Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Change has a name: anti-austerity

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The next time someone asks you the “what has Occupy done?” question, you can answer: changed the global political agenda to anti-austerity. A wave of elections across Europe this week has marked a pronounced shift. While elites continue to assert that there is no alternative to continued clampdown, voters have endorsed a new mood of anti-austerity. The content of such a politics is vague and no-one should expect dramatic transformations without continued pressure from social movements. The anniversary of Spain’s May 15 movement will now be the time to claim that such activist pressure has shifted the discourse and to move ahead to its implementation.

French socialists have that Occupy feeling

What is striking is that voters in the European elite nations France and Germany were as notably for change as in the marginalized Greek periphery. Equally, given the continued power of the bond and currency markets, that change is going to be hard to achieve. The euro has already lost 0.5% value by midnight European time, down to $1.30. Expect a major decline tomorrow morning.

It was in Greece that the strongest anti-austerity statement was made. Those parties that signed the “memorandum,” the agreement to the Troika-dictated bailout, are now in the minority. Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, is at the time of writing close to securing second place overall on 16% with 42% counted, up from only 4.6% of the vote in the last election.

The Athens News website translated the post-election speech of party leader Alexis Tsipras as follows:

He said that Europe’s leadership, especially that of Germany, had to understand that the result was a crushing defeat for austerity policies. He also stressed that voters proved through the ballot box that the path out of the crisis did not pass through bailouts and austerity. He said that Syriza understood that its meteoric rise in this election did not reward a party or particular person but a proposal for a leftist government that would arrest the course of austerity policies and bailouts and promised that Syriza would do everything in its power to bring about a government that would terminate the Memorandum and loan agreements.

He hopes to form a left coalition, despite the pre-election declaration by the Communists that they would not participate. His call has been for a New Deal for Europe, which would totally transform the European Union. Consequently, the parties for the memorandum will do all they can to form a government with US and German help.

Whether that can be achieved will depend greatly on the new President of France, François Hollande. He certainly struck the right note tonight, declaring:

austerity is no longer inevitable.

Nonetheless, Hollande is every inch a member of the traditional French ruling meritocracy, having attended all the required grand écoles and served dutifully in the Socialist Party ranks. While this election of a Socialist is only the second in the Fifth Republic, it does not guarantee that anti-austerity can be delivered. Hollande has promised higher corporate taxes, higher income tax on those making one million euros or more ($1.4 million), and a variety of improved social benefits. Whether these can be achieved will depend greatly on the léglislatives, the parliamentary elections coming up.

In more good news, Hollande’s relatively narrow 4% margin of victory and the 80% turn-out suggests that the National Front strategy of calling for a boycott failed. Marine Le Pen looks like a protest vote candidate once more, rather than a serious alternative.

In Greece, however, abstention was massive, nearly 40% of the turnout. The repellent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn benefited from this to claim its first parliamentary seats, with their leader declaring:

I dedicate this victory to the brave guys with the black shirts.

Unfortunately, in a proportional representation system, abstention can let in the thugs–but if this is the best they can do in such a catastrophic moment, they are still a fringe phenomenon.

In the U.K. only 32% of voters participated in this week’s local elections. In German regional elections, none of the established pro-austerity parties improved their votes, with the Green Party and the new Pirate Party improving their positions quite notably in a country allergic to sharp political change for self-evident historical reasons.

The mood in the over-developed world has shifted to anti-austerity. No one party or political formation seems set to benefit from this, although the center-right that implemented austerity is perhaps the clearest loser. Days of action like May 12 in the U.K. and May 15 globally are vital to reassert the anti-austerity theme.

In the U. S., the implications are interesting. Should Obama continue to use empty slogans like “Forward” without specifying an anti-austerity agenda that has bite beyond his bits and pieces ideas currently on offer, he may well be defeated by the “if nothing else, vote the bums out” rule of thumb.

Movements like Occupy, the Indignados and the social movements in Greece are not electoral formations or political parties. We’ve suggested that another world is possible. It seems that even in the mainstream people are listening, or at least willing to listen.

 

Mindful Occupation

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The name of this post is also that of community of radical mental health activists. Funded by Kickstarter, they have produced a new publication called Rising Up Without Burning Out. The project seeks to direct the movement’s attention to the normative mental health standards that police the boundaries of the social, to challenge those norms, and to think about how the movement should care for itself. It made me think about the sustaining of the movement, about the history of radical movements and radical mental health, and some lessons that these histories might provide for our “mindful occupation.”

Radical mental health differs from standard psychiatry in not seeing people as divided into “normal” and “pathological” mental states. The American Psychiatric Association, meeting this weekend in Philadelphia, produces the massive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual containing thousands of conditions and diseases for which the extensive pharmacopeia of psychotropic drugs can be prescribed. It’s huge business from the $500 an hour consults to the billion dollar annual revenues of drugs like Celexa and Lexapro.

By contrast, radical mental health first sees a person, not a set of brain chemicals or even, for those who can afford therapy, sets of personal histories, but as a place of

convergence of social, emotional, cultural, physical, spiritual, historical and environmental elements….We don’t have to see ourselves as separate beings, but rather in terms of relationships.

It would remind us that psychiatry classified “homosexuality” as a mental disease as recently as 1973 and that gender-queer and trans people still have to negotiate the psychiatric diagnostic mill. Going further back, there was actually a so-called disease that afflicted the enslaved in the U.S. known as “drapetomania”: the compulsion to run away.

In almost all other cultures, alter conditions of mental health have been afforded respect as part of the sacred, a gift of divination, as contact with spirit worlds, or as possessors of “dangerous gifts.” One mark of the modern “West” is its designation of such people as “insane,” requiring treatment and restraint. Our isolating and cash-mediated society clearly produces the multiple symptoms of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that it then medicates into passivity. That does not mean that people do not suffer and experience intense personal difficulties. At the same time, Occupy people are widely called crazy, obsessed, lazy and degenerate–all forms of mental health diagnosis. Evidence of this was claimed to be the prevalence of people in need that were attracted to the encampments and whose behavior did not change when they were there.

As Mindful Occupation points out, one occasion when medications can be helpful is when a person’s symptoms have gone unaddressed for a long period, like those who made their way to Liberty and other encampments. They also describe how people sleeping outside are likely to become sleep-deprived due to discomfort, light and noise–to say nothing of the cops. As sleep deprivation is widely recognized as a form of torture, it is not surprising that one simple way to mitigate symptoms may be to help the person get sleep, which may require sleep aids. Much of the pamphlet consists of sensible and practical ways to sustain ourselves without “burning out,” that combination of exhaustion and depression which has been a little in evidence post May Day.

Understanding the production of mental illness as a disciplinary mechanism of hierarchical societies has long been a feature of decolonial and radical movements but it has not been prominent in the Occupy movement. Perhaps the very claim to have a more rational understanding of political economy and the crisis in some way precludes it. Looking back at some earlier instances of anti-psychiatry can suggest what there might be to gain by developing such a project.

Working as a psychiatrist in colonial Algeria, the Caribbean radical Frantz Fanon enacted what were then untried therapies in his hospital at Blida. At the time, colonial psychiatry held that Algerians were, to quote a 1952 textbook a

primitive people [that] cannot and should not benefit from the advances of European civilization.

Fanon decolonized his building by allowing everyday North African activities to happen as normal, meaning here also as if they were normal, in contrast to the French presumption they were not. There was a café, a newspaper and even a mosque for people in therapy. The traditional segregation between “patients” and “medical staff” was ended, with everyone eating together. Fanon even ran a cinema evening.

The creation of this “safer space” was without precedent in colonial Algeria. When the revolution began in 1954, it was attributed by the leading colonial psychiatrist to “xenophobia against the occupying race.” Fanon had to leave for Tunis, where he created a clinic for Algerian refugees that made use of visualization techniques for children that are now regarded as standard.

Drawing made by an Algerian child in Fanon's Tunis clinic 1961

The drawings show violence, even torture. While some were typical child’s drawings as above, others were more experimental as in this cutout

Cut out showing searches and torture

The point here is two-fold. What can seem extremely radical in one moment can come appear entirely unremarkable not long afterwards: the idea that children’s drawings are therapeutic and reveal the source of their trauma is now a Hollywood cliché, after all. At the same time, Fanon’s clinic was militant only in its acceptance of the right of those he worked with to choose their own everyday experience over one that was expected of them.

Lecturing in Tunis, Fanon described those classified as insane as

the ‘stranger’ to society..an anarchistic element.

In this view, the psychiatrist worked as “the auxiliary of police” in these situations. Fanon sought to create a “sociotherapy”:

a society in the hospital itself.

What matters, then, is that Occupy create a validating form of the social that allows the anarchic to remain anarchic by means of enacting our own everyday. That’s why mutual aid, food, education and other such axes of every day sustaining have been so vital to the movement. None of these should be institutionalized, even the occupation tactic, until we can decolonize them.

The Media and the Message

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Yesterday I left one significant May Day lesson off my list: the mainstream media in the United States cannot be seen as a means for the movement to develop. It’s not enough to say that the sparse coverage that appeared was lazy and predetermined. It means accepting that the military-industrial-entertainment complex (MIE) uses the same strategy in its entertainment “wing” as it does for military interrogations. The goal is to produce a state of perceived helplessness in the detainee/spectator in which the only source of redemption is the interrogator/media authority.

Counter-spectacle cannot expect the MIE to broadcast our discourses of “truth” any more than the interrogator is likely to suddenly agree with his prisoner. That said, the MIE is not monolithic, is not subject to a single directing authority. and currently has very little sense of what narrative to offer. It’s precisely that crisis that gives us our opportunity.

Certainly, we should be careful of conspiracy theories. Yesterday, many of us found our inboxes filling with emails about planned activities for May Day. Some quickly assumed that there had been some cyber-skullduggery, delaying the messages until they were irrelevant. Given the pre-event raids by the NYPD on Occupy activists, it did not seem impossible. Quickly, however, it emerged that the list administrators had been too overwhelmed with work to approve all the messages.

So we should not assume that all the media directly conspire against Occupy. If the New York Times City Room stopped covering May Day events after 5.25pm, my guess is that the one employee working on it went home at that time, rather than there being censorship. On the other hand, some media certainly do fabricate their narratives. There were no less than four hostile pieces in the New York Post, a Murdoch tabloid. The editorial entitled “Goodbye, Occupy” opined that the protestors’ “ranks, as usual, were largely made up of union members, dispatched by their leaders after their workday ended.” In fact, union turnout was low but this was not reporting.

Meanwhile, in the business section a “May Day inspires markets” piece lets us know that “Wall Street celebrated May Day by driving the Dow to its highest level in four years.” That coincidence has been followed by a sharp decline, not attributed to the success of the day’s demonstrations. It’s hard to give a rational explanation as to quite how the same people who have told us for years that all markets are globally interactive can maintain this confidence in the face of the double-dip recession in Europe. In Spain there are now 5.6 million people out of work, a staggering 24.4% of the population. Greece is close behind at 22%. In both countries, youth unemployment exceeds 50%. Across the Eurozone as a whole, the unemployment rate is 11%, kept that “low” only by countries like Austria and the Netherlands.

There are two aspects of this crisis to notice. First, despite the dogma that only markets let people survive, Southern Europe has not had a social collapse, despite very real suffering. As ever, people help each other “against” their purported self-interest. Second, U. S. commentators have recently chosen to celebrate the “success” of 8.2% official unemployment here, a rate that is certainly comparable to Europe’s given the different means of accumulating data, which they will do right up until they begin attacking Obama again for his “failed economics.”

Here it’s hard not to think of David Graeber’s claim that neo-liberal economics has in fact been primarily directed to political ends:

it’s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

That is to say, the extraordinary efforts devoted to overkill policing on May Day and derogatory media coverage afterwards can be understood as component parts of a collective movement against the possibility of imagining a different way of being. As Graeber puts it:

So what is this obsession they have with us never feeling we’ve actually accomplished something? And I thought: everything in neoliberalism can be thought of in that sense.

I would want to frame that learned hopelessness in the context of the MIE. What Paul Virilio calls “the admininstration of fear” takes place in the counterpoint between the persistent identification of permanent global and domestic insurgency. Over and again, domestic security tries to frame Occupy as insurgency.

It has nonetheless notably failed to convince people of that equation, even as various security agency engineered “plots” have secured court convictions of their hapless fall guys. For Occupy has been able to generate its own counter-narrative, using the Internet as a mass medium. From countless individual projects like this one, to aggregator sites like Occupied Stories and Occupy.com, to a panoply of Tumblr sites stemming from the iconic We Are the 99 Percent, not to mention all the videos and photographs, Occupy has forged an effective counter-narrative.

The various government efforts to censor the Internet and to monitor web traffic are not unconnected to this movement. Such clumsy stratagems have run into the immense corporate influence of Google and Facebook, causing a stalemate. In the academic context, this is what I have called the crisis of visuality: authority is not fully able to visualize itself in such a way that it appears that its narrative cannot be questioned. In the political context, it means that the Law and Order view of the world, in which the police are always right, has been reduced to its Special Victims Unit, a ritual excoriating of a series of cartoon villains. That is the message of the media: authority is always right. Can the Internet be subjected to that authority? As long as the answer to that question is not clear, there’s a chance for the current wave of global social movements.

 

What we learned

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I’ve been meeting and talking with my Occu-buddies and while everyone is still tired, there seems to be some agreement about the lessons learned on May Day. Without presuming to speak for the movement as a whole, as ever, here’s my set of takeaways, for what it’s worth.

Get up! Get down!

  • The People’s Assembly was amazing and did not have a chance to get beyond its opening statements. Let’s have more!
  • Occupy now knows how to engage public space with disruptive and challenging non-violent direct action in ways that the police cannot prevent, like the 99 Pickets, the Guitarmy, street art and performance. Marches are great to emphasize our numbers but the actions are what we remember.
  • It may not be the best goal of the movement in New York City to aim for a permanent occupation in public space. Salon reported–whether accurately or not–that Marisa Holmes and others were frustrated at the way the People’s Assembly at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park turned into a discussion about an occupation. I remember a series of challenges at the Assembly by certain self-styled leftists to live up to the legacy of the Zapatistas and so on. I’ve been to Chiapas. It’s a place with a 500 year-old history of resisting colonial occupation and an indigenous population with substantial reason to engage in personal risk to do so. Sleeping in a New York City park is not the same thing.
  • That’s not to say we give up on occupation! Pop-up occupations like that in Bryant Park on May Day are beautiful and energizing. A building might be another way to approach this issue, as Lisa Fithian has suggested. An outdoor occupation could be mobile, on the river (why not?), or in disputed space.
  • At the same time, the reason why such a strategy might not work is the incredible willingness of the NYPD to use overwhelming force on a basis that they know will later be held to be illegal. It’s important to know and make visible how spectacular police repression is in the supposed capital of the free world.
  • Free University! This was a fabulous success and was the part of May Day most reminiscent of Liberty Plaza in its day-to-day mode of permanent discussion. There’s already impetus to sustain the energy for more sessions. There don’t have to be full-blown courses, as OccU has already pioneered that strategy. It’s more about a place of intersection for academic and movement knowledges, a mutually reinforcing moment.
  • The connection to immigrant rights and movements is a vital step, as this excellent video shows:

Such coalition building is hard work but most positive.

The impetus now is given by the May Pole: all our grievances are connected. May 15 is the European day of action–May 1 being so “normal” a holiday–and with elections in France and Greece likely to increase pressure on the all-austerity-all-the-time program, we need to work in conjunction with their social movements. There is increased tension in Egypt and uncertain outcomes ahead in their presidential election that may generate further momentum in the Arab world revolution. This is and was always a planetary movement, in which one sector now leads, then follows.

On the march downtown, I measured the response to the chants launched across the varying crowds I marched with. Clear winner:

Get up! Get down!

There’s a revolution in this town!

Is there? Not yet, of course, in the sense of 1789 or 1917. Mostly social change does not happen like that, however, as the very few dates available for such citations suggest. It often happens unevenly in response to people changing their own circumstances or to external forces beyond local control. I wonder if that isn’t what’s happening now?

A May Day in the Life

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After fifteen hours in New York City parks and streets, I’m tired in body, out of voice, but in good spirits. Occupy succeeded in visualizing itself to itself, in finding its strengths and its challenges. This is a long post because the media coverage that I have seen was so grossly unreflective of the experience I had. May Day showed Occupy has grown into a diverse, flexible and evolving movement backed by substantial numbers of people, who are not every day activists, but will turn out for events like this. And the NYPD continue to be the enemy of free expression in New York City.

So here we go. The day began at 8.30 with a picket of NYU, my own institution, in steady rain, which had been torrential an hour earlier, and soon eased off further.

NYU Picket. Credit: Max Liboiron

This “private university in the public service” has one percenters, like hedge fund titan John Paulson, on its board and is now planning a $4-6 billion expansion in the heart of Greenwich Village, which will be at least 60% (student) debt funded. This at an institution where 55% of students leave as debtors to an average of $41,000 per person, making it #6 in the nation–finally NYU makes the top ten! So a coalition of students, faculty, unions and local people have been protesting–a coalition never before achieved–and yesterday picketed the offices of the top administrators.

From there I head up to the Free University (my pictures unless otherwise credited), which was organized by a group consisting primarily of graduate students and some faculty, in which I had a small hand. By the time I arrived a large crowd were already listening to David Harvey speak but I could not hear much of what he had to say.

Harvey is center with the white beard

So I took part in a Horizontal Pedagogy workshop for a while, which raised interesting questions about definitions of teaching and pedagogy. These were later enacted in a workshop on solidarity organized by Marina Sitrin and others.

Solidarity workshop. Marina Sitrin center.

In the background, I saw a large group gathered to hear Andrew Ross on student debt. This was a really engaged session, with people questioning Ross for over an hour after his presentation. He commented that he was surprised to the extent to which some of the key facts are still not well known even to those who are personally implicated.

Occuprint ran a workshop on their lovely posters, which they were giving away, but I didn’t take any because I knew they would be destroyed during the course of the day. There was food provided free of charge, although I confess I did buy an espresso but I chalk that up to medicinal needs, exempt from strike prohibitions. The Free U. was an all-volunteer, co-operative space that intends to carry on working after May Day in conjunction with OccU [Occupy University] and others to reconfigure learning in the city. It was an example of mutual aid at its best, a lovely experience.

Then it was time for the Occupy Student Debt Campaign performance of “Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay!” on the steps of the flagpole. We had a mercifully sympathetic small audience and a great time was had by all.

Can't Pay! Won't Pay! With Niki Kekos, myself, Andrew Ross and Clare Lebowitz. Credit: Fulana de Tal

Even as we were having fun, David Graeber was addressing a substantial crowd, when the convergence march from Bryant Park arrived. Bryant Park was the site of many more picket actions, Mutual Aid, the OWS Library and other events, led down towards Union Square by the Guitarmy, a huge group of guitarists co-ordinated by Tom Morello. The Guitarmy scooted past us at speed–who knew musicians could move that fast?–followed by the main march.

We poured out of Madison Square Park to join them, giving the combined marches enough presence to take the street on Broadway.

Broadway and 17th, about 3pm

OWS Direct Action were co-ordinating this stage of the day very well and had sufficient control to organize a sit-down, not as a protest, but to slow the march so that those further back could catch up. During this pause, I spotted David Graeber using the opportunity to take pictures:

Graeber in brown leather jacket

Nice to know that even the famous activists like souvenir pictures as well as the rest of us;) And I’m mentioning these well-known figures here as a riposte to the suggestion that Occupy is now a rump of Black bloc anarchists and homeless people. This was one of the most beautiful parts of the day. Occupy activists were everywhere, the chants were loud and energizing and when we got to Union Square there was a May Pole, poetry and arts, it was like an alternative festival.

May Pole in Union Square

This traditional May Day celebration had been re-purposed to activist ends (or more exactly un-depurposed because it was an activist tool in the 18th century). On the top it says: “All Our Grievances Are Connected.” Each ribbon of the pole has an issue written out on it and as the dancers process around the pole they are interwoven. The May Pole reappeared later in the day at the People’s Assembly with its slogan high above us in the night.

It was sunny, hot even, by now and there was so much good energy around this section. Something of a lull followed, as we waited for the union contingents to arrive and for the rally at Union Square South. My subjective impression was that when the SEIU 1199 march and other locals arrived, they seemed much smaller than expected. Later in the day, other activists confirmed that impression. I passed the time handing out copies of the (free) fabulous Occupied Wall Street Journal, which was simple because people were so keen to get it.

Finally (as it seemed), it was time to march and I ran into my group from Occupy Student Debt. Here the long police preparations came into play. Although we left Union Square on the South side, we were immediately routed back north up a tortuously slow kettle of barricades, through a narrow bottleneck into 16th Street going West, all the way over to 5th Avenue, finally going south, but then back into another bottleneck on 13th St. The police made their intentions clear: they were not going to arrest people and give us a headline like Brooklyn Bridge last October. But they were going to try and break morale, depress people and take the edge off our mood.

I’d have to say they somewhat succeeded until we finally got moving on Broadway and you could see how many people there were out. The Guardian‘s aerial photo gives you a sense of this:

Credit: Guardian newspaper: note OWS banner at the front

Estimates of numbers are always more of an art than a science. Twitter posts announced that there were still people leaving Union as we passed Wall Street. The free newspaper Metro, which, unlike the New York Crimes, actually put the march on its front page, estimated 15,000 which feels about right. Importantly, unlike October 15 and November 17 last year, most of those people were Occupy people. As I said, the unions did not turn out as many as was hoped and they seemed to disperse early on, with important exceptions like the health care unions, who were fabulous. From being an activist group that relied on existing organizations for numbers, Occupy is now a mass organization, which relies on older groups for permits and facilities like sound and stages.

As we got further downtown, carrying the Occupy Student Debt banner most of the way, the march became more of an Occupy celebration. I caught up with the main Occupy banner, which was a giant blue tarp, donated during the encampment. It had a long slogan painted on top but no one seemed sure what it said. Underneath the tarp, people discussed the day so far and plans for the upcoming People’s Assembly.

Direct Action discussion under the OWS banner

Again and again, though, we stood idly as police halted all marchers. As I passed Trinity Church, rumors circulated via Twitter that the police had broken the march in two. With the location of the Assembly at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park on Water Street now circulating, people dispersed in various ways from the official route to find the park.

I entered the space with Andy from the Yes Men and it was one of those magic Occupy moments. Hundreds of people filled the bowl. A group of women from Occupy, led by Marissa Holmes, called the Assembly to order by People’s Mike that needed up to five relays to reach everyone. That sound, the murmuring of each phrase getting fainter as it retreated from where I was sitting close to the front, was very moving, exhausted as I was.

The People's Assembly, May Day, NYC

We were seated in between two towers, one belonging to the all-powerful ratings agency Standard and Poors, the other to mega-bank JP Morgan Chase. It was a good place for Occupy Wall Street, a good site as some began to think to occupy Wall Street. The bat-signal fired overhead.

99% Bat Signal

It was announced that this was the largest assembly held during the Occupy movement (I assume this meant in New York), and it was certainly the most extended I’ve seen, with dozens more sitting outside the main space, unable to get in.

Discussion turned to tactics. Whether planned in advance or spur of the moment, the proposal was that there be an attempt to occupy the park. Zach introduced a group from Veterans for Peace, who, appropriately enough given the nature of the park, were to blockade the police. Clergy arrived on a peace-keeping mission. Energy flowed.

At once, it seemed, Twitter and text feeds lit up with messages that hundreds of riot cops were outside on Water Street. It was announced that the park would legally close at ten pm and reluctantly, mindful of my green card status, I looked outside. I’ve never seen so many police anywhere, including during the miners’ strike in the U.K.

Police preparations on Water St

Those buses are empty, two of about six I saw driven up by the NYPD for mass arrests. Time and again, it has been pointed out that it is illegal for the police to use public transport vehicles as arrest wagons but the very point of their actions is to insist that there is only one authority in NYC.

Behind me, the Assembly took the decision to leave, rather than be arrested en masse. A few arrests did follow, inevitably, and some people found their way into Zuccotti Park. I’m not sure what happened overnight but I myself was very deeply asleep. Perhance, to dream of a better future.

 

On the Eve

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I’ve been nervous all day, as if I was organizing a conference or a public event. It’s silly really, but I can’t shake the feeling. It’s the same question: will people show up? Other than the Occupy crowd, that is. It’s been a day of running into people who are getting their last minute things done, looking forward, feeling excited and edgy.

It feels like much is riding on this one day, perhaps inevitably, given that months of organizing have been directed here. The cops have apparently also been practicing on Rikers Island with fake protestors. It’s frustrating to learn that the weather is forecast to be wet all morning for the first time in ages–the gods are not surprisingly in the one per cent it appears.

So here’s my schedule for tomorrow.

8.30 am: 99 Pickets. There are pickets being established of 99 corporations and other institutions of the one percent. While we’re on strike, they need to see that there’s opposition. Some of these have been announced but most have not, so it’ll be interesting to see how this tactic plays out.

10am to 3pm. Free University!

There will be over forty teach-ins and appearances including David Graeber, David Harvey and Frances Fox Piven. You can learn about drama, yoga, Take Back the Land, anthropology, urban space and more. Enjoy Radical Recess. I’m helping out and about 2pm I’m part of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign reading performance of Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay! We have real performance people in the other roles, so I’m hoping not to make a fool of myself–luckily the play is a farce so maybe it won’t be noticed!

Around this point, the rain is supposed to stop!

4pm Rally in Union Square

5.30 March downtown with the Occupy contingent

7.30pm on: Occupy after-party TBA

There are great actions going on all over the city. There’s public art everywhere and guerrilla libraries. One thousand guitar players will march in the Guitarmy from Bryant Square to Union Square. High school students are planning to walk out in solidarity in the Bronx.

From time to time, there have been disagreements about tactics or even whether having a May Day event was a good idea. Now I think we can all just agree to hope that what’s happening across the country tomorrow goes really well, that no one gets hurt and that no one who does not choose civil disobedience gets arrested.

One of the later suggestions for tomorrow is: No Data! So there will be no post on Occupy 2012 tomorrow. Good luck everyone and have a great May Day!

See you back here May 2

The Aesthetics of Occupy

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If it seems surprising to talk about the aesthetics of Occupy, it shouldn’t. This is a movement that uses the term “beautiful” as one of high praise in a non-ironic way. Nonetheless, this is not the beauty so prized by the art world. Occupy has made an aesthetic from being out of place that has come to have a noticeable affect in the run up to May Day.

I’m describing Occupy as aesthetic in the sense of Rancière and, as he would say, the Greeks. Rather than signifying beauty, as it would for Kant, he intends

an “aesthetics” at the core of politics …as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.

That is to say, if politics is the determination of relations between the visible and the sayable, there are certain forms that determine what can be “seen” and what is kept out of sight; between what may be said and what cannot; between what is said and understood, and said and not understood; and, finally, how we determine what it is to call something visible and sayable.

It is, then, not for nothing that the sign became Occupy’s first and perhaps most noticeable form. The classic Occupy sign is made on cardboard torn from a box and not bought specially from an art shop. It’s written in felt tip or Sharpie. The point is that it says something distinctive and interesting. One of my favorites:

This sign expresses what many were feeling at the time of the Liberty Plaza occupation and does so with wit and intelligence: it makes you smile and it makes you think. For some art world people, this is a “hand-made” aesthetic, perhaps a little past its sell-by date. My guess is that the person who made this is utterly unaware of that narrative and if they were, they could care less. This object was made to be seen but not displayed, let alone sold.

To really understand the aesthetics of Occupy, you have to get into what it means to say, for example, that the OWS library was beautiful.

OWS Library October 2011

Which it most certainly was. In part, that’s because it was a library that did not discipline its readers. It knew what it had, and what it had lent, but no one was under obligation to return a book if they liked it. There were no fines or people telling you to be quiet. More even than that, there was a sense that this was beautiful because it was out of place, unlikely and untypical. It challenged our sense of “what there is to see there” and, like all the Occupy sites, turned drab anonymous space into a place that had a certain magic to it.

You need to have felt that magic, which I’ve discussed before as being the gift economy of Occupy that worked even though it wasn’t supposed to do so, to get the varied ways that May Day has been imagined. On the lovely Occuprint May Day site, there are noticeably no Social Realist images, other than a few clenched fists, mostly from Oakland, where there is a historical tradition of radicalism and Black Power. More typical is this popular poster in NYC at the moment by Ethan Heitner (by the way, I don’t know any of these artists):

The hand-drawn image of kite-flying in a park on a sunny day nicely sets off the crisp graphic. It’s not whimsical, though. It’s after that “magic” that the aesthetics of Occupy offered: you shouldn’t be in the park flying a kite–an odd American insult is “go fly a kite”–you should be doing one of those things you’ve decided not to do for one day.

The image chosen for the most widely disseminated May 1 leaflet shares this aesthetic:

Detail of Nina Montenegro's poster

In this image, Nina Montenegro turns the “daily grind” into a visual image out of which new shoots of Spring are growing. The received image of the general strike, whether from Seattle on 1919 or Russia in 1905, could not be more different than such feminist imagery. It says a lot about what OWS thinks itself to be that it was selected.

Last, and perhaps by a short head my favorite, is one I’ve already posted but here it is again:

Elizabeth Knafo and MPA

Elizabeth Knafo and MPA have created a visualization of a theme that I’ve often discussed here–the sense of “movement time,” the way in which we’re reclaiming our time, both day to day, hour to hour and in general. The combination of a simple hand painted sun eclipsing the clock by which our lives are dictated and bringing a warm yellow light to a mass direct action: “Whose Time? Our Time.”

The posters tell a story of a movement that has indeed moved: seeds, flowers, women, the sun, kites, machinery only as the past, clenched fists to recall past actions. I’d rather see no fists at all, true, but it’s only been six months.

After Striking

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For the first time at OWS you can hear the words “After May Day.” It seems almost surreal after so much planning for this day. When the events of May are over, it’s a fair bet that the global social movements will once again have the world’s attention. What will we do with this second chance? It’s time to begin imagining how to connect our issues.

So as not to lay this on anybody else, I’m going to explore this by means of the most popular topic in my own project–namely student debt–and the least, which would be climate change. How can we avoid being co-opted on the former and ignoring the latter?  No answers, no demands, just questions for the Spring.

Student debt has become a viral topic in the past four months. Barely mentioned in the media until recently, it was theme of the week in the presidential and congressional elections. And what was until this week a mostly OWS slogan is now in the mix:

Romney Super PAC ad

Yes, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC called American Crossroads has used the Occupy Student Debt slogan in an attack ad against Obama. The quote marks in this still I made from their video suggest that they even know where it comes from. The theme of the ad is that while Obama is off being a “celebrity,” real problems have been mounting for American young people.

Obama has indeed done little to mitigate the student debt crisis, although the subject was one of his most reliable applause lines in 2008. Romney has no solution at all, certainly not the one proposed by OSDC: free public education. He knows Obama won’t argue for anything like that. If this meme goes viral across the Right, we risk losing one of the most effective OWS projects.

On the other hand, from micro to macro, climate change is  dropping out of sight in Occupy. When I post about it, as I noticed when I did finally look at the stats before going to Madison, readership plummets. In the Occupy global action week coming up in mid-May, climate is not mentioned at all, no doubt for fear of this alienating effect.

A news item this week seemed to encapsulate this dilemma. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, workers at a French steel plant owned by the multinational giant ArcelorMittal  have been occupying it to try and prevent its closure. However, an article in Le Monde this week clarified why the plant is not opened or closed.

This is a bit complicated, so here’s the takeaway: the steel producers are using climate change carbon credits to make a load of money for doing nothing. In more detail: under the terms of the European Union carbon trading agreement, companies were given a “free” level of pollution in 2005. Emissions would have to be paid for if they exceeded this level but a credit could be achieved by reducing them below it. ArcelorMittal has “reduced” its emissions by simply closing its plants. While some of its credits have been stored, others have been cashed in, allowing them to make $140 million in 2010: for doing nothing at all.

So if François Hollande wins the presidential election and gives ArcelorMittal an incentive to reopen the plant, it will have to be sufficiently large to exceed this free money and all the costs of actually producing. That’s not allowed by the “market,” the same market that gave all these credits to ArcelorMittal in the first place. They can cash them in, or hold the French government to ransom for a few jobs, with any actual steel production being carried out in India without tiresome regulations.

Here we see the pincer movement of financialized capital. The most widely accepted solution to the financial crisis from the Paul Krugman wing of the Democratic Party to the left is economic growth. For the green left, however, growth means more carbon emissions and accelerated climate change. For anarchists, it’s now taken as read that the current permanent expansion of capitalism must collapse because there are not infinite resources to exploit.

However, if you can capitalize total inactivity at technically an infinite rate of profit–and don’t forget all those tax deductions for the declining hardware and the savings on salary–this implosion may allow for a continued rate of profit even if there is widespread climate change.

I don’t have a simple answer to these dilemmas. I do think it suggests that a new form of affinity group is going to have to think how to cross the lines of the existing working groups to imagine a form of systemic critique that goes beyond the perhaps self-evident anti-capitalism. And that’s precisely as not simple as it sounds. The upside is that the space created by the activism of May gives enough time to get on it.

Other Histories: The Ancient General Strike, for example

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In remembering the general strike we also need to remember the historical world-view of the general strike. We have to replace the idea that all progress was modern and Western with a decolonial perspective that reshapes time as well as space. We should set aside the fictitious genealogy that runs from ancient Greece and Rome to Christianity and then modernity, even in thinkers as profound as Foucault, with an awareness of how much more varied and interesting the historical record has been.

So let’s consider the ancient world with this in mind. The oligarchic “democracies” of Western Europe and North American in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries first defined themselves as descended from ancient Greek democracy, a rhetoric that is widely deployed today. Against that pose, anarchists and radicals of the period produced a history of the ancient general strike.

Athenian democracy was in any event nothing like our present-day representative system. It was limited to non-slave men of adult age who had completed military service, a minority of approximately 10% of the population of Athenian slave-labor society. Most free Athenians “owned” at least one slave. Within the structures of the Assembly, officials were  selected not by voting but by lot, on the presumption of equality. So while the Assembly proceedings were decided by majority vote, this was a direct democracy of the minority, contrary to the usual representations. A look around any Western capital city will confirm that ancient Greece and Rome nonetheless became the archetypes for the modern imperial capital.

By the same token, European and North American radicals identified themselves as the descendants of Roman slaves in ongoing resistance to classicizing aristocrats. So the proles (child or minor) of Rome had engendered the “proletarian” of the industrial revolution. These researches into ancient class struggle were, according to History Workshop scholar Raphael Samuel,

the principal site on which the claims of historical materialism were advanced.

Among the most influential of these publications was a remarkable two-volume opus called The Ancient Lowly (1888) by C. Osbourne Ward, a member of the New York based People’s Party.

The Ancient Lowly

Ward did extensive original research in keeping with the then-latest methods of studying ancient inscriptions. In all other ways, he broke with academic convention. He self-published and later worked with co-ops to get his work out. He described his findings as “news,” like today’s “history of the present.” He called attention to ancient rebels and resistance fighters like Eunus, Achaeus and Cleon, who led what he called “general strikes” against Rome. Cleon, for example, headed an army of 200,000 rebel slaves in Sicily around 140 BCE. Under Eunus the formerly enslaved dominated the entire region for over a decade from 143-133 BCE, defeating numerous Roman armies.

You probably still haven’t heard of these people but you have most likely heard of Spartacus (109-71 BCE),  revolutionary leader of the enslaved. His story was told in the classic movie from 1960, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas as Spartacus.  Now the film is mostly remembered for its camp homoerotics and for the claim by all the captured rebels: “I am Spartacus,” a form of mike check.

There’s a sex-and-sandals TV show about Spartacus out in the wilds of cable-land even today.

These popular culture forms are the cultural echo of the long radical tradition of seeing the ancient period as one of radical class struggle, in which the enslaved often won victories against their oppressors. Indeed, seen in the historical long-run, you might argue that they won outright. Around 600 CE, slavery disappeared from the former Roman Empire in the West. While there are many views as to the cause, the modern radicals would have had no doubt that it was the final victory of a seven hundred year struggle. Against the view that slavery had existed everywhere prior to its European abolition, this argument can point to eight hundred years without slavery from c.600-1492. With such perspectives in mind, early twentieth century radicals recast the Bliblical story of Exodus as the Israelites general strike against dictatorship.

So how do we know that another world is possible? Because people have remade worlds over and again, overturning hierarchies that were supposed to be divine and eternal, first for days and years, then decades and centuries.