Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

The Empire and Its Gladiators

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Over the past few years, the United States government has devoted enormous attention and energy to pursuing a set of malefactors. No, not the banks and other agents of the financial crash. Some sports players who are alleged to have been “doping” to achieve their results, as if all professional sport was otherwise a fair contest. The message is clear: all of the 99% are living precariously now, and if you think that any form of achievement makes you an honorary one per center, guess again.

As most will know, the United States Anti-Doping Agency, a quasi-governmental body, published hundreds of pages yesterday, alleging a long running saga of banned drug use in Lance Armstrong’s cycling team. This follows close on the lengthy pursuit of Roger Clemens, the baseball pitcher.

It’s not like I don’t think this is probably what happened. But just look at professional sport. For example, since he was caught using banned substances Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez has “mysteriously” declined. Meanwhile, 40-year-old Raul Ibanez has had an “amazing” Fall, in which this .200 hitter has suddenly started hitting two home runs a game. Even an athlete that keeps to the rules is a highly produced machine, using extensive supplements and vitamins right up to the edge of the permitted, sleeping in oxygen tents, having zero body fat and so on.

In rugby, when they realized that people were always lifting each other in the lineouts (the ball is thrown in from the side and people jump to catch it), they just made it legal. But, we will be told, steroids and other banned substances are dangerous. Have you ever watched a crash in professional cycling? Or tried to ride a bike up a mountain? It’s all dangerous. And if danger were a serious category, we’d have to ban American Football at once.

So what’s happening here? In Slavoj Zizek’s interesting new book on 2011, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, he argues that well-paid people get what he calls a “surplus-wage” that has taken the place of the old surplus value:

The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers– managers who are qualified to earn more because of their competence (which is why the pseudo-scientific “evaluation” which legitimizes their higher earnings is so crucial today).

Zizek explains, in effect, why the division of 99% and one per cent seems innately right to people. The new capitalism of rent sustains even its elite class as paid workers, giving stock in companies but not ownership. Rewards for those getting the “surplus-wage” come as both money and as time. But they all come on sufferance.

Continued membership of those distinguished from the minimum-wage population, itself constantly being driven down by aggressive immiseration, is subject to constant review. From bankers to professors and nurses, continued status depends on passing what are usually called “performance reviews.” Such reviews consider all aspects of conduct at work, which is to say all conduct because work is never ending.

The working body is subject to constant self-review and assessment, indexed by obligatory gym membership and dietary modification. In this way, the performer will both be able to work longer, and require less health insurance. My employer is encouraging us to take a form of insurance with very high deductibles backed up by a Health Savings Account. In other words, I need to be able to amortize my own body.

The pro athlete is the exemplar of such self-fashioning. Their bodies are subject to review by fans and management every day. The conduct of conduct is Foucault’s definition of  governmentality. So it is too important to be left to such unpredictable entities. You can fix interest rates, share prices and mortgages with impunity, it appears. But never let a “banned substance” enter your body. It’s clear what we’re being told: these people are the gladiators of the empire. They serve at imperial pleasure and, just as in the Roman empire, the supreme power can determine (professional) life or death.

The disciplining of elite sportsmen makes it clear both that no one is above precarity but also that the decision as to who will suffer for transgressions is capricious. The bureaucratic state machine of the first era of the military-industrial complex was not concerned with the routine use of amphetamines by sports players of the period. At that time, the idea of a rebel gladiator named Spartacus became an anti-imperial theme. There’s a cable TV show called Spartacus now. Look at them:

These strange, porn actor bodies aren’t rebels, they are surrogates for empire. We can kill these curiously depilated and implanted bodies at will because no one believes that they are real. By the same token, they are no role models for rebellion.

There’s a reason the signature gesture of the global social movements has been refusal.

 

Digital Networking and Analog Activism

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I took a road trip to Rochester for the last two days, where I gave a talk about my work and how it has led me into militant research practice. What’s really useful to me about giving such presentations is watching the way that people respond to different aspects of the talk. In this case, it consolidated the sense that I have had for some time that while digital networks are vital to organizing, the actual activism remains necessarily analog.

There would not be a global social movement without digital network tools, that much is obvious. To take a very trivial example, sending out a tweet about my talk brought a group of different people over from Syracuse to the event, who otherwise would not have come. In the next few weeks, Strike Debt will initiate the first Rolling Jubilee project, which will buy debt on the defaulted debt market, sold at 5% of face value: and abolish it. The action will be centered on upstate New York, so it was great to make contact with people from across the area.

More importantly, the globalNoise people launched a Europe-wide Twitter campaign today to get the #globalNoise or #GN tags trending and managed to register it at the national level in Spain, which is impressive and a sign of what’s to come on October 13. Now that Facebook is trying to monetize your friends list by charging you to reach all your friends with a post, Twitter is all the more useful and relevant as the activist communication network.

In reporting back on the various projects I’m involved with from this writing project to the Scalar multi-media project and the book from which it was derived, there was no doubt that the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual attracted the most interest. In part that was because I was talking to a group that contained a lot of people with student debt. But it was also because it was a real material object that has a certain heft and displays care in its production values. The digital versions of the DROM are vital too: there have been 19,000 reads and over 65,000 embedded reads of the text, far more than we can possibly print. But if it was only a PDF file, I feel that it might not have the same resonance.

So far all the wired revolution talk, it seems to me that an activist movement that centers around putting our bodies in space where they are not supposed to be can’t but be an analog movement. As media theorist Brian Massumi has put it

The processing may be digital but the analog is the process

And Occupy is nothing if not a process, as is direct democracy, as indeed should be all forms of democracy.

Democratic voters have had to learn this the hard way. While the Obama campaign said to them, “move on, we’ve got this,” there was nothing for people outside the handful of swing states to do but watch the mediatic representation of a “campaign.” In such a campaign, as Romney apparently realized, holding rallies and ground-game are totally secondary to a media event that draws 70 million viewers. We have to confront the real possibility that unless he shows up to the other debates in game-changing mode, Obama’s virtual campaign has undone itself. It’s no good having banks of paid tweeters and Facebook posters if you have nothing good for them to tweet or post.

A Crack in the Debt Wall?

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In this morning’s New York Times, there was an odd story about Irish mortgages. It suggested that substantial debt abolition was set to happen but gave very little detail. So I went online to try and find out more and, as far as I can tell, it’s not true. Or, given that there were no details, it’s true that some people in Ireland want this to happen but it’s not clear whether it will. So why was it on page one of the “paper of record”? We can only presume that some people of influence are trying to sow the seeds for debt “forgiveness” as the paper calls it.

In the piece, now not visible on the top pages of the website, Peter Eavis asserts:

The Irish government expects to pass a law this year that could encourage banks to substantially cut the amount that borrowers owe on their mortgages, a step that no major country has been willing to take on a broad scale.

With more than 50% of Irish mortgage holders now underwater and the Allied Irish Bank raising interest rates on mortgages recently, such a decision makes sense. Only there’s no clear indication that it’s actually happening.

What Eavis is referring to is the Irish Insolvency Bill, proposed last June in the aftermath of the Keane report into the financial meltdown in Ireland. Media reports at the time noted that Keane placed

huge store in the implementation of a personal insolvency bill in early 2012.

 

This legislation is curiously lost in the parliamentary process with no clear account of what’s going to happen being available.

In fact, Irish media reported today the creation of a new joint Irish and UK personal insolvency company, Debt Options, which will be based in Dublin. The Leicester-based firm IrishBankruptcyUK.ie, has been involved in the write-off of more than €1 billion worth of Irish debt in the UK over the last year. Expectations are that more business is to be had because Irish procedure requires expensive legal counsel and a

six-month personal insolvency arrangement process with the bank

Clearly this investment would not have been made if people involved in Irish bankruptcy proceedings thought the government was about to act.

Certainly, debt forgiveness or abolition is in the air in Ireland. Here’s the Irish Independent from September after Blackrock showed that negative equity was at 50% and Moody’s reported that 20% or more of such mortgages would default:

“Principle modification” — which is a nicer way of saying “debt forgiveness” — is, according to Moody’s, the only solution. This has been empirically proven by Blackrock. Thus, we have a known cure that we won’t countenance and can’t afford.

That forgiveness is the answer has also been argued by Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart and backed up by several economists in Ireland, including Oxford’s Ronan Lyons, Trinity’s Brian Lucey and UCD’s Ray Kinsella.

Banks know that even mentioning this possibility is financial kryptonite to their sector. But just look at the figures. Short of mass repossessions, there really is no alternative. The message from the banks is: “Stay calm, don’t worry, this is under control.”

Quite frankly, our banks have been lying to us. This is about as controlled as herding butterflies.

Well put. So we have to conclude that the Times put this story on A1 because it too wants to put pressure on the banks. Who pushed them to do that? The only conceivable “source” that might have such clout would be the Federal Reserve or similar high placed financial regulators. Debt activists have been hearing rumors for a while now that debt abolition is on the Fed’s agenda.

Mortgages are $14 trillion. The earth may be moving under our feet.

 

 

Columbus Is Coming: Don’t Blink

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“Columbus? Euro trash!”

Jerry Seinfeld

Today in the United States, schoolchildren were given the day off, mail was not delivered and mattresses were discounted 20% to mark five hundred years of colonialism. In Venezuela, people marked Indigenous Resistance Day by re-electing Hugo Chavez, much to the annoyance of the Columbus Day types no doubt. Here in New York, we’re getting ready for a day of action in Columbus Circle on October 13. But see how the Venezuelans took care to pull down Columbus’s statue. These things are dangerous.

What danger did Columbus bring that has come full circle? In that brief instant of geological time since Columbus came in search of gold, it is now the Italians and Spanish who are perceived as the threat to continued world despoliation. It’s a familiar enough story how Europeans accidentally introduced disease and deliberately sent the indigenous population down their mines. Now it’s the Southern Europeans who are perceived as the threat of contagion that might finally kill the capitalist goose with its golden eggs. There’s a certain “native irony” there to use Stephen Turner’s phrase.

The monument to all this is at a key intersection in mid-town Manhattan. According to the Public Art Fund’s website, Columbus Circle is a relic of a past celebration of conquest:

Erected in 1892, this monument was designed by the Italian artist Gaetano Russo to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas. Atop the monument is a larger-than-life marble statue of explorer Christopher Columbus, …. He stands on a granite column featuring bronze ships’ prows and anchors that refer to his famous voyage with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

 No sign of the indigenous here. The whole looks out at another monument to the USS Maine,which sank during the  Spanish-American War of 1898. Although it was assumed at the time that the fatal explosion was caused by Spanish aggression, later investigation showed that it resulted from:

spontaneous ignition of highly volatile bituminous coal (which the US Navy had recently adopted as fuel as opposed to slower, cleaner burning and far less volatile but more expensive anthracite coal)

That the heavy bitumenous coal is to anthracite what the tar sands “oil” is to standard crude. Perhaps the tarry explosion that launched the American Empire into its long century of global domination will also see it out.

New York’s Columbus monument is currently occupied. There’s a bizarre artwork by sculptor Tatzu Nishi, which creates a suburban living room around the statue. While Nishi may have intended this as a place for contemplation, what we have is a photo-op. It’s become a popular attraction and tickets are often sold out.

Photo: Tom Powell/Public Art Fund

The thirteen-foot statue towers over the tourists. Or are they all carefully looking at the statue, making sure never to look away for fear of what the statue might do?

Robert Musil, the novelist, once suggested that the invisible monuments of a city structure its attention by directing “unseeing”:

Like a drop of water on an oilskin, attention runs down them  without stopping for a moment

Always present, rarely noticed, these stone forms embody the authority that would first colonize and then have us move on because there’s nothing to see. In recent series of Dr Who, these stone angels turn out to be a petrifying force, sending people back in time. They do so when you’re not looking at them, so you can’t even blink. “Nothing to see here” turns out to be fatal.

It’s as if these imperial monuments are a solid mass of anti-progressive matter, pushing us back into a neo-colonial present.

We need to see Columbus, pull him off his pedestal and send him back like the Euro trash he was–but don’t blink!

It’s Just Academic

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When I was first involved with Occupy Wall Street, academics and intellectuals were everywhere. Education and Empowerment was a massive working group, which did achieve a great deal. A year later and the academics, with honored and honorable exceptions, are on the sidelines, sniping, even as conferences and courses with titles using words like “radical,” “rethinking” and “political” abound. While European movements seem ready to change the paradigm, universities here remain comfortably asleep.

This injunction is against my tenured and tenure-track colleagues. One of the most noticeable features of the movement is the prominent place of adjunct and contingent faculty, and especially graduate students–precisely the people who do have something to lose. These are the people behind Occupy University, the Free University, Occupy Student Debt and many other of the best movement moments. Meanwhile there are a growing wave of books and articles by the tenured, weighing in “more in sorrow than in anger” about the various failures that they perceive in Occupy.

Let’s take an example that has been bouncing around Facebook of late, called “Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements and American Politics,”  published in the online section of Dissent by David Plotke, a professor of politics at the New School. I don’t know Prof. Plotke and as far as I’m aware we haven’t met at any Occupy event. The piece isn’t evil or terrible. It’s just operating in such a different conceptual to those of us working in the movement as to render it ineffective as as intervention.

Plotke offers four contrasting interpretations of Occupy, all of which make judgments in relation to electoral politics, especially the current election., enabling his conclusion that it was a “flash movement.” This undefined term is rendered as calling Occupy

the Herman Cain of the left.

It’s a cheap shot and Plotke quickly disavows it, in a “have your cake and eat it” form of writing.

The three paragraphs on his own answer to the question of Occupy’s meaning are followed by much longer excurses on the impact of Occupy on the Democratic Party, and whether it is more or less effective than the Tea Party. Nowhere does Plotke consider that Occupy was founded as a direct democracy movement, precisely because participants have little or no belief in the current system’s capacity to effect change. It’s right there in the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City:

no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.

It is entirely consistent with such an analysis that, in Plotke’s words:

The Tea Party experience shows how political currents can now appear both inside and outside the party system.

For most in Occupy, and indeed many others, the Tea Party is a well-funded corporate vehicle, tapping into white racism for a brief set of “upsets” in 2010. Plotke is nonetheless impressed with the selection of a far-right candidate for the 2012 Senate election in Texas:

There is nothing marginal or purely symbolic about this sort of success.

We might question how much difference one right-winger from Texas over another will really make. We might make parallels with the nomination of Tammy Baldwin for Senate in Wisconsin, where Occupy activists have invested in electoral politics; or we might talk about Elizabeth Warren. But this is to hold the electoral mirror to Occupy as if it was the goal of the movement: and it is not.

In fact, it is remarkable that throughout the long essay, Plotke never once quotes anyone involved with Occupy, or any of the many documents it has produced, although he did apparently interview people for the piece. Imagine writing on the Republican Party without naming or quoting any known Republicans. Plotke prefers the straw man strategy:

Neo-anarchists and other far leftists provided part of the core leadership of Occupy

He gives these unnamed persons fake credit for starting the movement but continues to note ominously:

There were leaders—yet OWS tended to deny they existed. Without any formal means of selection, they were there.

This is a combination of familiar scare tactics. First, it suggests that there were good things at the beginning (the “flash” moment) that became corrupt. This is a version of the interpretation of the French Revolution that claims to like “1789” but deplore everything that came after the storming of the Bastille. Next, it updates the “reds under the bed” meme of the Cold War to suggest that the poor dupes of the rank-and-file were manipulated by extremists:

Affirming the virtues of a leaderless and unprogrammatic movement afforded room for maneuver for actual leaders, without requiring them to articulate and defend their political and ideological positions. In this rapid and surprising sequence, neo-anarchists became Popular Front Leninists of a sort.

Does that sound familiar, Occupy people? Or does it sound more like a familiar Cold War paranoia from the New York “public intellectual” class?

This America-centric reading is consistent with the lack of mention of any of the other global justice movements from the Arab Spring to the Indignados and Quebec strikers that both inspired and sustained Occupy. On and on, Plotke goes misrepresenting the movement. He snips:

We’re not likely to see large efforts by an Occupy Dallas or Occupy South Carolina.

Really? But Occupy Atlanta was very strong before its eviction, and Occupy Tampa continues to be so. Just today word came in of activists in Utah creating a Strike Debt project and reprinting the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. Plotke will say, well, that’s not a “large effort.” It is for the people involved. What has mattered in this first year to most of us is the chance to try to be the change we’d like to see. We’re carrying on, making links with colleagues in Europe and Latin America. It’s a shame so few have been willing to get out of the ivory tower to join in.

Mining The Future

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One way of thinking about debt is spending the future: a debt incurred today must be repaid with future earnings. In planetary terms, mining places us all in biosphere debt. To open a mine is to guarantee further primary extraction, incurring high energy use, new carbon emissions, destruction of the local environment, atmospheric and water pollution. It further sets in motion the commodity production process because new minerals will become new cars or girders or an iPhone. In short, any chance at moving away from neo-liberalism would have to begin with a slowdown or even cessation of mining. At present mining companies are all trying to expand, while also reducing still further their labor costs. It will take a co-ordinated global movement to push back.

Last week the transnational steel giant ArcelorMittal finally closed its Florange steel furnaces in France, having waited out the French elections and the Olympics (where ArcelorMittal was a major sponsor). 700 jobs were lost with the usual knock-on effects that such retrenchment entails. As in 1981, the Socialist administration is discovering that its room for maneuver is far more limited than they expected.

In South Africa yesterday, the Anglo-American Platinum corporation resolved a three-week strike by firing 12,000 workers. The standard pattern sees the company then hire back a fraction of its former staff and reduce output. At present, world platinum prices have recovered from their low-point of August, to 2011 trading highs of about $1700 an ounce, still far below 2008 levels of $2200. More than enough to pay the salary being demanded by the miners which, at 15,000 Rand is ironically about $1700, the price of a single ounce of platinum. Too much for Anglo-American. In a country where people are desperate for work, firing workers that have become militant and replacing them with a totally different workforce is an acceptable option.

Xstrata mining in Australia

Xstrata, the world’s largest extractor of thermal coal, is still trying to merge with a financial company called Glencore in a $32 billion deal. The Glencore-Xstrata merger is unusual in that it brings together financial capital with primary extraction in the same company:

Xstrata is very good at operating mines efficiently and at low cost, without upsetting local communities. Glencore is not.

But it does boast a global network of commodities traders who possess unrivalled intelligence on global demand trends that theoretically allows them to make money at any stage of the commodity cycle.

This will create what corporate-speak calls a “vertically-integrated” company. In fact, it will amount to a dramatic change in philosophy. Xstrata is a greedy, play-it-safe company that works cosy, inside deals in countries that are considered “safe,” meaning pliant to neo-liberal market world views. Glencore, according to business journalist Nils Prately, are altogether more aggressive:

The Glencore thesis is that the best returns come from extending so-called brownfield sites and that the political risk that goes with investing in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo is tolerable.

Translated into English, this means that expansion in under-regulated, low-wage regions is considered worth the risk of political upheaval. This is not to say that Xstrata are not in favor of biosphere devastation.

McArthur River zine mine, Australia

This August they won approval from the Australian government to convert an underground zinc mine into a massive open-cut operation in Northern Territory (above). It’s just that they like governments who can be relied on to jump to the precise height required with no foreseeable risk of change.

Ironically, it’s being held up not by concerns about the disastrous biosphere impact but about the egregious payday (even by Wall Street standards) that Xstrata management lined up for themselves. Merger and retention bonuses (cash for showing up on Monday to do the job you had on Friday) would amount to a whopping $233 million. Shareholders are now getting to vote on the compensation deal but the big investors like Qatar’s sovereign fund are now behind it.

So we can see that neither shareholder activism, as in the Glencore-Xstrata merger, or strikes by workers as in France and South Africa, have been able to restrain multi-national mining.

In Texas beginning on September 24, a group of activists have taken to the trees to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from being completed. This pipeline is being built to bring the “carbon-bomb” of Alberta’s tarsands oil to the Gulf coast. If you look at the clear-cutting and construction going on, it’s hard to imagine that a “decision” seriously remains to be made after this kind of expenditure. After November, whoever wins the elections, this pipeline will be authorized. The Texas activists, like their predecessors in the logging struggles in Washington State, have taken to the trees.

So confident of their future are Big Oil, energy and mining that they’re not even giving that much money to Mitt Romney (relatively speaking). They rank only number nine, way behind the Wall Street firms and banks who have decided that the current docile administration is still far too hostile to them.
Nonetheless, there’s a palpable chance they have overplayed their hand. All the minerals were being mined for China, whose economy appears to be slowing down drastically. There are ongoing strikes in the diamond, iron, chrome, platinum and gold sectors of South Africa’s mining industry. They can’t replace all these people.. By placing their bodies in the way of the neo-liberal machine,  the tree-sitters have made the issues visible. If we want things to change, we have to make a similar effort.

The Global Agenda: Europe’s Move

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We Don’t Owe, We Won’t Pay! (Spain 13O)

The global social movements move. First it was Tunisia and Egypt that moved the Arab Spring. Then Spain set in motion the Take the Squares Movement across Europe. Last September, a group of people in New York set off the Occupy movement. Now for good reasons and bad, it’s looking as if Europe may be taking the lead again.

The bad reasons are really bad. As austerity continues to intensify, there’s a real sense of desperation and urgency.This film by Ross Domoney about the situation in Greece over the last two years shows this intensification in process.

Athens: Social Meltdown from Ross Domoney on Vimeo.

Greek dockworkers yesterday managed to occupy the defense ministry in Athens, while conservative prime minister Samaras is reduced to comparing the national situation to that of Weimar Germany. Just to calm things down, Angela Merkel goes to Greece on Tuesday and should be met by a very clear rejection of her austerity plan.

The Troika’s Orientalist plan to build a firewall around the crisis in Southern Europe and pass it off as a set of local errors, caused by laziness and inefficiency, is blowing up in their faces. Occupy Fake Democracy began a week of continent-wide action today in Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament.

On October 17 and in the week around it you’ll see actions around the world but especially in Europe. Check out Barcelona and Madrid (in Spanish) for exemplary days and weeks of action.

What makes this moment feel different to me, however, is that long-term strategizing and planning about alternatives is well underway. In November a four-day meeting called Agora 99 will bring together participants from across Europe. Here’s their call (lightly edited for idiom:

The cuts and plundering policies we are suffering are generated on a global and European level. The financial economy plays its game in a board that very much exceeds national borders.

What does this space mean for the 99%? What made millions of people feel deeply affected by what had happened in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Portugal, in Syntagma Square in Greece, on Wall Street, in Chile, in Mexico and in many other places around the globe? How does this new type of political structure work after the outburst of the Arab Spring, Iceland, Greece, after the 15th May in Spain? Even more importantly, how do we proceed?

What for?
We want to put in relation what we have learned in the square and the networks in the context of the 15M movement with the knowledge of other European and Mediterranean networks. We want to produce a space for interaction, cooperation and organization that could work at least at a European level.

The aim is to end the meeting with a common working calendar and common events around the three axes (Debt, Democracy and Rights) and common working tools.

The themes of debt, democracy and rights are close to those of OWS’s S17 call relating to debt, the corruption of democracy and environmental justice.

Both sets of ideas feed into the major convergence of social movements, networks and civil society organizations called Firenze 10+10 to be held 8-11 November. The name derives from the European Social Forum that was held in the same location ten years ago but the new meeting

aims at creating a space for movements and networks to meet and to work towards the building of convergence of our struggles.

To that end 150 delegates have already met to define a set of “pillars” for the agenda in Florence:

1) Democracy in Europe

Democratic grassroots “constituent process” and development of a citizen pact and assembly; rebuilding European institutions beyond the current undemocratic treaties; migrants and the proposal of an European citizenship by residency; democratic floodwall against the right, neo-fascism and racism; rebuilding social solidarity.

2) Finance/debt/austerity

“Debt tribunal”, audit of the debt; campaigns against austerity measures and the fiscal compact; financial transaction tax etc.

3) Labor and other social rights

Labor and social rights in the time of neoliberal globalization and austerity; sustainable social development; social Pact; adequate income (wages and social protection) etc

4) Natural and social common goods + public services

Land, food, water, energy, climate and post-Rio agenda etc; the defense of territories against useless big infrastructures and projects imposed top-down; the struggle against the financialization of nature etc.

5) Europe in the Mediterranean and the world

Peace and support to the fight for democracy and peoples’ rights; War/peace and social justice; cooperation and solidarity; fair trade; denuclearization of the Mediterranean; arms trade control; “Arab revolutions”; stop the occupations; exchanges between different cultures and identities (building a bridge towards the WSF Tunisia – and the “World Social Forum-Free Palestine” in Brazil)

The gender dimension is transversal to all the pillars.

In addition to these five working groups or pillars, a sixth group will be working to co-ordinate the process of each working group towards a single agenda, comprising of  a general common action in the short term, and a proposal for a joint common strategy in the long term.

There will be “demands” after all. Somehow I don’t think that all those media types are going to like them nonetheless.

 

A Transnational Communication on Debt

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A few days ago, I reported on the European action against debt, which is part of the October 13 Global Day of Action. This falls within the Global Week of Action against Debt and IFIs (October 7th to 14th), which will be observed worldwide. This week of action was established in the World Social Forum at Nairobi in 2007, to denounce the injustice of foreign debt on peripheral states and the submission policies imposed by multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

Strike Debt has consensed a communication with Démocratie Réelle Maintenant (Real Democracy Now!), the group formerly known as the Indignés (Outraged) and spokes from the Spanish 15M movement. The Communication may also be agreed to by other global social movements. It’s a statement of solidarity and joint outlook, not a redefinition of either movement or the O13 day of action.

I think it’s an interesting text so I’m pasting it below:

 

October 13 against debt

International communication.  

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.

On O13, we will mobilise against debt in several cities of the world: Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, New York…

The state response to the financial and economic crisis is the same everywhere: cuts in expenditure and austerity measures under the pretext of reducing deficits and the repayment of a public debt which is the direct outcome of decades of neoliberal policies.

Governments in the service of finance are using this pretext to further reduce social spending, lower wages and pensions, privatize public utility and goods, dismantle social benefits and deregulate labour laws, and increase taxes on the majority, while social and tax giveaways are generalized for the big companies and the highest net worth households.

The campaign to subdue the world to public and private debt is a calculated attack on the very possibility of democracy. It is an assault on our homes, our families, our social services and benefits, our communities and on the planet’s fragile eco-systems—all of which are being destroyed by endless production to pay back creditors, who have done nothing to hog the wealth they demand we make for them.

Faced with such coordinated attacks on our social gains, resistance is getting organized around the world, there are national general strikes and the ‘indignados’ movements are increasingly active. In Iceland, the people refused to pay the Icesave debt to the UK and the Netherlands. In Spain, and in Portugal, from the 15th of september, enormous demonstrations against debt have gathered more than 1 million of people, and a movement of major scale is growing around the surrounding of the Parliament in Madrid to demand a Constituant process.

We from the Occupy / Real Democracy Now / 15M movement call for public and private debt resistance and refusal. Debt resistance includes: fighting for free public education, free healthcare, defending foreclosed homes, demanding higher wages and providing mutual aid.

In Europe as in Egypt and Tunisia, initiatives for a citizens’ audit of public debt analyze how much of the public debt is illegitimate, odious or unsustainable, and must therefore be cancelled. Paying such creditors is stealing what rightfully belongs to the population and payments will continue to be the cause of college and hospital closures, pensions cuts, and so on and on. And the debt feed the debt.

We Don’t Owe, So We Won’t Pay! We Are Not a Loan.  Bad laws allowed all this debt. Let’s rewrite them together.

 

It seems that O13 will be a major day in Spain, notable in France, and marked by many smaller actions worldwide. If the global social movements can begin to properly co-ordinate, for example via a current proposal that there be global actions on the 22nd of every month, that could be a very interesting development.

 

 

 

Austerity Intensifies

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How’s it going for austerity? Mass unemployment, rising interest rates, higher taxes and strikes, since you ask. Today brought grim news for the 99% in Greece, Ireland and Portugal. And the Eurozone as a whole returned to recession in the third quarter. While US media seem to want to keep this crisis off the front pages till November 7, make no mistake. This crisis is our crisis–we, the 99%, not the US.

So let’s do the rounds. In Greece, the Troika are getting cute about when they will release the next tranche of aid to the strapped government. We’re talking €31.5 billion, which in terms of global finance is really chump change. If Goldman Sachs needed this amount, the Fed would have it to them by close of business but as it’s just people not getting paid or having access to services, who cares? A delay has the additional benefit of postponing any crisis till after the US elections. It seems that global austerity apparatchiks are rooting for Obama.

In Ireland the de facto state-owned Allied Irish Bank raised mortgage rates for its customers by 0.5% despite the global recession, in order to raise more money to balance its books. One in five Irish homeowners have their mortgages there and now have to continue to bail out the bank, even after its €21 billion bail out. This is the second increase in six months, even as European Central Bank rates remain very low. The Irish Central Bank reported today that the property market would not even begin to recover till 2018 and it might take till 2029 for a full recovery. Unemployment, as everywhere, remains high for the foreseeable future. Occupy Dame Street (the Irish Occupy) held a sit-in at AIB to protest (above).

In Portugal, official unemployment is about 14% and set to rise to over 16% over the next year. But in order to bail out the banks, the government raised taxes today. While there were some higher taxes for the wealthy, there were numerous redistributive measures, such as moving more people into higher tax brackets; a new income tax surcharge of 4% on individual income; and a rise in the “average income tax rate” will rise from 9.8% to 11.8%,

In response Portugal’s CGTP union, which extends across many trades and professions, has called a general strike for November 14:

This is an authentic programme of aggression against the workers and the people …The consequences for the workers and their families are brutal — general impoverishment, drastic worsening of living conditions and life expectancy.

The graffiti above calls for the fall of Prime Minister Passos but the Troika will come with their demands no matter who is in office.

Debt refusal, debt strike, debt abolition: call it what you will, it’s the only way forward that doesn’t further impoverish the 99% to bail out the banks.

On October 13, make some noise, end the racket!

No Spectators

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Over the last few days, the idea of the “wild” has, as it were, “accidentally” cropped up repeatedly, from questions of climate change, to Beasts of the Southern Wild and gaga feminism. That’s one of the intriguing things about a durational project of this kind, how ideas arise unexpectedly that you would not otherwise have spent much time on. So what would happen if we bring the three figures of wilding, walking and occupying together? You would not be spectating, that’s for sure.

Occupying is not in itself walking but it is moving in both senses. It creates (a) movement and it is emotionally stirring. The Zapatista koan of “walking while asking questions” has seemed a good way to describe it. If “walk on the wild side” evokes the subcultures of the 1970s, Occupy is not quite that. Subcultures had codes that were recognizable to themselves but mysterious or off-putting to others, from Oscar Wilde’s queer green carnation to punk safety-pins. They invited people to look but not to understand the internal dynamics of the subculture.

Both during the encampments and the “movement of movements,” Occupy has sought to change people. Or more exactly, people have made the Occupy movement into a vehicle for change. For many of us, this is the most important aspect of the project, like feminist, queer and other variants on “the personal is political.” In this case, the dynamic was intended to change those already there and draw others in.

Writing in the fifth edition of Occupy!, filmmaker Astra Taylor describes how this has worked for her as a stepping off the sidelines that

has stripped me of the self-righteousness and surety that comes with being a spectator.

As a filmmaker who has worked with Zizek we can safely assume that Taylor is not unaware of gaze theory. Yet she puts herself into the place of being looked at as part of her decision to be involved in the process, realizing that

people are complicated, that the way to achieve profound political change is not clear, but that we must move forward nonetheless, adapting our thinking and our strategy along the way.

This may not sound “wild” but that’s what it is– a refusal to define a “line” that we must follow, to make the now infamous demands, or to assume that clarity is the greatest of virtues.

By resisting the politics of representation, we have found, almost by accident, a performative practice that is unplanned, unscripted and seen only by the other “performers.” It couldn’t be further from the currently hegemonic vogue for Marina Abramovic-style staged performance, putting the self-styled artist fully in control. To occupy, to be wild, or to walk with questions is instead to perform the right to look, in which I invent you and vice versa, a fully mutual engagement.

So far, so hooray for us. Doing “not spectating” has worked for a year. We’ve countervisualized to good effect. What we have not yet done is get fully beyond the militarized tropes of visuality. We march. We lay siege to Wall Street. We do this in the name of direct action as opposed to symbolic action.

But it’s all symbolic. After all, very few of the one per cent actually work on Wall Street itself: they’re in mid-town or Connecticut but everyone gets why shutting down Wall Street is symbolically powerful. Better yet are symbols that do not rely on a rhetoric of power and force and do not mimic military tactics. They exist: the Occupy Town Square events, the Free University, guided walks around Wall Street to tell people hidden histories of the financial district, and many more. Within and without the movement, though, there is a sense that these are not “real” actions and that confrontation equals realness. As Lady Gaga can tell you, realness is way overrated.