The Media and the State of Exception

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You won’t be reading this in the mainstream media but there are social movements challenging the status quo from Canada to Mexico–the North American Free Trade Association is kicking back. In Mexico, the media are directly the target of the movement. In Canada, you’ll get a completely different story depending on whether you’re Francophone or Anglophone. And in the US, silence reigns.

On the way back into my building last night after the solidarity march, I met a neighbor who asked me why I was all dressed in red. So I explained and she was genuinely surprised: a New York Times-reading, PBS-watching liberal with literally no idea this had happened. This morning I checked the online media and there was no mention of events in Quebec in either the Times or the London Guardian, which I tend to think of as more progressive. There was a video deep down on Le Monde‘s website.

So is this a classic case of what Noam Chomsky called “manufacturing consent”? There’s a good deal of that certainly. At the same time, media professionals are consciously following their own sense of what makes news. Underneath these familiar, if frustrating, patterns, something else can be glimpsed–the possibility that this is in fact turning into an exception to the “business as usual” relation between media, elites, and people.

Clearly, media outlets want to cover things as “news,” what’s exceptional from the everyday. Once things become “normal,” even if they are protests at what is taken to be normal, they drop back into the blur of the everyday. So even if journalists believe themselves to be doing a good job of representing the “news,” social movements are going to find it difficult to feature without “victories.”

It’s intriguing that the newest student-led social movement in Mexico is directed precisely against media bias, in the anxiety that media collusion is helping the chances of the PRI to return to power, over a decade after the long-term single party was voted out. Even the Wall Street Journal has noticed:

“The protest movement has already achieved the impossible: forcing Televisa to cover an insurrection by young people,” political analyst Sergio Aguayo wrote on Mexico’s Animal Politico website.

Students drove the PRI candidate out of a university, leading to allegations that they were not really students. 131 students posted their identities to Facebook and as a result the Twitter hashtag is #yosoy132, “I am 132.” The movement’s goal is free elections and equality of information, which would be a social revolution. 50,000 marched in Mexico City this past weekend. Can social media lead a challenge to entrenched broadcast media and political power in the Americas, as well as in North Africa?

Montreal raises the bar still higher. Anglophone media have treated Loi 78 as normal legislation, or at best a Special Law, meaning that the protests against it are not significant. The Francophone media has quite correctly called it a “loi d’exception,” a law of exception. Such a law is, as many emphasized during the second Bush administration, a law that suspends the normal operations of law in order to defend the force of law. That is, those in power see the existing legislation as insufficient to enforce consent and pass a law giving them exceptional powers. The paradox here is that the law of exception reveals the force at work in the “normal” law at the point when people cease to consent to obey it.

The particular force of the Montreal law is that it undercuts the one space of exception left to the dominated. Standard law does not expect or provide for the repeated defiance of a particular piece of legislation. Thus New York public-private spaces were open 24-7 as a hedge against the private owner closing the space for their own purposes. It had not been considered that a group of private citizens might choose to occupy the space 24-7. It was, after a duration of time, intolerable to city authorities, who realized that their ability to enforce consent was being challenged. The evictions were done as sheer force with the flimsiest of justifications.

In Montreal, the repetition has been of the right to strike and the right to march. As the strike continued towards 100 days and the nightly marches reached into the 20s, a form of panic seems to have set in among state government. After the initial outcry, they fell back on the strategy of claiming that the law was in fact “normal” because other cities like New York and London had similar laws. Despite their penchant for violence, the Montreal police do not so far seem inclined to use their new powers. Talk of negotiations has surfaced at once.

It matters a good deal how this ends. If the students agree to some deal that leaves the law of exception in place, the state will have gained notable, if formal, new powers. It will also set a precedent that other cities like New York might look at with interest. That is, it will be said that the law brought about an end to the crisis. Canadian conservatives are claiming that this is now a movement “about nothing” and the law is perfectly reasonable in the main.  A media narrative of the power of the exception is in the making.

On the other hand, the Montreal movement currently has dual power. Unlike, exceptionally, many other such movements globally, it has not yet chosen to exercise that power except in calling for an end to the neo-liberal policies of the Quebec administration. Should they take exception at the way their self-evident mandate is received, that might change. Normally, in North American societies, that doesn’t happen. Whatever this is, it isn’t normal.

So-so-so-solidarité: austerity vs. education

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Ceci n'est pas un riot/This Is Not A Riot

From Spain to Canada, the U.K. and U.S., student debt and education funding has become the defining issue of austerity. States have responded with violence and by accusing activists of being violent, a wonderfully Orwellian twist. Above, Canadian artist Max Liboiron visualizes the Red Square protests with the title “This Is Not A Riot.”  Sadly a fully representative scene would have to show charging riot police. The recent police violence changes how we think of Canada, formerly thought of as a more humane version of the US–see below.

The passing of Loi 78 does not seem to have deterred many of those involved. A new website “Arrest me, somebody/Arrêtez-moi quelqu’un” borrows from the 99% meme:

Céline Magontier

Text reads: ” I disobey Bill 78″

Clémence Boisvenue

“I don’t listen to my parents, much less Bill 78.” By identifying themselves and indicating their intent to disobey, these people are technically already in breach of 78.

One student union CLASSE (Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) has already indicated that they will not abide by Loi 78 and made a public declaration to that effect yesterday in Montreal.

However, the mainstream student unions did supply a route plan to the police and the march was therefore permitted: and enormous.

Montreal May 22--red everywhere!

Without playing the numbers game, this presence makes it clear that Loi 78 is not going to end the strike or undermine its support.

The contest between education and austerity maps the boundaries of the latter. On Tuesday, educators from kindergarten to university levels in Spain went on strike to protest cuts and tuition increases–student fees have been increased by 50%. Conservative provinces controlled by the ruling Popular Party have implemented the cuts, while other regions struggle to minimize the impact. So when you read pieces about the euro worrying about the budget deficits in the Spanish regions, this is the real agenda: austerity vs. education. Of course, austerity affects other areas of life as well but it’s here that transatlantic resistance has been mobilized and it’s here that the issue will be decided.

So in NYC, where education is in a mess from K-16, a day of solidarity efforts and perhaps a realization that, at least for the present, the centre of the global movement is Montreal. It was an object lesson, though, in why past left tactics don’t work in the new climate and the still-vibrant sense of possibility generated by Occupy.

At 2pm a handful of people gathered for a traditional picket of the Quebec government offices in Rockefeller Plaza. Police compelled protestors to march in a small circle in the street behind barricades, while a sentorian-voiced RCP organizer bellowed slogans. It was totally depressing, relieved only by the excitement of three Quebecois teenagers on a trip to New York.

Free University Washington Square Park

At five, we gathered in Washington Square Park for Free University. A crowd of about one hundred arrived in a warm, conversational mood. The Free University had about five classes on offer but the crowd spontaneously split into two groups: one focused primarily on the events in Canada and the other on issues of counterinsurgency, debt and violence. After a while both groups ended up in a free-flowing discussion about what next for Occupy, with some stringent self-criticism as well as some affirmation. Free University has hit a nerve, supplying the need for an open exchange of ideas that used to be the hallmark of Liberty Plaza. If it’s not yet drawing in many new people, it is allowing those who have been involved for a long time to discuss and rethink our strategies.

Unlimited Strike/Grève Illimitée

At 8.30, the time that the students hold their marches in Montreal, a few hundred people left Washington Square Park on a wildcat march up Broadway across town on 13th around and about a bit and into Union Square.

A qui la rue? A nous la rue!

Traffic was terrible anyway so I’m not sure how disruptive it was but it was fun and a morale-booster. There was even some dancing in the street.

A-Anti-Anticapitalista!

Some victories have been accomplished–Cooper Union students have fought off efforts to introduce tuition at their historically free institution, at least for two years. Like the Quebecois, they understood that it’s the moment when tuition is introduced that is the one serious opportunity to defeat it. For the moment, we say:

Avec nous, dans la rue!

On est plus de cinquante!

In short, it seems that it’s Montreal’s turn to shift the dynamics: solidarité!