Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Stand With Occupy

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If you’re reading this, you have some sympathy for the Occupy movement. You might not agree with everything it’s done and that would make you just like everyone else in the movement. You might feel that you personally have done what you can. There’s an amazing opportunity coming up this coming weekend to remind the world why there was an Occupy movement in the first place. Please consider joining us in person if you can or signing a letter of solidarity if you are not able to be in New York or at one of the many other events.

As you know, on September 15-17th in New York City, OWS is organizing three days of education, celebration and resistance to economic injustice with a full slate of permitted convergences, family friendly assemblies, a big concert, and mass civil disobedience on that Monday in the heart of the financial district. The evolving schedule as well as detailed information can be found at s17nyc.org. Outside New York, there are events all over the country and indeed the world. There’s always space for more: a speak-out in a park or outside on a college campus, an Occupy Rosh Hashanah event, whatever.

Time is short and it’s a busy time of year. So if these options are not open, please consider signing the letter of solidarity with Occupy from artists and intellectuals. Here’s an excerpt from the letter that’s already been signed by a crowd of people ranging from the “big names” of Butler, Rancière, Zizek and West to those artists, academics, writers and members of the New Academic Majority who do day-to-day work in Occupy and for S17: Andrew Ross, Pamela Brown, Astra Taylor, Yates McKee, and many others.

Here’s the letter:

It’s time for those who are privileged enough to think and write and create and teach for a living—particularly those of us with full-time faculty positions or secure careers—to step up and be counted. We have earned academic and cultural capital from espousing radical positions. Now is the time to lend our support in visible ways to the commitment shown by the Occupy movement and to help it grow and evolve.

The letter gives you a list of things you can do over the weekend and beyond, if you want to get involved whether it’s for the first time or once again. You can donate some money if you’re so minded, any contribution would be fabulously useful.

But what would be really great would be if everyone would post the link:

http://standwithoccupy.org/

on all your social media, email it to people that don’t use social media and generally make this thing go viral.
Thanks.

How Occupy Has Won the Argument

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A rash of Serious Books by Serious People–the kind who get on the news or NPR–has validated Occupy’s critique of American political economy. Not that they put it that way. But from debt to Big Oil to the economy, it seems that the unwashed anarchist rabble–as those same Serious People see OWS–were right all along.

I’m bit a bit unfair to some of these writers. Joseph Stiglitz, whose term “the one percent” was part of the inspiration for “the 99%,” calls his new book The Price of Inequality, an Occupy-friendly concept. And Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! uses a slogan for a title. The primary conclusion of both writers is that the current economic crisis is in fact a political crisis. It’s at this point that we tend to say, “we know!” However, in the rarefied domain of academic economics, this is heresy. Stiglitz warns mainstream liberals that they are at risk of an Arab Spring:

our own country has become like one of these disturbed places, serving the interests of a tiny elite.

Apart from the Orientalism, the idea that this is new and the suggestion that the 2011 events were a bad thing, I agree!

Of course, what’s at stake in many of “these places” is oil. New Yorker writer Steve Coll has a massive tome out, exploring what he calls the Private Empire built by ExxonMobil. The book uses the judicious tone of his home journal but nonetheless amply reveals how astonishing the power wielded by this “too big to fail” behemoth has become. For example, when agreeing to drill oil in Chad, ExxonMobil and other Big Oil companies secured a thirty-five year compact. It provides that

the State guarantees that no governmental act will be taken in the future, without prior agreement between the parties, against the Consortium which has the effect either directly or indirectly of increasing the obligations or amounts payable by the Consortium or which adversely affects the rights or economic benefits of the Consortium.

As well they might: Coll notes that the $5.3 billion profit made by ExxonMobil when this was signed in 1988 was several times larger than Chad’s entire economy.

This history, and many others of its kind, like the Memorandums of Understanding by which India’s mineral wealth has been handed over to private corporations, indicates that the concept of corporate personhood, complete with “human” rights, was created in the underdeveloped world and then imported to the neocolonial metropole. Even Republican administrations wait to be told what ExxonMobil want. The reviewer of this book for The Nation noted that even Coll’s own foundation has received grants from ExxonMobil–although, to be fair, Coll recused himself from the process.

Coll cites some interesting evidence that ExxonMobil were prepared to accept a carbon tax, while vehemently opposing a cap-and-trade policy for carbon. You wonder why the Obama administration, never one to stand on principle, couldn’t have found that out so that some small limitations on fossil fuel use might have resulted.

Arguably, it’s too late. In an article on Truthdig, Chris Hedges quotes Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,

Our solution is our problem. Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable.

This is Strike Debt’s argument: the “externalities” created by growing the carbon-based economy sufficiently to pay off even a percentage of household and sovereign debt would include disastrous eco-cide. Coll notes in passing that extracting fuel from tar sands uses immense quantities of water, as does fracking. In both cases, the water is horribly toxic afterwards. When we have 63% of US counties in drought, can we really afford to use this water to accelerate climate change and produce more drought? What happens when humans start running short of water in the US? Are humans small enough to fail?

Where there are political arguments in these books, they are not being discussed by either political party. Where there are political implications, they are being drawn out only by the social justice movements. The disturbances have only just begun.

Life After Debt

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So I have my ups and my downs with my Occupy life. Today was one of those days where I love this movement. In a day of rolling events in East River State Park in Brooklyn, a tight plan for S17 emerged, Strike Debt consensed on its actions for the weekend and then we held the Life After Debt action.

East River State Park is a patch of grass with a few benches that runs down to the East River, offering a spectacular view of Manhattan. I got there via brunchtime Willamsburg, a picture-perfect cliché of hipster Brooklyn, all oversize glasses, plaid shorts and undersized tops: and that was just the men. There was a resolutely apolitical vibe. In the park, sunbathing, picnics and in the corner, a group of intensely discussing people.

After three hours, the direct action people had set aside some personal disagreements and finally devised a workable and compelling plan for S17. Details will be forthcoming but what struck me across today was the effectiveness of focused collective intelligence. It’s like rehearsing a play. There can be all kinds of mess, sometimes you need for the whole thing to get to the verge of falling apart and then all of a sudden it palpably clicks into shape.

That happened with Strike Debt today. It’s a disparate group with plenty of personality and some divergence as to tactics and goals. When you get the Occupy process right, though–an agreed agenda, timekeeping, tight facilitation, temperature checks and bottom lining–it’s surprising how the group can rise above that in a way that I have (almost) never seen in academia, for instance. I could give you the decisions but that’s not the point. On a micro scale you learn how a horizontal democratic process grounded in trust and política afectiva actually works.

And then we enacted it. The first Strike Debt action called people together to refuse their debt by describing their debt situation and then symbolically burning their debt. We gathered in a circle facing the river with some new Strike Debt banners. It happened to be a gorgeous day, clear and sunny–there’s going to be some great pictures of the event but I was too busy to take any, sorry.

As people stepped up to speak it seemed to grow quiet even in this very public place. We heard people talk about suddenly diagnosed medical conditions that are not covered by insurance, but might be life-threatening, plunging a life into chaos–and debt. How a piece of bad advice from a union about unemployment benefit led to a contingent faculty member being sued. And many times about the craziness of student debt. To speak in this assembly was at first upsetting but then affirming. Debt is no abstraction. It destroys lives. We’re trying to take them back.

We walked down to the river in procession, took the ashes of the debt papers people had burned and cast them into the water. It wasn’t sad, it was calming and beautiful.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t expect any transformation in the macro-situation in regards to debt any time soon. Finding these alternative ways to live as if there was a life after debt makes that otherwise devastating prospect bearable. And someone had made a cake.

 

To Walk Asking Questions

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This is the theme of a fascinating new book, Occupying Language, by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series. The authors situate the present Occupy movement in the context of the insurgent movements in Latin America over the past quarter of a century. From this perspective, to occupy is to walk asking questions. And it’s ok to get lost.

Cover of Occupying Language

The authors develop their project in the colonial context suggested by the original meaning of occupation:

Language is not neutral, and words transport and express concepts and ways of thinking. They can consolidate and perpetuate hierarchies, domination and control just as they can underline equality and strengthen consciousness. Latin American struggles for dignity, freedom and liberation are rooted in more than five hundred years of resistance. Language derived from their struggles comes with historical antecedents.

The book goes on to describe concepts like Territory, Assembly and Rupture that translate easily, as well as more elusive and perhaps productive forms, such as política afectiva (≈affective politics), poder popular (≈popular power) and autogestión (≈collective democratic self management).

Each term is “openly defined” in a short sentence and then given living form in a piece of reportage of the authors own experience with the concept. The rest of the entry analyzes the use and meaning of the term.

Such fascination with language was a commonplace in the early days of Occupy. The word “occupy” was odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.And so it proved, with the citation arguing

It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word.

In this project I also undertook a decolonial genealogy of the word. So it’s renewing to see how much energy can still be generated by an attention to the politics of language, now that everyone is “over” Occupy and wishes we would just go away.

Sitrin and Azzellini’s book reinforces some of my own thoughts about our present direction. We know, for example, that many mainstream reporters will declare S17 a failure because there will not have been a new Occupation, even though we no longer intend to do so. Sitrin and Azzellini point out that the global movements have all gone through

a process of reterritorialization…after a few months….Thus, around the world there has been a shift into neighborhoods and workplaces, to focus on local needs yet at the same time come together to co-ordinate.

Whether because of anxieties about the Presidential election, or because people still harbored hopes for a more thorough-going transformation, we’ve not paid enough attention to this process and not given it a high enough value. For Sitrin and Azzellini, the project is one of

Caminar Preguntando (To walk asking questions)….[M]ultiple histories that help create multiple open-ended paths.

This walk leads us into what Benjamin called “a secret rendezvous between past generations and our own.” For Anglo readers, we might understand this as a decentering and decolonial vantage point on the history of the present as understood by those who have been colonized for five centuries.

There are many moments that resonate in this slim volume. One that caught my eye was the discussion of política afectiva. The term came out of the post-2000 autonomous movements in Argentina, meaning “a movement based in love.” This was no easy sell in a place like Buenos Aires, as Toty Flores from the Unemployed Workers Movement recalls:

Imagine being in a neighborhood like La Matanza, which is full of really tough men, men who have lived, and still live, a violent macho life, and we’re talking about new loving relationships. No, it isn’t easy, not even to talk about, let alone practice. This is part of our changing culture, and as we change, we notice how much we really need to.

I was reminded of a visit I had the chance to make to FOMMA, a performance space and center in San Cristobal, Chiapas, where Maya women have used performance to educate their community about domestic violence. Such spaces are amazingly empowering and inspiring, however local their project.

Sitrin and Azzellini remind us that too often such transformative projects are written off as being “identity” or “gender” issues, unlike the “real” economic or class issues. They riposte:

Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya

Responsibility for the other and solidarity are basic conditions of a future society not grounded in capitalist principles.

OWS once knew that very well. There are days where I worry that the focus on confrontational direct action, arrests and civil disobedience seemingly for its own sake rather than as an articulation of a wider idea, has allowed us to forget it somewhat.

When we talk of Democracia Real Ya! that is what we mean. Anti-capitalism, this book reminds us, is a politics of walking and of love.

Sometimes, as Rebecca Solnit has taught us, when you walk you get lost. And she suggests that’s a good thing, a way to let go of our hyper-disciplined OCD selves and wandering to wonder. That might be where we are now.


Move on, no crisis to see here

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It seems that there’s a concerted effort at the level of the nation state and the transnational institution to assert that the status quo is assured. The European Central Bank has written a blank check for the Euro, pollsters are predicting a win for Obama and stock markets are back to 2008 levels. The wrinkle comes from Quebec, where forty years of organizing has laid the background for the election of the new Parti Quebecois government, committed to abolishing the tuition hike and the noxious Loi 78.

Mario Draghi, head of the ECB, announced yesterday that it would buy bonds from member nations in unlimited quantities. His action was designed to forestall all rumors that the Eurozone might break up, by restoring liquidity to nation states. For the inflation-shy German central bank this action was held to be

tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes.

And indeed it is. Against neo-liberal economics, Draghi and other central bankers assume that there will be no inflation because consumer demand and wages alike continue to be depressed.

Across the world we see the reasons why. The US economy added no more than a rounding error of jobs last month. The battered Greek welfare state is about to undergo another $11.5 billion in cuts. Portugal increase its social security tax from 11 to 18%. Like all the other money poured by government into banks, none of this will find its way out to people.

Meanwhile, in the NAFTA-zone, Mexico is set to return to the institutional rule of the PRI and Canada remains under the oil-first government of the Liberals. The 538 blog (now hosted by the New York Times gives Obama a 77% chance of victory, which is good news in terms of preventing further neo-liberal and culture wars insanity by the Republicans. Given the low chance of the Democrats taking the House, it will nonetheless mean the continuance of gridlock, with continued impunity for banksters and no risk to the one per cent.

The exception to all the gloom comes from Quebec. After the narrow election win by the Parti Québécois, they smartly decided they did not want to be saddled with the Liberals’ baggage:

“We had a call from the PQ assuring us they will cancel the tuition increase and Bill 78,” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, noting students will also meet with Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois. “They said they will reimburse any students who have already paid.”

 

CLASSE have indicated that the national demonstration of September 22 will go ahead, in the absence of an actual repeal, and in support of their claim for a student grant increase. It will most likely have the feel of a victory party.

There are no doubt questions as to what happens next in Quebec. For now, let’s note their successul formula so far

  • building a radical community over an extended period of time
  • working in alliances, even with groups with whom you have distinct differences, towards specific goals
  • great messaging and symbolism, together with resolute direct action
  • keeping it local.

These tactics resonate with those used by the horizontal and popular movements in the Southern half of the hemisphere. They did not back down, even in the full force of law, and have made a real difference. There’s really something to see there.

Privatized Austerity: Why Silence=Debt

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The new report on debt from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York presents the case for a decline in household debt. Which is true, if you exclude bankruptcy, foreclosure, and student debt all of which are up. And forget trying to get a new mortgage at those nice low rates you hear about: the banks aren’t lending at all. What we’ve got here is a privatized austerity that’s affecting individual lives every bit as much as its nation-state implemented partner in Europe. In this privatized form, debt-driven austerity presents less of a political target. Silence=Debt. Which is why we strike debt.

Let’s look at the Fed’s own numbers. With student loans, the news is all bad, explaining in part why, of all debt topics, attention continues to be centered on student loans:

• Outstanding educational debt stood at $914 billion as of June 30, 2012 [previous Fed figures had it at $870 bn]

• Since the peak in household debt in 2008Q3, student loan debt has increased by $303 billion, while other forms of debt fell a combined $1.6 trillion.

• Student loan delinquency rates increased for the second consecutive quarter; The percent of student loan balances 90 or more days delinquent increased to 8.9% from 8.7% during the second quarter of 2012.

Note that the delinquency rate here is across all student loans, including those currently in deferral. The Fed itself has reported that 27% of loans not in deferral are in some stage of default. The increase in student debt is a direct consequence of the impossibility of declaring bankruptcy or defaulting on these loans.

So we need to be careful about the assumption that the numerical decline in bank reported debt means that people’s situations are improving. To the contrary, as bankruptcy and default increase, banks move debt off their balance sheets, making their situation appear better. For the debtor, the situation is in fact worse.

Here we can see that more people are being pursued by debt collectors for larger sums than ever:

This chart suggests that about 14% of consumers are in collection and the amounts are climbing steeply to an average of $1550.

As we might expect from this, bankruptcies are up, while foreclosures are running back at 2011 rates, despite the 5 million people who have already lost their homes

So how can total household debt be lower? Here’s the giveaway detail. Foreclosures and bankruptcies allow banks to remove that debt from their balance sheets. The people concerned are now invisible, statistically unaccountable and therefore (it is hoped), politically neutralized. Here’s the Fed’s visualization of that for mortages:

The red section of the bars refers to “charge-offs” meaning defaulted or foreclosed loans. The more these increase, the lower total mortgage debt becomes as you can see here, as represented by the black line.

Notice also that the blue bars depict new loans and mortgages that are actually paid off by the homeowners. This number has now declined to irrelevance. If we assume that some folks are in the course of time managing to pay off their 30-year loans, then the amount of new mortgage lending is very low indeed. That would accord with the anecdotal sense that, despite notionally low interest rates, mortgages are now impossible to get. The federal funds set aside to help underwater mortgage-holders have been little used, not because people don’t want them, but because banks put so many obstacles in the way of refinancing.

Unlike European austerity that is visibly punishing the 99% to recoup the excesses of the one per cent, this silent austerity has come with relatively little political consequence. A Wall Streeter whose entire enterprise rests on forcing companies into debt and then cashing out, leaving them to pay off the debt, is at 50% for the presidency. He’s only doing to companies what the banks are doing to all of us.

Strike back. Strike Debt Assembly at 1.30, followed by Life After Debt: A Gathering of Debt Refusal at 4pm, this Sunday in East River State Park in Williamsburg.

Get Up! Get Down! Events for OWS Anniversary

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As people come back to school and start thinking about what’s next, it seems like a good opportunity to remind everyone about the activities over the weekend of September 15-17 and beyond for the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. There was a three-month run up to May Day but the summer holiday and the Presidential election campaign has made it harder to keep people focused. Here’s a moment when the world’s attention will be back on OWS and it’s a great chance to show that, whatever you think Occupy is or should be, the energy of the movement is still here and still needs to be heard.

The full program is constantly being updated and is available at the S17 website.

These are my personal highlights:

 Saturday 15 September: Education

12.30-4pm Assembly

The weekend begins with a thematic assembly in Washington Square Park. You can hear about what the different working groups of the movement are engaged in and participate in open-ended facilitated discussions about the key themes of the weekend, such as debt, the environmental crisis, political corruption, as well as long-term themes of the movement. The assembly ends with a re-convergence to discuss the future.

7.30pm Launch of The Debt Resistors Operations Manual, Judson Church

A collective publication by Strike Debt, The Debt Resistors Operations Manual offers debtors practical advice and information on debt of all kinds and how to resist it. Published for the weekend, this launch event includes teach-ins, video screenings and the chance to share stories.

Sunday 16 September: Celebration

7.30 pm Occupy Rosh Hashanah, Zucotti Park/Liberty Plaza. The Jewish New Year begins at sunset on the night preceding the anniversary. Following from the amazing Occupy Yom Kippur last year, Occupy Judaism and others are creating an nondeminational holiday service and potluck dinner. There will be echoes of the alliances during the Civil Rights Movement between Jewish progressives and African Americans, it’s a great prelude to S17 itself.

Monday 17 September: Liberation

Early morning from 7am: The People’s Wall will block access to Wall Street by closing down key intersections. ACT UP, 350.org and Housing Works are among those joining OWS in this action. It’s a non-violent civil disobedience so be prepared by doing a training on Saturday or Sunday.

Also early: The 99 Revolutions, mobile actions by affinity groups across downtown (as in the poster above).

Strike Debt will also have actions during the course of the day. More details closer to the time.

These actions are being finalized over the next week but everything will depend on how the day goes. There is already a large pile of NYPD barricade blocks at Zucotti Park, so it may be that it’s the police that shut down Wall Street for us.

6pm: The Emma Goldman Assembly, 55 Water Street. Perhaps the most enticing event is the gathering of the “movement of movements” that Occupy has become to plan ahead. The Assembly is not a decision making body but a place to share, discuss and learn. There are plans to make this a regular event going forward.

September 18-22: Free University

The fabulous Free University has a week-long series of events in the works following S17, to build on the action and take the energy into Year Two. Most meetings in Madison Square Park, as on May Day.

There’s so much more going on and I’ll be returning to this often in the run-up to the day. For the time being, the thing to do is get the word out. See you in the streets.

Recolonizing Everyday Life

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I’m writing this post, like all the others, on a Mac computer that proudly advertises it is made from solid aluminum (or aluminium). That aluminum was probably mined from land belonging to indigenous people. Today workers for Spectra Energy began constructing a pipeline that will bring fracked natural gas and its accompanying radioactive Radon right into the West Village, close to where I live. Needless to say the swathes of land being destroyed by this extraction once belonged to the indigenous people here too. The once-heralded immaterial knowledge economy feels a lot less real than this recolonization of everyday life. Wherever you live, it’s right there in increasingly similar ways.

In the swirling moments around 1968, the Situationists declared that there was an ongoing “colonization of everyday life.” Perhaps it’s an indication of what McKenzie Wark has called the “disintegrating spectacle” that this drama can now be visualized. It’s a surprisingly material process, the physical extraction of energy and minerals displacing first the indigenous, and then whomever else happens to be in the way. We are reminded once again that, as Walter Mignolo has put it,

coloniality is modernity.

The endless process of accumulation is revisiting both places and materials that it has already used in a different way to produce this recolonization.

So what’s in my Mac? Making aluminum an incredibly destructive process. Three tonnes of bauxite is required to produce 1 tonne of alumina. It’s nearly all strip-mined because bauxite tends to close to the surface. Only half a tonne of aluminium can be extracted from 1 tonne of alumina. So it’s a six to one waste to product ratio. Mining regions are devastated.

The supply chain for a globalized material like aluminum is not transparent. The nations offering the largest supply include Australia, China, India and Brazil. You’ll be aware of the explosions in Apple’s China plants caused by aluminum dust.

Apple supplier in China after explosion

In Australia, 60% of all mines are either situated on land still recognized as Indigenous or adjacent to it. On the Burrup Peninsula, home to the extraordinary petrogylphs of the Yaburara people, some 90 of the 118 square kilometres has been zoned for industrial development.

 

The pattern in India is similar. India’s Center for Science and the Environment reports:

If India’s forests, mineral-bearing areas, regions of tribal habitation and watersheds are all mapped together, a startling fact emerges – the country’s major mineral reserves lie under its richest forests and in the watersheds of its key rivers. These lands are also the homes of India’s poorest people, its tribals.

The map below indicates mines with symbols and areas of poverty/Adavasi habitation with dark shading:

North-East India: minerals and poverty
The mines are mostly owned by multinational magnates like Vedanta, which generated $14 billion in revenues in 2011 and made a cool $4 billion in pre-tax profits on that. It produced 675 kilotons of aluminum, largely at Jharsuguda. Nonetheless, Vedanta is closing some of its processing plants because it says everything is gone from the ground. This may be taken with a pinch of salt because Vedanta were prevented from mining in the hills at Niyamgiri, a region sacred to the Dongria Kondh, the indigenous people of the area.

The reasons are clear. According to an Amnesty International report of August 2012:

Vedanta’s human rights record falls far short of international standards for businesses. It refuses to consult properly with communities affected by its operations and ignores the rights of Indigenous peoples.

We could generalize that statement to say that the recolonization of everyday life flatly ignores what it considers to be unnecessary restraints on profit generation like rights or existing law.

In Canada, according to a devastating piece by Andrew Nikiforuk, the neoliberal Harper administration has literally rewritten the law to enable the creation of a tar sands pipeline into and across the Great Bear Rainforest. The forest has hitherto been a model of sustainable development, combining:

ecotourism, renewable energy, sustainable forest products, shellfish aquaculture, and the restoration of First Nations’ access to fisheries.

In March 2012 the administration bundled together an extraordinary assemblage of deregulation into one package and passed it as an omnibus bill, undoing not only the rainforest protections but almost all aspects of environmental monitoring that might hinder the operations of Big Oil.

The distinguished marine ecologist Ragnar Elmgren of Stockholm University called it “an act of wanton destruction…the kind of act one expects from the Taliban in Afghanistan, not from the government of a civilized and educated nation.”

Leaving aside the cultural hierarchy implied in this statement, which is a tad unfortunate to say the least, what’s notable is that this recolonization–or perhaps more exactly, reversion to colonizing conditions–has no exception for the EuroAmerican “white” person.

The Fourth World can be permitted a wry smile. The West Village, home to Sarah Jessica-Parker and other glitterati, is now not only subject to the mad NYU expansion, which will put construction in the area for twenty years and leave it looking like downtown Omaha, but now it’s getting a fracking pipeline. So as much as the global city likes to present itself as an oasis from the actual conditions created by financial globalization, they have now returned to sender.

As I mentioned, it’s happened before. Nikiforuk calls the tar sands product by its traditional name: bitumen, also known as asphalt. It’s that filthy dark black stuff they use to coat roads. And in the beginnings of the industrial period, they used it as part of the immaterial labor of the day. For artists always searching for a true black, bitumen appeared to be a great discovery. So in museums all over the world you can see early nineteenth century paintings that are gloomily dark and cracked. Bitumen never fully dries, so it expands when warm and contracts when it cools, creating the cracks and allowing it to spread across a canvas. The great canvases of Romanticism in particular are literally smeared in oil.

The most famous example is The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault.

Géricault “Medusa”

The coal-smoke yellow and impenetrable gloom of the canvas are the gifts of fossil fuel painting. Ironically, the subject concerns a shipwreck of a colonial voyage to Africa that led the survivors to cannibalism. Once again, the recolonization of everyday life has us cannibalizing ourselves, dying for fuel in a tragic farce.

“The Will to Justice”

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In her essay in the new Tidal, Gayatri Spivak encourages us to develop what she calls the “will to justice.” This ethical and incremental approach is at odds with what I might call the palpable “will for hierarchy” within certain sectors of the movement. The desire for “wins” sometimes risks overshadowing the very radicality of Occupy’s challenge. For  to be theoretically anti-hierarchy is always and already an organizational imperative–“be the change that you want to see.”

Gayatri Spivak

Spivak’s call reworks Nietzsche’s famous phrase “the will to power” that was so significant for thinkers like Michel Foucault. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche defines

our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will–namely, of the will to power.

Such power, Foucault argued, is not owned or controlled but simply used. It was a challenge to then-dominant ideas about the “conquest of state power” because power would continue to be instrumental, regardless of who was directing it. Spivak also turns away from such “vanguardist” approaches, as she calls them, in favor of

the general nurturing of the will to justice among the people.

There are three distinct threads interwoven in this phrase. Spivak’s mind is so supple that you can visibly see her thinking on multiple levels simultaneously as she speaks. Here she mixes Rousseau, Derrida, feminism and Marxism.

From Rousseau, we get the concept of the “general will,” the base on which social order can be constructed. Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton have shown that

The Occupy movement is an attempt to form the general will in new ways. As such, it is a potentially fundamental contribution to resolving the contemporary crisis of democracy….as a part of saying yes to the possibility of thinking differently about the political consequences of global markets

That is to say, the “counter-democracy” of saying no–to Republicans, to war, to neo-liberalism–has been joined by a means of saying “yes” to new forms of community and democracy. “Nothing can be harder than this,” caution Couldry and Fenton.

Yet Spivak gives the process an optimistic tinge. She links Rousseau to Derrida’s concept of “justice” as that which cannot be deconstructed. Which is not to say it is a simple thing. As the global movement knows, Derrida’s justice

doesn’t wait. It is that which must not wait.

But at the same time,

justice is an experience of the impossible.

Otherwise known as the impossible demand. The will to justice is the deconstruction of the force of law. It is the right to look.

Because the right to look is a consenting exchange between two (or more) it is by definition non-hierarchical. It is also, as Spivak stresses, the responsibility to nurture and care for the other: what we call mutual aid. Emphasizing the feminism of the will to justice, Spivak recasts its imaginative horizon from war or struggle to care and nurture.

With all these concepts in action, Spivak is able to re-energize the much-abused formula of “the people.” It’s important to note that she does so in a planetary framework that emphasizes how neo-liberalism relies on global hierarchy to function:

For financial globalization to work, the world must remain unevenly divided between the global South and the global North, so that there can be constantly fluctuating differences in the value of hard currency and soft currency, so that financialization can operate.

It’s crucial, then, not to replicate this hierarchical “world-making” in our own organization. In addition to this theoretical caution, we also need to be careful that a strategy that produces gains in the global North does not do so at the expense of the South.

It’s easy to be solipsistic here and say, for example, “a win for the Democrats is a win for the South,” even though it’s simply marginally less bad. Take the case of the Marikana platinum miners. While we want to support their claim for a living wage, it must also in the long run be better that they not have to work as miners, both because the labor is so hard and destructive; and because that would mean fewer cars were being built, as platinum is mostly used for catalytic converters. But were that to happen overnight, the result would just be more poverty.

For as Suzayn Ibrahimian puts it on the facing page of Tidal:

We have fundamentally understimated our ability to recreate our own oppression.

She sees the widely-circulating concern with “wins” as a short-term viewpoint that reinforces the “hierarchy of stability.” And so people more or less openly call for vanguardist approaches in OWS, or what are euphemistically called “decision-making bodies.” Of course this could be done and then we would be one more lefty pressure group, hoping that for some reason the Democratic Party might finally change its mind.

It seems that “Occupy” is about to splinter into a coalition of broadly autonomous campaigns like Strike Debt, Occupy Our Homes and Foreclose The Banks that come together for symbolic days of action like S17. If this means of organizing preserves the will to justice that was so visible a year ago, rather than creating new hierarchies, then let’s make it happen.

To return to Spivak, it is only the

building up of a will to social justice

that matters, not the name under which it is done.

 

 

 

 

Five Theses on Debt

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From Tidal for S17 by Strike Debt:

STRIKE DEBT/DEBT STRIKE/DEBT
WHEN WE STRIKE DEBT. WHY WE DEBT STRIKE. HOW TO MAKE DEBT:

We must remake our failed economic system that impoverishes millions while destroying the ecosystem. Using a diversity of tactics that includes a Rolling Jubilee, a People’s Bailout, and vigorous organizing towards a debt strike, Strike Debt seeks to abolish debt and reconstruct a just society where our debts and bonds are to one another and not the 1%.

When you strike debt, know that:

1. You are not a loan.


Debt is not personal, it is political. The debt system molds us as isolated, scared and subjugated, unwilling to consider going public for fear of the all-powerful credit ratings. There is a reason so many people speak of debt as slavery. Slavery was social death. So is debt. It makes us ashamed. We have to sell our time, our souls, working jobs we don’t care about simply so we can pay interest to the bank. Now that debt is so rampant, many of us are ashamed for putting others in debt. Our professions from teacher to lawyer and physician have become means to direct more victims to the loan sharks. So perhaps above all, we strike the fear, refuse the shame, end the isolation. When we strike debt, we are giving ourselves permission to be more than a set of numbers. In a sense, we create the possibility of an imagination. We are not abdicating our responsibility, we are exercising our innate right to refuse the unjust.

2. We live in a debt society, buttressed and secured by the debt-prison system.


$1 trillion of student debt. 64% of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt. 5 million homes foreclosed already, another 5 million in default or foreclosure. Credit card debt is $800 billion, generating an average 16.24% interest on money banks borrow at 3.25%. Permanent indebtedness is the pre-eminent characteristic of modern American life. Keeping all this in check is the peculiarly U.S.- specific apparatus, in which mass incarceration, racialized segregation and debt servitude are mutually reinforcing. The choice is stark: debt or jail. With 2 million in prison, seven million involved in the “correctional” system in various ways and sub-prime loans and other predatory credit schemes targeted at people of color, this is a system designed to disenfranchise and exclude.

3. There’s A Debt Strike Going On


There is something happening in our debt society right now. 27% of student loans are in default. 10% of credit card debt has been written off as irrecoverable. Foreclosures and mortgage default are rampant. People are walking away from debt. These actions take place driven by necessity, by desperation but also by something else. What do we call this? We could call it refusal. We could also call it a debt strike. In this time of high unemployment, battered trade unions, and job insecurity, we may not be able to signal our discontent by not going to work, but we can refuse to pay. Alongside the labor movement, a debtors movement. For those who can’t strike, we propose a Rolling Jubilee in which we buy debt in default, widely resold online for pennies on the dollar: and then abolish it. It will be funded by the People’s Bailout, and other forms of mutual aid that will prefigure alternatives to the debt society.

4. When we strike debt, we live a life rather than repay a loan.

We refuse to mortgage our lives. We reject the math that debt forces on us; math that says we cannot “afford” to care for our communities because we must “pay back” the banks forever, above and beyond what was borrowed. We question the dominance of the market in every aspect of social and cultural life. We abolish the trajectory of a life that begins with the assumption of debt before birth, and ends with a post-mortem settlement of accounts. This is financial terrorism. We intend to reconstruct a social world in which we see each other as people, recognize our differences, and acknowledge that the chimera of permanent economic growth cannot outstrip actual ecological resources.

5. We claim the necessity of debt abolition and reconstruction.


Abolishing debt is held to be an impossible demand. “Debt must be repaid!” Unless you are a corporation, bank, financial services company, or sovereign nation. We understand that debt is at the heart of financial capitalism and that the system is rigged to benefit those at the top. The question is not whether debt will be abolished but what debt will be abolished. The banks, the nation-states and the multinationals have seen their debts “restructured,” meaning paid off by the people, who now have to keep paying more. The debts of the people in whose name these actions were undertaken should also be abolished. Then we can begin reconstruction, transforming the circumstances that create the destructive spiral of permanent personal debt. Right now we must borrow to secure basic goods that should be provided for all: housing, education, health care, and security in old age. Meanwhile, around the world, debt is used to justify the cutting of these very services. We understand that government debt is nothing like personal debt. The problem is not that our cities and countries are broke but that public wealth is being hoarded. We need a new social contract that puts of public wealth to equitable use and enshrines the right to live based around mutual aid, not structured around lifelong personal debt.