Monthly Archives: May 2012

Sovereigns to Students: Debt Enforcement as Law

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Occupy Montreal! 5 21 12

A qui la rue? A nous la rue? Or as we say down here: Whose streets? Our streets! As ever it sounds better in French, smarter even. Tomorrow is the 100th day of the student strike in Quebec that has now been the subject of the state of exception Loi 78. In a way, we can be grateful for this resort to violence because it clearly reveals that the use of state-sanctioned force in defense of debt extends from sovereigns to students.

The student resistance is remarkable both for its foresight into the disaster of student debt and its fortitude against police violence. There were 308 arrests yesterday and tonight’s action is just getting underway.

The acceleration of this repression has come in synchronization with the increased drumbeat against Greece. Increasingly, it is said by “sources” that Greece must leave the euro, perhaps even the European Union, should it dare to consider debt abolition. Such discourse seeks to transform the moral discourse of debt into sovereign enforcement. It relies on the absurdity that Greece should cut its social services in order to borrow more money to repay debts incurred at the suggestion of the very bankers who now cry foul. Canadian students are now subject to this violence in advance–they are being compelled to accept future debt at the cost of present violence.

Perhaps we have not fully recognized the value of this struggle until now. Making up for lost time, there has been an impressive rallying of solidarity actions in the past few days.In New York tomorrow, there is a rally at the Quebec government offices at Rockefeller Plaza (access from 48th St) at 2pm. This will be followed by a march leaving from Washington Square Park at 8pm.

The Free University group happened to be meeting yesterday evening and it was quickly decided to hold a Pop-Up Free University tomorrow in the time in-between. So there’s banner and sign-making at 5pm in Washington Square Park and teach-ins, open forums, skill-shares and other events from 6-8pm.

First and foremost, there’s the opportunity to learn more about what’s happening in Quebec.

I’m leading a discussion for Occupy Student Debt on the connections between the student debt crisis and the state of exception. We’ll reflect on how student debt has metamorphosed from an issue of personal responsibility and morality, discussed only in private, into a matter for the exercise of the supreme force of law. Loi 78 gives the Quebec state the power to claim all actions that question debt feudalism.

In this action, Quebec has highlighted the close proximity of debt and state violence, as  David Graeber has pointed out:

Modern money is based on government debt and governments borrow money in order to finance wars.

This apparatus has been vastly expanded since the end of the Cold War to no very good effect internationally. Even in the Counterinsurgency New York Times, there has been a more-or-less open recognition recently that the war in Afghanistan is an expensive and pointless failure. It was in Chicago that it is “working,” insofar as it has exercised overwhelming force against public protest.

Chicago 5 19 12. Credit: Sarah Bennet.

Quite rightly, Occupy Theory will be holding an open forum on these counterinsurgency tactics tomorrow.

What alternative could there be to the regime of permanent debt, consumerism and anxiety? OWS Sustainability have a number of skill shares happening at Washington Square Park that suggest some possibilities. There’s one on how to create a worker’s cooperative, not as the “solution” but as part of what they’re calling the “transition economy” from the present disaster to something more offering more possibilities to people, and less destructive to non-human life. Then we can learn about permaculture, sustainable forms of culture that are not subject to the market requirements of built-in obsolescence.

Debt claims to be morality but is always violent in theory and in practice. The pattern that is emerging tells us that the creditors are worried. Show them they should be–attend, like, tweet, support the Quebec strike, the solidarity rallies and your own local debtors.

 

Going viral, going unmentioned: global Occupy

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After May Day, there was some internal discussion in OWS as to both the success of the actions and the press coverage. If the goal of May Day was to give a boost to actions worldwide, it’s beginning to look as if it succeeded (without claiming that OWS or Occupy “caused” any non-Occupy events). It feels like something is happening, there’s a new wave of actions and certainly a new wave of repression. Media is another matter.

On Friday, there was a very substantial demonstration in the northern mining town of Calama, Chile, demanding a greater share of the revenues produced by the copper mined there. The town was blocked by barricades and there was a communal cacerolazo, the banging of pots and pans with spoons and forks.

Calama

Yesterday I saw barricades all the way along Union Square and University Place for some kind of march and there were needless to say cops everywhere. It turned out it was for the annual Union Square Dance Parade and some intrepid Occupy folks had got in on the event. Video by Randolfe Wicker:

In Chicago last night after the highly dubious arrest of three protestors as “terrorists,” a peaceful marcher named Jack from OWS was run over by a police van. There are many pictures on the #nonato twitter feed of injured people.

Today what even the Chicago Tribune, no leftist paper, called “a massive anti-war protest” culminated in a return of medals by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that had many in the audience in tears.

Frankfurt 5 19

In Frankfurt yesterday, 20,000 protested the austerity regime after police mass arrested over 400 people on Friday. Note signs in Greek, German and English in this one photo, evidence that participants see themselves as part of a global movement now, even in Germany, anchor of the European austerity policy.

Montreal--"Crime: To Have an Opinion"

In Montréal, police used their new law against last night’s student demonstration, declaring it illegal as of 9pm and following up with 69 arrests. Student websites have closed to be replaced with anonymized sites that formally advise people not to attend the events that they list. The Quebec Liberal Party and the state Education Ministry websites were down for much of the day: it was inaccessible when I tried to access it. Who do we know that might have done such a thing? Hint: think Guy Fawkes.

Tonight, reports of concussion grenades and mass panic from the Montreal Gazette.

So here in New York a day of intense discussion and action following all this. The Occupy Theory Climate Assembly was a wide-ranging discussion that provided an interesting snapshot of the current state of the movement–it will be discussed at greater length another time.

Eagle in Washington Square Park for Occupy Theory

There was an eagle there, though, which must be some kind of a sign, right?

It turned into a discussion with Direct Action of how to call attention to the weekend-long series of dramatic events.

Soft circle in Times Sq. Credit: Lisa Sabater

OWS met at Fox News, the Military Recruiting Station in Times Square and at the nearby police station, soft linked arms and mic checked a statement, which read in part:

We are all Chicago, / we are thousands in the streets! / We will not be terrorized into silence / as we protest the illegitimate power / of financial and military elites / from the G-8 and NATO.

 

Mic Check! / We are all Montreal, / we are thousands in the streets! /we refuse the draconian emergecy law / invoked by the government; / we will continue to rise up / and strike against tuition-hikes. / Free education is a right!

 

Mic Check! / We are all Frankfurt, / we are thousands in the streets! /We stand against the globalization of austerity /and the punishment of the people / for the crimes of the bankers. / Another world is possible, / and she is on her way!

On Tuesday May 22 in New York there is a rally at 2 pm in support of Montreal on the 100th day of the Quebec Student Strike, outside Quebec government offices, 1 Rockefeller Plaza.

There will be a pop-up Free University in Washington Square Park from 5-8pm, with discussions on the situation in Canada, historical precedents and what it means for the movement.

At 8pm, March Against Repressive Anti-Protest Laws Worldwide leaves from Washington Square Park.

How much of this will appear in mainstream media outside the towns in which it has happened? If recent history is anything to go by, relatively little. Even OWS media advisory people felt that there was no new story on May Day without huge numbers of protestors (although I would argue that 50,000 people is an event) or arrests. Perhaps a truly global movement might merit a mention? Let’s get on it.

 

Civilians in the Red Square

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One of the Plus Brigades tactics taught to people at OWS Spring Training was “civilians.” It means breaking up the mass of demonstrators and disappearing into the New York city foot traffic, only to recongregate later at an arranged spot. It’s a good way to get onto Wall Street for example. In light of the on-going militarization of North American cities and the right to assembly, it begins to take on other meanings. It can be resistant simply to claim civilian status, to act like a civilian, to demand that law enforcement treat this as peacetime.

I had been wondering if Occupy’s tactic as a whole might be “civilians,” a returning into the social fabric with challenges to its normalizing operations punctuated by resurgences on selected days–the next “day” is targeted in New York as September 17, the one year anniversary.

Red Square of solidarity hangs over a union in Montréal

What has happened in Chicago and Montréal makes it clear that “civilians” is every bit as much about resisting the militarization of everyday life. In Chicago three activists have been arrested for alleged terrorism offenses: based on the presence of a home-brew kit. Supposedly the bottles indicated preparations for Molotov cocktails. As might my recycling. Now those arrested are subject to the full panoply of anti-terrorism legislation. As the day has gone on, the police have dramatically amplified their charges, while defense lawyers are suggesting yet another operation co-ordinated by police informants.

Anti-NATO demonstrators at the statue for the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886

In Montréal the hasty legislation passed through Québec’s parliament yesterday was a veritable State of Emergency. Known as Bill 78, it’s extraordinary. In addition to ending the academic year forthwith and requiring students to return early next semester (what happens to those trying to graduate I wonder?), the law then criminalizes protest in a new way:

any gathering of 50 or more people must submit their plans to the police eight hours ahead of time and must agree to any changes to the gathering’s trajectory, start time, etc. Any failure to comply will be met with a fine of up to $5,000 for every participant, $35,000 for someone representing a ‘leadership’ position, or $125,000 if a union – labour or student – is deemed to be in charge. The participation of any university staff (either support staff or professors) in any student demonstration (even one that follows the police’s trajectory and instructions) is equally punishable by these fines.

So my entire class last semester would have had me liable for draconian fines, given that we attended OWS actions (by consensus and in ways determined by group members). They’re not finished though. You can’t cover your face with a mask, scarf or hood–in Canada, with its mild winter climate.

Passages like this make it truly State of Exception legislation, a new low for North American civil liberties post-Cold War:

Anyone who, by act or omission, helps or, by encouragement, advice, consent, authorization or command, induces a person to commit an offence under this act is guilty

You could be accused of giving advice for teaching radical texts, be accused of omission for not reporting an activist student to the police–this is truly unpleasant catch-all legislation.

The overreaction stems from the anxiety that anti-austerity is on the move. Counterinsurgency doctrine holds that the first element of defeating insurgency is to quarantine it and then cut it out for fear of contagion. So it’s not the hundreds of activists in Chicago, or even the thousands in Montréal, that are causing the panic–it’s the idea that this might go viral from Athens to Paris, Chicago, Montréal, Frankfurt–and then where next? This is Contagion: The Reality Show only it’s not funny.

So civilians, yes: people with civil rights, who should be presumed to be acting as civilians not insurgents, who have the right to assembly, free speech and self-presentation. These are very fundamental propositions and for those of you who have been standing back from the movement for any of the usual reasons, now is the time to get back involved. Like it or not, this involves you now.

In New York, there’s a meeting in solidarity with Montréal on Sunday at 3pm in Union Square by the Gandhi statue. Hope to see you there.

 

 

 

Horizontal learning: a report back

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One last word from higher education before it’s time for Summer Disobedience camp and other fun activities. Throughout the course of 2012 so far, I’ve been engaged in a variety of endeavors to promote horizontal learning. Always in my mind as I participate in these projects is Augosto Boal’s concept of “thinking as action.” How’s it going?

In January, I posted about the way in which a group of us had set about trying to render a “class” into a workgroup. We set three forms of activity: actions, close readings of selected writings, and thematic weeks. We later added a guest visitor to that agenda. Of the three, clearly actions are most distinct from standard higher education practice, except perhaps in performance practice or tactical media classes, which are hardly standard fields. Perhaps as a result, the weeks where we went on the March 1 education march or May Day events felt most compelling.

The sense of liberation that we had during actions highlighted the constraints of our modern seminar room, a windowless chunk of carpeted square footage dominated by an imposing computer console containing a thoroughly mediocre machine. It wasn’t until we had a meeting outside during the freakishly warm March in New York that we realized that this alienating effect was exaggerated by the way the room made us form a very wide circle: close circles work much better. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference.

One of the most effective choices we made was to have students work in small writing groups. Although the groups were chosen randomly, they came to have very different sensibilities. Each group determined how they would approach the action days, how they would work on a final project (collaboratively or not) and also formed discussion groups within the formal meetings. Increasingly, these groups became the engine room of the project as a whole. That is, after all, what people pay for at the Ivies (that and the one percent networking).

Meeting time was allocated according to a consensed agenda, based on a proposal drawn up by two facilitators. Every group member did this at least once, most twice. Everyone reported some reluctance to do it and then a strong sense of empowerment having carried it out. While the agendas varied notably week by week, as the Spring wore on, it was clear that there was more and more desire to spend time in the smaller groups, so much so that it was hard to get people to stop work and report back to the collective.

So lots of positives. Let’s note also that trying to functional horizontally in a vertical institution is complicated. Some participants felt that they benefited from what I, as the instructor of record, had to say and wished for more of that. I responded that I in turn felt my comments were far more effective once I had a strong sense of where people were with the material and so the usefulness of my interventions was in fact a consequence of the way we were working. We did agree during that discussion, however, to be sure to begin meetings with a conversation about the terms we were going to use that day.

As time wore on and the other non-horizontal classes were gearing up for term papers, the anxiety level notably increased and people stopped referring to their projects and started talking about finals. It took a lot of one-on-one and group interventions to stop the panic. Normally what this means is that people then like my class but write their thesis/dissertation on a topic from a seminar where a long research paper was required. In this instance, I don’t think that will happen (although it’s not an issue for me) because of the wider context in which Occupy and the political are so central.

More pointedly, can there be horizontality when one person is being paid to attend/teach and the others are (mostly) paying to attend/for credits? To pose the question is to answer it: not perfectly, no. In prefiguring a different approach, you can perhaps take steps in the right direction. It helped I think that we had discussed and agreed on the syllabus, so that we didn’t seem to have a week where the topics and materials weren’t of interest. It helped more, again, that many of the group were also active participants in the movement so felt that they had equal standing. There were one or two who felt unsure about this but did feel able to say so.

Now the school year is over. The group has reconstituted itself as an affinity group and we meet in Washington Square Park weekly for discussion, reading, walks and actions. I’m particularly pleased that it’s not just the usual suspects: the most skeptical person in the group is still active. Where does this go? I have no idea. I’m not worried about it either.

A-Anti-Antigonick

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As predicted, Greece is having its Antigone revolution in refusing to abide by the Law in favor of kinship. For the majority who voted for Syriza and other anti-memorandum parties, mutual aid outweighs obligations to creditors. In the first days of this project, you may recall, I was very taken with a reworking of the Antigone legend in the context of the global social movements by Italian performance group Motus. The proper treatment of the dead body was later visualized by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen. And so when the chant “A-Anti-Anticapitalista” became the subject of a later post, I rewrote it in my head in my geeky way to go “A-Anti-Antigone.” Amazon knows that I am interested in Antigone now and when Ann Carson’s new book Antigonick was published this week, they told me. And this was uncanny because I am known as Nick to my friends.

Actually, what the book, a reworked translation of Antigone, is called is open to question. The cover says:

  ANTIGO              NICK

But the inside front page and Library of Congress listing have Antigonick. You won’t notice that at first because you will be admiring the beauty of the book.

The text was hand-inked on the page, in black and red ink [so red in quotes does not now indicate a hyperlink] then photographed–it’s a bit smudgy sometimes but very striking.

Bianca Scott has produced overlay color drawings that intersperse the text on translucent paper. The only book I can remember seeing like this recently was by the artist Cai Guo Qiang and indeed this one was printed in China (no further details are given). Without being unkind, there’s a story about labor, costs and outsourcing there that might interest Antigonick.

Then you notice that this is not at all a literal translation. It begins wonderfully (Carson’s caps):

[ENTER ANTIGONE AND ISMENE] ANTIGONE: WE
BEGIN IN THE DARK AND BIRTH IS THE DEATH OF
US. ISMENE: WHO SAID THAT ANTIGONE: HEGEL
ISMENE:SOUNDS MORE LIKE BECKETT ANTIGONE: HE
WAS PARAPHRASING HEGEL ISMENE: I DON’T THINK
SO

Carson reminds us that a legend is always a question of how you tell it. And that this is a play, a text to be performed. In the list of characters we find:

Nick  a mute part [always onstage, he measures things.]

We’ll come back to him in a minute. The references to Beckett and Hegel tell us that we can’t hear Antigone as if we were ancient Greeks. This is a modern drama now. Isn’t it just.

KREON TO ANTIGONE :YOU KNEW IT WAS AGAINST
THE LAW ANTIGONE:
                 WELL IF YOU CALL THAT LAW

By the unspoken convention (Nick’s measures), words in red have so far indicated the names of characters. It’s not too much to say that the LAW is a character in Antigone. Or it could also be “just” an emphasis. Or it could be an emphasis on the just, over the law.

Such undecidability is of course contrary to Hegel, who held that

in a drama [spiritual powers] enter in their simple and fundamental character and they oppose one another.

It might be thought that the drama of Oedipus was a (literally) classic example. But it depends. In a review in the New York Review of Books (paywall), Peter Green points out that it was held that Oedipus’s father Laius was attracted to:

Pelops’ son Chrysippus, and carried him off in the first (but by no means the last) homosexual abduction known to Greek myth. Pelops cursed Laius; and the latter’s death at the hands of his son, who then unwittingly married his mother Jocasta, was the working out of this curse.

In this version, the Oedipus complex is more complicated and less decidable than it’s usually allowed to be. Again, as Judith Butler has emphasized, when Antigone talks of her brother, she could be describing Oedipus because they share the same mother. The Oedipus complex was always already queer.

And that LAW thing isn’t just the law of the father. Today Alex Tsiras of Syriza said of Greece “we are going directly to hell,” meaning a living death underground. Which is what happened to Antigone. As Carson reminds us, the myth has power today because it still affects us. She uses words like ANARCHY where the standard translation uses “unruly.” She talks of the “state of exception.” How to measure that?

In the nick. In the nick of time. By Nick.

Eurydike, Creon’s wife, mother of Haimon who Antigone was to marry, has famously few lines in Sophocles. One speech, five lines.

Carson has her speak much longer, with a riff on Virginia Woolf. Then she asks a question about Antigone [the spacing isn’t right in the quote, the lines are alternately indented but WordPress won’t allow that measure, sorry]:

BUT HOW CAN SHE DENY
THE
RULE
TO
WHICH
SHE
IS
AN
EXCEPTION                                               IS SHE
AUTOIMMUNE. NO SHE IS NOT.    HAVE YOU HEARD
THE EXPRESSION    THE NICK OF TIME WHAT IS A
NICK

What indeed? The OED gives us an astonishingly long entry. It refers to a notch, a cut, a groove, whether in a machine, a tool, wood or an animal. It can refer to the vagina, as in various Jacobean dramas cited by OED. Then it is also the precise moment, later the nick of time. It is essential, what is aimed at. You can also go to the nick, a jail or prison, and be beset by Old Nick, the devil.

At the end of the play, NICK still on stage MEASURING. Measuring the collapse of autoimmunity, the collapse of debt’s capital, the capitals of debt.

Like in Beckett, who crops up here, Imagination Dead Imagine:

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault.

 

Measuring, counting the debt in the living tomb that is the Troika’s Greece, there we find A-Anti-Antigonick. An odd creature.

Graduating to the Mad Men future

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Like many in higher education, I have spent most of this week in graduation ceremonies of various sorts. Like all “traditional” rituals, such events are patently invented and everyone knows it. Perhaps it was just me, but the usual evocations of the future that dominate the endless rhetoric of these gatherings seemed more than usually trite this year.

At the events I attended were graduates who had been with me at Liberty Plaza, 60 Wall Street, Washington Square Park and the other locations of Occupy. We’d marched together on October 15, November 17, March 1 and most recently on May Day. None of this intruded, of course, and I would not expect it to have done so. Platform speakers this year seemed mesmerized by Facebook and Twitter, so I expect there will be jokes about Occupy Graduation in 2017 or so.

These grumbles in the back of my mind were given some shape when I watched Slavoj Zizek give a talk called “Signs from the Future” on YouTube (it’s over an hour long so I didn’t embed it). Zizek makes a similar kind of joke imagining OWS activists meeting for lunch in ten years time–on break from their jobs on Wall Street. He was warning against this possibility and arguing for the global social movements as a space in which

one should learn the art to recognize, from an engaged subjective position, elements which are here, in our space, but whose time is the emancipated future.

This is the move that many of us call “prefiguration,” a working out of the future to come in the complex temporalities of the present. Zizek describes it as theological, drawing on Pascal’s notion of the “hidden God.” There’s a long history here, which is fine, except that as soon as there is theology, there tend to be accusations of heresy and before you know it internal divisions of the kind that you can find all over the Internet if you want.

I was more interested by his switch to media as a form of prefiguration. Like everyone else, Zizek is appalled by the current state of Hollywood “cinema” and realizes that narrative in particular has shifted to television. None of his TV examples (The Wire, The Simpsons and 24) are very current, however, and are perhaps sufficiently well ripened even for inclusion in a commencement speech.

Sitting through these events, I wondered to myself how you could use the current hit Mad Men as a cultural symptom in the manner of Zizek: which is to say, in a non-disciplinary, perhaps undisciplined fashion (for proper readings of Mad Men, see the Kritik blog series).

Don Draper

For the first four series Mad Men was really the  Don Draper Show, in which the children of the Sixties asked themselves whether their distant, unavailable fathers maybe had more going on than they knew. Now it seems to have decided they didn’t and Don is just a Dad, sharing the stories of his first wife, once a terrible secret, as a minor plot device.

What we have instead is an ensemble drama, aka soap opera, in which the writing time and again circles around letting the upheavals of the 1960s into the narrative, only to move in a different direction.This is after all a spectacle about the spectacle, in which selling ads is both the subject of the program, and its real raison d’être. The entertainment machine, as Dana Polan calls it, knows its place in the military-industrial-entertainment complex.

The first episode of the current fifth series began with a civil rights direct action that a rival firm of ad executives literally poured water onto. The story quickly turned into a business success for “our” firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Campbell, leading to the hiring of an African-American woman as a secretary. As the show passes through 1965, race has only appeared again once, this time literally around the cash nexus.

Dawn and Peggy

Peggy has the new secretary Dawn stay over at her house and visibly wonders whether it’s safe to leave her handbag, which happens to have a good deal of cash from Roger Sterling in it, in the room with Dawn.

Such moments allow the presumed white viewer to have their racist frisson and disavow it at once. We “get” what Peggy is thinking, without any spoken dialogue indicating it, because “we” get how white racism works. That understanding is then at once disavowed both by Peggy herself in the plot and by the viewer. In this way, Mad Men presents long-term political struggles as minor plot moments for the well-versed TV viewer.

The fully explored pleasures in Mad Men are not really the smoking, sex and drinking that provide many plot points, so much as the repeated pleasure of the sale. In this period at least, there are an apparently endless stream of American manufacturing companies making money and looking for advertising. Cars and airlines are the jewels in this crown but the show invests most time this season in a protracted “get” of Heinz Baked Beans. New things are everywhere, from LPs to acid, and money flows as a result. Literally in the background of one episode, a newscaster talks about Vietnam.

Perhaps the real question to ask, then, is why so many seem to expect and hope that Mad Men will “deal” with the radical side of the Sixties. Bear in mind that for all the attention, this is a very niche show: 3.5 million watched the première but it’s down to 2.2 or so now and over half the viewing audience is over 49. The show works because the majority audience know how things turn out in the wider context and have become used to celebrating such victories as civil rights that are now part of almost any evocation of the “future.” That is, as so many commencement speeches will have had it, “we” triumphed over past adversities and so we will again.

More than this rather simple pay-off, I think there’s an investment (and yes, I’m using these terms on purpose) both in mass media as potentially significant cultural forms and in our own skills as readers of those forms.

For all the intricacy and subtlety of television drama narrative in shows like The Wire, The Sopranos and indeed Mad Men, it’s noticeable how often they deal with the past or institutions that have fallen from past glory, such as Baltimore or the Mafia. Mad Men‘s cleverness is to sell you a version of history in which the good things are still happening, albeit offstage to the central business of the show, which is indeed business.

 

Climate and the Commons

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Huni: once one island, now two

Occupy Theory has decided to set up weekly themed assemblies. Like Barcelona, only with about 39,900 fewer people: so come along, Sunday at noon in Washington Square Park. So I’m supposed to come up with some discussion ideas on climate and the commons, and thought I might try them out here. They have to be short so it can go on one side of paper. Please comment! Too depressing? Not depressing enough? Clear? not so much? what else should be here? FB, email, carrier pigeon, even here on the blog.

Ideas and Actions

1. In the seventeenth century, English revolutionaries declared “the earth a common treasury for all.” Climate change is the polite name for the one percent robbing the commons. The overdeveloped world as a whole is the “one percent” in relation to the dominated world.

2. Capitalism began with the enclosure of the commons and continues to expand today through the fossil fuel and mining industries. All these actions were and are thefts from the commons. To stop climate change, we have to stop neoliberal capitalism. It is a political choice, not an argument as to who is right or wrong about data.

3. What we call the climate and the economy are both complex systems with real effects. Since the beginning of the industrial era, what we call climate has become the product of the economy. This includes temperature, rainfall, sea levels, drought, ice melt, species extinction, flooding, and other variations in formerly stable conditions.

4. There are no longer such things as nature or the environment. You can argue if there ever were but human action in the industrial era has transformed everything that there is, from the rocks to the air: it is real in the sense that it exists and artificial in the sense that humans made it. What we also now know is that it will do so until it is made to desist.

It’s a Good Thing

1. The response to the neo-liberal destruction of the commons will open a new age of leisure for all. Automated production powered by renewable energy can sustain our needs, including modern conveniences and medicines, without the built-in obsolescence, waste and endless debt-slavery of the current system.

2. For half a millennium, priests, colonizers, industrialists and moralizers of all stripes have been bemoaning the laziness of the common people, while extolling the leisure required by the monk, the scholar and the aristocrat. Reclaiming the commons opens the contemplative life to all those who might want it and ends the necessity of pointless labor.

Another World Is Necessary

1. Agriculture and non-nomadic settlement became possible during a geologically brief window that we are now closing. You can measure it: 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allowed for the climate our parents remember. Right now we’re at 393 or so. The International Energy Authority says that we’ve already used all the extra fossil fuels that will take us up to 450 parts per million at which point no one really knows what will happen. It has to stop.

2. The Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan flooded last year for the simple reason that there is now more water in the Western Pacific than there used to be thanks to climate change. High sea-level events like tsunamis and hurricanes multiply small sea-level rises by factors of up to 10,000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced this in Delhi. No Western media reported it.

3. Conservative estimates predict that such sea-level rise will mean 33 million people in the U.S. will have to move, part of 250 million worldwide. That’s one in ten of the current U. S. population. Live in New York? That’s you. And me.

4. Flooding is first affecting the island cultures of the Pacific (see the island of Huni above, divided in two). Indigenous peoples have created the least emissions and are paying the highest price. One-third of the world’s existing spoken languages are found in this region. Capitalism is stealing our cultural commons as well as the air, sea and land. It’s ours and we want it back.

A Tale of Two Cities: NYC and Cairo

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As Occupy activists shake the May Day dust off their feet, the real discussion and decisions over “what next?” are beginning. The calls for global actions are becoming less rhetorical, more substantive. There’s a new form of Occupy emerging, as long assemblies and meetings gather to discuss strategy, tactics and goals in the context of the ongoing global social movements. While the Occupy strategy is of necessity intensely local, its reactivation of the popular claim to public space in conjunction with the European crisis and the continuing Arab revolutions has set in motion the possibility of a globalized countervisuality.

Here’s two report backs from discussions about the movement in New York and in Cairo and how they might relate or interact.

Yesterday, Occupy Theory called an assembly in Washington Square Park on the first hot day of summer. About twenty-five people came and others were drawn into the circle of the discussion as it carried on: unlike the heavily-policed Zuccotti, you can sit down in WSP and no-one seems to mind. It’s the hippy park, after all.

Facilitated by Marina Sitrin, the discussion at first reviewed how people were feeling in general about the movement. There was some expression of unhappiness with May Day’s direct actions, and there were some feelings that without Liberty Plaza, the movement is without direction. Against that, there was a sense that this is a different moment to last September and that horizontalism needs to be reconfigured, that we need to learn from Greece, Spain and Egypt.

A particular turning point was David Graeber’s observation that the real question going forward might be preparing for another, perhaps still more serious collapse of global capitalism. Sure enough, today we’ve seen a wave of nervousness concerning the Grexit–the Greek exit from the euro. That is to say, it’s not so much a question of formulating “demands” in this time of rapidly accelerating change as deciding what principles might guide our choices. There was a stress on developing mutual aid as a form of direct action, in addition to the idea of horizontal learning as direct action.

It was decided to hold a set of thematic assemblies on the Spanish model on successive Sundays. The first one next week will be on climate change and the commons, I’m pleased to say–more on this soon.

Today at the CUNY Graduate Center, an activist from Cairo named only as Mohammed shared his experience of the revolution. As always, you’re struck by the difference in scale at first. Going to a march with hundreds of thousands, seeing people carrying materials to build barricades, or using motorbikes to deliver Molotov cocktails are obviously not daily events in New York. As the discussion continued, I began to see how such distinctions could obscure some important interactions and interfaces of the global movement.

Mohammed mentioned that Tahrir had been designed to be accessible to colonial troops by the British, which also enabled the popular takeover in January 2011. He also suggested that even under the dictatorship there was a certain subcultural street life that was independent, such as the football Ultras whose experience in fighting the police was so crucial in the revolution.

I wonder if there’s a certain fluidity built into the colonial city that paradoxically allows for at least the possibility of the “classic” revolution? Whereas the dispersed, neoliberal, hyperpoliced urban environment requires that (re)claiming public space be the first step towards establishing the possibility of social change? So what is unique about the post-2011 movements is that these challenges to the established sense of authority have coincided, interacted and produced a new sense of the counter-global.

Indeed, as different as Cairo’s revolution was, Mohammed expressed a familiar frustration about the difficulty in sustaining their struggle against a very unified enemy prepared to use whatever violence is (from their point of view) necessary and the move into a “war of positions.” Periods of intense activity are followed by quieter times. Guerrilla art actions have emerged, like women artists holding discussions about sexual harassment in subway cars when denied official space. I don’t think that Occupy and the Egyptian revolution are the “same,” of course, but that, despite the differences in intensity, the different struggles against neoliberalism are paradoxically becoming similar.

In the discussion, these possibilities were drawn out. If there was a focus on the place of neighborhood and local actions from the Occupy side, that is because the more public space is reclaimed as popular space, the greater the sense of disruption to neoliberal business as usual. Then the idea emerged to link Cairo and Tokyo activists over the moving of the IMF meeting in October from the former to the latter–or as it was wittily put, “from revolution to radiation.” It seems that neoliberalist functionaries are running out of places to congregate, that the reclamation of public space has rendered all global cities with Occupies (that is, most of them) so politically toxic that the bankers prefer real toxins.

 

Student debt: stage one accomplished

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With a rash of recent publications in the mainstream media, it’s clear that the first stage of the Occupy Student Debt campaign has been accomplished: to raise awareness and make this a national issue. Now it’s time to start working on promoting the solutions to debt that the media still shy away from: Jubilee, free public higher education and transparent private sector financing.

I’m going to give three examples of student debt becoming more visible, two of which are personal in the Occupy tradition of representing yourself first and foremost. My awareness of student debt was raised when Ruth Gilmore, as president of the American Studies Association, challenged us to find out more about how our students worked (for money) and their levels of debt. My eyes were opened to the crisis around me.

Even before OWS, I had crafted what I’d now call a community agreement with my students, stressing attendance and participation, week-long “due dates” on assignments, giving credit for collaborative projects, having no cumulative assessments and so on. I think it has proved very successful, judging from the evaluations. Nonetheless, let’s be clear: debt is  an educational crisis, one in which the experience of financing is the dominant one of “college,” not learning. I’m close to a point where I can’t envisage how to do this ethically at all.

These stories were the starting point for the TEDx talk I gave a few weeks ago. Here’s the video, which you’re welcome to use although the quality of the sound and images is not quite as high as I would have hoped.

The next item across the media transom is an essay by Thomas Franks in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine (paywall). Franks tells the now familiar story of student debt for the mainstream liberal audience of Harper’s. Then he gives it a twist. He quotes an anecdote from David Graeber, in which Graeber describes how one of his former students is now working as an escort on Wall Street to pay back her student debt. She’s literally getting screwed by the system. Franks ends the piece with a quote from what remains the most accessed post in my writing project:

I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

What’s interesting about this citation is that when I used the line at an NYU faculty meeting, Andrew Ross, who’s been a lion-hearted organizer of Occupy Student Debt, took care to point out he didn’t quite want to go that far. Whereas I tend to go for it, Andrew looks to sustaining coalitions–so this is no knock on him. That was a few weeks ago. Now this quote is good enough to go into public libraries all over the country.

And if you have a Facebook you’ll know that the New York Times today published a long anecdotal article on student debt in their “please give us a Pulitzer Prize” format. The piece is fine at the level of showing how difficult it has become for many people to afford college. It’s strong on the J-School 101 theme “personalize the story” with wholesome, middle-class white kids from Ohio being used to illustrate the ongoing disaster that student debt has become.

It’s weak on analysis and deficient on political context. For example, it’s true that 3% of borrowers owe more than $100,000 as the Times says: would it not be more compelling to spell that out? One million people owe more than $100K. There’s a strange formulation about debt patterns at private schools, which range, they say from:

under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Anyone who knows anything about student debt knows that students at Ivy Leagues and elite schools can be just as way over their heads as people at other private institutions. I could give you stories from each of my own classes–see the TEDx above.

Even more bizarrely a federal official is quoted as suggesting that student debt is like the mortgage crisis:

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise.

While student debt can and does ruin lives, it is almost impossible to default on in a permanent fashion. Lenders can and do take money from unemployment benefit and Social Security. There are no bankruptcy provisions for student debt and you can’t be foreclosed on. Default and delinquency rates are up, yes–but the lenders are doing so well out of the interest rates that they won’t ever really lose money.

It’s on solutions that the piece really falls down. It seems to suggest only that the costs of college be made clearer to applicants and that students need to make choices compatible with their resources not their aspirations. There’s a bit of a suggestion that states might want to raise their support for their higher education institutions and some thought from the Republican governor of Ohio that the universities are to blame for wanting to be good in all areas. Funny, I thought that was the point of a university.

Nowhere is there a discussion about activist calls for debt abolition, a Jubilee, free public higher education, a return to education as a top priority in private schools, private school accountability and the other goals of the Occupy Student Debt movement. Now we have to move quickly to advance that agenda so that pious lamentations about student debt don’t become an election year formula, crowding solutions out of public discussion.

 

How to organize dual power: 12M

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Five Reasons to Occupy

In New York, the General Assembly has been in effect suspended for some time because Facilitation has withdrawn its support for a process that had become increasingly dysfunctional. As we look at the impressive mobilizations across Spain today for 12M (European style dates), it might be worth taking a look at the ways in which they have structured the events. I’m looking only at a few public documents, of course, and I have not been part of any discussions.

But whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. There’s a sense of a real dual-power structure in Spain and above all in Greece, where the elections have confounded the austerity consensus.

Democracia Real Ya, the prime movers of the M15 occupations a year ago, has recently registered as an association, causing some strong dissent among its supporters. Its themes for M12M15 as outlined above nonetheless seem to have been adopted quite widely. The basic themes were elaborated by the Assembly in Barcelona into six themes for discussion:

1. Not one more euro to rescue banks. Citizens’ debt audit. We will not pay illegitimate debt created by those who caused the crisis.

2. Education and health financing and public management, free and of quality. Do not cut public spending, no to the privatization of public services. No repayment.

3. Fair distribution of work and wealth. No to precaritization. No to retirement at 67. Withdrawal of the Labor Reform. Valorization of reproductive, domestic and care labor.

4. Guaranteed right of access to decent housing. Retroactive payment in kind. Spaces for affordable socializing housing. Promotion of housing cooperatives.

5. Tax reform to redistribute wealth fairly, which we all, men and women, produce together. Universal basic income for all people.

6. Defense of the rights to assembly, demonstrate, strike, unionize and all civil liberties including the right to control one’s own body.

These might be said to be principles more than demands, as there is no chance that the current Spanish government will implement them.

The Assembly has created a set of levels of organization for the discussion in the General Assembly that are more detailed than those normally used in New York.

Facilitation (3 people): Responsible for the dynamics of the assembly.

Containment (6 people): Responsible for managing the people who want to speak to the assembly urgently, questions of process, and specific incidents

Take the floor (6 people): Organize one aisle and recognize speaking order evenly across the space. We suggest carrying an identification poster.

Meeting minutes (2 or 3 people):  will be taken into Castilian and Catalan. After the assembly, minutes to be pooled and scanned to get a summary to post on the web. Will seek to record the sound of the assembly to complete the written record.

Timing of interventions (1 person): Controls speaking time with a stopwatch and will signal the speaker to remind them when 1 minute remains (requires sign).

Collection of information (2 people): Charged with collecting and sorting the names of the collectives that want to participate in block 3B and explain the dynamics of this block. This information will be passed to the communicators with facilitation. Will be next to the calendar or poster information to fill in the days during interventions.

Communicators with facilitation (2 persons): Gather information and communicate with facilitators.

That’s a team of 23 people to run the assembly. It’s true that for the most part, Occupy in the US has had no need of such complex structures, as we have not had the numbers. It also shows what the challenges would be to get from where we are now to such a place.

After the People’s Assembly on May Day, which I would guess was about 700 people, Marisa Holmes and others publicly (FB status=public, right?) expressed frustration that the Assembly had lost the opportunity to hold the kind of focused discussions envisaged in Madrid, Barcelona and other Spanish cities. If that Assembly had been able to issue a set of six articulated principles like those formulated by Barcelona, that would have been very interesting.

Because although New York’s movement is much smaller in numbers, it benefits from what you might call global media sensory ratios. Marshall McLuhan suggested that cultures have sensory ratios by which they determine the relative priority of the senses, so that in some cultures hearing is central, whereas in others it might be vision. Of course, all the senses are in fact mixed together so it’s somewhat arbitrary how these ratios are defined.

By global media sensory ratios, I mean something much simpler: how much media “noise”/”spectacle” does an event have to cause to be noticed worldwide? Here events in New York have a very low threshold, whereas a similar event in Spain has to be, as we’ve seen, about ten times the size, and one in a dominated nation like Indonesia larger still. On the other hand, if it suits, a small protest like yesterday’s in Moscow, can make global headlines–in this case, to keep pressure on the BRIC nations.

In Madrid, the gathering has been substantial throughout the day and has met the threshold for coverage as the lead item on the BBC News website at 19.00 Eastern. No sign of the events whatsoever on the New York Times front page, or even on its World page. Moscow’s protest is right there on page one.

Puerta del Sol in the morning

By midnight in Madrid, the time the permit for the rally officially expired, the crowd was immense–full details in El Pais here. No sign of anyone leaving and no sign of a police effort to evict the Indignados. It’ll be interesting to see whether they try and establish an overnight camp or not. If they do, and succeed, that would be a direct assertion of the movement’s power over government edict. It’s clear at any rate that they could do so–the question is whether to risk violence.

Sol around midnight

Around the same time, efforts to form a new government in Greece had to be abandoned because Syriza stood by its principles on refusing the Troika’s conditions and would not join in a coalition. So the 12M organizing is working–on a transnational basis so far but there are bound to be repercussions in Spain if Greece renegotiates its deal or simply defaults. One year in and things are just beginning to get interesting.