Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

A Walk on the West Side

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New York is a very parochial city. You tend to stay where you feel comfortable and move in a set of familiar patterns. Today I was out of my comfort zone all over the West side, observing a new corporate district emerging and engaging in some rehearsals for a performance at the end of the week.

Today began with a walk back down the High Line from 30th Street, where I left my car to be fixed with a great group of guys from Côte d’Ivoire. They got a huge kick out of the fact that I speak French, which is apparently not common in their usual clientele of South Asian taxi drivers and New York City officials. It was a place that I fetched up at because of Yelp!  As is not uncommon in global cities of the South, this shop actually fixes things, albeit in an improvised fashion. I usually feel wildly out of place in US car places, where it is really obvious I don’t do mainstream masculinity at all well. Here was fine, we talked about the European soccer championships and made fun of people in French.

The casual improvised feel could not be more removed from the High Line. It has extended Chelsea’s art district north and allows for walkers to see works displayed in non-traditional spaces. So there was a large portrait by JR, the French art-ivist, as he calls himself on the back wall of a house. Usually I love JR’s stuff but one piece by itself seemed out of place, just another commercial display. Even early in the morning, the High Line crawls with people, mostly tourists, all taking extensive photographs.

At the north end, there’s a massive building project going on over the West Side railyards. Two full city blocks are being converted into the usual mix of offices, high-end apartments and retail outlets with one or two affordable places in undesirable locations thrown in as a sop. One site is being developed by our old friends Brookfield Properties. This site, which they are calling Manhattan West was announced on September 2, 2011, just two weeks before OWS moved into Zuccotti Park. It stretches from 31st to 33rd Streets and from 9th to Dyer Avenue. It’s huge. When you see the scale of all this, it’s amazing to think that Occupy has had any impact at all.

From there I had to go up to Columbia University to rehearse for what is being billed as a performative lecture on debt in the series Debt! hosted by undergroundzeronyc, a theater festival. The project brings together directors from Eastern Europe, with performers and lecturers from New York. Our project, “Yours In Debt!“, is being co-ordinated by Ida Daniel, from Bulgaria, whose work, so far as I have seen it, seems very much influenced by Brecht and behind him Kafka. The performance we’re doing has an Expert and Assistants, and the latter were very important characters in Kafka.

Kafka

Just as in Kafka, the Assistants are really in charge of the performance, not because of the way it is structured, so much as because they really are performers. Working on exits and entrances, thinking about cues and so on, you realize how glib the academic use of performative often can be. Applied to ourselves, it means that we do what we do anyway but now with a sexier name. Actually performing feels much harder, even though the topic is one with which I am now only too familiar.

Or is it just rehearsing, trying to work out how to work with people in a space whose dynamics are new? Put like that, it starts to seem more familiar. There is a curious dynamic here by which I began writing about the performativity of Occupy and now I am doing a performance about Occupy. This is what happens if you venture onto the West Side.

Learning to Organize

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The Strike Debt campaign had its fifth assembly today in a very warm Washington Square Park. Summer madness was affecting some of the transient population that use the park during daylight hours but the assembly was surprisingly focused and businesslike in the close to 100 degree heat.

I’ve learned some interesting things about organizing and about learning already. Debt is a very technical topic, full of complexity and difficult math. Seen another way, it’s not about that at all. It’s a set of stories, often about lives or projects begun in a flurry of optimism only to founder on the hidden reefs of compounding interest, credit ratings and wage garnishing. We’ve learned that to organize around debt, you must first allow people to tell their stories and to reclaim their personhood.

What we’re doing here is reclaiming the 99% as a set of individuals, all of whom made choices that were inspired by their hope of making a contribution in some way. Seen together, even in the relatively small groups that gather in hot New York parks, you get a vertiginous glimpse of what has been lost, not just in this crash but in the turn to finance capital as a whole.

So what we don’t yet know is the end(s) of the stories. Where we’re not going is to put our trust in a higher power, divine or human. A system that places so many people in servitude can only properly end in abolition. Before abolition, it can seem hard to envisage reconstruction but in the moment it’s not so complicated. Now I’m getting ahead of myself, except that part of this moment is to give people a sense of a different outcome, which the original OWS sketched in far broader terms. By being specific about debt, which is not exactly a small field, we can target real but very different futures.

In organizing this story telling and imagining, we’ve found that it works best either to allow the meeting to proceed as horizontally as possible or to have it tightly facilitated. There’s a glib one-liner about direct democracy that uses the title of Jo Freeman’s 1970s pamphlet “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman was discussing consciousness raising sessions in the (then) Women’s Liberation movement and how they could lead to a “star” system. There’s a long discussion to be had here but for the moment I want to suggest that these strategies are precisely directed towards avoiding what is less tyranny than muddling in the middle.

Self-facilitated peer-to-peer discussions also rely on the group making sure that individuals don’t dominate and that a due division of points of view is heard. Such discussions are great when you’re trying to get a sense of where to go and what the possibilities are in a given area. Facilitation allows you to make progress from that beginning and to not repeat the same discussions over and over. What we had to learn in the case of debt was that you could not separate the personal and the political, even in organizing. It’s a very old lesson now but one that needs to be relearned until absorbed or until things have actually changed sufficiently that we no longer need it. Which will not be soon.

We’ve learned not to target specific dates by which certain things must happen and to set low, achievable goals as part of creating a sense that things are happening, rather than shoot very high all the time. Some might say that political organizers have long known these tactics and that may well be right. On the other hand, it is my impression that sometimes such organizers take the content of the action too much for granted. Certainly we’ve heard that debt is a “weak” concept. Perhaps it lacks a one-liner so far. We’re working on that.

 

There’s A Debt Strike Going On

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There’s a wildcat strike against debt going on. The numbers are remarkable. By definition, a wildcat strike can’t be organized and, in this case, can’t really say speak its own name. That’s why OWS has a Strike Debt campaign: to articulate the crisis, to end people’s shame at being in debt and to encourage them–us–to speak out. Send us your story to strikedebtresearch[at]gmail. No contact details will be released.

Numbers

27 percent of student loans are in default and that number is rising.

$1.2 trillion of mortgage debt is underwater (debt exceeds value of property) or about one-third of all properties.

5 million homes have been foreclosed and 5 million more are under threat of foreclosure, meaning that owners are in default or behind on payments. 300,000 people had a foreclosure notification added to their credit report in the first quarter of this year.  27% of mortgages are seriously delinquent–ironically, a slight improvement. 300,000 more people went bankrupt.

The average credit card debt per household has fallen from $17, 936 in 2009 to $14,336 now: because of mass default. In 2010, credit card companies had to write off fully 10% of all debt.

Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

So although we see delinquent debt totals falling, it’s not just because people are striving to pay it back but because it has been written off or put into foreclosure. Adding all this up, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates:

As of March 31, 9.3% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency, compared to 9.8% on December 31, 2011. About $1.06 trillion of consumer debt is currently delinquent, with $796 billion seriously delinquent (at least 90 days late or “severely derogatory”).

Student debt is more indicative in this regard. Using their own calculation on student debt, which has it at $904 billion, the Fed indicate how serious the student debt issue has become relative to other debt:

Since the peak in household debt in 2008Q3, student loan debt has increased by $293 billion, while other forms of debt fell a combined $1.53 trillion.

That decline in other debt includes write-offs, bankruptcies and foreclosures, options that are not available for student loans. In this sense, student debt provides the clearest picture of what’s happening, precisely because it cannot be manipulated off the books like other debt.

Lenders know this and have cut back credit. Mortgage originations for the first quarter of 2012 were down 17.4% from even 2011, let alone 2007. Try and get a credit card with an interest rate under 15% once the “grace” period expires. The average credit card rate is now 16.94%. This is usury in a time when bank interest rates are at all-time lows, on average 3.25%. That’s a 500% mark-up, even before you get to fees, memberships and so on.

The Morality Question

All this data is public knowledge. What we need to make public is that people are clearly making the choice to refuse repayment of debts. While the PR machine of the debt industry has long asserted that debt refusal is immoral, the ongoing debtors revolt proposes that it is compulsory endebtedness that it is immoral.

What I mean to suggest is this: lenders are actively deceitful. Playing by the rules as presented to us as consumers leads to massive shortfalls. Students were told to contract debt as a means of getting high-paying jobs that are not available, homeowners were encouraged to borrow and refinance as much as they could because house prices never went down. These are people trying to play by the rules, only to discover that the game is fixed.

For corporate persons, as the Supreme Court has it, this kind of utter imbalance has been rectified by debt forgiveness, restructuring and other finagling. Miss a payment on a credit card or a student loan and you get hit with a penalty fee, increased interest rates and a shot credit rating. MF Global used $1.6 billion of its clients’ money to try and save their firm–and they “could face a negligence charge.” Morality has nothing to do with debt.

What we have seen with debt, as with other areas of social life, is a secularization of Catholic doctrine. In this way, confession became secularized as therapy, for example. St Thomas Aquinas, the fearsome medieval theologian, argued that there is a debt of punishment for sin that cannot be expunged:

sin incurs a debt of punishment through disturbing an order. But the effect remains so long as the cause remains. Wherefore so long as the disturbance of the order remains the debt of punishment must needs remain also.

Of course there was a way out: you could purchase an “indulgence” allowing the debt of punishment to be bought out. In the secularized form, being in debt is seen as punishment for the failure of the debtor to be sufficiently wealthy. As capital now is the highest form of value, sinning against debt is the worst sin of all.

The Credit Rating Scam

Many people are afraid to speak out about debt because they fear it will impact their credit rating. These ratings are scams. As we’ve already seen, lenders are pre-emptively withdrawing credit and increasing rates and fees. If you don’t have a loan and it’s not student debt you’re after, the credit rating score required to get the “best” deals has become so high that no-one who really needs a loan is likely to qualify. So the loan you will get will already have punitive levels of interest.

How Can You Join In?

You don’t have to refuse to pay your own debt to join the debt strike. Here are some ideas:

Speak out. Debt is immoral, not debt refusal. Challenge people who say “they borrowed it, too bad, they should pay it back.” If you’re in higher education, talk to your colleagues about debt, emphasize the risks involved and think of alternatives.

Research. In your area, what’s happening? Do you have a story to tell? Email strikedebtresearch [at] gmail

Take action. Create debtors assemblies where you live. Look for the online materials coming from the Strike Debt campaign to help you. Create a Tumblr or other off-the-shelf websites. One idea that has floated is to collectively buy and forgive loans in default. There are websites where you can buy defaulted loans for a small percentage of the face value. The commercial loan market operation hopes to recover more than that percentage and so make a profit. It’s real bottom-feeder stuff. So even if we can’t actually afford it, let’s expose this kind of scam.

Remember: Debt Is Fucked Up and Bullshit. You Are Not A Loan.

 

Space, Observation and Strike Debt

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In the past weeks since the Debt Assemblies began and led to the formation of the Strike Debt campaign, my relationship to this writing project and to OWS has begun to shift. For a long time, I wrote from the participant observer position. I was there, in the room, often in the square or on the march. But I was not taking decisions or influencing people very much, although I might make the odd comment here and there. Honestly, Occupy and direct democracy were quite a steep learning curve for an academic.

It’s also a somewhat comfortable position, of course, allowing the writer to perhaps imply criticism, although I have always tried to do the harder thing of trying to look for the optimistic or hopeful outcome. Over the past few months since I’ve begun working more closely with Occupy Theory and now Strike Debt, that safety barrier is gone. I find myself questioning whether I have the right to report certain discussions or issues, Or better put, whether I should, not from the point of view of this writing but from the point of view of the movement.

It’s not that I’m party to any secret decisions or that I’m in any way, shape or form a “leader” because there really are no leaders. It’s that I’m not sure exactly what my role is now. Some other writers I know call this “observant participation.” Key here is the acknowledgement that you are writing about the movement as you are also active in it. Unlike most of these people, I’m writing about things as they happen, more or less, rather than for a dissertation, article or book project. It’s not a moral question, although I do respect security culture within the movement and I don’t name people who have not made their writing public. It’s a writerly question: what’s my perspective on this now?

Two other developments impinge on this repositioning. One is that there are fewer people active on a day-to-day basis in OWS now than there were at May Day. A good deal of this is the summer diaspora from New York, and with the climate-changed 97 degrees it was today, no wonder. There are students back home or doing research travel and activists. Others have dropped out, burned out or moved on. So it’s easier to get a sense of the movement than it was when it seemed to be limitless. Perhaps that’s also a coming-to-terms with the sheer difficulty of actually changing this deeply entrenched system.

Finally, it’s the debt campaign itself, which is a re-orienting of my own position. We are all “in” debt, or I certainly am. Mortgage, credit cards, refinanced mortgage. It’s a place of some shame and embarrassment: isn’t a middle-aged, more or less successful person (in their field) supposed to be past all that? Maybe, but I’m not, given a commuting work situation that requires two households in one of the world’s most expensive regions. I assumed getting “out” of debt was a combination of personal discipline and professional success, a Houdini-like escape trick that has eluded me so far.

Now I can see that getting “out” of debt requires getting into public space. It means striking debt so that if a corporation is a person and must be bailed out, guess what, I’m a person as well. It’s realizing that if there are 5 million households still under threat of foreclosure, 27% of student debtors behind or in default, and $800 billion of revolving credit card debt, there’s a massive debt strike already taking place. We just haven’t dared to admit it. You are not a loan.

On message, on messaging

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“We interrupt this writing project to bring you this message.” How our relationship to advertising (or messaging) has changed. When I began a course in visual culture or media studies, one of the exercises I used to perform would be to ask people in the group: who felt that they were influenced by advertising? Normally, hardly anyone raised their hand. Then I would ask who felt that other people or “ordinary people” were influenced by advertising and everyone would raise their hand. It was supposed to be learning moment. When I have tried this exercise since the rise of social networks, the mask has fallen. Everyone raised their hand and accepted that they were influenced by ads.

One index of this change has been the shift in “must-see” TV for media studies people. While The Wire had its day (2002-8), complexity, urban politics, crime and long-form narrative seemed to have migrated from 1970s cinema to the television drama. The past five years have belonged to Mad Men, a TV show about advertising relying on advertising revenues, in which the sexiest moment is “the pitch.”

That is to say, the moment when Don Draper (Jon Hamm) presents his narrative of a commercial seduction to the clients. There’s much more in the pitch than the ad itself. While the series is soap-like in its narrative format, these moments are lingered over lovingly. Half of the last series hinged around the pitch to Jaguar cars, for which one character prostitutes herself, another commits suicide, still a third comes to existential crisis, while a fourth quits the company.

What was this magical tag line: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.”

Don Draper pitches to Jaguar

This kind of message has a weird form of overlap with Occupy messaging. It uses a direct address to the viewer and it claims beauty. While Occupy would never associate beauty with a one percent commodity like this car, the interface should not be denied. After all, the Mad Men screenwriters have 2012 mentalities.

Compare an actual 1968 Jaguar ad:

Jaguar ad from 1968

“Finally,” it says. “The kind of car you dream about owning.” In 1968, year of global revolution, a tweedy self-satisfied young man looks at the viewer in the ecstasy of ownership. The motif of sexualized domination is there but subliminal. The ad addresses men as men without referencing unavailability. In 2012, a year of global social movements, that element needs to be foregrounded to give “nostalgic” satisfaction. So successful has this “pitch” moment been that AMC have commissioned a reality to follow Mad Men called The Pitch, featuring two advertising companies competing for a client.

Against this layered moment of actual messaging with faux-sophistication–sexism in the 1960s is supposed to show “we’ve come a long way, baby” while also indulging the presumed male viewer in its pleasures–how can a social movement address those it would like to participate? Most seem to think that simplicity and directness are the key. Certainly, the “We Are the 99%” meme moved Occupy to the front of media attention.

The difficulty is that we don’t want people to buy something but to do something. Recently I sat next to a friend watching TV when one of the NY State anti-smoking ads came on, featuring people with horrific post-surgical disabilities caused by smoking. She shied away from watching, which I presumed was revulsion at what might happen to her as a smoker. But in fact it was because any ad that mentioned smoking made her want to smoke and she’s trying to quit. Here of course the State gets to have the best of both worlds: it can claim a public health campaign that looks effective to the non-smoker, while encouraging its smokers to consume and thereby raise state tax revenues.

What made “We Are the 99%” so effective was, then, precisely that it did not have content. Each person could decide how it worked for them, just like any effective message. What happens once a tag has circulated endlessly across a show-me-the-money culture for over a year? On September 17, we’ll find out. We may be surprised.

 

Anti-Capitalism and the Great Extinction

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How should we think of the past year? One way is to realize that in that time, any possibility of making serious changes to the global deterioration of the biosphere has dramatically receded. Whether you’re an environmental activist, a “that’s so terrible” headshaker, or an “it’s all about capitalism” person has become irrelevant. Short of major collapse, disaster or unforeseen events, we’re past the point of being able to do anything about this. What might get your attention is that the signs are that what worked for the climate issue is now being applied to capitalism–denial, displacement and legal enforcement.

The last surviving Pinta tortoise, Lonesome George, died in the Galapagos on Sunday. The species is now extinct.

If you have not been paying much attention, you may even not be aware that the UN Rio+20 environmental summit came and went last week. Rio was supposed to make good the promises of the earlier Earth summit and lead towards more sustainable development. The inevitable communiqué was dismissed as “283 paragraphs of fluff” by Greenpeace. Occupy activists did interrupt the closing ceremony to make a statement but were soon silenced. There was minimal media coverage and relatively little awareness in Occupy. When the COP17 Climate Change conference in South Africa collapsed in similar fashion early last December, there was a day of action at Zuccotti Park. Last week, as wildfires devastated Colorado, Arctic ice levels fell to record lows, and an early tropical storm flooded Florida, no comparable action took place.

Along with many others, I’ve been pushing this issue throughout this project to little effect. We did hold an Occupy Theory Assembly on climate. It started well but became becalmed in demands that we endorse a long submission to the Rio conference. Proposals for direct action against the fossil fuel industry were more promising. However, the idea of lying down in front of coal trains was a little daunting. It was not that people did not see the urgency of the issue but that they could not see how to make headway with it.

And here’s why. Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals in DC ruled against a suit attempting to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating green house gases. The judgment scathingly noted against the so-called climate skeptics:

This is how science works….The E.P.A. is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.

However, the Republican attorney general of Virginia gave notice that he will appeal the ruling. Any guesses as to how the Supremes will rule on this?

On the same day, we learned that, despite the disaster in the Gulf, Shell Oil will get off-shore drilling permits for Alaska. What’s so tawdry about this transparent election-year vote grubbing from the Obama Administration is that not a single Republican or Independent that wasn’t going to vote Democrat will do so as a result of this move. But one of the few remaining pristine landscapes will be ruined and yet more animals will die.

Humans are now causing what is known as the Sixth Great Extinction, a mass slaughter comparable to whatever it was that killed the dinosaurs, except that we’re doing it on purpose and we know we are. About 30,000 species a year are becoming extinct from megafauna like the Pinta tortoise to frogs. Insects are thriving and will inherit the planet.

Leave the disasters, extinctions, floods and fires to one side: we’ve got used to grey smog as the permanent condition in all the global cities, to a hole in the ozone layer, to holes in the floor of the ocean leaking oil, to the disappearance of drinking water, the spread of deserts and once-tropical diseases. If we’re ok with all this, do we expect debt and unemployment to generate a mass anti-capitalist movement?

For capitalism, this is all business-as-usual, what they like to call “creative destruction.” It’s also a new way to profit, as the wave of green-washing ads from oil companies makes clear. For anti-capitalists of all stripes, from the mildest reformist to the most wild-eyed revolutionary, our collective failure to develop anything other than rhetorical purchase on the survival of life is devastating. Not just to the biosphere, human and non-human life, but to the chances of pushing back neo-liberal capitalism.

 

Mafia Capitalism

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During the course of some back-and-forth discussions over the past two days about the OWS messaging in relation to debt, David Graeber coined the phrase “mafia capitalism” to express the palpable element of violent coercion at the heart of financial globalization. The latter phrase sounds technical, even clean. The reality, as we see around the empire, is that the debt machine has responded to mild setbacks with a dramatic escalation of force.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri reminded us that what Marx had called “primitive accumulation” was always part of capitalism’s process. This violent disruption separated the producer and the means of production, while also accumulating basic raw materials from colonies. There is, then, a

relationship between wealth and command and between inside and outside.

That is, in the case of England, the wealth came from outside (from the empire) and the command arose internally. This process was reversed outside Europe, so that wealth was created internally and command came from the outside.

In 2000, it seemed that this model was giving way to one of immaterial production. Today we might suggest that the new form is rather one where the command is internal in order to preside over a forcible transfer of what internal wealth there is to those in command. The form of that transfer is legalized violence and the end of state concern for the welfare of its population. In short, if this trend continues, we are no longer in the period of governmentality in which the management of population was the prime concern of government, so much as in a moment of internal colonization.

The debt crisis of the 1990s was a sovereign debt crisis in which Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (as the IMF rhetoric has it) [HIPCs] were compelled to borrow in order to repay their existing loans. Today, Heavily Indebted People are being forced to borrow more and more to survive. Or not. And the difference now is that, like the Mafia, authority no longer cares what happens to you, it just wants you to pay. Or else.

In the US, the Supreme Court, having presided over an electoral coup in 2000, has now become the legislative branch. It has enabled corporations to legally buy elections in the manner of mobsters of old. Yesterday, it authorized police to become immigration officers on the basis of mere suspicion. And tomorrow it will overturn a Republican-inspired health care plan because any concession from corporations to employees is now seen as being not just unnecessary, but illegal. The radical right don’t need to win elections: it can just rely on the Court. There is no solution for this dilemma  in the present constitution, whereby the Court invalidates laws it doesn’t like, and then legislates things that it does. Here, the force of law, backed by the simple violence of its enforcers, has become whatever the Heads of the Five Families (aka the 5-4 conservative majority) says that it is.

In the UK, where the Conservative government (technically a coalition with the Liberal Democrats) has been shown to be the creature of Rupert Murdoch, it has responded not by toning down but ramping up its attacks on the welfare system. Prime Minister David Cameron proposes ending housing benefit for young people and limiting child benefit to three children. These are deliberately nasty policies, aimed at pleasing the older (and racist) voter, who believes that hordes of (non-white) benefit “scroungers” are getting away with something, just as the tabloids have claimed for years. With not inconsiderable audacity, the Old Etonians that lead the government have denounced a “culture of entitlement” in those qualifying for benefits, just after they cut taxes for the rich.

Finally, it is worth noting that Israel, so often the paradigm-shaper for its purported dominant partners, has also turned its tactics on its internal population, cutting and privatizing services, reinforced with a police force well trained in violence.

There might be a certain schadenfreude for Palestinians and their allies in watching (presumably) Jewish Israelis complaining about police violence. This is an old lesson: colonial authority will always use the force it develops in the colony, or occupied territory, at “home.”

Just as it has done since the 1970s, neo-liberalism responds to a crisis by intensifying its operations, as Gilles Deleuze would have put it. Indeed, the Israeli Defence Force now read Deleuze as a tactical guide to defeating Palestinian resistance. This resort to force is, then, not in fact a sign of strength but of the continued inability of capitalism to match its rhetoric of wealth creation with the reality of internal wealth transfer. Welcome to mafia capitalism.

“We Are All Children of Algeria”

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This is the name of an online multi-media project that I made in collaboration with design intellectuals Craig Dietrich and Erik Loyer that went live today. The project looks at how to decolonize visuality; or, to put it affirmatively, how to visualize a society after colonialism. It uses the central example of Algeria and its decolonial struggle from 1954 to the Arab Spring. Here I want to talk a bit about how this project both laid the ground for my involvement with the Occupy movement and for the shape that Occupy 2012 has taken since. While this is a tad narcissistic, this is a blog a) and b) there might be relevance for other people thinking of taking on similar work.

In this project, “Algeria” is also a metaphor for the contested border between North and South in the formation of financial globalization and thus exists in many places other than the geographic space known in English as Algeria, in French as Alger and in Arabic as al-Djazair. In the book, I wove a tight narrative that tried to hold these pieces together across about forty pages. When I came to make this section into a digital project, I thought it would be a simple task: cut the text into pieces and add the films, photographs and other images.

At the first meeting I had in LA with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which designed the software used for “We Are All Children of Algeria, they asked me a  question that threw all that out of the window: how did I want to design the project? What was the concept? I didn’t think I had one but I found myself saying that it was about a demonstration. Or what is called a march in the US. This was, it turned out, what you might call a retrospective realization about where the work was actually going.

So I took the title from chants used at French anti-fascist marches that I had been on as a student in Paris back in the 1980s. As part of solidarity, crowds chanted “Nous sommes tous enfants d’immigrés” or “We are all children of immigrants.” French anti-fascism was not notional: then and now the National Front were racist and violent. Their targets were “Algerians,” meaning any person who is from or descended from North Africa–or in any way sympathetic to them.

When I began the project in the summer and autumn of 2010, I felt that I needed to justify the very idea of marching, or simply putting bodies into public space, as not being totally outmoded. Now of course it seems that this tactic, far from being redundant, has been key first to the extraordinary movements in North Africa and the Middle East and now to Occupy. So that in and of itself seemed to prepare me for Occupy and to be part of the movement.

Although I got involved fairly early, I at first felt that I did not want to make academic work about Occupy at all. When I decided that as part of a strategy to develop my own sense of commitment and understanding that I did want to write about it, I took the performative or artistic model of the durational project, rather than just say “I’m writing [yet another] book about Occupy.” I wouldn’t have done that before thinking how to make a digital project.

It’s also enabled me to do something to the way that I write, which, when it works, seems now to be able to speak to both activists and academics. Again, I say this not to claim some spurious status for myself but to encourage other, younger artists, writers, performers and intellectuals to embrace the challenges of such cross-platform projects. As this way of thinking and imagining is so much more familiar to you, you will do far more exciting and ground-breaking things than I can conceive.

There’s so much lazy reluctance in academia to be involved with either the intellectual or political forms of the present moment. I can count the other (full-time tenure track) faculty that I see at Occupy events or meetings where they are not speaking–well, let’s just say easily. On the other hand, the design and programming group involved in ANVC are all in different ways productive intellectuals and engaged activists. Enough said.

 

Given Time: Debt and the Impossible

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“Let us begin by the impossible.”

A fourth Strike Debt Assembly today in New York found itself in a problem that it defined as organizational: what to do next? Or first? Or in what order? If you were there you would have heard people say many things related to time, such as “Time is of the essence.” Or, “We have no time.” There was a sense of repetition, we’ve been here before. It was experienced as frustration. I would suggest that it is, as befits an Occupy Theory project.  more of a theoretical problem.

Any economy is a distribution and a sharing of what there is, according to the law (nomos) within a household (oikos). In Roman law, the holder of authority is the auctor, precisely the person that decides this distribution. By definition, that person was a patriarch, the male head of the household, whose word controlled animals, slaves, women and children.

There is a certain frustration, then, in giving time to a leaderless association like Occupy that refuses authority and does so in part by refusing to meet inside (oikos) and by challenging the distribution of what there is to be seen and said. This is, then, a gift that cannot make itself present. Or a present, even.

And in the matter of debt, what is taken is also time. Debt is measured in time: a 30-year repayment perhaps, a monthly minimum, a daily calculation of interest. It is circular and it is  without end. In my own case, I have come to realize that the debts that I have will be resolved by my own death, the end of my given time. An uninsured chef suffering from leukemia, cited in a Times Op-Ed today, hoped for his own death so as to spare his family debilitating posthumous debt.

So we are faced with an impossible equation: we give time to something that cannot accept it in order to reclaim some of our given time. These are, then, the reasons for the impossible demands of Strike Debt. Debt has to be abolished, not forgiven. For if it is “forgiven,” an obligation remains on those so forgiven to live up to forgiveness. We see intense resistance to such apparently unearned gifts that were part of the formation of the so-called Tea Party, when a white guy from Chicago railed against people of color getting mortgage support. So there is now an automatic mediatization of radical right demands that no time be given to anyone who has not “earned” it.

Yesterday in Bed-Stuy we talked about abolition in terms of the abolition of slavery: how slavery appeared to be essential to the economy right up until the moment of its abolition; how Reconstruction reimagined the place of the public in ways that we still have not lived uo to 150 years later; and how Stop-and-Frisk continues to inscribe certain people as inherently criminal and part of the economy only on sufferance. We reminded each other that, just as enslavement was social death, so too is debt that treats lives as disposable but banks as eternal.

Today I am reminded of the means of “forgiveness” inherent to slavery. When a slaveowner died, he would sometimes free those of the enslaved he liked or had fathered. These emancipated folk had to carry papers at all times to prove that they had been freed, papers that were not always given credit. You do not make demands on systems like this, systems that discount people from their status as people to being chattel or criminal.

You recognize that impossible demands require a given time: a breaking, a fracturing of the normal course of time. It comes when you least expect it, as it did in Tunisia. Or it comes when those who are subsumed into the impossible category of chattel, debtor, criminal, strike that concept and step into a place in which they are not supposed to be. So the enslaved moved themselves from the slave states to the Union and became not free but “contraband,” or stolen property. They had, impossibly, stolen themselves. Impossibly, they had abolished enslavement.

 

Strike Debt: an emerging consensus

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For a long time, Occupy was a combination of radical affect, method and principle. It did not have a central subject. Readers will have noticed that debt has increasingly become a key theme in this project. And now it’s perhaps becoming the theme in OWS as well. A growing consensus is emerging that the next major day of action will be orchestrated around debt. This will be Black Monday, or September 17, Occupy Wall Street Year One.

In a sense, this is overdue. After all, OWS’s own David Graeber is the author the global best-seller Debt. But just as the 2011 protest lagged behind the worst of the bailouts, it’s only now that the full extent of the debt crisis is becoming apparent.

There are three main factors at work here. One is the exemplary resistance in Montreal to the privatization of higher education and the refusal of endebted futures. Here is a direct challenge to the idea that morality means debt. Quebecois consider that they have already paid for education via direct and indirect taxation, one. And, two, they see a moral society as one that educates its citizens as a public good.

“I fought nazism. I fought fascism. I detested Duplessis. I didn’t make it to 94 for this. NO to law 78.”

Next, and perhaps resulting from this rigor, is the new refusal of student debt that I’m seeing. I’ve met several graduates who are talking about going directly into default from graduation, confronted with apparently long-term unemployment. Many others have moved home with family to a very different future than the one they envisaged when matriculating.

Finally, the macro-economic picture continues to worsen. Spanish banks can’t even calculate how much bailout they need. And this, incidentally, is one of the many reasons why the parallel between family budgets and financial institutions doesn’t work. If the EU came to me with an offer to bailout my debt, I could work it out in about half an hour. Yet giant Spanish institutions with highly qualified staff offered a spread of between 20 and 62 billion euros. So the real amount needed is probably 120 billion.

Major US banks had their credit ratings cut on Thursday so that Citigroup and Bank of America are now two notches above junk bond status. The only upside for their customers is that these banks have so maximized their fees and penalties already that they have run out of room for more.

In his European travels, David Graeber has been saying that the question now is, not if there will be some form of debt abolition, but how it will happen. In Iceland, the state has decided:

to forgive [mortgage] debt exceeding 110 percent of home values.

This forgiveness has affected between 15 and 20% of mortgages to a cost of at least $1.6 billion (in a country where the population is only about 300,000) and has had a dramatic turnaround effect on the economy.

Here banks have moved to a new tactic to their own benefit alone: short-selling, in which a house is not formally foreclosed but the bank accepts a sale at a loss. A striking 233,000 homes were sold this way in the first quarter of this year, a quarter of all such sales. That’s a million people who have had the banks sell their homes for them. Thus the headline-making foreclosure sales are technically down, at just over 20% of the market. Banks still own nearly 700,000 homes and the same number are in some stage of foreclosure: over 5 million more people are confronting homelessness.

The housing crisis is an invisible reason the student debt situation has worsened, I suspect. Parents and other financial supporters no longer have home equity to draw on to sustain ever-rising tuition costs, as universities assumed they did until 2008. That’s me right there.

And next week the Supreme Court is going to overturn health care, which, as flawed as it is, represented at least a chance that medical debt might be contained. In today’s New York Times, a couple with two health insurance policies are reported to have found themselves with a $90,000 bill after a fall led to an unexpected set of surgery and nursing home stays. A consultant reduced the costs by $22,000–but charged 25% of that as a fee.

So when the Montreal solidarity march last night took the theme “Night of the Living Debt,” it really made sense to people. It might as well be zombies spreading the debt crisis because it would be no more out of control than it is now.

Night of the Living Debt

Today, a group called “Free Bed-Stuy” had a great Free University-style event in a lovely park in deepest Brooklyn (I forgot to take pictures because I was doing a teach-in). An urban farm next door housed chickens, pigs and vegetable plots: and also a serious sound system that was luckily far enough away from the event that we could hear ourselves talk. No cops. And a comfortable curious crowd, who were eager to hear our ideas about linking debt to prison, slavery and stop-and-frisk. Tomorrow, the fourth Strike Debt assembly in Washington Square Park, 12pm. I’ll report back.