Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

The People’s Bailout and the Rolling Jubilee

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Here’s an exciting new initiative from Strike Debt: the Rolling Jubilee. This project will raise money by means of a benefit and other donations to buy back debt in default: and abolish it. Whereas the traditional Jubilee has been a gift of the overlord to the subjugated, the Rolling Jubilee is mutual aid by and for the 99%. The project is set to launch at the People’s Bailout on November 15 at Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street, New York (tickets are not yet on sale).

The event casts light on a shadowy area of American financial markets, where banks and other lenders sell debt in default at very low rates between 5 and 10% of face value. The purchasers are normally debt collectors, who then try to extract some percentage above what they paid out of these most destitute of people. A couple of home truths emerge from the very existence of such markets.

Banks and other lenders do just fine with such a return because all debt is a way of creating new money. By getting a return of 5%, the bank has that much more new money rather than having lost the 95% not repaid by the debtor, as we might imagine. Next, as a society, we traffic in this misery. 15% of Americans are now being pursued by debt collectors. The Rolling Jubilee will buy what it debt it can on these markets: and abolish it.

The Bailout will be an evening of guest performers doing music, comedy, and variety together with speed teach-ins and debt-related performances. Local community groups and Occupy workgroups will be there as well and it promises to be an amazing night. It will be livestreamed, so it’s also a Telethon. On the night, there will be ways to donate to the Jubilee, and all money so donated will be used to abolish debt. The target is $50,000 which would abolish an amazing $1 million of debt.

That’s a drop in the ocean of debt, of course. It’s just a beginning, both to the Jubilee and to the awareness of how debt operates in this society. If we collectively decide to be active both in abolishing debt–$5 abolishes $100 of debt!–and in opening a new discussion about the kind of country that makes money selling debt, then the Jubilee will be rolling.

Questions will be asked about how exactly the abolition will be carried out and I don’t as yet know the answers to them but I’ve been told that once the mechanism has been fully prepared, it will be announced. Already, it does seem clear that it’s not really possible to target any one person’s debt for abolition. I did a Google search myself and quickly came up with a company called LoansMLS, who are willing to sell me debts as varied as $30 million of second mortgages in California at 10% of face value or a $36,500 home improvement loan at 8%. But you can’t find out specific information about the debtors and that’s presumably the last vestige of privacy they/we have left.

What matters here are not so much the technicalities of this process as the debate it needs to open about debt as a commodity. For all the rhetoric about the morality of repaying debt, banks don’t seem to need more than these small percentage returns to be ahead. A debt abolition on a general scale would be the greatest stimulus to the economy imaginable, as people who had hitherto scraped every penny together they had to send to banks that don’t even need it, would now be able to spend that on goods and services. That’s 15% of the entire population that could be helped, even before we get to underwater mortgages, Federal student loans (which are not resold) and high-interest credit-card debt.

Beyond even that benefit, it’s time to talk about what kind of a society we really want to live in. Have we so little imagination that the only possible discussions are whether or not to cut taxes for the wealthy, or who said the word “terror” when? Are we not better than that? Clear your calendar for the People’s Bailout, an evening a year to the day after the mean-spirited and illegal eviction of Occupy Wall Street, when we look ahead to our better futures.

The Anatomy of Capitalism

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There are eight of them around the livid corpse. It is a display of imperial power to a paying and wealthy audience. All but one them ignores the body. They look instead at the open book at the right hand side. Or in two instances, out at us, the onlookers. Another man, closest to us, takes a sideways glance. Meanwhile the one man touching the body with his metal implement looks high and away into the ether, astonished by his own sublimity.

These are, they have no doubt, Great Men. They don’t know the phrase “great men make history” because it will be said two hundred years into their future, but if they did, they would agree with it. The G8. The Great. Who are resolutely trying not to notice the death in their presence. Let’s call that death Capitalism. It’s an odd death because the G8 are trying to learn about life from it from the dissection and the anatomy lesson.

But these are contemporaries of John Donne. They do not ask for whom the bell tolls because they know very well. It’s for them, just as much as it is for the living dead corpse of Capitalism in front of them. Like the vampire, capitalism dies in a regular cycle, returning to a passive state of money before it goes off on the rampage again. The Great have always been confident that they know how to raise the corpse. Only now, some two hundred and fifty odd years into their undead lives, they are not so certain.

The tricks they have tried in the past have not moved the corpse in the way they have come to expect. But they are undead too and they have no others. Free trade, they say. Less regulation. Yet more tax cuts. But the ones looking out, rather than fixing their gaze at the book of all truths–maybe it’s now Ayn Rand they look at–know that things are not going so well. The corpse is that of a man named Aris Kindt, a thief. One of their own. So they cannot look at him.

Out in front of this scene was Rembrandt once. He painted them in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632). In its frozen tableau are both the certainty and fears of emerging capitalism. This weekend I found the painting reproduced in a book that I had first read many years ago by W. G. Sebald, called The Rings of Saturn. Having trouble sleeping, as I often do these days, I opened it and at once began coughing from its dust and the already decaying pages of the cheap British paperback.

Sebald lived in the U.K. although he was German by descent and wrote in that language. He is the supreme writer of melancholy, a German haunted by the twentieth century and living on the wind-swept marshes of East Anglia. Rings of Saturn begins by a meditation on The Anatomy Lesson and Sebald’s speculation that one of the eight was Thomas Browne, a poet of melacholy. Browne did one visit Tulp’s displays of erudition for the wealthy bourgeois of Amsterdam, so why not say that he is painted here?

As I tried to sleep, the image shifted in my mind, linked to the contemporary Anatomy of Melancholy by Richard Burton, and became the Anatomy of Capitalism. But that is to say the same thing. Melancholia, Freud reminds us, is mourning that has not been resolved. It is our refusal to let go of the lost object that keeps us in a state of melancholy, a condition in which we see ghosts. Which is not to say that the ghosts are not real. Must a ghost, I thought, always do the same thing? Hamlet’s father chooses when to speak and when not to speak. So does that other ghost that haunted Europe first but the United States later and more scarily, das Gespenst der Kommunismus, the ghost of communism. That ghost has had little to say for quite a while. Is it not once again in the wings, awaiting its entrance?

Why, I wondered, do those three Dutch merchants look out at us like that? Are they afraid we know something they don’t? Are they worried that we might come in and mic check the anatomy lesson? Or are they just keeping us in our place, the place allocated to us from which we may look at them and nothing else? In its lights and darks, with sharp perspectives, the scene is all about who can see what from where and what they make of it. What does Aris Krindt see as he lies there with his neck broken by strangulation–so civilized, Holland–looking up into the jowls of the burghers and their hipster goatees?

How To Change: Learning, for example

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How do we learn from change? How do we learn to change? These repeated but slightly different questions seem at the heart of the emerging difference between the academic assessment of the Occupy movement and its own internal process. Today Critical Inquiry published three intriguing essays about Occupy, written about the 2011 moment. Yesterday, I learned a good deal from Occupy University about how to create a successful “learning encounter.” The two are noticeably different and yet intersect.

The Critical Inquiry pieces (paywall protected) are by W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt. All distinguished figures to be sure, an amazing team to have backing Occupy, yet all three are white men of a certain age (as is acknowledged). While each essay movingly describes, and often quotes, the experiences of students and occupiers, it’s a shame that at least one of these people wasn’t given space to report back for themselves.

It’s not at all that the writers are not aware of the dilemma of doing academic work about Occupy. For Mitchell, one problem was simply that

it threatens to drown the researcher under a tsunami of material.

Anthropologist Michael Taussig resolved that issue by writing a moving account of last O13, the first attempt to evict OWS that failed because so many turned up to support the occupation. Yet even the span of one night raises difficult questions:

So how do you write about it? In such circumstance of dissolving norms, effervescent atmosphere, invention and reinvention, what happens to the ethnographer’s magic—as Bronislaw Malinowski called it—and that old standby of “participant observation”?

Is that magic strong enough?

Am I clear here? I don’t think so, and I think this is the problem of writing surprise and writing strangeness, surely the dilemma and sine qua non of ethnography. As soon as you write surprise—or, rather, attempt to write it—it is as if the surprise has been made digestible, so it is no longer surprising, no longer strange.

Each writer has interesting and provocative ideas: Mitchell saw Occupy as a new iteration of the revolution as “empty space,” as proposed by Michelet. Harcourt sees it as a new phenomenon he calls “political disobedience” that “resists the very way in which we are governed.” Taussig understands the mic check as a way to “come to grips with trauma,” using “the cultic expression of magic,” reminding me of Rebecca Solnit’s description of the occupations as a response to disaster.

There is for all that a certain tension in finding a place for what Occupy has tried to do within the established forms of academic practice. There is a seemingly deliberately retro list of theoretical references –Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Nietzsche. In short, all the Very Serious Germans–plus Foucault. But no Marina Sitrin, David Graeber, Rebecca Solnit, Zapatista writings and so on. Thus the diligent sub-editors at the University of Chicago changed Harcourt’s “stack takers,” the organizing of people to speak at a meeting, into “stocktakers,” a commercial counting of inventory.

Theory, in the American university, now serves as authority. It brooks no gainsaying other than more theory in response. Occupy has tried to resist authority and to be a leaderless movement. Bernard Harcourt, the legal scholar, takes this problem seriously and gets it right when he says:

[T]hose who theorize the Occupy movement—anyone who is trying to understand the movement, as I am here—cannot speak with authorial voice on behalf of or for the movement, since they are, at the moment, outside the movement.

What, then is the “author” who is part of the claim to authority to do?

Occupy University have been working on this for the past year. When I had the pleasure of doing a learning encounter with them yesterday, I saw a number of ways in which they have brought movement practice into the practice of learning. In this format, while there is a speaker in the conventional way, time is not limited to the standard hour. After I spoke to some images, we sat in a circle and a facilitator took over the discussion.

The facilitator controlled the flow of conversation and I was allowed to step back, rather than engage in the standard Q and A. The practical result was that this part of the evening, usually a test of the speaker’s authority in academia–can they withstand the questions or not?–became the main event. It took most of the time and generated more of the ideas and all the discussion. By the end, there was a joint ownership of the topics under discussion. I know this sounds a bit idealized, but it really was my sense of what happened.

Women in Kashmir burning their electricity bills, 10-18-12

As a result, the conversation was more interactive and engaged than is often the case in academia. Several reasons for this engagement seemed clear. It was a very diverse group, especially in terms of national origin, which allowed for a range of perspectives on debt and the global social movements, rather than referring mainly to OWS. At the same time, people active in the movement here used the encounter to be self-reflexive and critical of their own practice. When there was an opportunity to speak, care was taken to see if someone who had not yet spoken might want to do so. What began a little hesitantly opened up into a space in which Bedouin, German, Palestinian and Indian experience was being cross-referenced.

There were those who touched on theory–Jameson and Rancière for cognitive mapping and the division of the sensible respectively–but I really felt something else was emerging here. This was not a naive or unschooled room of people, in an art foundation in Manhattan. But there was a sense that we were trying to reach a little further, not to score points, but to learn how to learn. I got too involved in following and listening to take proper notes. And that in itself reminded me of being in the park in the first days that the Critical Inquiry team were writing about, when for a long time, I just wanted to be there and be part of it.

The Art History of Debt

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Here’s the outline of an art history told from the point of view of debt. I devised this for a session of Occupy University held in an art gallery and at first it was just a bit of a joke but it came to seem that you really can tell the history of canonical Western art as a story about debt and commodification.

This painting by Perugino is typical of the transformation of pictorial space created during the Italian Renaissance, which is when the classic “Renaissance to Modern” art history survey class begins. Perspective depends on drawing all lines to a vanishing point, in this case located in the door of the church. This visual element reinforces the meaning of the painting in which Christ anoints Peter as the leader of his “church” to come. Visually, it depends on a space of nothingness, the vanishing point.

At the same period, this nothingness came to be drawn as zero, using the Arabic numeral ‘0’ for the first time. During the Middle Ages, zero was considered immoral precisely because it represented nothing, whereas God was everywhere and so there could not be a space of nothing. By the same token, interest, money that comes from nothing, was immoral. Zero was then instrumental both to the system of visual representation and the emergent capitalist banking system based on debt that paid for it.

Pieter Klaesz, "Still Life"

Pieter Klaesz, “Still Life”

Jumping ahead as we do in these rapid surveys, here’s a classic seventeenth century Dutch still life by Klaesz. It represents a debt financed economy on a set of levels. First, it depicts a group of commodities, including exotic imports like olives and lemons from the South of Europe. The pocket watch represents both advanced technology and the new importance of accurate time to commerce. Second, the audience is taken to be those people who know what these things are for and how to use them–even today proper use of cutlery and glassware in fine dining restaurants is very intimidating. So it reinforces the cultural as well as finance capital of the painting-owning class. The painting is itself a commodity, of course, and it indicates the patron’s refinement that he can afford this level of technical skill. In short, the painting creates a reality-effect in which speculation and the commodity are taken as the material basis of the concrete.

Audubon, The Yellow Cuckoo

John James Audubon, the ornithologist, by contrast turned from debt to natural history. Exiled from Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) by the 1791 revolution, Audubon later started a mill in Kentucky but went bankrupt during the financial panic of 1819 and was imprisoned for debt. On his release, without any money, he decided to travel down the Mississippi and draw birds. Audubon had then gone through the collapse of two economic systems before learning how to sustain himself in the emerging knowledge economy of the nineteenth century.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of Theodore Duret

The history of modern art is nothing but the history of debt: indebted artists desperate to sell work, bankers and financiers becoming their dealers, other bankers and financiers buying the work. Above is a portrait by the independently-wealthy Manet of the banker-turned-art-dealer Duret. There’s a little miniature still life at bottom right as an acknowledgement that the painting depicts the new world of commodities and capital, in its mix of seventeenth-century Spanish Absolutism (via Velazquez, the grey background, the painterly style) and the painting of modern life (via Baudelaire, the depiction of modern dress and the bourgeois).

Degas, Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873

Here’s Degas, son of a banker, painting his uncle the cotton speculator in his New Orleans office during Reconstruction. The people in the room are in debt because they lent money to the Confederacy during the Civil War. They’re about to rise up in support of “Redemption,” meaning white supremacy and the end of Reconstruction. Fittingly, the scene is dominated the white whiteness of the cotton itself, for which so much blood and tears were spilt.

John Singer Sargent 

Sargent paints the wife of a banker. A scandal ensues. Not for the first or last time, a woman becomes a debt-financed commodity.

Paul Cézanne, Portrait of his Father

Here’s Cézanne’s portrait of his father, a banker, reading the newspaper to see how his affairs are going. Patriarchal debt-financed authority here literally enabled the avant-garde.

Matisse, Souvenir de Biskra

Finally, a place where it all comes together. Matisse said of his work that he wanted it to be

an armchair for a tired businessman.

What it shows is a woman from the North African town of Biskra, a French colony, who we are supposed to think was a sex worker. So calling her a “souvenir” has the usual bought object connotation and the sense of a fantasized memory–the real woman did not have hips like that, for example. It’s colonial speculation at work–business–interacting with the sense of entitled play and commodified heteronormative desire to create the new normal of the imperialist world-view.

These paintings are not “just” about debt or just explicable by debt, of course. There is nonetheless a coherent way to tell the story of Western art from the zero of perspective to the emergence of the debt-financed dealer and today’s speculative global art market that is informed by the rise of the debt society. I wonder if anyone’s going to teach it?

Strike Everywhere

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If you live in these peculiar United States, you might almost believe that the most important thing in the world is how many times Mitt Romney lied in the debates (trick question: he always lies). Unreported and undiscussed, a wave of strikes is spreading across the regions of the world that were most affected by the global social movement. The shift from Occupy to Strike is underway.

Tunisia

This is where it all kicked off. Today, the entire journalistic profession went on general strike to pressure the government to accept laws passed in the first weeks of the Arab Spring guaranteeing freedom of the press, following months of demands. And won. While these laws have perhaps to-be-regretted state of exception clauses, they are detailed and extensive, covering all areas of intellectual, journalistic and artistic expression. Light years ahead of where the American-backed dictatorship of Ben Ali had been, these laws are comparable to any liberal democratic state.

Egypt

Just as with the Arab Spring, the strike wave has extended to Egypt. In the forefront here are doctors and other medical personnel. After a series of assemblies last May, doctors called for one day strikes on May 10 and 17. Their demands are simple: effective pay scales for all medical staff, an increase of the health share of the national budge to 15% from its current 4.5%, pay increases and free public health care. Watch this excellent video from Mosireen that explains the new strike that began on October 1 and is set to continue until demands are met:

It discloses a shocking lack of facilities, armed attacks on hospitals, and that the salary of a 30 year veteran hospital consultant is only $200 a month. Emergency rooms are still open and people needing surgery are being treated: without charge.

Doctors now plan a mass resignation of 15,000 physicians to compel action–like some Occupy actions, they are waiting until that many have committed before launching the resignation tactic. The ethical nature of the strike is noticeable: just as Tunisia called for the right to free expression, Egypt advances the concept of health care as a human right.

Spain

This wave of rights-based activism has spread to Spain. Unremarked in all the discussion about austerity and the euro in the business pages has been a series of drastic education cuts amounting to €6.5 billion. School students are fed up and are planning a general strike this Thursday, like their peers in Chile, who have been striking for the right to an education for the past two years.

European General Strike

Today comes news of a co-ordinated general strike against austerity of all workers that has spread first across the Iberian Peninsula and now around Europe. Spanish unions today joined the Portuguese call for a general strike on November 14. Later,  unions in Greece, Italy, Belgium, Malta and Cyprus have joined them. Let’s hope the connections are made and anti-austerity is presented as a political claim for fundamental democratic and human rights.

United Kingdom

A weekend march planned by the Trades Union Congress against the austerity measures and cuts in the UK has morphed into a call for a general strike. Legal prohibitions on striking put in by Thatcher and Blair have limited options for the unions but The Guardian reports:

A leading industrial relations barrister, John Hendy QC, argues that a general strike against government policies …can take place under the European Convention of Human Rights…. Steve Turner, Unite’s director of executive policy, said: “This will be a political strike. There will not be any ballots and it is our view that political strikes are not unlawful.”

No doubt the Tory government will take a different view…but a major union calling for an explicitly political strike is, well, striking.

Estados Unidos

And will the wave carry here? N14 would be after the elections and if, god forbid, there’s a President-elect Romney, it would be a great time to make a statement. It’s not at all likely. There is some agitation building up in New York about yet another rise in public transport costs that could see some actions. It’s not likely to be the labor movement that answers the European call, not least because there’s really no precedent. There are those that have been more responsive…

 

Vivir Bien: Why Trees Have Standing

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There’s a moment in one of the videos from the early days of OWS that stayed with me after we saw it again last month. Chris, a long-time occupier and Direct Action mainstay, leans into the park from the stairs and says

This is the epicenter of a global revolution!

Massive cheers. It would have been more accurate perhaps to say: “this is the node of the planetary fightback at the epicenter of global media.” Less thrilling, though. Watching Thomas Sankara speak in the videos from 1987, you see a confidence in the forward march of history that now seems so long ago and far away. But his agenda of sustainable, regional and peaceful economies is still a viable alternative. You can see emerging a triangulation of how it might–might–be possible to triangulate it into being.

Node one: Africa

Sankara’s claim that Africa could be the center of an alternative economy seems far-fetched in the era of the Troika consensus. But the rebellion by South Africa’s majority is ongoing, not just in the mining industry but also in trucking and now municipal workers. Unemployment continues to rise and South Africa’s credit rating was just downgraded.  And most of the country’s trade is with Europe, so things are going to get worse. The question is whether calls for land redistribution and the nationalization of the mines might lead to a rethinking of what the economy is intended to do. If, as the strikers hope, its primary purpose is to support the living standards of the majority, then everything would have to change.

Node two: Bolivia

In a classic legal essay from 1972, Christopher Stone asked

Should trees have standing?

Meaning can non-human entities have legal rights? As Stone pointed out, corporations do. And each time an extension of rights occurs, it had previously been “unthinkable” to do so.  Stone proposed that “natural objects,” such as forests, rivers and oceans should have rights. Since then, such basic ideas have come to be enshrined in law but always fiercely opposed by the neo-liberals. For it creates a stalemate between the “rights” of the corporation and those of the natural object.

How can such issues be resolved? In Bolivia, a new proposal for legal rights to the planet that would give a clear direction:

Bolivia’s government will be legally bound to prioritise the wellbeing of its citizens and the natural world by developing policies that promote sustainability and control industry.

This principle is known as Vivir bien, or “Living Well.” The proposed law defines it as follows:

Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.

Bolivia does not have the luxury of considering climate change to be something you can ignore in two Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates (unless you count Romney’s “I Like Coal” sloganeering for West Virginia’s benefit). As the climate changes, Bolivia is running short of drinking water and is also, ironically, at risk of flooding from melting glaciers. Vivir bien is exactly what would motivate the South African grass-roots activism and why should it not?

Node Three: Texas (yes Texas)

While such ideas have routinely been dismissed as “tree-hugging” in the United States, the term is no longer just rhetoric. In East Texas, eco-activists have occupied the trees that have to be cut down for the Keystone XL Pipeline.

There’s plenty of hostility in Texas as you might imagine. Texas land commissioner Jerry Patterson marvelously argues that the pipeline to bring Canadian bitumen to the Gulf:

will create thousands of jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

Perhaps Canadians aren’t foreign? But what about that nasty socialized medicine they have? Sarcasm aside, it’s direct action in defense of vivir bien that might open a space in which the new legal doctrine of planetary non-human rights could take effect. To the immense benefit of humans–well, most of them. Say 99%?

 

Remember Sankara: Abolish Debt

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Today is the 25th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso. His killing came a few months after he had called for African nations to go on debt strike against multinational lenders. That’s not a coincidence. So as part of the global week of action on debt, the Spanish 15M movement has called on us to remember Sankara’s message today. Of course, the best legacy we could offer would be to accomplish debt abolition.

Thomas Sankara

So, first, hit the link and get Fela Kuti’s amazing tribute to Sankara playing in the background. Now let’s review the basics. The 15 M statement reads:

Thomas Sankara was president of Burkina Faso between 1983 and 1987. Sankara, a soldier, came to power via a coup, but unlike other presidents whocame to power by the same means, he always prioritised the welfare of the people of Burkina Faso. He nationalized land and distributed it among the peasants, nationalized minerals, launched immunization and literacy campaigns, banned genital mutilation and defended by all means equal rights for women… and confronted the dictatorship of debt.

This is what he said at the Conference of African Unity in 1987:

The debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure. Those who led us to indebting ourselves had gambled as if in a casino. As long as they had gains, there was no debate. But now that they suffer losses, they demand repayment. And we talk about crisis. No,…, they played, they lost — that’s the rule of the game, and life goes on.

Now we might wish that we had a President who talked in this fashion. Sankara’s analysis saw debt as a continuation of colonialism into a new form:

Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before…Debt is neo-colonialism in which the colonizers have transformed themselves into a form of technical assistant….Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa.

Sankara went so far as to call this form of debt a “financial slavery.” Since Strike Debt and the other debt resistance movements have gained attention, there have been those who have wanted to criticize them for making this analysis. The critics take upon themselves the name of the (neo)colonized but ignore this African legacy.

Such internal squabbles are irrelevant. The important point is this. Just as the Haitian Revolution drove the French Revolution into its radical phase; just as the Algerian and Vietnamese revolutions produced the Euro-American wave of 1968; so now the debt abolition movement is implementing decolonial politics in the metropole. In short: throughout the colonial era (since 1492), there have been successive waves of radicalism, from the colony to the imperial “center.” This is not surprising because it is in the colony that imperial power is practiced and exercised.

The “neo” in neo-liberalism thus comes from using such colonial techniques in the regions of that “center” that are now deemed dispensable. After the financialization wave swept through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries in the 1970s and 80s, the banks turned their attention to Heavily Indebted Poor People in the late 90s and 2000s. With the crash of that tactic in 2008, extraction is now concentrated on those regions of Europe that were considered “Oriental” in the nineteenth century (Greece, Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal), as well as people of color in the United States.

And as Sankara said, it seems that

the crisis gets worse each time that the popular masses get more and more conscious of their rights against exploiters.

So Sankara proposed that, against the G7 (as it was then) and the Club of Rome, African nations should form their own “club,” a united front against debt. He stressed that European and African masses were not antagonistic but were rather being exploited by the same people. Unity was essential, he noted, adding that if Burkina Faso was the only nation not to pay, he would not be there for the next conference. As indeed he was not.

Sankara memorial

The final message in Sankara’s speech was the necessity of African mutual aid. Rather than exporting raw materials to the developed world and importing finished goods, Sankara called for an internal African market. Such a market would still be huge but it would allow for disarmament and development. This point is crucial: debt abolition was not, in Sankara’s terms, a “provocation” but a crucial first step towards a sustainable regional economy that was not centered on war.

It has not happened. Yet. Perhaps the wave of refusal spreading across South Africa against these same, unchanged conditions will become Sankara’s legacy. Let’s do what we can to make it happen.

 

Police Strategy to Silence globalNoise

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There were 13O globalNoise events yesterday in at least 42 cities that I know about, ranging from North and South America, East Asia, and across Europe to Iceland and no doubt many other places. There were naked protests in Madrid and Lisbon, thousands on the streets, with poetry, art, music, banners and so on. The chances are, though, that unless you follow social media, you wouldn’t even know. I don’t think there’s a media conspiracy but I do think there’s a set of police tactics that helps produce their desired result: “nothing to see here.”

So just for the record, here’s Madrid:

Madrid 13O

To be fair, organizers did say the crowd was smaller than they had hoped, but still. On to Lisbon, where crowds were substantial:

Portugal dismembered by the Troika

You can almost imagine the organizers thinking “the media can’t ignore this.” But they did for the most part. The relatively small media coverage was not altogether unexpected. Many events, like our own in New York, began at 6pm when most newsrooms are essentially deserted on a Saturday night. I was, perhaps naively, more surprised that the global coordination of the protests was not considered important or interesting, especially as it could have been written in advance. To be fair, there was strong coverage in social media and on the web, which is where most global social movement people probably get their news.

What there was everywhere was cops. In Paris, for example, a crowd of hundreds, diminished by the pouring rain, was everywhere paraded by riot police.

From the accounts of participants, what happened was that the police entirely surrounded the marchers on all sides, preventing them from distributing literature and even from being seen. Unaccustomed to being policed as insurgents, French activists were outraged. It’s hard not to suspect that this was a deliberate, and perhaps co-ordinated, strategy as similar reports came in from across Europe and Japan. Here’s what the demonstration in Tokyo against the IMF meeting looked like:

The men in hats are police and the demonstration is effectively shielded from view. Low-level banners are being carried but can’t be seen.

Something similar resulted in New York, where police on motorbikes cordoned off protestors from the public but couldn’t prevent some fun exchanges into shops, hotels and restaurants. While people were pleased yesterday that there were no arrests, in the light of day it seemed puzzling. Officer Winsky, the long-term OWS super-cop, was beside himself on various occasions but none of the usual random arrests followed. Officers did not carry their usual bundle of plastic zip-tie cuffs. Presumably, there had been a decision not to make arrests. Certainly S17 had shown that even a few arrests make the papers, while none of the more imaginative or creative actions were mentioned.

So between a set of co-ordinated police tactics to keep events invisible and not generate documentable arrests, and the low level of media attention on a weekend evening: nothing to see here. At the same time, all this strategizing can’t help but make me wonder if there isn’t a little nervousness out there as well. In any event, global coordination of protest events is set to continue. Now we have to make sure there’s something to see.

The Global Day Against Debt

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On this global day of debt action, OWS had what most people involved thought was one of the best days of action for a while, in terms of targets hit, lots of funs and no arrests:) Oh, and two banner drops at Columbus Circle and Rockefeller Center and a fun afterparty at Times Square.

Debt Is the New Colonialism

The convergence was at 4pm and almost at once a banner was dropped from the current installation surrounding the Columbus statue. It read: “Debt Is the New Colonialism.” It was not up for very long but it was photographed by many of us and far more tourists and passers-by. A session on the “Future Without Debt” from Free University followed and at 6pm an Assembly celebrated the Global Day of Action. I had the fun experience of mic checking the French call for today’s action– in French! The crowd gamely followed and cheered when we got to la resistance.

Yo Soy 132 in New York today

People from Yo Soy 132 in Mexico, the Japanese anti-nuclear movement, and Quebec’s student movement reported on actions in their locations and we heard the news from Spain.

The first action stop took the gathering of about 300 people to Goldman Sachs chair Lloyd Blankfein’s residence.

O13 chez Blankfein

Some of us got inside while casseroling and after the police sealed the building, the gathering mic checked the “vampire squid” CEO. Off to a selection of one per cent destinations across the mid-town area, casseroling all the way. We checked in at the Plaza Hotel.

Casseroling at the Plaza

Given a power lift by a passing performance artist, I led a mic check of the global day of debt to the patrons of this prime one per cent venue. New York’s “finest” were not thrilled and used a good deal of force to clear the doorways. So off we went to Tiffany’s, who took one look and closed their security doors (below).

Sorry, Audrey, Tiffany’s is now closed

Perhaps the best received action of the night came when some people managed to hang the Occupy Wall Street banner off the balcony at Rockefeller Plaza, right in front of Rockefeller Center. Sorry the picture isn’t that good, I was on the other side of the skating rink

One of the things that was fun about all this was that, even as stores and restaurants closed their doors, their staff smiled at us, waved support and gave surreptitious thumbs-up. Even at Gucci. It turns out that those who see the one per cent close up have no particular love for them.

So we made our way casseroling to Times Square, where so many gathered last year. A happy afterparty waved at themselves in the Jumbotron and celebrated a successful action that did not put anyone in jail.

If anyone wants to play Where’s Waldo, your correspondent is visible somewhere in this picture.

The easy judgment is that there were of course far fewer people in Times Square this year than during last years O15 mass rally. But if you count it a different way, there were far more. Because people all over the world held rallies and marches today and did so on similar themes and ideas. There were 100,000 in Madrid alone. By way of confirmation, here’s the call from the US, Spain, France and Portugal:

From Strike Debt/OWS

To the financial institutions of the world, we have only one thing to say: we owe you NOTHING!

To our friends, families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

To the people of the world, we say: join the resistance, you have nothing to lose but your debts.

From: Plataforma Auditoria Ciudadana de la Deuda (PACD) España

A las instituciones financieras del mundo, una sola cosa para deciros: ¡No os debemos NADA! A nuestras familias, comunidades, a la humanidad y nuestro entorno natural que hacen nuestras vidas posibles, os lo debemos todo.

A todos aquello@s que habitan el mundo, les decimos: uniros a la resistencia, no tenéis nada que perder excepto vuestras deudas.

From: Democratie Réelle Maintenant! Paris

Aux institutions financières du monde, nous n’avons qu’une seule chose à dire : nous ne vous devons RIEN !

A nos amis, familles, communautés, à l’humanité et à notre environnement qui rendent nos vies possibles, nous vous devons tout.

A celles et ceux qui peuplent le monde, nous disons : rejoignez la résistance, vous n’avez rien d’autre à perdre que vos dettes.

From: Primavera Global em Portugal

Às instituições financeiras do mundo, só temos uma coisa a dizer: não pagamos o que não devemos!

Aos nossos amigos, famílias, comunidades, à humanidade e à natureza que torna a nossa vida possível, devemos tudo.

Aos povos do mundo, apelamos: juntem-se à resistência, não têm nada a perder, apenas as vossas dívidas.

Yes, that’s right: we’re all saying the same thing. We owe you, the financial institutions, nothing. We owe you, our loved ones, friends and communities, everything.

It’s a moment.

Who Occupies the Occupiers?

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How do movements grow? How do they relate to established institutions? Today we had a case in point at the Creative Time summit under the title “Confronting Inequity.” Creative Time, the well-established and regarded arts agency with a social justice mission, has held these events for the past four years. This year’s event incorporated a theme on “Occupations,” involved many social movement activists, but also got itself into an entanglement with Israel. Aside from the issue itself, the ramifications created a form of Rorschach test for how people feel about the movement.

So first the issue. Creative Time (CT) announced that it had a series of “in-depth partners” for these events. One was the Israeli Center for Digital Art. While the ICDA seems relatively progressive by Israeli standards, it is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Sport and the town of Holon. This connection was first discovered by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen, whom I have often written about here, and I was really looking forward to meeting. In a statement that was widely circulated on sites such as Electronic Intifada, Mosireen announced that they could not participate:

The invitation to participate that we recieved from Creative Time initially impressed us with its language, claiming to be a response to “a growing community of cultural practitioners working in the realm of social justice and socially engaged art practice” and exploring “the impact of wealth inequity across the globe as it engenders totalitarianism and undermines democracy.” This language and other similar statements about democracy, equality and revolution were encouraging to us. We believed that the discourse around these topics was finally shifiting from its traditionally unjust and orientalist political coordinates.

It’s true that no money directly came from Israel to New York and a rapid name change to “screening partners” was implemented. Mosireen were nonetheless not arguing about equivalency. Their attention was on the Israeli Center for Digital Art and its involvement with the state:

After the Second Intifada [ICDA director] Mr. Danon said “we started doing projects that were aiming at communicating with artists/curators working in similar conditions in the region (Palestinian authority, Arab states) as well as in the Balkan area.” This inappropriate emphasis on symmetry runs through their work ever since. The deaths of 13 IDF soldiers (4 from friendly fire) during the 08/09 assault on Gaza is not a “similar condition” to the killing of 1,417 Palestinians, of which at least 313 were children.

You might not agree with this argument. There has nonetheless been an ongoing call for “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” since 2004, supported by major US intellectual figures like Judith Butler, as any progressive person must be aware. If I was organizing an event calling “Confronting Inequity,” I would not go anywhere near a partnership with an Israeli group. If for some reason I had to do so, I would surely have wanted to have many Palestinian organizations involved as well but CT missed that call, although there were screening partners in Morocco and Abu Dhabi.

Unnoticed by Mosireen and others, there was also another partner in Israel at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, founded by the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, which seems fully integrated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has had the Prime Minister visit in 2006, and so on. More than the ICDA, this partner seems troubling.

Following Mosireen’s withdrawal in regards to the ICDA, the hip-hop duo Rebel Diaz withdrew in solidarity.

So at the opening of the Summit, CT president Anne Pasternak had the difficult task of announcing these withdrawals  but did not do so in a way that made it clear to the audience what had happened, other than that it was over Israel-Palestine. Curator Nato Thompson followed and said that while CT “get it” about the issue, they wanted “to get everything on the table” and discuss it. Which would entail a screening partner in Palestine, even if you accept that argument.

The issue was widely discussed on Twitter (#CTsummit) but did not make the platform until the editorial team from Tidal, the OWS theory journal that I have again often discussed here, had their moment in the segment called “Occupations.” Amin Husain, a well-known figure at OWS, talked from his own background as a Palestinian. He recalled debates over whether to use the name “occupy” that had been decided in favor of reclaiming the language but not, as is often suggested, without being aware of Palestine. He noted that Israel is an “economy set up to benefit the elite at the expense of the indigenous,” while pointing out from direct experience of the negotiations that nationhood for Palestine has always come with conditions of subscribing to neo-liberalism. Tidal raised the question of the boycott but did not call for people to walk out. They used the remainder of their time to discuss what they had wanted to talk about: the Strike Debt campaign and a video they had made to show, which is below:

In a keynote in the afternoon, Queens Museum curator Tom Finkelpearl tried to intervene into the debate by sniping that if you boycotted a Creative Time event, there was really nowhere left for you to go. There were those who clearly agreed with this sentiment (see here, though, for notes on later presentations that supported the boycott which I didn’t see–scroll all the way down).

Before this view could take hold, it was undermined by the Spanish artist Fernando Garcia-Dory, winner of a prize for Art and Social Change. Garcia-Dory, who has done remarkable work with shepherds, giving attention to the Spanish Federation of Shepherds,  which he describes as

a social system design that allow[s] an excluded community to get together, share worldviews and problem analisys, pose alternatives for action and unite[s] voices to get listened [to].

He further suggested that the assemblage formed by the activist artist working on a social justice project in a given community constitutes the artwork in itself, which has further mutual relations with questions of audience and content. Nowhere present in the diagrams he used to visualize this relation was the art gallery, museum or institution. Such realizations lie behind both the turn to performance and the occupy movement. If we have already seen a vogue for institutionalizing performance, to very mixed effect, we should be cautious about institutionalizing occupation.

That’s not to say that the social movement has to stay literally and metaphorically outside, but that, in the manner hinted at by Garcia-Dory, we have to build our own institutions. How those institutions are funded and networked cannot be treated as matters of convenience, as we have so often done in the past. We should not be preachy about it but we have to consider the much harder question posed to us by Slavoj Zizek in his keynote: what kind of future is that we want? And by Occupy lights, that means we have to act as if the future is now.

In short, it’s not just debt abolition. It’s what does a world without debt look like? How do we start living it? Who should we talk to in this discussion? The real shame of the whole imbroglio at the Summit was that the conversation could not begin there. But it will begin tomorrow across the world with the 13O day of action and week against debt. Get outside.