Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

debt resistance/ gaga wildness

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In his new book Gaga Feminism, queer theorist and activist Jack Halberstam calls for a new gaga feminism, represented by Lady Gaga, that is epitomized by

a politics of free-falling, wild thinking and imaginative reinvention.

It’s an “undoing” that Halberstam suggests might lead us to “occupy gender.” This isn’t a review of the book, because I’ve only just started it. It’s a riff on the possibility of such wilding in the debt society.

One of the reasons Occupy was so surprising to city authorities, especially in New York, is the successful containment of the possibility of “undoing,” a term also used by Gramsci to refer to spontaneous popular revolt. Would today’s NYPD allow a situation like Stonewall to unfold? Would ACT UP be able to stage a die-in on Wall Street, and, if so, would anyone notice? We know the answer that one: ACT UP were fully involved in the Occupy Anniversary and no mainstream reporting resulted.

I live in Greenwich Village as a bonus part of my work. When I arrived here nearly a decade ago, some traces of a more resistant urban space could be seen. But The Little Red Schoolhouse, the “left” school at the end of Bleecker Street turned out to want $27,000 a year in tuition. Now it’s $35,000, somewhat higher than Harvard. The sign for the Village Gate Theater is still there but it actually closed in 1993. The Beat coffee houses like Le Figaro are closed and today punk venue Kenny’s Castaways shut. The Chelsea piers that once were a genuinely wild urban site are a frequently patrolled park.

Bleecker Street today visualizes the debt society. Between Laguardia Place and 6th Avenue alone, there are branches of Chase, Bank of America and Capital One. Every time rents go up, and that is often, another space becomes a nail salon, a fast food outlet or a pharmacy. The endless pharmacies all prosper on the medicalization of everything, the non-stop stream of prescriptions that are less and less often covered by insurance. Workers in nail salons rent their space from the owner of the store, meaning that every day they begin work in debt.

So when Halberstam suggests that it’s children under eight, women over 45 and

the vast armies of the marginalized, the abandoned and the unproductive

that are those best-suited to perform gaga wildness, he’s also measuring the margins of the debt society. A year ago when the Occupy Student Debt Campaign was created, debt refusal, or wilding debt, was a outlier position. On October 13, there will be debt refusal protests from Athens to Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, New York and Rome, to name a few. Wilding is happening.

Becoming Wild

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Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a dense, emotional film that has the dramatic achievement of being perhaps the first film to create a means to visualize climate resistance. We already have films like the mediocre The Day After Tomorrow that depict climate disaster. Beasts of the Southern Wild gives us a way to begin to imagine wild alternatives to governmentality, without sentimentalizing the prices that have to be paid for that. By mixing magical sequences with cinematic realism, it does for climate resistance what Pan’s Labyrinth did for anti-fascism.

The plot is intricate and so most reviews have concentrated on describing what happens in the lives of Hushpuppy (Quvenshané Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) to the detriment of what is seen, heard and felt. Its scenario depends on the transformation of the climate and rising sea levels. But this is a visceral film, often quite literally, as in a lingering shot of an animal’s intestines, or the disease that kills Wink. It is filmed very tight, meaning that the screen is filled with whatever we are looking at with nothing else to distract us or any means to set it in context. Piles of crustaceans fill the screen, or thickets of dense vegetation, or masses of melting glacial ice. Even the air is thick with dust motes, glinting in the sun, or insect life. The crisp, empty space of the modern cinema is here overflowing with what Jane Bennet calls “vibrant matter.” It’s wild, unbounded and undomesticated.

Such visualization of wild space is resistant to neo-liberalism’s passion for order and its terror of a profit-less wilderness. The commodity drive exists to fill space, whether the private house or the public domain with commodities. To suggest that wild space is always already “full,” or perhaps better, occupied, is to say that maybe the need is not so clear.

In the houses built by the residents of the Bathtub, as they call their low-lying Gulf island, poverty registers as an accumulation of material objects in a small space. The risk of romanticizing deprivation is clearly present. It is negotiated by a contrast with the spaces of governmentality, when the Bathtub is evacuating for “health” reasons after a hurricane. The sanitary but depressing geometric spaces of the shelter show those who don’t have to live in them why homeless people often avoid such spaces. It further suggests that having Hushpuppy narrate the story is not a “child’s eye view,” as most reviews suggest, but the wild view, the untrained and unrestrained way of seeing. Like Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, Hushpuppy sees differently because she refuses the discipline and domination around her.

Wild seeing allows Hushpuppy to visualize her absent mother as or at a lighthouse. There’s a seeming dream sequence when she and the other children visit the lighthouse and find it to be a kind of speakeasy-cum-brothel, where the women all desire to mother the children. They don’t stay, it’s just a trip. And then there are the aurochs, prehistoric creatures, frozen into the ice, who come back to life as the glaciers melt. Hushpuppy can see the aurochs, just as we all breathe atoms of prehistoric air released by ice melt.

The Bathtub folk choose to remain in their flooded and devastated wild dwellings, even at great cost to personal health. The vibrancy of this vitalism is expressed by the driving Cajun soundtrack, one of many similarities between Beasts and Treme. Disaster survival and the physical deprivation that comes with it can, it is suggested, generate meaningful alternatives.

For all the dynamism of this wilding, Beasts is a film about loss and it leaves you feeling devastated. Wink dies and Hushpuppy walks across a flooded causeway into our mutual uncertain future, where the waters are rising, and we don’t know what to do or how to live. This isn’t a perfect film. It begins the possibility of imagining a re-wilding of social space, of the costs we are going to pay as living bodies for the climate change caused by the phantoms of financial debt, and of new ways to visualize that situation. Go see it.

Up the Plebs, Off With Their Heads!

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The U. S. often has little to recommend it over social democratic Europe. It is at least a Republic, recent events have reminded us. Monarchs lording it over formerly colonized indigenous people, hunting endangered species and dismissing anyone who contradicts them as “plebs” have reminded us that behind the present obsession with sovereignty are sovereigns or aristocrats, and a sorry bunch they are. To quote Lewis Carroll, as one should: “Off with their heads!”

Sometimes you don’t really need to add much to a picture.

Here’s the idiot “Prince” William having himself carried around Tuvalu with reality star Kate Middleton close behind. It will be said that this is “traditional.” Like the monarchy itself, most such traditions were invented in the nineteenth century, in this case, most probably by missionaries. There’s some confusion online as to whether this happened in Tuvalu, one of the world’s most threatened nations by sea-level rise, or the Solomon Islands, ditto. In either case, farce pushed out tragedy, with discussion about La Middleton’s semi-naked photos dominating even this colonialist parody.

Juan Carlos hunting elephants in Botswana

Or this. In the middle of the Spanish crisis, King Juan Carlos, appointed in effect to the monarchy by fascist dictator Franco, managed to break his hip falling off a step.He was elephant hunting at the time. Yes. The “modern” monarch, not averse to enriching himself via Saudi patronage, is sufficiently traditional that he thinks shooting endangered species from a raised platform is a fun thing to do. And he couldn’t even walk up the steps straight. Oh, and did we mention that he is an honorary president of the World Wildlife Fund?

And what about us plebs? The word has gained new currency since public school upper class twit of the year Andrew Mitchell, chief whip for the UK Conservative Party, yelled at police who wouldn’t allow him to ride his bicycle through the security gate at 10 Downing Street:

You’re fucking plebs!

Normally Occupy 2012 is on the side of police critics. Here an extremely entitled man wants a door held open for him to save him a few seconds and reacts with an outburst of class hatred.

It’s Year Two of Occupy. In Year Two of the French Revolution, they abolished the monarchy. In his 1975 lectures on power, Foucault reflected

What we need… is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty….We need to cut off the head of the King: in political theory that has still to be done.

He was referring to the juridical power of the state as sovereign. But there’s a still older problem: the entitled feudal power of the soi-disant aristocrat over the plebs, the colonized and the non-human world. This work we had thought done. It seems we spoke too soon. Off with their heads!

Flirting With Fascism

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On one day, three severe austerity budgets were issued in Europe. For the most part, the cuts fall on the back of the poorest and least able to sustain yet more “austerity.” All these losses are in theory driven by the post-World War II fear in the then West Germany that it was inflation that caused fascism. While there is no present sign of inflation–and many people think it would be a good thing if there were–austerity is creating its own form of state-directed dominance, while asserting its desire to resist fascism.

In Greece, where military dictatorship is a phenomenon of the recent past, the very unpleasant Golden Dawn are now reaching 22% in the opinion polls and have tried to open an office here in New York. Happily, Anonymous at once hacked their website. Golden Dawn are almost a parody of the jackbooted, violent image of fascism that might seem a historical relic if it were not for the shadow of recent Serbian history, not so far away. They serve perfectly as a bogeyman for neoliberal austerity across Europe, so much so that if they did not exist it would no doubt be necessary to invent them. That said, we should not minimize the threat they pose in Greece: even the neoliberal Greek government is trying to delay further cuts for fear of accelerating their rise.

It’s in Spain, France and Italy that the new paradigm is being formed. Cut after cut,  more and more regressive taxation from the detested TVA or sales tax, to more expensive parking meters and raised museum entry fees. Spain has cut the budget of the world-famous Prado museum by two-thirds. Soup kitchens abound in Spain, while the government talks of raising the retirement age and finding yet another €60 billion to bail out the banks.

While France today ventured towards making higher tax at least half of its formula, there are still €37 billion in cuts, pay freezes for the numerous public employees of the country and so on. The neo-fascist National Front lost no time in denouncing the “hyper-austerity” of the budget, while a nationwide demonstration against the EU budget treaty in Paris on Sunday is expected to draw 30,000 or more. The Front’s position again allows the austerity regime to pose the alternative “fascism or us,” while subjecting people to its own dominance.

In Italy, one day after a similar 30,000 struck against austerity, the technocrat prime minister Monti let it be known he would take another term if requested–surely we have to call this The Full Monti, a naked assault on living standards. Being unelected, Monti is impervious to democratic pressure and election results alike, although the recalcitrance of Italian corruption holds him back. Ironically, only the Mafia now stand in the way of mafia capitalism.

While a demonstration estimated by organizers to have had as many as one million participants in Portugal–ten per cent of the country’s population–did succeed in shelving some cuts, for the most part The Troika (the EU, the IMF and the World Bank) seem to welcome confrontation. They see a new form of domination in sight, in which banking escapes national controls of any kind, while governments and corporations are no longer obliged to maintain welfare provisions.

In short, the post-World War II settlement in which those that fought the war extracted major concessions from the state in exchange for not going communist is over. Now the Troika want to withdraw all protection from people and offer it to banks instead. Strikes, walkouts, civil unrest and even the break-up of nation states does not deflect them from this goal. And then, of course, there would truly be a United States of Europe.

 

Temperature Check: Needs Work

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At a Strike Debt meeting yesterday, we discussed the joint call for action on O13. One person looked askance and commented: “We better not just get 25 people wandering around New York.” In other words, the tens of thousands that routinely turn out for Europe’s anti-austerity demonstrations are likely to be matched on a scale of one in a hundred at best in the U. S. Why are we still so marginalized?

It’s certainly true that the Eurozone disaster is extraordinary. And of course, Occupy is no more than a year old. In a broadside published today, Rebecca Solnit isn’t having any of it. She firmly blames the left for its own divisiveness and celebration of failure. Having begun to think about hope, she writes,

I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.” All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable.

This tendency to not only see defeat looming but revel in it is a familiar figure. The great heroes of the left from the Commune to the Spanish Civil War and so on all lost. It was the second edition of the first ever punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue that declared punk dead back in 1977.

Now, however, there’s an added social media snarkiness to it all. All over ZuckerBook you can read dismissals of OWS, its publications and campaigns as being insufficiently anti-capitalist and otherwise deluded. As if posting to Facebook was anything other than  a way of making money for its shareholders.

All that said, there are real contradictions here. As a number of people have pointed out, and I am well aware myself, my explorations in militant research are a part of my privilege. I tend to think it a better use of that situation than simply perpetuating the status quo but nonetheless it is fair to ask whether it helps people in the New Academic Majority. My hope is that by acting and writing in the way that I would prefer to do, I make it possible for others to do the same and use my project as a model or reference. That said, you won’t hear much from me after 12/31/12 for a good long time.

For Occupy more broadly, the feminist-inspired culture of trust, process and love has been one of its great accomplishments. But when I hear, as you do from time to time, someone yelling at someone else that they are “bourgeois” or some other infraction, it’s always a male-identified person defining a female-identified one.

At the first GA I remember attending in Zuccotti, I was impressed by a young woman of color talking about the way the assembly did not yet look like New York City. Well, what’s left of that body still doesn’t resemble its parent metropolis, and there’s a renewed bout of questioning as to why. Some people are criticizing the topics we’ve highlighted recently, such as debt, as if debt did not affect the poorest and most discriminated against in our society. Can we do better? No question. But there’s a real issue out there. Here’s a visualization of payday loan stores in Bushwick. There are a lot in a small area.

Here’s the Upper East Side:

Exclude A and C which are bank branches and you have three such payday loan places from 59th St to 106th St on the entire East Side.

So why is OWS in general and Strike Debt in particular still lacking diversity? Part of it stems from the bulk of Solnit’s article about the election. African Americans are strong supporters of Obama, with over 90% in most polls saying they will vote for him. If anyone was in any doubt that Republican hatred for Obama was motivated in whole or in part by race, the rash of “chair lynchings” that followed Clint Eastwood’s speech should have settled the issue. If you’ve missed this, a set of chairs have been hanged in trees with American flags attached to them. Given Eastwood’s identification of an empty chair with Obama, the message is as clear as it is repellent. In the 1960s civil rights activists carried US flags to claim equal rights in contrast with the Confederate flag. The Vietnam War put paid to that association and the flag can now be meaningfully tagged with racist murder.

So while how to vote is almost a technical debate in New York or California, at least at Presidential level, it’s not hard to see why people of color, women, LBGTQI folks and many others don’t see it that way. As Solnit trenchantly puts it:

You don’t have to participate in this system, but you do have to describe it and its complexities and contradictions accurately, and you do have to understand that when you choose not to participate, it better be for reasons more interesting than the cultivation of your own moral superiority, which is so often also the cultivation of recreational bitterness.

The reduced numbers of active people in OWS need to heed such warnings and realize that we can’t turn things our way by hyperactive organizing alone. It turned out that the crisis was not of a brief duration and nor was there to be a revolutionary solution to it. Perhaps for a moment last October we glimpsed the mountaintop but we’ve slipped a long way down the slope since then. That’s OK. Instead of turning on each other, we need to turn outwards and start engaging with the constituencies we most want to be in dialog with.

The Global Debt Resistance

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Another day, another enormous resistance to the neo-liberal austerity regime. Today it was Greece, yesterday Spain. before that Portugal. Now a media and governmental meme is emerging in which it is said that “only” the periphery of Europe are in trouble and that the “strong” countries are doing well. It is hinted that Greece can and should leave the Euro. This is all bravado.

In “strong” France, it was announced today that unemployment has passed the three million mark. Despite the socialist victory in the Presidential elections, French activists see a continuity of austerity. I’m translating below a call to action on October 13 issued by the Paris Assembly of Démocratie réelle maintenant, the French equivalent to Spain’s Democracia Real Ya! Anti-debt groups across Europe and in the Americas are now working to co-ordinate a call for O13. Can what we used to call the left finally get its global act together?

Here’s the French call, translated rather literally, to be true to the original, which centers on the “casseroles” used in Montréal, the banging of pots and pans (all emphasis original):

Citizens! Into the Streets and To the Casseroles to Cancel Illegitimate Debt!

Debt is a racket!

Closure of schools and hospitals, reduction or suppression in social services, increased sales tax, absence of affordable housing…Such politics of austerity, applied for years in Latin America and Africa, are now current in the European Union. No population has been or will be spared, with the most precarious being the first affected. The situation is serious: let’s wake up!

Austerity claims to be legitimate because it results from excessive expenditures on benefits…In reality, sovereign debt comes from both the savagery of private banks since the 2008 crisis and the numerous fiscal gifts to the richest and to corporations for decades.

The debt also results from the excessive interest rates that we pay to private banks from whom the State borrows to finance itself, since it can no longer borrow from the Central Bank. The total debt results from compound interest built up over the past forty years!

The public debt is odious when we are told to reimburse the same people who are responsible for the crisis and who have not ceased to enrich themselves since.

The public debt is not legitimate when it impoverishes us, the 99%, in order to sustain private and unwarranted lenders.

To pay the public debt is just to produce… private debt: that of students, those in precarious housing, the sick, workers, the unemployed, farmers, undocumented immigrants, as well as all those who have to pay the individual price of the dismanteling of public services and benefits.

To continue with growth at all costs imposed by the blackmail of debt is also to increase our ecological debt, which, far more than the public debt, is what’s really at stake in the 21st century.

Where is democracy if we cannot say NO to that which is in the interest only of the privileged and when collusion reigns between them and those who govern us? Where is democracy when all future debate and politics is barred by European treaties, the latest of which, known as the Budget Treaty, is even now in the course of ratification by our so-called “representatives”?

The abolition of illegitimate debt must also be extended to other countries: we demand that the French state cease to shake down other nations in the name of odious debt, which they have already largely repaid, while we continue to pillage their wealth. We won’t pay illegitimate debt, not here or elsewhere! The only legitimate debt that we have is to respond to the call of the African [President] Thomas Sankara to create a global front against debt.

October 13 is a global day of action! Paris, rise up, everyone in the streets with your casseroles for a great unity march from Goldman Sachs to the Assemblée Nationale [Parliament/Congress]: stop the European budget treaty, cancel illegitimate debt here and elsewhere.

After the march, we will meet in an assembly to discuss alternative futures and to build common outcomes from the mobilization.

So there are a couple of points to note here. Obviously this is a more substantive and less media-oriented press release than is now common in the Anglophone world. And the focus is at first more on sovereign (or public) debt. The analysis moves into full agreement with global debt campaigns as it highlights how public debt produces private debt at the expense of developing nations and the biosphere. What might just be happening here is the formation of global anti-capitalist movement with a common theme. I find that idea more than a little intriguing.

 

Que se vayan todos!

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It’s time for them all to go. Who? The global neo-liberal Goldman Sachs-dominated financial elite. Around the world, it’s clear that people are coming to this conclusion and for good reason. In Portugal mass demonstrations forced the government to backtrack on cuts and raise taxes instead. In Egypt, workers are meeting in assemblies. What’s happening is a widespread withdrawal of consent to be governed in the name of austerity, cuts and finance. There are alternative programs emerging. The last year and a half was the warm up. Now it begins.

Egyptian car workers

I spent the morning reading about the civil rights movement as part of Strike Debt’s project to think about how to expand and build its campaign. Then I get online to see what’s going on in Spain, and there it is, happening. Today was a day of action 25S/S25 in which the Congress was encircled.

You wanted demands? They have demands:

– The dismissal of the entire government, as well as the dismissal of the Court and the Leadership of the State, because of betraying the country and the whole community of citizens. This was done in premeditation and is leading us to the disaster.

– The beginning of a constitutional process in a transparent and democratic way, with the goal of composing a new Constitution

They want the elimination of all remnants of Franco-ism and the beginning of a new democracy and sustainable employment. Central to that process is the citizens’ audit of debt:

– The audit and control of the public debt of Spain, with moratorium (delay) of debt’s payment until there is a clear demarcation of the parts which not have to be paid by the nation, because they have been served private interests using the country for their own goals, instead the well being of the whole Spanish community

This is the outline of a political alternative, one that could operate state power, albeit in a very different way.

It was in order to visualize that claim that the massive encircling of Congress took place today. It began earlier with a rally in the Avenida del Prado at the center of Madrid. Here’s a video (HT Marina Sitrin):

They’re chanting: “They don’t represent us.” Indeed they don’t with official unemployment at 24% and poverty at 22%.

They moved off to Congress:

To Congress

There were, shall we say, quite a few people there by the time they arrived and established the circle.

The police behaved with typical restraint.

But as often as the police waded into the crowd, they reformed, sat down and held the ground. Their chants reflected the manifesto: “It isn’t a crisis, it’s a fraud!” and “This is not a democracy, it is a Mafia.”

Ugly Naked Man with a sign: “Life Without Hope in Madrid”

The tunes were often ones used at soccer matches, together with classic left slogans like “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido.” These are forms of social connection that Occupy in the US can’t really draw on. Attending professional sport is a luxury event here, as is class activism. The Indignados are activists because they activate such patterns of social life. NFL referees can go on strike–NY state workers cannot.

If Occupy is to follow, it will have to learn how to cross the color lines that still prevent social activism from cohering here. It’s not that social conditions are different. Poverty in New York City, center of global capitalism, stands at 21% and the top 20% make an incredible 38 times the income of the bottom 20%. Madrid’s unemployment rate is 18.6%, while it reaches 13% in parts of New York like the Bronx, with much more stringent conditions and shorter eligibility. Of course, that difference is both  marked by and defines racialized hierarchy in the US. That’s the task ahead on this side of the Atlantic.

For the Indignados, today was simply a step on the road to the Global Day of Action on October 13, preceded by  O12’s celebration of America Latina Indignada or Occupy Latin America! Which makes sense because this refusal to be governed by neo-liberalism follows in the wake of similar Latin American refusals from Argentina to Bolivia and Chile. As so often, resistance moves from the decolonial regions to the former colonial metropole.

Last March, Madrid led and New York followed in September. Can we close the gap this time?

Why Aren’t You Watching Treme?

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The third and last full season of Treme opened last night. You probably didn’t watch it because only about 500,000 people do. If you’re reading this, you should (and if you’re about to say “I don’t get HBO,” that’s very sweet, try googling ‘watch Treme‘). It’s about how to survive disaster and celebrate life, it’s about mutual aid, it’s about how to have difference in urban space. And it’s about the violence, poverty and state-sponsored oppression that is modern America.

Sunday’s premiere opened with a scene all too familiar to any protestor of recent years. A group of musicians assemble outside for a memorial parade to Kerwin James, a trumpeter who died of post-Katrina medical issues in 2007. Before they can move off, a police car descends and arrests those at the front of the line, although musical parades are a long-standing tradition in New Orleans. Antoine (Wendell Pierce) gets arrested as well for flipping off a cop as he walks away. The march reconvenes later with the protection of the National Lawyers Guild green hats, making it clear that the marchers are there on suffrance that the police can revoke at any moment.

Those plot moments aren’t really why you should watch. This is one of the few dramas that’s actually set in a modern America that resembles the U S in which most of us have to live. It does so by depicting complex and imperfect characters, who do the best they can in a society where the odds are stacked against them. It’s a drama where most of the characters are African American–but not gangsters, drug dealers, whores or pimps. It depicts a post-disaster New Orleans–the opening title for series three says simply “Twenty-Five Months After”–but doesn’t blame the people who live there for it.

Here’s the difference with The Wire, also directed by David Simon, which is everyone’s favorite TV show now but was watched by less than a million viewers when broadcast, even in the last series. Now I hear British acquaintances holding forth about the city, even though they cannot identify in which state it is located.The Wire was relentlessly dystopic, presenting Baltimore as a Hobbesian nightmare of what happens when Leviathan no longer rules.

Treme is not a commercial success because it tries to keep multiple stories going in divergent ways. Viewers are expected to be familiar with jump-cuts, serial narration, flash-backs and fragmentary references to local culture. Luckily the New Orleans Times-Picayune publishes a full breakdown of all such references for geeks the next day. The complaint is that the lives we follow “don’t go anywhere.” Where should they go? This is about people staying on, not leaving, continuing to occupy a city that they believe in against all the odds.

If this sounds romantic, and it is, bad things happen to good people in Treme against the usual show-biz logic. Leading characters have committed suicide, one has been murdered and one raped. The last in particular was very hard to watch but I always prefer depictions of the reality of violence, rather than the sanitized cop-show murder. Why is New Orleans the city with the highest murder rate in the country, is the difficult question that Treme asks? Increasingly, it has come to focus on systemic police violence and police corruption in refreshing contrast to the Law And Order exaltation of all law enforcement.

I’m going to suggest that Occupy’s movement of movements is a similar effort to sustain multiple narratives in one overall conversation. Sometimes that conversation breaks down, sometimes you lose the thread, but it’s never less than fascinating. And Treme gives us the metaphor to understand that conversation as American popular music. The New Orleans brass band is a way to have a set of “voices” in conversation at the same moment. By setting that conversation over a funk beat, that conversation takes on an edge–it represents. It represents the popular voices that are not usually heard, outdoors, in public space that is reappropriated for the purpose. (Video below: may not be visible in Chrome)

HBO are cheap about this and post the music videos from the series to iTunes at $1.49 each. So this is the Treme Sidewalk Steppers with the Rebirth Brass Band from 2009, a few months after the setting of the current series. It shows the interaction between brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians and hip-hop styles. The whole ensemble is about Rebirth, the revival of the flooded city. All our cities are drowning in debt, enmired in violence and swamped with police repression. Step out into the second line.

For A Climate Debt Strike

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Yesterday I had a bit of a rant about the destruction of the biosphere, ending in a call for action. It was that piece that got tweeted and FBed more than anything. So what does climate-related direct action look like? At the end of a day of Strike Debt meetings, it became clear: a climate debt strike.

How did we get here? There was a full day of Strike Debt discussion. A two-hour meeting looked at next steps for the movement after S17 in long breakouts. The consensus was to pursue greater networking at local NYC level and at national level. Task forces were created to investigate both processes. The immediate target is October 13, or O13, the European day of debt action, when Strike Debt will be doing solidarity actions.

Next, a debrief from S17. A strong sense here that the day went well for OWS in general and Strike Debt in particular, who were in the thick of things throughout. There was some concern that our messaging didn’t get out in the MSM, but no real surprise about that. On the positive front, The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual was a huge hit everywhere from Occupy Tampa to the Brooklyn Book Fair and the Free University.

At the end of all this a group retired to a local Happy Hour just to kick back. Everyone’s kidding around and suddenly a passionate debate about climate justice has started. Perhaps it was no coincidence that people from Panama, India and Palestine got this moving, calling attention again to the privilege that even a protestor on Wall Street has in relation to residents of underdeveloped nations. The daily threats of toxicity, disease, food insecurity (aka hunger), pollution and sea level rise make daily life in many locations a permanent emergency.

Climate justice activists have long highlighted the “climate debt” that the developed world owes to those places it has underdeveloped. That is to say, developed nations should cut cut their carbon emissions sufficiently far as to leave “room” for currently underdeveloped nations to expand their industrial economies in such a way as to mitigate their everyday emergency.

So far, this concept has won lip-service, some green-washing ads from corporations and not much else. Eco-activism has long concentrated on trying to influence national governments or global governance structures like the United Nations. The collapse of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio earlier this year made it clear that such options are no longer viable.

Just as we have seen with financial justice, the only way that the global one per cent will concede climate justice is if a radical movement forces the issue onto the agenda. We have begun to organize a debt resistance movement in the finance economy. We need to start to organize debt resistance in the climate economy. Which is to say that all debt refusal is also climate debt resistance.

The reason is simple. In order to “pay back” purported “debt” it is necessary to increase the size of the economy. At the present moment that cannot be done without increasing carbon and other toxic emissions, increasing land grabs from indigenous peoples and increasing primary extraction, like tar sands. Debt refusal is not an immoral welching on an obligation. It is at once the political claim that such debts were coerced; and deceptive and the moral claim that the economic growth required to “repay” them must be refused in name of all life.

A debt strike is a climate debt strike. Join the resistance. Strikedebt.org

The Extinction of Natural Time

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Take a moment out of the beautiful fall day to mourn the passing of the biosphere. It seems to have barely registered on the global hive mind that the Arctic sea ice melted this year to an extent never seen before. In a matter of years, not decades, there will be no ice in the Arctic in summer. A world without a North Pole. A biosphere that no longer plays out according to its own rhythm and time but has become a by-product of the capitalist profit/loss cycle.

People often say this is too depressing to think about because it’s so overwhelming. Let’s try and come at it through a single detail. And get angry, not sad.

A scientist from the National Snow and Ice Data Center tried to document the change in the Arctic by measuring ice floes, pieces of ice floating in the sea.

She was unable to find one sufficiently dense to support her weight. In the nineteenth century, when British whaling ships went to exactly the same region of the Arctic, near Spitsbergen (Svalbard in Norwegian, as in the map), the ice was so dense and heavy that they moored their ships on ice floes. They would then use chains to lift whales out of the water to strip their blubber, while counterbalanced with the ice.

 

Visually, in a century we have gone from here, a whaling ship trapped in the ice with other ships operating nearby:

to here, a former whaling site in the summer of 2012, the whaling season:

Baffin Bay in 2012, former whaling site (AFP photo)

This isn’t long in human time. In what used to be geological time, it’s too short to measure. Capitalist time has now eliminated geological time, it’s extinct. This wasn’t supposed to happen until 2050 or later, according to projections made only five years ago.

The cause is the same as that which led the whalers to the Arctic in the first place: the relentless autoimmune destructive force of capitalism’s need for energy. Whalers first hunted commercially in the Bay of Biscay in the sixteenth century. Soon, the animals were extinct there. They turned to walruses and eliminated them. By the late eighteenth century an Arctic whaling boom was in full swing, as whale oil could be used in the textile and lighting industries. So the whales died to keep factories open after dark, as the oil produced by Arctic whales was low quality compared to sperm whale oil. The shift, the working day and the concept of separating time into “work” time and “leisure” time are by-products of the human conquest of diurnal time and space.

By the late nineteenth century, Arctic whales had disappeared in turn and the British industry went fallow for a few decades. Another time we’ll think about whaling as the first paradigm for globalization. The remnant of all this destruction is the continuing Norwegian insistence on hunting whales, despite their extensive oil reserves.

The message of the open Arctic is clear. Capitalism is constitutively incapable of restraining itself. It cannot be reformed or regulated in its quest for energy, as indicated by the insane efforts of governments and corporations to use the melting in the Arctic to drill for more oil. Its only measure of time is the profit cycle, which must always move forward and always creates “externalities,” such as the death of the biosphere.

So don’t mourn the biosphere: organize. It’s time.