Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Red-Line the Banks

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Perhaps calling what the banks have been up to in the past decade “mafia capitalism” is starting to become a slur on organized crime. Today we learned that major banks served as money laundering operations, openly discriminated against people of color, and that JP Morgan lost far more gambling than they had admitted. To try and cover this up, the NYPD launched a sad smear campaign against OWS that totally backfired.

In London, where regulations are so laughably weak that banks can do just what they want, HSBC was busted as a money-laundering front. Within the bank, this has been known for a long time and people in compliance who wanted to do something about it have been assaulted. Speculation is rampant that fines here may reach $1 billion for

the money laundering and terrorist finance vulnerabilities created when a global bank uses its US affiliate to provide US dollars, US dollar services and access to the US financing system to high-risk affiliates, high-risk correspondent banks and high-risk clients.

This is policy-speak from Congress about Iran. It shows that when the government actually cares about the outcome of an investigation, it is willing to use its powers to the full. By inference, then, it does not care very much about what happened in loans to its own citizens.

Elsewhere today, banks continued to display contempt for those citizens. Wells Fargo was merely the latest bank to admit that the long-standing practice of “red-lining” continues. That is to say, banks used to openly designate certain areas of cities where minorities lived as “red-lined,” meaning no loans were to be approved.

Here’s the official definition of red-lining:

Red areas represent those neighborhoods in which the things that are now taking place in the Yellow neighborhoods, have already happened. They are characterized by detrimental influences in a pronounced degree, undesirable population or infiltration of it. Low percentage of home ownership, very poor maintenance and often vandalism prevail.

 

This, then, was official policy in the 1920s and 30s. The impressive T-RACES digital project that has mapped these red-lined districts has shown that such neighborhoods continue to be financially disadvantaged and have a higher percentage of minority residents than favored areas for lending today.

Today, the hustle extends to selling more dubious products to people of color. Wells Fargo

steered more than 4,000 minority borrowers into costlier subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit risk profiles had received regular loans.

African Americans paid an extra thousand dollars in fees per hundred thousand borrowed and were 2.9 times more likely to be made to take a sub-prime loan.

Now we’ve crossed $500 million in fines to major banks for racist loans of this kind but the reparations should just be beginning. Remember this clown?

Chicago trader Rick Santelli “spontaneously” rants against mortgage support for certain “people,” who will “drink the loan.” The flimsily-concealed racism has been a subtext to the entire Tea Party movement and the hostility to debt abolition. Now we can see that many of these loans were pushed on people who did not deserve (if anyone does but that’s another question) the high terms of a sub-prime mortgage. And then became targets of white resentment when the set-up-for-failure arrangement failed.

Tomorrow JP Morgan Chase will announce huge losses, somewhere between $2 and 9 billion for the quarter due to their terrible investments. These were pre-leaked today to try and minimize the impact. Do we think that there will be people on CNN and Fox ranting against Jamie Dimon? Of course not.

Instead yesterday the NYPD launched a bizarre allegation that someone in OWS must have been involved in a high-profile murder case because DNA found at a scene where some presumed OWS people had opened a subway gate matched that found at the murder. Except, oops, it turned out to be that of the Chief Medical Examiner. Somehow this cock-up found its way into all the newspapers. Retraction on p. 100 in the 4 point font. And last night irritated cops launched a totally unprovoked attack on people in Liberty Plaza, whose main offense appears to be “refusal to go away.”

No wonder the Democratic party wants the movement to concentrate on the generic “money out of politics” meme. Now the reality of what the finance capitalists actually did in this administration as well as the last is starting to emerge. Maybe we’re ready for a discussion on how to replace this morally and financially bankrupt system? Maybe it’s time to red-line the banks.

The Fall of the Oil Empire

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We have spent much time trying create a narrative to tie together the themes of biosphere extinction, debt catastrophe and the failure of counterinsurgency. It may be as simple as this: the oil empire built by the US was undone by the unanticipated consequences of debt and climate change. There never was a grand strategy, just the application of overwhelming force that no longer holds sway. No one knows what comes next.

What do we know is that the empire doesn’t work, the debt machine has been exposed as a fake, and the biosphere is really starting to show signs of non-viability.

In no particular order: the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) debt scandal is huge and should be the top political issue of all time. LIBOR is the means of setting global interest rates by a few men in London after polling 16 leading banks. This sets the rate for your mortgage, credit cards and student loans. And it has been systematically fixed for years. These manipulations were of the order of five or ten basis points (1%=100 basis points), which sounds negligible. But $550 trillion of credit is affected by this rate: some estimate as much as $800 trillion. Apparently tiny changes save or cost the banks billions. So far from this being a “free” market, it’s been fixed.

Not only that, it’s not just Barclays, who have paid a minimal fine of $450 million as part of their acceptance of wrong-doing. LIBOR rates automatically exclude the highest two rates and the lowest two. So to actually change LIBOR at least six, probably eight, maybe all 16 banks had to be involved. If the mafia had done this, we’d have 800 year prison sentences being handed down under RICO statutes. Don’t hold your breath to see a bankster do time. Because government must have known: or, equally scandalously, they didn’t. Either way, in a functioning political system of any kind, heads would roll. If they don’t, we’ll know that the empire has no functioning bureaucracy and that it has all been outsourced to the financial sector.

It’s been obvious for some time that global counterinsurgency has morphed into a drone-enabled assassination program, a kind of automatic merger of COINTELPRO and Murder Inc. It doesn’t work very well. Why does this matter? Because if non-US nations buy US Treasury bonds as tribute to the global empire, as David Graeber has argued, it rather makes a difference whether that empire can keep order.

Here the US has benefited from the disaster that has become the eurozone so that rumors that circulated in 2007 about oil being priced in euros have disappeared. Global liquidity has nowhere else to go except the dollar. One group of mainstream economists have described the US dollar as being on the “oil standard.” In this view, the empire kept peace in oil-producing regions and in exchange, oil was priced in dollars and not too highly. Since the invasion of Iraq, the connection that kept the dollar strong when oil prices were high has been broken.

It still makes sense to think of the dollar as a petro-currency and of its empire as being boosted by oil. In 2007, it was predicted that the US would produce about 30% of its oil needs in 2010. In fact, it currently produces about 45% of its needs, due to massive exploitation of all available resources and greater fuel efficiency. From not being in the top ten oil producers in 2005, it is now number three.

Big oil is very much alive and well as a result.  The five largest oil companies made $136 billion in net profits in 2011, with no sign of decreases this year. US Representatives that receive significant campaign contributions from Big Oil get over $150,000 each: all 250 of them. Ironically, the supposed oil man, Bush, has been replaced by a far more oil friendly regime.

There are just two tiny problems. The oil is running out, one, and the biosphere is dramatically transforming, two. Which is why, three, things aren’t going so well.

The International Energy Authority, a totally pro-fossil fuel organization, has been sounding the alarm for some time. On the one hand, according to their chief economist Fatih Birol

We think that the crude oil production has already peaked in 2006, but we expect oil to come from the natural gas liquids, the type of liquid we have through the production of gas, and also a bit from the oil sands. But in any case it will be very challenging to see an increase in the production to meet the growth in the demand, and as a result of that, …the age of cheap oil is over.

Notably, even though their percentages have improved, the big five oil companies are indeed making less oil than they used to do.
And then there’s the heat.

Temperature records for June 2012 in the Midwest

Across the country, 3300 temperature records were set or tied in June. 172 new all-time temperature records were set. The climate scientists are now able to tie these weather events directly to carbon emissions, while also being able to say that events like the cold winter in the UK in 2011-12 were not so caused.

If you were, say, running for office and needed to win in the Midwest, where 600 heat records were set in June, you might make something of all this: if that is, you had any idea what to do about it. Time’s up for pretending that everything will be OK, that some invention will come along or whatever else.

So what’s left for the empire? Good question.

 

Society of Debt II: Shame and Abolition

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[Part two of the text for ‘Yours In Debt! Part One is here]

{The Expert returns onstage, a mess of water and erased chalk. The Assistants are slumped on the ground}

It seems that debt is a bit of a mess. Maybe a word cloud or analysis isn’t the right way to go after all. There are two reasons why that might be so.

First, we need debt. Not as money but as social obligation. It’s what connects us as people. Say I make you a birthday cake. You don’t come round to my house the next day with another cake because that would be weird. Still less do you give me money because that would be rude. So out there is the idea that maybe one day you’ll make me a cake. And that’s nice. Which is one of the ways we stay connected rather than as entirely separate individuals.

Then there’s shame. Debt makes us ashamed, it’s embarrassing. Shame itself is a very complex emotion, like debt. It’s physical. We blush, sweat, find it hard to talk, you might even cry. At the same time it’s external. People say:

“Why did you take out all that debt if you can’t pay it back?”

“What were you thinking?”

“Aren’t you ashamed?”

If actual people don’t say this, we imagine that they do and it is demeaning. It’s odd, though, this association of debt with shame. A debt is a technical contract that says we will lend you X units, which you will return plus Y interest. Of all social exchanges, why does morality apply to this one?

One of the odder things about modernity is the way that it has secularized religious strategies for population care, control and management. So whereas the faithful once went to confession, we in New York now go to therapy and for $150 for a 50-minute hour, we receive absolution. In the Middle Ages, the Church took debt very seriously. Officially, they were opposed to any charging of interest. At the same time, it told its members that certain sins were so serious that they would incur a “debt of punishment,” meaning hellfire for eternity. There was one way out of this. You could, if you were rich, buy something called an indulgence, which allowed you to evade the debt of punishment.

Now that starts to sound a bit familiar doesn’t it? Indulgences for them, shame for us.

Wait a minute, though. It’s too neat, too clever. It presumes that capitalism is an infernal machine, run by some secret Dr. Evil, machinating and manipulating as it goes. This view appeals to the rich themselves. I think they rather like being called the One Percent, it makes them feel important. In fact, one thing we learned during the financial crisis is that they have no idea what is going on. When the credit default system started to go wrong, all they could do was hit ‘Refresh’ on their computers and the algorithm was supposed to resolve the issues. It kept showing something like “you have lost a ton of money.”

Banks still don’t know what’s going on. Spanish banks couldn’t even calculate how much cash they need for a bailout. Somewhere between 20 and 60 billion euros. Those are not only huge numbers, that’s a huge margin of error. Capitalism comes to seem more like a form of sorcery, a spell that works precisely as long as you believe in it. Or it’s the Emperor’s new clothes, where everything goes fine until one person points out the truth that is in fact in front of our eyes.

This is a dangerous moment for the system, then, one in which the possibility of doing things differently begins to arise. We can start to talk about abolition and reconstruction. One hundred and fifty years ago, another financial system was said to be essential for the economy. Without it there would be no way to produce vital cotton, sugar, coffee and other  goods and ruin would follow. This was slavery. When the enslaved got up at the beginning of the Civil War and left the plantations for the North, they began a remarkable experiment called Reconstruction.

During Reconstruction, another way of being was envisaged. The formerly enslaved abolished debtors prison and penalties for debt, even though those in debt at the time were mostly former slave-owners. They knew that debt was central to the system of slavery and it had to be abolished to fully abolish slavery. Next, they created a system of what we might call mutual aid. There was the first free public school system for all. The first state provision for the disabled. And they made it possible for legislators without personal wealth to serve. Today in Washington, not one person is less than a millionaire. Finally, they did borrow money but in order to buy land for groups of the formerly enslaved, a system we remember as “forty acres and a mule.” This was to have allowed for a collective agriculture on what we would now call a sustainable model.

So how come we never hear about any of this? Because in 1873, following a crash on railroad bonds, Wall Street stopped lending money to the Reconstruction. By 1877, white planters were back in power, segregation was beginning together with the erasure of the thirteen years of Reconstruction from national memory. That’s another source of American shame.

My feeling is that just as slavery was abolished by the actions of the enslaved themselves, so too can the shame of debt can be set aside only by releasing ourselves from the sorcery of capitalism, by refusing to believe in the spell any more. To do that we need to admit our vulnerability and complicity with the system.

So: I am not an expert. My name is Nick. I teach Media Studies at a nasty purple university not far from here. Everything I know about debt, I learned from the Strike Debt Campaign. I am jnvolved with it because of the shame in my profession. At my institution people working on degrees graduate with astonishing amounts of debt. But the numbers in themselves, shocking as they are, don’t matter. What matters is that young people can’t pay this debt and it impedes their lives drastically. Graduation, which should be a moment of hope, becomes the beginning of the repayment of a mortgage. I used to say in academia we do very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for the loan sharks.

From all of this we can learn some old truths in new ways.

The personal is political.

The political is collective.

Another world is possibe.

[Expert exits and returns with a cake. The Assistants share stories about being in debt, share cake with the audience and invite them to continue the discussion. There is no end].

The Society of Debt I

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This is the first half of the text of my part as The Expert in ‘Yours in Debt!’ minus some parts that won’t make sense here. I’ll expand on some sections of this later. It’s open source, so use it as you will:)

ENTER, CARRIED BY THE ASSISTANTS

Debt. We are all in debt. We are yours in debt. That does not mean that you are in debt to us or we to you. Rather, we live in a society of debt. In this society, the primary means of social connection is not between people but between people and their loans. This society of debt replaces other means of social organization.

Once upon a time, we used to say that there was government of the people, by the people, for the people. In civics class, they called this the public square, the place where debate and public opinion shaped democracy. Last year in this city especially and many others across the United States, we went to the public square and we were evicted. Some of us were arrested. Some were beaten. At this moment, a gentle man named Mark Adams  is doing 45 days in Rikers Island. His offense was to set foot on land owned by Trinity Church Wall St. There was a sign saying “Open to the Public.” We are not the public. You are not the public. The public is a means to control and organize us.

More recently, people talked of a consumer society, a society where people were mediated by goods. So a man my age might buy a red sports car but not primarily for transport. A woman might buy some shoes but not really for footwear needs. It was known as the society of the spectacle, dazzling us with the lure of the commodity. The spectacle isn’t very spectacular any more. If you’ve seen The Avengers, you’ll know what I mean. We still buy stuff of course but it wasn’t made here, it doesn’t last very long and has little compelling power.

Where we are is in debt. Debt is a space, a social space that has depth and dimension. That’s why we talk of “getting out” of debt more than we do of paying off our debt. Here I want to map that space with you.

The first layer is what I call underground debt. This is where you give money to a friend who needs it. You don’t expect to see it again but you give it anyway. Then when you need money you might go to a pawn shop–that’s P-A-W-N. Here you can get a small amount of money for one of your possessions, which, again, you probably won’t see again.

So prevalent is this culture that there are now not one but two reality TV shows devoted to it. One’s called “Hardcore Pawn” and the other is “Reality Pawn.” Both are playing with the idea that debt is obscene, something to be kept out of sight, except here it is, all too visible. On the other hand, loan sharking and other forms of criminal lending that we all know go on are invisible but palpable.

Above us is what I call Penthouse Debt, playing on the obscenity metaphor. This is where debt gets bought and sold, people make money on it, where banks, financial services, corporations play with and manipulate debt. At the highest point of this level is sovereign debt, the debt of nations, so reliable that it is never entirely paid off but never fails. Until it does. Or threatens to. And then it’s back down here with us.

Where we are, debt is very visible. It identifies, locates and quantifies us. It keeps us in place but fragments our social world. This is what I call the Debt Square of personal credit. So let’s together identify the four corners of the debt square.

[The Expert asks the audience to identify sources of personal credit]

1. Credit cards. There are $800 billion of rotating credit card debt. On average, we are charged 16.24% interest for that debt, while the banks pay about 3.25% to get it. So even before they charge you a membership fee or any of those other fees they like to charge, they’ve made about 500% profit. At the same time we should note that in the present system of finance capitalism, debt is how banks make money. You might assume that if someone makes a deposit in a bank of $100, that’s what they have to lend. In fact, they can lend 3, 5, 10 or even 100 times that. Now we learn that the interest rates they charge us are fixed in the first place. The very notion of a “free market” turns out to be a fantasy.

2. Education Debt. Or student loans. There are $1 trillion in outstanding student loans. I have trouble understanding what a trillion is. It’s a one with twelve zeroes after it. To borrow one trillion dollars over the course of 2012 years, you would have to borrow $1.3 million a day, every day for the whole 2012 years. To put it another way, there are one million people with over $100,000 in student debt. Put them together and you’d have a city the size of Columbus, Ohio, the tenth largest city in the United States. All this appears to be out of control, as no-one can prevent endless tuition increases. The result is that, at the moment where young people’s lives should be beginning, they find themselves with the equivalent of a mortgage for 120 credit hours. This is insane.

3. Mortgage debt. This is the largest sector of all. There are about $13 trillion of personal mortgage debt, which, not coincidentally is roughly equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of the United States. For as long as we can remember, we have been told that to buy a house is to guarantee personal wealth and prosperity, as well as bringing related benefits to the nation. Now fully one-third of those mortgages are under water, meaning that the loan is more than the home is worth. We feel less wealthy because we are. In fact, median US net wealth has declined a stunning 40% between 2007 and 2010 to $77, 300 wiping out the gains of the past 18 years. In Iceland, the government forgave housing debt over 110% of the current value of the home, erasing $1.6 billion of debt. Scaled to the US, that would be about $1.5 trillion, the kind of stimulus that might finally move the economy.

4. Medical debt. This is the hardest area to get precise data about because insurance companies don’t want you to know. What we do know is that of those people who went bankrupt in 2010, 64% cited medical debt as part of the reason for their bankruptcy. You might be thinking that the Affordable Health Care Act, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, will take care of that. Unfortunately, it turns out that 61% of those who go bankrupt with medical debt have insurance. If you’ve ever been sick, you’ll know why. Your doctor may suggest a drug but your insurance doesn’t cover it. The doctor you need to see doesn’t take your insurance. You need a procedure but it’s not approved by your insurance adjuster. In these situations, people face a terrible choice. You may have to decide whether to pay for preventive tests out of pocket. We see people dying unnecessarily all the time for not having tests like colonoscopies. In recent days, the media reported a man who committed suicide after receiving a diagnosis of a terminal disease for which he did not have coverage. He did not want to inflict two losses on his family: his own death and the resulting medical debt. No human being should have to make a choice like that.

These are, then, the component parts of the Debt Square. At the same time, as we look around it, on all sides there’s something else going on, something that the media do not report. There are many people at all corners of the debt square either choosing to or being compelled to give up repaying their debt. There have been some 5 million foreclosures of homes already. There are another 5 million homes in some state of the foreclosure process. That’s about 40 million people who have chosen or been compelled to give up repayment. In the student loans corner, we have 27% of those owing who are out of deferment now in some stage of default. All across New York I meet young people who have just graduated into unemployment and have decided to go directly into default. The credit card companies have had to write off 10% of all debt in recent years. Again, medical debt is the dark horse, except that we know that people can’t afford their bills.

The question is what we call that. In the eyes of the police, the response is as always “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” In other words, all these tens of millions of people are simply in the wrong with nothing else in common. What if we called what all those people are doing debt refusal? What if we even called it a debt strike? We’d need to recognize that in the legal nightmare of the US, almost all strikes are wildcat strikes, meaning that they are not formally declared. Again, they are the product of desperate necessity as much as carefully calibrated rational choice. That doesn’t make them any the less strikes.

What we are reminded here is that politics is precisely the relationship between what is visible and what is sayable. In 1990, to call someone “queer” was a direct insult. Then Queer Nation stood up and said “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Twenty-odd years later, we mostly have got used to it and a good thing too. So what seems almost extreme at one moment passes for common sense not long after.

Tonight we want to get a sense from you of what words you associate with debt. I’m going to throw out some questions about debt and the Assistants will write them on the walls to form a word-cloud. In this way we may be able to get a sense of what the meanings of debt currently are for us here tonight.

Questions: how much are you in debt? How did you get in debt? How does being in debt make you feel? What would you like to do about it?

[The Assistants take over. Part II of the text tomorrow}

 

 

“Debt, debt, debt!”

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These were the opening words of the performance lecture conceived by Ida Daniel and myself in the undergroundzero festival still ongoing in New York. I’m going to describe the performance as a whole today and give a version of the spoken text tomorrow, so as not to go on too long. It’s a bit narcissistic, perhaps, but this is what I’ve been doing in Occupy recently and that’s what this project is about, after all.

Ida, who works as a director in Bulgaria, and I were paired by the festival. She comes from a theatre family. Her grandfather was an influential Brechtian director, as we saw during the performances, when Bulgarian theatre types would approach her reverentially, as might Americans meeting Stanislavsky’s grand-daughter.

Ida attended a Strike Debt assembly in Washington Square Park and became active for the duration of her visit in a working group as well as the assembly. We talked about a format and arrived at a formula whereby the point of the performance would be to undo the idea that we can change the debt situation by means of a more perfect analysis. We wanted to explore the associations of debt with shame and the forms of personal transformation that getting past those connections would entail.

So I went off and wrote some bits and Ida worked with the actors when they could coordinate their schedules. When we started working together it became clear that this was really going to be a performative lecture, not just a lecture with performance around it. Which made me more than a little nervous.

The actors were: Amanda Boekelheide, Darcy Cadman and Tracy Everett, all very gifted and well-trained, all working multiple paying jobs–including preparing apartments to be sprayed for bed bugs–as well as engaging in multiple (often non-paying) acting work. The usual combination of factors meant that they weren’t paid for this performance either, which, for what it’s worth, I did point out to the audience each night (I wasn’t paid of course, but I have a job, so I don’t need to be). The performance was free to the audience as well, though.

The space was a small black-box theatre in the Clemente Soto Veléz Cultural and Education Center on Suffolk Street. There were three lights that operated as on or off so no  fade-in or out was possible, let alone any other theater technology. Somehow, whether because the building is an old school, or because so many performances have taken place there before, it has a very welcoming feel nonetheless. I could imagine a small audience feeling perfectly comfortable there in a way that sometimes you don’t.

The actors opened with a nonsense song that finally converged on a chant of “Debt, Debt, Debt” in the tune of “Frère Jacques.” I emerged from behind a curtain into the space and they carried me in. I was The Expert and they were to be The Assistants. At work here was a combination of Brecht’s theory of the gesture, in which what is not said is as important as what is; with Kafka’s bureaucratic vision in which the not-quite-human Assistants are the only people in whom we can have hope. Ida later told us that she is committed to a theater that thinks, and encourages its audience to think, in body and mind, a very OWS paradigm.

So I introduce the topic of debt, which kept changing as I worked more with the actors, until we got to a point where we engaged in a word association game with the audience. I asked them first to call out how much they were in debt. Then why they were in debt. How it made them feel. And what they wanted to do about it. The Assistants shouted out the answers, wrote them down on the walls of the space and on the floor and gradually created a cacophony of responses. The noise was ended when Amanda picked up Tracy, pushed her against the wall and used her body to erase what was written. She then did the same on the other side with Darcy and he then picked her up to clean off the remaining writing. Meanwhile Tracy used water to clean away any writing on the stage. This was all very funny but we were directed to take it seriously, as our work as The Expert and The Assistants.

In the second half, then, having given up on the idea of a pure analysis, I talked about the curious associations of debt with shame and thought about how we might claim an abolition of debt that we will have to do ourselves. At a certain point in this discussion, the Assistants revived themselves and began a complicated and funny game of exchanging clothing with each other and myself. This game was halted only when I brought out a cake to share–an example I use in the lecture part to show why we will always have debt as a form of social obligation, even if monetary debt disappears.

We distributed the cake to the audience and each performer shared a story about their own experience with debt. We then invited the audience to share stories as well. As I mentioned, Occupy people, who are used to this, took up the offer with alacrity. The second night, when we had performers from other shows in the festival as our main audience, there was surprisingly less willingness to share, even though many people came up to us afterwards and told stories or hinted at them. Debt is so destructive, so hard to discuss.

Debt, debt, debt.

 

Occupy Theatre

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A note to holdover the writing project as a daily endeavor. Today was dominated by three and a half hours on the Long Island Railroad in and out of an insanely hot New York. All worth it though, for the pleasure of working with great actors and engaging with a generous audience who braved the hottest day I can remember to fill the little space for our second and final performance of “Yours In Debt!”

Yesterday we were playing to a largely Occupy-friendly audience, meaning a group of people involved in Occupy and others familiar with its process. So when we called out for audience questions, comments and sharing, they knew exactly what we meant. Tonight was an audience drawn more from theatre, with the exception of my OWS affinity group on Politics and Visual Culture. Collectively, then, this audience wanted more from us in a way but also allowed us to perform a little more, which the real actors in the group appreciated. They were less responsive in the discussion although that was certainly also heat-related.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of a curtain call for a performative lecture on debt, except to thank people for their generosity. I am left with a sense that orchestrating the Occupy project around debt does allow us to reach people in a different way and to reach different people. It most certainly will not be a simple process and it is unlikely to be fast. But on a day when Gayatri Spivak sat out in Washington Square Park and discussed debt with a crowd of Summer Disobedience School students and we worked with a crowd of Eastern European theatre people, perhaps you get that little Occupy shiver, when you do think that another world is possible.

Many years ago I had ambitions to be an actor, only for the realities of trying it to prove very clearly that this was not a path open to me. It’s one of the odder aspects of Occupy’s culture of mutual aid to offer people a second chance like this,  but it’s a memory I will be grateful for. I’ll actually describe what was said and performed later today but for now that’s all folks.

Performing Occupy

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We drove into Manhattan on yet another sizzling day for the “Yours In Debt!” debut and the first thing we saw was a Banksy mural on the Lower East Side, which seemed like a good omen. Then I got a big piece of red felt at a fabric store to make red squares for ten bucks, even better.

The Lower East Side has so changed. A lifetime ago I used to come down to Delancey to get salsa records when I was a DJ. Chi-chi it was not but it had a great vibe and I still have some of those records. Now there’s an organic juice place on every corner–the one opposite where we are working on Suffolk has the most expensive juice I’ve ever seen. It’s good–but $9 for a small container? The old jewish shop signs still survive but under them there are art galleries, hat shops, feminist sex toy stores and all the other paraphrenalia of hipsterdom.

I’ll write something about the content of the piece later but for now I’ll just reflect on this performance of Occupy. Last September and October, the performance was all about process, the mechanics of direct democracy. For those of us who had not had much experience of the global justice movement it was at once fascinating and liberating. OWS was about everything it seemed.

There’s less simple optimism now but more purpose. I was moved to see the front row of the performance filled with Strike Debt comrades, who have all heard me say this stuff before and anyway know just as much about it. When the lights came up I was somewhat embarrassed–and also delighted– to see David Graeber sitting right in the back, as is his wont. My role in the performance is The Expert, who talks about debt. So it was a little bizarre realize that I had done it in front of the real expert in the field.

Sometimes people say Occupy is inward-looking and perhaps there’s some truth to that, as there is in any organization. There’s also real solidarity, as I saw tonight watching people leave in sweat-drenched shirts from the black box space, whose low-rent A/C was not up to the challenge of 95 degrees.

It’ll be interesting to see if events like these and the direction taken over this summer mark a turn to Occupy having a clearer sense of its political targets and self-identity. These will probably be needed if the watch-words “disperse/strike” are to have purpose. Can Occupy consense to consense? So far, I’d say yes.

Phase Two, in rehearsal

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A final day of rehearsals for our debt performance piece “Yours In Debt!” I know people who always practice their talks ahead of time and I’ve done this when I have time. It’s always worth it. Workshopping a set of discussions like this with people skilled in performance has been very interesting. They have been gentle with me and very careful to be subtle about pushing me in a different direction. Over the course of the brief time that we’ve been able to work on the talks, they have notably changed nonetheless.

The simplest way to describe this shift is one away from a fact-laden analysis towards the emotional and spatial experience of being “in” debt and what it would mean to get “out” of debt. In short, in classic Occupy fashion, it’s starting to feel like an exploration of what it would mean to give people permission to view these issues with something other than shame and subjection.

One indication of how far there is to go came from the only question posed by a Bed-Stuy dwelling, bike-riding alternative theatre person, who watched the tech run: “What about people who do pay their debts?” So we talked about how it was likely that many if not most people would not be happy with the bank or other creditor and might well think that they deserved more favorable terms of repayment. It still seemed clear that the idea of strike debt, let alone a debt strike, was something that made her quite uncomfortable.

Nor did anyone at the theatre who was not part of OWS recognize the red square that I had thought was now widely recognized. I suppose I have naive assumptions that alternative arts people are necessarily aware of political issues, like my friends in OWS and at places like the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. But then most politics people don’t get what’s going on with performance.

Right now, Occupy Theory has two slogans for Phase Two.

From base to disperse.

From Occupy to strike.

The point is that these are goals, not statements of what has been achieved. It’s a change of approach. Projects like this make me feel both that we have a long way to go and that making progress with it, at least at first, won’t be as hard as you might think.

 

 

 

No holiday from debt

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Today was a long rehearsal for “Yours In Debt!” in a slightly less sweltering Manhattan that was almost empty of locals for the day. I’ve always liked being around performers and I enjoy their confidence and their physical poise, not qualities I notably associate with myself. Being around those that do raises your own standards.

This performance about debt is not without the usual tensions and contradictions in the creative industries. There’s not much by way of resources and, at least to go by one of the performer’s monologues today, there’s no pay for the actors–or myself, of course, I wouldn’t ask for it and would donate it to the others if offered. At the Debt Assembly last week, a young actress described the Catch-22 of her situation. She has substantial student debt from her acting degree so if she takes any work that she would like to do, all her pay would go to debt.

When we were throwing out words to respond to today, I noticed the performers all found an extra edge when I said “MFA.” These terminal degrees in the arts rarely come with financial support beyond some TA work but that does not mean they are cheap. That said, the musical, physical and performance skills on display today were impressive. It’s not that these courses don’t teach people how to do what they want to do, which makes the double-bind of debt all the more oppressive. One of the group had turned down a top program at the New School, despite the opportunities it offered, to avoid the debt burden.

So while I had thought that working in a hot dark room for several hours was not the perfect way to spend a holiday, on the other hand, perhaps it was. What could be more American than this tense mixture of aspiration, talent, frustration, debt and politics? In all of this, I am supposed to be The Expert. In many ways, we are all experts in this field.

 

 

Capitalism: “the horror, the horror”

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It is said that Eisenstein hoped to make a movie out of Marx’s Capital. If anyone wanted to make a movie out of today’s capitalism, it would be a horror film. Like all horror films, this is a sequel. The convergence of financial crisis, environmental disaster and stalled imperialism that we see today has recurred across the modern period, beginning in the eighteenth century. It’s catchphrase is “the horror, the horror,” first coined by Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness concerning European imperialism, reapplied by Francis Ford Coppola to the Vietnam war. Today, as befits the third in a series, the crisis of capitalism, imperialism and the biosphere is planetary.

As the astonishing scandals unfolding at Barclay’s Bank indicate once more, if capital is the monster in this film, it is one that is now out of control. The particular issue concerns the fixing of interest rates by the bank to its own ends. Imagine that one month you want to pay credit card debt so you want interest rates low to keep the payment down. The next month you have some savings, so you want rates high so you can make a profit.  Of course, we have no choice. For banks, it’s different, as Reuters report:

Some 257 requests were made to rate submitters from at least 14 Barclays derivatives traders over four years. Traders at other banks also tried to influence Barclays’ rate, while Barclays’ traders put pressure on the rates offered by others. Most of the world’s biggest banks are under investigation…Barclays is the first to settle.

This is at one level another Bankster scandal, in which there’s one rule for them and another for us.

The traders making these fixes were nonetheless relatively low-level operatives. We tend to assume that behind them is some Dr. Evil figure manipulating the whole scheme, in the manner of Gordon Gekko. An oral history project on the financial crisis shows rather than no-one understood what was going on. The credit derivatives people relied on their computers to calculate what their trades had actually done. In 2008, they started to discover that they were losing more money than they could imagine every time they hit F9 to make the calculation. And these were the best informed people. One trader explained:

most in the bank didn’t understand our products. Even the risk and compliance people who were supposed to be our internal checks and balances …  I learned that the people high up know just enough for the role they’re in…

all major banks and corporations are doing this.

This is the horror–the machine you have created is out of control and you don’t know how to stop it. The trader developed night sweats, skin disease and has been diagnosed with PTSD. The interest rate fixes were sticking plaster over gaping wounds.

This does not get fixed by setting a new way to calculate LIBOR. As Christian Marazzi has put it, in his analysis of post-Fordist capitalism:

What is at stake is not only the understanding of our world, but our very being in this world.

Like Mr. Kurtz, we find ourselves in an existential crisis, in which the current ways of doing things are a horror, but so is the alternative: “the horror, the horror.” It is the apparent anonymity of the crisis that creates the horror–the very fact that the algorithms have done it. As Emmanuel Levinas put it in a different context:

In the night, when we are riven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is no longer this or that; there is not “something.” But this universal absence is in its turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence…The rustling of the there is…is horror.

As this suggests, for existentialism, the horror is in part the absence of God, or of rational purpose. Capitalism has claimed a spiritual dimension since Adam Smith’s fantasy of the “invisible Hand” and in modern America, capitalism is directly bonded with fundamentalism Christianity. So there is a reason that anti-capitalism is also anti-monotheism.

Imperialism sees itself as erasing nothingness, whether the terra nullius of supposedly empty space or the tabula rasa (clean slate) of the “heathen” mind, requiring conversion, the very “colonization of consciousness” (Jean and John Comaroff). When it looks at land it sees nothing but “wilderness as never having entered into any economic transaction” (Timothy Morton). What the missionary David Livingstone described as the Three Cs, “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization” were intimately linked. Perhaps there are in fact then three horrors.

Marlon Brando as Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" (1979)

In Conrad’s roughly contemporary novel, it is only after Kurtz has been retrieved from his inland ivory station that he gets a glimpse of what he has truly done–“the horror, the horror.” The death and destruction wielded by his company in pursuit of accumulation finally becomes apparent to him. The devastation of the rain forest described here is still just a backdrop but this was a period in which carbon emissions escalated dramatically and biosphere extinction moved closer. You can’t simply endorse Conrad because part of his story is about Kurtz “going native” and adopting indigenous religion. Religion is part of the horror, above all colonizing Christianity, the third horror.

In today’s Congo region, millions have died since the Rwanda genocide of 1994 opened an era of wide-scale instability. From time to time, there are newspaper articles and the liberals shake their heads but, as Zizek has consistently pointed out, paying attention to the horror of the Congo then and now means not reforming the system but abolishing it.

So how does this movie end? There are those market apologists who suggest that the 1890s financial panic turned out great with a decade of prosperity following it. Most with a degree of perspective see it as the precursor to World War 1. I’m not sure that capitalism can revive itself without a dose of war profits, but present-day counterinsurgency warfare has proved spectacularly unprofitable for the population at large.

I do think we should refuse existentialist despair. The solution to the Congo question of the 1890s was in the end fairly simple: stop colonizing it. But once the new automobiles wanted rubber tires that was not going to happen. It’s fascinating how clearly the fossil-fuel economy that was modern capitalism’s first intensifier is still its last support now that the machine has gone crazy.

Against craziness and religion, we can offer rational solutions: Stop burning fossil fuels. End derivative markets. End imperialism, and use the massively reduced military budget to fund education, health care and a living wage. Here’s the thing. In the first reel of the movie, it almost seems possible that the monster will win but in the end it never does.