The New School Reoccupied

The Great Recession and the Failure of Capitalism with Paul Mattick

reoccupied — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 07:59:00 +0000

The Great Recession and the Failure of Capitalism, Paul Mattick,Professor of Philosophy, Adelphi University, New York, Part of the 2011 Ethics Awareness Week from the Center For the Study of Ethics.

The New School in Exile, Revisited

reoccupied — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:23:45 +0000

- via n +1: This piece first appeared in the third issue of the OWS-inspired Gazette: OCCUPY!

RACHEL SIGNER, Dec 26, 2011

I arrived at the New School in the fall of 2008 to do a master’s degree in anthropology. Tuition was $23,000 per year—this did not include room or board—but the opportunity to be in a great intellectual community eased my anxiety about the cost. A little bit.

Tuition was high for a reason: the school, I soon learned, was on shaky financial footing. Founded in 1919 in part by Columbia professors disgusted by their university’s support of World War I, then expanded in 1933 as a refuge for scholars fleeing Fascism and Nazism in Europe, it wasn’t the sort of place that produced the sort of people who turned around and gave their alma mater millions of dollars. The endowment was meager, and the school relied on tuition for revenue.

The New School needed to improve its financial situation and its status, and it was going to do it, like any New York institution, through real estate. It owned an old two-story building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street—a former department store whose slogan had been “Fifth Avenue Values at 14th Street Prices”—that it was going to tear down and replace it with a state-of-the-art gleaming sixteen-story tower, home to studios for designers and artists studying at the New School’s profitable design institute, Parsons, and laboratories (for whom, no one could tell you; the New School offers no courses in hard sciences), retail food vendors, apartments, and—most insulting of all, I think, to the symbolic heirs, as we liked to consider ourselves, of refugees from fascism—a fitness center. At the time, the building, at 65 Fifth Avenue, was a multi-purpose meeting place where graduate students could read quietly, have lunch in the café, or find books in the basement library. There had been classrooms upstairs, but at that point they had already been relocated to the Minimalist-style building a few blocks away where my department, Anthropology, was crammed together with Sociology.

Nobody liked the idea of a new building; we thought the old building was perfectly fine, for one thing, and for another we thought the money could be better spent on fellowships for debt-saddled students (like me!). The campus was in an uproar already after the faculty senate, enraged that the university’s president, Bob Kerrey, had, after his fifth successive provost left the job, simply assumed the post himself, passed a unanimous no-confidence vote against him. Shortly after news got around about the faculty vote, an unofficial student meeting was called. There were fliers posted around campus by the Radical Student Union. About fifty of us gathered in the basement of the new graduate building on 16th Street. A piece of butcher paper was thrown up on the wall, and a list of demands was produced: we wanted Kerrey and his vice-president, Jim Murtha, to resign; a new provost selected by the student body; a transparent academic budget; and, later, we added one demand that propelled us to action: that the demolishing and “capital improvement” of 65 Fifth be cancelled.

Most of the meeting’s attendees were graduate students in the Social Research division, notably more interested in radical politics than, say, students at Parsons. The meeting was led by a tall, skinny Philosophy graduate named Jacob, and a chain-smoking Politics student with deep bags under her eyes named Fatuma. Before the meeting started, Jacob passed around a pamphlet he’d written about direct action as he munched, ostentatiously, on some dumpster-dived bananas. “I think it’s time,” he said, as we convened in the basement, “for an action.” Another of the leaders was Tim, a gruff, shaggy-haired guy from the Poli-Sci department, who sneered a bit when people’s comments seemed too moderate.

At this meeting, two actions were proposed. The first was directed at an upcoming meeting Kerrey had convened with the faculty, presumably to try to convince them to reverse the no-confidence vote. We, the students, had not been invited, and our plan was to show up wearing duct tape over our mouths. The next action would be some kind of sit-in, or occupation. We wrote down our emails and walked back out into the night—revolutionaries.

The duct-tape action was a smashing success; many of our faculty members threw their fists up at us, and a buzz went around campus. Meanwhile, our planning meetings for the occupation continued, as quietly as possible—which later would be cause for our fellow students to accuse us of exclusivity. The truth is we didn’t want to get busted. Then, late in the afternoon on December 17th, about sixty of us gathered in the cafeteria at 65 Fifth, a room with glass walls on three sides and, in the back, a little deli that sold terrible sandwiches and coffee. Round tables and chairs were strewn throughout the room. We lounged casually, as if having coffee with friends, as we knew that the administration had, through some whistleblower, caught wind of our scheme. Then, at a designated time, I think around 6 PM, we stood up on the tables, taped banners with “NEW SCHOOL OCCUPIED” to the walls, pushed chairs against the main entrance, and probably began chanting something, or cheering.

I’m not sure at what point we came up with the name “New School in Exile,” but it stuck. It was, of course, a reference to the proud history of the institution, its birth as a place of exile. And not only that. When I’d told my parents that I was planning to go do a master’s at The New School, I learned that my grandparents had taken continuing education courses there, and my grandmother had also been a secretary for one of the deans.

They were both mostly self-educated. My grandfather had been expelled from City College in the nineteen-thirties for protesting against Fascism in Europe, then gone on to become a journalist for the Daily Worker; my grandmother, who knew Italian and Spanish, had been a union organizer. In Specters of Marx, which I read in my second year of graduate school (by which point I was about $30,000 in the hole), Derrida talks about the ghostly nature of politics, how it moves in cycles. That night, as hundreds of New School, CUNY, and NYU students gathered outside the building, on Fifth Avenue, sending us tweets and text messages of solidarity, and as we huddled inside, writing our list of demands, I felt my grandparents’ ghosts inside me, in that building, likely the very same one where they had read philosophy and sociology and tried to channel those ideas into creating a better world.

That night we put up our new “New School in Exile” banners, and a blog was created in that name by a politics student named Scott. Scott, it must be said, was a Leninist, which pissed everybody off and made us worried, because he was our media guy. But for the moment, things were great. Someone from the New York Times came in to report on us—at this point the administration was letting people enter and leave the building at will—and an organization from Harlem sent food. Jim Murtha, our vice-president, showed up, with alcohol on his breath, and we booed him. Some NYPDentered and hovered in the lobby near the front door, chatting with the security guards. As the morning hours approached, we played music on our laptops, made signs about neoliberalism and student debt, and worked on our final papers, which were due that week, and most of which were probably about Marx. Some of us slept, a little, on the floor.

The next day, people began coming from all over campus and other universities to show their support or just check us out. A sign saying “New School: OCCUPIED” had miraculously appeared on the outside of our building, a couple of stories up; people sent us photos via cell phone. I also learned that many of my fellow students in the Anthropology department were unsure what to think. There was a sense that our faculty were not enthusiastic about the occupation, and grad students concerned about keeping good relations with them (who wasn’t, really?) were hesitant to align themselves with the New School in Exile. Regardless, some of my colleagues, and students from other departments and the undergraduate divisions, showed up at 65 Fifth for the afternoon meeting on the second day.

We proved to be totally unprepared for this. As a large group of students gathered chairs in a circle, expecting to learn our plan for getting the administration to cave in to our demands, I looked around and realized that I was the only organizer in sight. Where were Jacob, Fatuma, Tim, and Scott the Leninist? Gone. I looked at the gaggle of bright-eyed but uncertain students, threw up some butcher paper on the wall, ripped off my sweater as I began to sweat profusely with anxiety, grabbed a marker, and began to solicit agenda items from the crowd.

Thankfully, someone sensed my confusion and stepped in to help: it was the anthropologist David Graeber. Many New School students knew him through his previous work with the New York Direct Action Network, and they had called him in to help. He gave us a brief workshop on democratic consensus-building, and then stepped aside. And then we were doing it. I facilitated, and people wiggled their fingers, and we moved through our agenda items. We talked about the cafeteria workers, who we wanted to make sure were not losing a day’s wages because of our protest, and decided this should be high on the list of our demands. We discussed other things. It was exhilarating to be using this new language, with our hands, to hold a discussion. Soon, meetings were popping up throughout the day in that room, all using the consensus procedures. Graeber moved in and out silently, hardly making his presence known.

Finally, the missing organizers from earlier returned to join the rest of us. They told us they’d learned that, all over the city, anarchist networks had mobilized and were ready, were near the school even, waiting, to join us. They wanted to come in that night. We discussed it; I remember not liking the idea, but I can’t remember why. Eventually we voted it down. It didn’t matter. At around 1 AM on the second night of the occupation, about one hundred and fifty people, with Mohawks and patched-together cargo pants and Doc Martens, came pouring into the building. Graeber had found a side entrance unguarded by the security guards. As the students ran in, the guards attempted to stop them, throwing them up against the wall or grabbing at their limbs, but the anarchists pushed through and nearly every single one of them made it into the cafeteria, where we were cheering. We hadn’t liked the idea, but now, we felt, we were stronger. There were over two hundred of us. The negotiations were continuing with the administration. We felt that it was possible we would succeed.

Eventually the security guards in the lobby, outside the cafeteria, stopped letting people enter and leave the building. We had enough food and water to last us awhile, and we were energized by our recent growth in numbers. Negotiations were going on in a reading room off the cafeteria between, on our side, Fatuma and some of the other main organizers, and a few selected representatives from the administration and the faculty. Even as the police grew stricter, though, we were still fairly casual about venturing out of the cafeteria to the bathrooms, which were located right outside the cafeteria doors. Then, on the third night of the occupation, the police walked over to the bathrooms, and planted themselves in front of them. There would be no more free pass to the bathrooms. This had not occurred to us. They’d found our blind spot.

People immediately began talking about building a compost toilet with paper walls in the back of the cafeteria. Hey, it was more eco-friendly, anyway! Other people, however, looked sick at the thought. We still had lots of food, donated by supporters, but everyone immediately stopped drinking and eating. It got tense. People grew quiet.

As the negotiations continued in the next room, little by little news came in: they were granting the student government the power to e-mail the entire student body, something they hadn’t previously been able to do; a socially-responsible investment committee would be formed; no one who had occupied would be expelled. We were mostly getting what we wanted, except a few things, such as the opening of the university’s accounting books, the immediate resignation of Kerrey and Murtha, and, most importantly, the building. There would be no compromise. The building was going down. And we, too, were on the verge of going down. Standing in front of the glass windows, peeking out from behind the butcher paper that read “NEW SCHOOLIN EXILE” and “EDUCATION IS NOT ABOUT PROFIT” at the numerous police officers and large-bellied security guards prohibiting our access to the toilets, we knew that our occupation was over.

The administration did, however, offer to create of an interim study space for students (which became the site of the recent, also brief, New School occupation in November of this year). They also said that a group of students would be allowed to be on the committee that was planning the new building.

So it was that I found myself a few weeks later, drinking bad coffee at nine in the morning next to our new provost, Tim Marshall, alongside architects and administrators—who nervously eyed the other student representatives and me—looking over various blueprints that the venerable architectural firm SOM had prepared for the “University Center” that would replace the building we had occupied. I blinked at the designs, which I knew would be realized long after I’d left the New School, and felt the gloom of compromise. I offered the suggestion that a rooftop garden might make the building more sustainable, and its residents could eat from it, too; I received weird, patronizing looks in response. A rooftop garden was not entered into the SOM design.

On October 5, 2011, when Occupy Wall Street called for a Day of Action for students and unions, many New School faculty signed their names to an online pledge in support of OWS. They walked out of the university and marched, alongside thousands of students from The New School and NYU, down to Zuccotti Park (or, to Foley Square, where the police boxed them in and let them trickle out little-by-little). Atop the ledge surrounding Zuccotti Park on its north side, as the march went by, people were holding an enormous banner that read, “ARAB SPRING, EUROPEANSUMMER, AMERICAN FALL.” In the bottom corner, it said, “NEW SCHOOL INEXILE.” It had been resurrected.

Our December 2008 occupation received letters of support from Greek labor unions, from the Chicago factory workers who were striking, and from students everywhere, particularly UC Berkeley, where students were gearing up for their own occupation in protest against a 33 percent tuition hike. We received emails from people like Clemson University philosophy professor and anarchist Todd May, who wrote: “Too often, in our world, we are told that politics is dead, that resistance is useless, and that public action is nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia. We are told that we live in a post-political world, where we must compromise with those who would oppress us and must subordinate ourselves to those who would manage our lives for us. These past few days you have shown, as others in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia and Africa seek to show, that politics is not dead, that resistance is not useless, and that public action is precisely what our world requires and demands.”

The letter made us proud to be students of the New School, and confirmed our belief that we were not merely complaining about our particular, isolated situation—we were participating in a broader critique of neoliberalism, of which our corporatized university was just one instance.

But, for the most part, The New School in Exile did not have the support of our own faculty and fellow students. Only two faculty members, Tim Pachirat and Simon Critchley, publicly announced their support of the occupation and visited it. In my department, people accused me of participating in an “elitist” and “exclusionary” movement—too secretive for all to have been involved, too time-demanding for students with jobs to participate. Our department chair, Hugh Raffles, read a statement to us expressing his belief that direct action was not the way to go in this situation. Students nodded in agreement. The New School in Exile had also, during the occupation, been associated with some fairly questionable acts: a group of students literally chased Bob Kerrey down the street in the West Village, near his home, screaming at him as he ran. Kerrey, a Vietnam War veteran, had had part of his leg taken off by a grenade in the Nha Trang Bay. When we inside the occupation heard this had happened, some people cheered, and our blogger, Scott, condoned it in a blog post titled “See Bob Run.” Others wondered if it was ever really okay to chase and threaten a late-middle-aged, hobbling man.

What was it three years later that suddenly made it okay to Occupy? Was it the occupation itself—more dramatic, more clearly connected to the broad impact of the economic crisis beyond the context of our private university? Was it that people had become angrier about the inability of Congress to deal with the recession? Was it that radical politics finally seemed justified in a situation where no other form of politics was effective? Perhaps, if we want to be self-congratulatory, our New School in Exile movement shook things up a bit and created the space for that radicalism. Or maybe it just has to do with the simple fact that, thanks to the convenient location of a 24-hour McDonald’s down the street on Broadway, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park had the one crucial element that our movement never possessed: a bathroom. Having finished my master’s, I’m no longer at The New School, so I don’t know what prompted my faculty to support this occupation, when the previous one had seemed out of bounds. Maybe it’s just easier to accept criticism when it isn’t in your own backyard.

———–

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the New School was founded in 1933 rather than 1919, and misstated the time at which the New School was given the building at 65 Fifth Avenue. (It was in the 1960s rather than 1930s; as one history of the New School tells us, “When Jurgen Habermas saw the shabby facilities, he was shocked, though he always made the most of it.”) The article also overstated the proportion of New School faculty who had signed an online petition in support of OWS.

Image: The New School in Exile, December 2008. From justseeds.com.

Happy Hanukkah from Adorno & Horkheimer

reoccupied — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:42:30 +0000

Towards a New Manifesto:
Conversations between Adorno & Horkheimer, 1956

Read / Print

A life-long intellectual partnership between two major thinkers, so close that their most celebrated single texts were co-authored and their names are difficult to dissociate, is rare enough to rank as virtually a sport of history. There seem to be only two cases: in the 19th century, Marx and Engels, and in the 20th Horkheimer and Adorno. Might they be regarded as prefigurations of what in a post-bourgeois world would become less uncommon? Their patterns differed. Marx and Engels, born two years apart, were contemporaries; once their friendship was formed, collaboration between them never ceased. Adorno was eight years Horkheimer’s junior, and a close working relationship came much later, with many more vicissitudes: initial meeting in 1921, intermittent friction and exchange up to the mid-1930s, concord only in American exile from 1938 onwards, more pointedly distinct identities throughout. The general trajectory of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research is well known, as over time ‘critical theory’— originally Horkheimer’s code-word for Marxism— confined it- self to the realms of philosophy, sociology and aesthetics; to all appearances completely detached from politics. Privately it was otherwise, as the exchange below makes clear.

This unique document is the record, taken down by Gre- tel Adorno, of discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, with a view to the production of—as Adorno puts it—a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. In form it might be described, were jazz not anathema to Adorno, as a philosophical jam-session, in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work—theory and practice, labour and leisure, domination and freedom—in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. Amid a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reck- less, the playful with the ingenuous, positions are swapped and contradictions unheeded, without any compulsion for consistency. In substance, each thinker reveals a different profile. Horkheimer, historically more politicized, was by now the more conservative, imbibing Time on China, if not yet to the point where he would commend the Kaiser for warning of the Yellow Peril. Though still blaming the West for what went wrong with the Russian Revolution, and rejecting any kind of reformism, his general outlook was now close to Kojève’s a decade later: ‘We can expect nothing more from mankind than a more or less worn-out version of the American system’. Adorno, more aesthetically minded, emerges paradoxically as the more radical: reminding Horkheimer of the need to oppose Adenauer, and envisaging their project as a ‘strictly Leninist manifesto’, even in a period when ‘the horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one’.

Sic 1.1

reoccupied — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 13:22:40 +0000

Sic1.1-read / Sic1.1-print

[Sic 1.1] Further Remarks

Further remarks and discussion on The Present Moment from Sic 1

Table of Contents
1. Additional remarks on the end of activism
2. “The police is also, opposite to us, our own existence as a class as limit”
3. General remark by Blaumachen on the text
4. Formal subsumption; real subsumption
5. The conjuncture
6. Critique of the conception of theory in the text

Sic: International journal for communisation Issue 1

The present journal aims to be the locus for an unfolding of the problematic of communisation. It comes from the encounter of individuals involved in various projects in dif- ferent countries: among these are the journals Endnotes, published in the UK and the US, Blaumachen in Greece, Théorie Communiste in France, Riff-Raff in Sweden, and certain more or less informal theoretical groups in the US (New York and San Francisco). Each of these projects will continue to exist on their own. Also participating are vari- ous individuals in France, Germany, and elsewhere, who are involved in other activities and who locate themselves broadly within the theoretical approach taken here.

Blockading the Port Is Only The First of Many Last Resorts

reoccupied — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:18:03 +0000

via bayofrage.com

By any reasonable measure, the November 2 general strike was a grand success. The day was certainly the most significant moment of the season of Occupy, and signaled the possibility of a new direction for the occupations, away from vague, self-reflexive democratism and toward open confrontation with the state and capital. At a local level, as a response to the first raid on the encampment, the strike showed Occupy Oakland capable of expanding while defending itself, organizing its own maintenance while at the same time directly attacking its enemy. This is what it means to refer to the encampment and its participants as the Oakland Commune, even if a true commune is only possible on the other side of insurrection.

Looking over the day’s events it is clear that without the shutdown of the port this would not have been a general strike at all but rather a particularly powerful day of action. The tens of thousands of people who marched into the port surpassed all estimates. Neighbors, co-workers, relatives – one saw all kinds of people there who had never expressed any interest in such events, whose political activity had been limited to some angry mumbling at the television set and a yearly or biyearly trip to the voting booth. It was as if the entire population of the Bay Area had been transferred to some weird industrial purgatory, there to wander and wonder and encounter itself and its powers.

Now we have the chance to blockade the ports once again, on December 12, in conjunction with occupiers up and down the west coast. Already Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver and even Anchorage have agreed to blockade their respective ports. These are exciting events, for sure. Now that many of the major encampments in the US have been cleared, we need an event like this to keep the sequence going through the winter months and provide a reference point for future manifestations. For reasons that will be explained shortly, we believe that actions like this – direct actions that focus on the circulation of capital, rather than its production – will play a major role in the inevitable uprisings and insurrections of the coming years, at least in the postindustrial countries. The confluence of this tactic with the ongoing attempts to directly expropriate abandoned buildings could transform the Occupy movement into something truly threatening to the present order. But in our view, many comrades continue thinking about these actions as essentially continuous with the class struggle of the twentieth century and the industrial age, never adequately remarking on how little the postindustrial Oakland General Strike of 2011 resembles the Oakland General Strike of 1946.

The placeless place of circulation

The shipping industry (and shipping in general) has long been one of the most important sectors for capital, and one of the privileged sites of class struggle. Capitalism essentially develops and spreads within the matrix of the great mercantile, colonialist and imperial experiments of post-medieval Europe, all of which are predicated upon sailors, ships and trade routes. But by the time that capitalism comes into view as a new social system in the 19th century the most important engine of accumulation is no longer trade itself, but the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production process. Superprofits achieved through mechanized production are funneled back into the development and purchase of new production machinery, not to mention the vast, infernal infrastructural projects this industrial system requires: mines and railways, highways and electricity plants, vast urban pours of wood, stone, concrete and metal as the metropolitan centers spread and absorb people expelled from the countryside. But by the 1970s, just as various futurologists and social forecasters were predicting a completely automated society of superabundance, the technologically-driven accumulation cycle was coming to an end. Labor-saving technology is double-edged for capital. Even though it temporarily allows for the extraction of enormous profits, the fact that capital treats laboring bodies as the foundation of its own wealth means that over the long term the expulsion of more and more people from the workplace eventually comes to undermine capital’s own conditions of survival. Of course, one of the starkest horrors of capitalism is that capital’s conditions of survival are also our own, no matter our hatred. Directly or indirectly, each of us is dependent on the wage and the market for our survival.

From the 1970s on, one of capital’s responses to the reproduction crisis has been to shift its focus from the sites of production to the (non)sites of circulation. Once the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production of goods no longer generated substantial profits, firms focused on speeding up and more cheaply circulating both commodity capital (in the case of the shipping, wholesaling and retailing industries) and money capital (in the case of banking). Such restructuring is a big part of what is often termed “neoliberalism” or “globalization,” modes of accumulation in which the shipping industry and globally-distributed supply chains assume a new primacy. The invention of the shipping container and container ship is analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the 1970s – a technical intervention which multiplies the volume of capital in circulation several times over.

This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces –the ports, for instance– did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat. In such a situation, the flying picket, originally developed as a secondary instrument of solidarity, becomes the primary mechanism of the strike. If postindustrial capital focuses on the seaways and highways, the streets and the mall, focuses on accelerating and volatilizing its networked flows, then its antagonists will also need to be mobile and multiple. In November 2010, during the French general strike, we saw how a couple dozen flying pickets could effectively bring a city of millions to a halt. Such mobile blockades are the technique for an age and place in which production has been offshored, an age in which most of us work, if we work at all, in small and unorganized workplaces devoted to the transport, distribution, administration and sale of goods produced elsewhere.

Like the financial system which is its warped mirror, the present system for circulating commodities is incredibly brittle. Complex, computerized supply-chains based on just-in-time production models have reduced the need for warehouses and depots. This often means that workplaces and retailers have less than a day’s reserves on hand, and rely on the constant arrival of new shipments. A few tactical interventions – at major ports, for instance – could bring an entire economy to its knees. This is obviously a problem for us as much as it is a problem for capital: the brittleness of the economy means that while it is easy for us to blockade the instruments of our own oppression, nowhere do we have access to the things that could replace it. There are few workplaces that we can take over and use to begin producing the things we need. We could take over the port and continue to import the things we need, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine doing so without maintaining the violence of the economy at present.

Power to the vagabonds and therefore to no class

This brings us to a very important aspect of the present moment, already touched on above. The subject of the “strike” is no longer the working class as such, though workers are always involved. The strike no longer appears only as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from a workplace by those employed there, but as the blockade, suppression (or even sabotage or destruction) of that workplace by proletarians who are alien to it, and perhaps to wage-labor entirely. We need to jettison our ideas about the “proper” subjects of the strike or class struggle. Though it is always preferable and sometimes necessary to gain workers’ support in order to shut down a particular workplace, it is not absolutely necessary, and we must admit that ideas about who has the right to strike or blockade a particular workplace are simply extensions of the law of property. If the historical general strikes involved the coordinated striking of large workplaces, around which “the masses,” including students, women who did unwaged housework, the unemployed and lumpenproletarians of the informal sector eventually gathered to form a generalized offensive against capital, here the causality is precisely reversed. It has gone curiously unremarked that the encampments of the Occupy movement, while claiming themselves the essential manifestations of some vast hypermajority – the 99% – are formed in large part from the ranks of the homeless and the jobless, even if a more demographically diverse group fills them out during rallies and marches. That a group like this – with few ties to organized labor – could call for and successfully organize a General Strike should tell us something about how different the world of 2011 is from that of 1946.

We find it helpful here to distinguish between the working class and the proletariat. Though many of us are both members of the working class and proletarians, these terms do not necessarily mean the same thing. The working class is defined by work, by the fact that it works. It is defined by the wage, on the one hand, and its capacity to produce value on the other. But the proletariat is defined by propertylessness. In Rome, proletarius was the name for someone who owned no property save his own offspring and himself, and frequently sold both into slavery as a result. Proletarians are those who are “without reserves” and therefore dependent upon the wage and capital. They have “nothing to sell except their own skins.” The important point to make here is that not all proletarians are working-class, since not all proletarians work for a wage. As the crisis of capitalism intensifies, such “wageless life” becomes more and more the norm. Of course, exploitation requires dispossession. These two terms name inextricable aspects of the conditions of life under the domination of capital, and even the proletarians who don’t work depend upon those who do, in direct and indirect ways.

The point, for us, is that certain struggles tend to emphasize one or the other of these aspects. Struggles that emphasize the fact of exploitation – its unfairness, its brutality – and seek to ameliorate the terms and character of labor in capitalism, take the working-class as their subject. On the other hand, struggles that emphasize dispossession and the very fact of class, seeking to abolish the difference between those who are “without reserves” and everyone else, take as their subject the proletariat as such. Because of the restructuring of the economy and weakness of labor, present-day struggles have no choice but to become proletarian struggles, however much they dress themselves up in the language and weaponry of a defeated working class. This is why the Occupy movement, even as much as it mumbles vaguely about the weakest of redistributionary measures – taxing the banks, for instance – refuses to issue any demands. There are no demands to make. Worker’s struggles these days tend to have few objects besides the preservation of jobs or the preservation of union contracts. They struggle to preserve the right to be exploited, the right to a wage, rather than for any expansion of pay and benefits. The power of the Occupy movement so far – despite the weakness of its discourse – is that it points in the direction of a proletarian struggle in which, instead of vainly petitioning the assorted rulers of the world, people begin to directly take the things they need to survive. Rather than an attempt to readjust the balance between the 99% and the 1%, such a struggle might be about people directly providing for themselves at a time when capital and the state can no longer provide for them.

Twilight of the unions

This brings us finally to the question of the unions, the ILWU in particular, its locals, and the rank-and-file port workers. Port workers in the US have an enormously radical history, participating in or instigating some of the most significant episodes in US labor history, from the Seattle General strike of 1919, to the battles on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934 and the sympathy strikes that spread up and down the coast. The ferocious actions by port workers in Longview, Washington – attempting to fight off the incursion of non-ILWU grain exporter EGT – recall this history in vivid detail. Wildcatting, blockading trains and emptying them of their cargo, fighting off the cops brought in to restore the orderly loading and unloading of cargo – the port workers in Longview remind us of the best of the labor movement, its unmediated conflict with capital. We expect to see more actions like this in this new era of austerity, unemployment and riot. Still, our excitement at the courage of Longview workers should not blind us to the place of this struggle in the current crisis of capitalism. We do not think that these actions point to some revitalization of radical unionism, but rather indicate a real crisis in the established forms of class struggle. They point to a moment in which even the most meager demands become impossible to win. These conditions of impossibility will have a radicalizing effect, but not in the way that many expect it to. They will bring us allies in the workers at Longview and elsewhere but not in the way many expect.

Though they employ the tactics of the historical workers’ movement at its most radical, the content of the Longview struggle is quite different: they are not fighting for any expansions of pay or benefits, or attempting to unionize new workplaces, but merely to preserve their union’s jurisdictional rights. It is a defensive struggle, in the same way that the Madison, Wisconsin capitol occupation was a defensive struggle – a fight undertaken to preserve the dubious legally-enshrined rights to collectively bargain. These are fights for the survival of unions as such, in an era in which unions have no real wind in their sails, at their best seeking to keep a floor below falling wages, at their worst collaborating with the bosses to quietly sell out workers. This is not to malign the actions of the workers themselves or their participation in such struggles – one can no more choose to participate in a fight for one’s survival than one can choose to breathe, and sometimes such actions can become explosive trigger points that ignite a generalized antagonism. But we should be honest about the limits of these fights, and seek to push beyond them where possible. Too often, it seems as if we rely on a sentimental workerism, acting as if our alliance with port workers will restore to us some lost authenticity.

Let’s remember that, in the present instance, the initiative is coming from outside the port and from outside the workers’ movement as such, even though it involves workers and unions. For the most part, the initiative here has come from a motley band of people who work in non-unionized workplaces, or (for good reason) hate their unions, or work part-time or have no jobs at all. Alliances are important. We should be out there talking to truck drivers and crane operators and explaining the blockade, but that does not mean blindly following the recommendations of ILWU Local 10. For instance, we have been told time and again that, in order to blockade the port, we need to go to each and every berth, spreading out thousands of people into several groups over a distance of a few miles. This is because, under the system that ILWU has worked out with the employers’ association, only a picket line at the gates to the port itself will allow the local arbitrator to rule conditions at the port unsafe, and therefore provide the workers with legal protection against unpermitted work action. In such a situation we are not really blockading the port. We are participating in a two-act play, a piece of legal theater, performed for the benefit of the arbitrator.

If this arbitration game is the only way we can avoid violent conflict with the port workers, then perhaps this is the way things have to be for the time being. But we find it more than depressing how little reflection there has been about this strategy, how little criticism of it, and how many people seem to reflexively accept the necessity of going through these motions. There are two reasons why this charade is problematic. For one, we must remember that the insertion of state-sanctioned forms of mediation and arbitration into the class struggle, the domestication of the class struggle by a vast legal apparatus, is the chief mechanism by which unions have been made into the helpmeet of capital, their monopoly over labor power an ideal partner for capital’s monopoly over the means of production. Under such a system, trade unions not only make sure that the system produces a working-class with sufficient purchasing power (something that is less and less possible these days, except by way of credit) but also ensure that class antagonism finds only state-approved outlets, passing through the bureaucratic filter of the union and its legal apparatus, which says when, how, and why workers can act in their own benefit. This is what “arbitration” means.

Secondly, examined from a tactical position, putting us blockaders in small, stationary groups spread out over miles of roads leaves us in a very poor position to resist a police assault. As many have noted, it would be much easier to blockade the port by closing off the two main entrances to the port area– at Third and Adeline and Maritime and West Grand. Thousands of people at each of these intersections could completely shut down all traffic into the port, and these groups could be much more easily reinforced and provided with provisions (it’s easier to get food, water, and reinforcements to these locations.) There is now substantial interest in extending the blockade past one shift, changing it from a temporary nuisance to something that might seriously affect the reproduction of capital in the Bay Area given the abovementioned reliance on just-in-time production. But doing so will likely bring a police attack. Therefore, in order to blockade the port with legal-theatrical means we sacrifice our ability – quite within reach – to blockade it materially. We allow ourselves to be deflected to a tactically-weak position on the plane of the symbolic.

The coming intensification of struggles both inside and outside the workplace will find no success in attempting to revitalize the moribund unions. Workers will need to participate in the same kinds of direct actions – occupations, blockades, sabotage – that have proven the highlights of the Occupy movement in the Bay Area. When tens of thousands of people marched to the port of Oakland on November 2^nd in order to shut it down, by and large they did not do it to defend the jurisdiction of the ILWU, or to take a stand against union-busting (most people were, it appears, ignorant of these contexts). They did it because they hate the present-day economy, because they hate capitalism, and because the ports are one of the most obvious linkages in the web of misery in which we are all caught. Let’s recognize this antagonism for what it is, and not dress it up in the costumes and ideologies of a bygone world.

Society of Enemies

December 2011

The Crisis, Occupy, and other Oddities in the Autumn of Capital

reoccupied — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:47:39 +0000

29. Nov 2011 - Translation of the editorial of Kosmoprolet #3 by Friends of the Classless Society (Berlin)

All over the world, events are keeping up with the pace of a crisis, the end of which was just recently cheerfully proclaimed by people who thought ludicrous amounts of sovereign debt to be the recipe for an economic miracle. By racking up debt to their ears, governments worldwide were able to contain the so-called financial crisis; but then, the rating agencies presented them a bill that they promptly passed on to wage workers. The whole maneuver did not lead to recovery but to an even more menacing state budget crisis, the handling of which through uncompromising austerity measures has aroused anger. Resistance is mounting. We are at the threshold of a social crisis. Those who feel the effects of the governments’ austerity programs in their everyday life are starting to realize ever more clearly that these are not temporarily painful, yet necessary sacrifices. They are becoming aware of the fact that the drastic cuts will not only last for years or even decades, but that their own future is becoming ever bleaker. We are probably at the start of a new era: Ever since society was brought back down to the earth of cold hard economic facts, the culturalist carnival of differences has come to an end. Society’s colorful superstructure has scaled off to reveal, in Orthodox Marxist terms, the drab, universal base. And the crisis has achieved what activists striving to link struggles have been incapable of for decades: millions have taken to the streets simultaneously with the same purpose. All they’re left with is an ever more precarious survival under the reigning conditions. For them, it’s all or nothing.

The widely feared collapse of the financial markets was prevented by extensive governmental interventions; exorbitant stimulus packages were able to stabilize industry and even effectuate momentary economic upswings here and there. Germany, in particular, was able to establish itself as a profiteer of the crisis at the cost of the weakened competitors due to its momentary export boom, at the same time becoming the leading advocate of the austerity doctrine. The determined efforts to tackle the crisis failed nonetheless; the problem was merely shifted to the state level and the banking crisis has molted into a sovereign debt crisis, which threatens to break the Euro zone.

At first, Greece drew most of the attention. Unable to raise new money on the financial market on its own, the Greek government was forced to officially request financial help. The troika, consisting of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund granted the Greek state a loan amounting to 110 billion Euros, but this soon turned out to be insufficient. The Euro’s tumble continued and in May 2010, European heads of government agreed on a European Stabilization Mechanism worth 750 billion Euros to prevent sovereign default by any member of the Euro zone. Above all, the so-called PIIGS, that is Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, are thought to be in danger. But even such massive measures were unable to halt the crisis. Meanwhile, there is now talk of allowing Greece to default, although the consequences for the Euro zone’s future are unknown. If Greece defaults, Greek banks and pension funds will be hit first, as they own about 50% of the government’s bonds and a bailout by the Greek state would, of course, be out of question. Beyond that, important banks in Belgium, France, and Germany would also be in imminent danger, as they, too, hold considerable numbers of Greek bonds in their portfolios. However, the magnitude of the calamity cannot be measured simply as the sum of the shaky government bonds; the crucial point is that these bonds, in turn, serve as securities for further loans, which would no longer be secured as a result of national bankruptcy. Because of these interdependences, which indirectly affect the whole of the European banking sector, banks directly hit by a Greek sovereign default would not be the only ones in danger. Rather, in the medium term, a collapse of the Euro would be possible, which is why negotiations about a recapitalization of European banks with government or EU money are currently taking place. The Euro zone can bear neither a meltdown of the finance sector nor the insolvency of individual members. To keep these things from happening, it is now resorting to leverage techniques. The latter emerged in the mid-1990′s when the trade in financial products was given a boost by enormous numbers of unfunded credit default swaps being sold in the hope that the bloated market could expand just a little more.

Thus, the whole issue keeps spinning in a circle and even the media’s deceptive fragmentation of the crisis into a plethora of crises – real estate crisis, credit crunch, fiscal crisis, sovereign debt crisis, Greece or Ireland crisis, and so on – can hardly hide this. This is because, despite what the talk of ever new individual crises suggests, all of them have the very same origin in the crisis of the real economy. Ever since the post-war boom ran dry in the early 1970′s the rates of profit have been faltering, because ever less living labor keeps ever more dead labor running.1The excessive debt the European states and the US started to incur at this point is a symptom of a capitalism losing its economic dynamic; measures originally conceived as a temporary economic stimulus morphed into a permanent policy of subsidies for the productive sectors. However, this policy of excessive deficit spending was unable to sufficiently preserve enticing possibilities for the valorization of surplus masses of capital or to create new ones. Surplus capital gushed into the financial sector, which was bloated more and more until the crisis of 2007/2008 manifested itself as a financial crisis. The bursting of one financial product bubble after another from 2007 on is merely an expression of the scarcity of investment opportunities for capital, which has shot itself in the foot with its permanent technological-scientific upheaval of production.

The cries for a restoration of the “primacy of politics over economics”, which currently dominate the op-ed sections of newspapers and can also be heard in the protest movements, fails to grasp the problem, because they are incapable of understanding the role of banks and lending. They do not only provide the necessary lubricant to keep the accumulation cycle in continuous acceleration; above all, the origin of lending is the part of surplus value that cannot be directly returned into the cycle because of latent over-accumulation. In a sense, the organic way out of the crisis would be a gigantic destruction of capital: bloated financial values would have to be wiped out, banks left to fail; the market would purge itself through company bankruptcies; wage levels would fall even further. After that, the “old filthy business” (Marx) would start from scratch in a new cycle. However, because a laissez-faire policy, which would give such a devaluation free reign appears too risky at the moment even to liberal economists due to its unforeseeable, but certainly drastic consequences, crisis management through state interventions has been the first choice so far. This has led not only to astronomical national debts, but has also cemented the fundamental problem of over-accumulation and merely postponed the unavoidable crash – meanwhile, the stakes keep growing. The increasingly desperate actions of politicians and economists, who, in a climate of ludicrous market fetishization, are behaving like dog trainers unable to cope (“the markets have to be calmed down”, “the markets have to re-gain their confidence”, “be reined in”, “put on a leash” and “put in their place”), reveal to what little extent they are in control of the situation. Their aimless bustle and increasingly open cluelessness and, last but not least, the acquiescence of leading neoliberals to a course of state intervention bear witness to the fact that they have neither a plan nor a clue, but not to the claim, made by Naomi Klein and co, that the crisis is just politics of word choice, designed to serve the “ruling class” in its quest to advance the “neoliberal project”. The same is true of talk of a lack of an alternative to the austerity programs. This lack of an alternative is not merely a rhetorical trick to serve the class struggle from above; in fact, the wiggle room for state actions keeps getting smaller. It has been exhausted in the past decades by necessary subsidies and stimulus programs, particularly since the onset of the crisis in 2007/08.

The most indebted countries are forced to push through the decreed cuts; giving in to the demands of social movements would be construed as weakness and incapacity and cause their position to deteriorate even further. Even in countries that are not immediately threatened by state bankruptcy, re-consolidating state finances is a must, as they have to be prepared to absorb the costs of preventing the collapse of further banks, in order to prevent the meltdown of the financial sector. Considering this, the prospects for reformist politics are scant. The austerity programs being pushed through tooth and nail are, of course, attacks on the proletarianized, whose livelihoods are increasingly being taken away or cut radically. In Greece the suicide rate – thus far the lowest in Europe – rose by more than forty percent in the past year. In the US, 28 million people received food stamps before the onset of the crisis; in July of 2011 there were 45 million, about 15 percent of the population. They receive an average of 134 dollars; six million of them have no other means of income.

By that standard, the resistance by wage earners has been rather meek. A first wave of protests starting in the fall of 2010 relied primarily on the traditional means of resistance, but they were no match for the state’s keenness to push through the programs. The protests started in France, where a pension reform sparked days of action controlled by the unions and occupations of schools. Most notably, strike and blockades in refineries by workers, unemployed and other discontent people caused gasoline shortages in France. The motto of these actions was bloquer l’économie (“block the economy”), a slogan chanted in part by the rank and file of the CP-allied CGT, much to the dismay of union leaders. But the government stood strong and the pension reform was passed. In late September, a one-day general strike was held in Spain against the relaxation of dismissals protections, after the social democratic government led by Zapatero had already lowered public workers’ wages and frozen pensions, in order to balance the budget. The bill passed. A general strike against an austerity program in Portugal, the first called by both of the two largest unions, the CGTP and the UGT, since 1988, was also unsuccessful. According to the unions’ figures, it was the largest general strike in over twenty years; but the government stated that it has no leeway when it comes to cuts. There were no compromises. In the same month, tens of thousands of British students put up resistance against drastic raises of tuition fees and the education budget being cut by forty percent. In London, the party headquarters of the Tories was attacked; despite the riots, the increases of tuition were pushed through. In Italy, tens of thousands of students protested cuts in education simultaneously by blocking highways and occupying universities; there were intense riots, but the education reforms were passed unamended by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

The conventional means of class struggle were unable to put enough pressure behind their demands anywhere and the protests failed in every respect despite enormous mobilization efforts. In this climate of social unrest the Arab Spring starting in early 2011 became a formidable beacon and inspired a second wave of protest. The Spanish movement was the first to import the square occupations that had been so successful in Egypt and in Tunisia to Europe. The call for Democracia Real Ya! (“Real Democracy now!”), simultaneously the name of a platform and its most important demand, was able to mobilize masses of indignados (“the indignant”), as they called themselves, to occupy central squares in over a hundred Spanish cities. Following the principles that the Democracia Real platform had propagated – unity of the indignados, decision-making in general assemblies, no open presence of political parties or groups, non-violence – more or less closely, the occupations showed themselves to be collectively capable of spontaneous self-organization and represented a rupture in the everyday lives of the participants, but soon revealed considerable weaknesses related to the form of the action itself. Direct democracy based on the consensus principle turned out to be impractical in assemblies with more than a thousand participants. Significant discussion was impossible, and a meaningful consensus could not be reached.2 Moreover, the ideology of non-ideology advocated by the Democracia Real platform was fishy from the start – how could an economic crisis, which then manifested itself as a legitimation crisis thereby gripping the totality of society, be solved with nothing more than a new political form, namely real democracy? In many places this ideology played a part in silencing radical critique and advocating the replacement of politicians, new election laws, ethical banking, and other equally tame demands. An ideology of non-violence that does not even allow for self-defense was shown to be a total failure, at the latest, the moment the police wanted to evict the occupation of Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona and pacifists impeded those attempting to defend it. At least in Barcelona, the central square occupation dissolved in the Summer into neighborhood assemblies that led to loud demonstrations, road blockades and other promising actions from time to time, but were unable to take root in the center of town.

Despite the ambivalent results of the Spanish model, it soon caught on and this form of action spread to other countries. In Greece, where general strikes, occupations and protests had taken place on a regular basis since 2008, often coupled with militancy, the square occupations gained a special kind of momentum. Syntagma Square in Athens was able to exert enough pressure to force the two major union federations ADEDY and GSEE to comply with the occupiers’ call for a general strike; a novelty, not just because one of the general strikes that came about this way went on for two days, making it the longest in years, but also because the protestors’ steadfast refusal of the austerity plans went so far as to accept sovereign default – the most radical answer to the notion that cuts are necessary. The option of either accepting objective necessities or striking one’s employer into bankruptcy now presents itself on a state level in Greece, where both the effects of the crisis and resistance against cuts are strongest. Forced to decide between sovereign default and austerity measures that drive the economy further into ruin, the Greek government is left with very little wiggle room. The attempt to attain public approval for the austerity policy by means of a referendum and thereby regain legitimacy for the social democratic government failed, mainly due to European leaders’ opposition, and the menace of public unrest continues to lurk. Within the anti-austerity front, the Stalinist KKE along with PAME, the union under its control, has already distinguished itself as the party of order. On October 20, it placed thugs in front of police lines. There, they beat protestors trying to prevent the parliamentary vote budget cuts.

In Israel, a country where the Middle East conflict has always drowned out questions of class relations, weeks of occupations and protests with hundreds of thousands of participants amid the crisis put rising rents and lack of housing on the agenda as a topic that could no longer be ignored by society. And in the United States a movement of occupations under the label “Occupy Wall Street” started in mid-September in New York but soon spread to other cities, including many outside of the US. Occupy movements have now formed in most major American and European cities and have repeatedly been the starting point of militant activities. They are marked by a kind of practical internationalism that is probably, above all, the result of the participants’ horizon of experience, making them immune to any sort of nationalist discourses. The novel forms of protest are also a response to the crisis to the extent that they are no longer centered around the workplace, but are pushing into city centers, thus allowing the growing mass of the surplus population, the unemployed, and the precariously employed, but also college and grade school students, to participate. Although self-organization, as of yet, has for the most part not gone beyond life in the squares and rarely puts property relations in question, events like the general strike in Greece, resistance against evictions from housing started in the Spanish Asambleas, solidarity with wildcat strikes in Oakland, New York, and elsewhere, and, last but not least, the militancy in defense of occupations demonstrate that the occupied squares could be the starting point for more.

Nevertheless, the new protests’ one-sided attacks on the finance sector are their biggest weakness. Not only does this make them open to the anti-interest crowd, all sorts of conspiracy theorists, and in a few cases even open anti-Semites, but, by concentrating on the “excesses” in banking, the protests merely blindly join in the already rampant fetish of the financial markets. To the extent that they concern themselves exclusively with the banks’ “machinations”, they ultimately cloud the view on capital relations, instead of making it clearer. A symptom of this is the slogan that started in New York and caught on all over the world: “We are the 99%, they are only 1%”. It expresses the very real experience that the broad majority of the population is supposed to sacrifice ever more to overcome the crisis and, to this extent, hint at a rather vague understanding of the class contradiction; on the other hand, it blames all the misery on the one percent profiting the most and raise only the issue of individual excess rather than of social relations. The movement still stands somewhere between class struggle and populism.

To the extent that they made discernible demands, the protests failed in every respect and had to fail. In times that Keynesianism has been proved worthless and in light of its weakness, the state is no longer a viable addressee for demands. However, this has yet to be reflected in the emergence of revolutionary consciousness, but rather in a strange sort of disorientation. The attempt to escape the obsolete forms of protest and stale ideologies, along with the heterogeneous composition of the protesters, also goes hand in hand with a paralysis of the new protests. The assambleas’ and occupations’ mobilization spanning across milieus is only made possible by a conception of common politics rooted in the article of faith of unconditional tolerance. But, without carrying out conflicts within their own ranks, the movements will be subdued by the dictate of consensus building, unable to address decisive questions out of fear of a division in the common project – and perhaps this, and not the recognition of political demands’ obsolescence, is responsible for the absence of demands. The phenomenon of protesters who are vaguely discontent and speak of values and ethics is symptomatic for a crisis currently expressing itself as a spectacle at whose mercy are the international protest movements as much as the professional crisis managers. “We must guard against the tendency to mistake this weakness of the capitalist mode of productionfor a weakness of capital in its struggle with labor.”3 Crises have always strengthened the position of capital vis-à-vis the proletariat. The falling demand for labor power undercuts the workers’ bargaining power and austerity programs cut social spending precisely when it is needed most. In absence of a revolutionary perspective – which is currently not visible anywhere – the workers’ interest is first and foremost to keep their jobs, and the interest of the unemployed is to get one. The realization that the rat race on the labor market would have be put to an abrupt end, should the square occupations issue into a collective appropriation of production, could lead out of this predicament.

Nevertheless, what we are currently experiencing across the world is the flaring up of new interlinked movements than can happily do without the traditional political forms. If they realize the clout they could gain, much is to be won. If, on the other hand, they stay at moral indictments of bankers and politicians, a historical opportunity will go to waste. The rapid successes of the square movements in the Middle East against outdated state apparatuses will not be possible in countries in Europe or America not ruled under dictatorial conditions. In this manifest crisis the unpropertied are only left with the choice of accepting an ever more meager existence or of putting the curse of wage labor to an end. They have to choose whether to swallow all they are being fed or to reject it altogether.

Friends of the Classless Society, Berlin
Eiszeit, Zurich
La Banda Vaga, Freiburg

1.Cf. Sander: A Crisis of Value, Internationalist Perspectives 51-52, 2009 and Friends of the Classless Society: Thesen zur Krise, Kosmoprolet 2, 2009.
2.Cf. Peter Gelderloos, Spanish Revolution at a Crossroads, counterpunch.org.
3.Bar-Yuchnei (Endnotes), Two Aspects of Austerity (August 2011)

Critical Theory For and Against Itself

reoccupied — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:54:52 +0000

On the one hand, critical theory condemns the occupation. (see letter below)

On the other hand, critical theory defends the occupation. (see letter below)

Can it do both and still be itself? As an old dialectician once said,

CRITICAL THEORY has to be communicated in its own language — the language of contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: the language of the critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Not some “writing degree zero” — just the opposite. Not a negation of style, but the style of negation.

First Negation

Monday, November 28, 2011

To the New School Community

Dear Friends:

We need to express our strong appreciation for the way our president, provost and some of our faculty members handled the unfortunate occupation of a part of the New School. They were right not to call in the police, and to be conciliatory, ready to negotiate until a full democratic vote of those present could be taken.

They were also right (letter of November 23) in calling attention to the destructive and undemocratic practice of a minority that initially refused to leave in spite of the vote. This act of firmness also facilitated the favorable outcome.

Some of us, probably a relatively small minority of students and faculty, may think that it is acceptable to occupy the New School whether or not there is any school specific contentious issue at stake. Let us note however, that as against the recent past, the leadership of Van Zandt and Marshall (not to speak of the faculty mostly enthusiastic about OWS) has provided no conceivable excuse for this action. On the contrary, it was all extremely hospitable to the movement and its reasonable demands for time and space. We are aware of possible motivations why the New School was selected: namely our very tolerance and liberalism made us a much easier and less defended target than the real enemies of the movement. But the existence of opportunity is not in itself a justification for anything.

Whether any of us do agree with the occupation of a part of our place, we are sure none of us can accept the fact that the occupiers have deliberately caused serious damage to the facilities. $40,000 dollars is mentioned as a figure. That is quite a sum. Just to pick an example of alternatives, the equivalent of 10 graduate assistantships will go for renovation instead, at a time when we already cannot reward at all some of our best students.

We are not calling for the punishment of the students concerned by the University. This would be counter-productive. But we do think that any serious movement-to-be has the responsibility to police its ranks, and discipline its membership by excluding those who violate democratic rules and engage in random violence.

Again the president and the provost need to be offered our sincere thanks. Had someone else been in their place, the results could have been tragic, and not only for the short term. The long shutdown of universities from Greece to Uruguay and Mexico has happened in the past initially for equally fortuitous reasons. It is our job here, faculty and students, to make sure that this cannot happen to the New School.

Signed by,

Elaine Abelson
Andrew Arato
Jay Bernstein
Emanuele Castano
Doris Chang
Alice Crary
James Dodd
Federico Finchelstein
Carlos Forment
Laura Frost
Teresa Ghilarducci
Jeffrey Goldfarb
Eiko Ikegami
Elizabeth Kendall
Marcel Kinsbourne
Benjamin Lee
Arien Mack
Elzbieta Matynia
Joan Miller
Edward Nell
Julia Cathleen Ott
Christian Proaño
Vyjayanthi Rao
Janet Roitman
Jeremy Safran
Willi Semmler
Ann-Louise Shapiro
Rachel Sherman
Ann Stoler
McWelling Todman
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Terry Williams
Eli Zaretsky
Vera Zolberg

Negation of the Negation:

Dear all,

I hate to be a party pooper, but I must tell you that I will not sign this
letter. While I agree that the administration handled the situation very
well, I belong to the group, described as a “small minority,” that believes
that a building occupation need not be justified by demands addressed
explicitly to its owners. In fact, that idea runs directly counter to the
premise of the occupy movement, as I understand it, which involves seizing
public or quasi-public spaces to make broad claims about the overall
(mis)direction of our society. Hence, the occupiers of Zucotti Park were
not addressing demands to its owners, but were seeking to speak to the
public at large. I see no principled reason why a movement should not
occupy a university building to make such a statement or initiate such a
discussion. The students who did so in this case may have misjudged the
situation, overestimating their support and failing to communicate clearly
what they were doing and why. But if so, those were tactical errors in
executing what might have been a promising strategy. The letter that many
of you have chosen to sign does not even contemplate such possibilities. It
seems to me to be written from the standpoint of those who govern, whereas
I prefer to consider this matter from the standpoint of those who protest
injustice, a group our society already marginalizes-politically,
intellectually, and spatially.

Best to all,
Nancy Fraser

Positive Negation

I come in late in this conversation, so I risk repeating things that have been said before. I am sorry about this. But I want to return to the initial faculty letter that Jeffrey Goldfarb posted on this blog. This was drafted by Andrew Arato, and signed by a large number of New School professors, many of whom are friends of mine, and most of whom I would expect to agree with on political issues. But I am troubled by the letter. I was not asked to sign it (presumably it was circulated only to tenured faculty), but if I had been, I would have declined.

I had no problems with the first paragraph. We certainly should show our appreciation of the impeccably liberal way in which the President has responded to the various protests over the past few weeks, and especially of the way that he, together with some administrators and professors handled the occupation of the Student Center. For me, this indicated a very welcome reaffirmation of New School values and traditions.

But I thought that the rest of the letter was much too quick and unreflective a response to our local occupation, expressing immediate outrage, perhaps disappointment, rather than considered judgment. Some examples: Why raise the issue of student punishment, merely to dismiss it as ‘counter-productive’? Why not also say that it is inappropriate, indeed wrong, for a university to use punishment except as a very last resort, especially in cases involving politics?
If there is a concern with what is ‘counter-productive’, why then go on to say that any ‘serious movement-to-be has the responsibility to police its ranks, and discipline its membership by excluding those who violate democratic rules and engage in random violence’ (my italics)? This is not the language likely to create a dialogue with members of a highly diverse movement, most of whom are committed to self-organization and inclusion. Why raise the emotional ante by invoking the specter of the ‘long shutdown of universities from Greece to Uruguay and Mexico’ as if a similar ‘tragic’ fate for the New School was only narrowly averted. In the absence of some account of similarities and differences, this is largely scare mongering.
Of course there are substantial issues here, ones that deserve and may get the decent discussion that Jeffrey calls for. But in the letter they serve as rhetorical bludgeons, not as invitations to dialogue.

I want to say something about an issue that is in the near background of the faculty letter: the politics of protest movements. Most of us recognize that protest is a legitimate and necessary part of democratic politics. But we need to pay attention to the nature of this form of politics. Protest operates on the borderlines of legality and, let us face it, of civility. The largely symbolic forms in which protests are mounted (occupations of public or private space, sit-ins, street marches, theatrical interventions in bureaucratic procedures, political graffiti, etc.) often involve breaches of the law, confrontations with the police, inconvenience to uninvolved citizens (those Wall Street workers who complained of the difficulty of getting to work were not wrong!), and extra expense to public authorities. They also attract an incredibly diverse range of participants, with different agendas and priorities, especially with regard to confrontation with authorities and pushing the boundaries of extra-legal activity. Organizational structures are at best fluid and often chaotic; and local initiatives are a constant challenge to overall coordination and planning. OWS did a remarkable job of coordination through procedures of self-management and consensus in very difficult circumstances. But there is always the possibility of smaller factions splitting off from the larger grouping (even the democratic majority) to pursue agendas that they conceive to be more important. Even if it were desirable, it is simply not possible for the group as a whole to ‘police’ its members, ‘exclude’ those it suspects of a penchant for violence. At best other groups (the ’majority’) may want to criticize breakaway factions, and in certain cases disavow them. This is entirely appropriate. But when we presume to give advice as to appropriate democratic procedures, we should be sensitive to the fragmented nature of this form of politics. For good or ill, minority actions of this kind should be recognized as an ever-present possibility in ongoing protest movements. We should not be too surprised, even when our institution is the target and it is our walls that are graffitied.

Jeffrey says that he criticizes the occupation on behalf of the many (I guess most) students who oppose the occupation. Fair enough; though surely their criticisms would have been more effective if they had made them themselves. Criticism by faculty is also appropriate. But where possible, this should be conducted in ways that open up discussion, and do not foreclose it. In this case, I would have hoped that the response of my colleagues might have shown more sensitivity, not only in the terms in which it was expressed, but also to the political circumstances surrounding the occupation. The issues raised by the occupation needed to be discussed. But in a cool hour. There is a place in politics for outrage and disappointment, but these should not displace the need for judgment. Especially at the New School.

Ross Poole
December 5, 2011

Lost in the Fog: Dead Ends and Potentials of the Occupy Movement

reoccupied — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:20:45 +0000

The following text comprises a presentation and analysis of the Occupy movement in the United States, by the Lost Children’s School of Cartography. The text was used as a basis for an event on the Occupy movement, that took place at the Skaramanga occupation in Athens, on November 25th, 2011. The brochure published for the event, including this text in Greek, along with the video screened on the night are available here.

Lost in the Fog: Dead Ends and Potentials of the Occupy Movement

Introduction

So what do you make of this Occupy movement in America? Of course it is the news that everyone wants to hear about. Al Jazeera claimed shortly after the encampment near Wall Street was founded that the Occupy movement in America was facing a mainstream “media blackout.” But in reality, it seemed that nearly every media source was dedicating coverage nationally and internationally. Despite all the press, if one added up the total number of participants in the fledgling occupations throughout America at that time, he would end up with far less than the total number of demonstrators at a general strike in Athens, or a single American anti-war demonstration from 2004.

This alone should serve as a cause for skepticism, although perhaps it is only predictable that in America, of all places, a social movement would arise firstly as the mere spectacle of revolt. After all, its initial coordinators intended from its inception that the Occupy movement of America be a copy of a copy. The genuine, spontaneous, and seemingly unstoppable surge of rage–the insurrection–in the Arab world had already been watered down into the pacifist indignados movement of Europe. Next the American radicals who called for an occupation of Wall Street would try to copy-and-paste the indignados movement to America by sprinkling a tactic–occupation–on what they hoped would prove grounds fertile enough to grow a movement.

That movement now seems to be swept up in its own momentum, and every day there are new developments in what seems to be a genuinely unpredictable and leaderless social reaction. While the occupations were perhaps first populated by the same cliques of activists who had championed the previous failed American social movements, the encampments and demonstrations have grown because they have attracted the self-identified American “middle class.” As American society comes under further blows of the so-called “crisis” of capitalism, the illusion of middle class comfort dissipates, revealing its previously hidden, but now more apparent, dispossession. The Occupy movement is an opportunity for the middle class to protest the “unfairness” of their proletarianization. In part thanks to widespread disillusionment with political representatives, previously non-activist citizens are suddenly eager to participate in an activist social movement. Paradoxically, the brightest hope we can find in this situation is also the grimmest fact: the increasingly dire economic situation is not turning around, and life will not go back to the way it once was. It is precisely because the movement for a preservation of the illusory American dream is doomed to fail that the Occupy movement has the potential to supersede itself.

Of course, regardless of its active decomposition, the middle class carries its values into the movement–the ideological values of the good citizen. One could characterize the Occupy movement as a citizens’ movement for the survival of capitalist democracy in a moment ripe with potentials for true rupture. Here, self-described radicals, anti-authoritarians and in some cases even anarchists may play the most critical but hidden roles in recuperation, if in their well-intentioned attempt to “build the new world in the shell of the old” they actually succeed at protecting the core of the old world in the shell of the new. (We will elaborate on this in a moment.)

But there is also a beautiful discord within the situation. The Occupy movement can hardly be summed up by any particular ideological stance, and its greatest potentials spring from its chaotic features and resistance to definition. Anarchists who have stubbornly refused any participation in what they have disregarded as merely a bourgeois movement have safeguarded their identities as the most radical of all at the cost of guaranteeing their own irrelevancy in the developing situation. In order to move the Occupy movement in the direction of genuine upheaval, anarchists must participate to cause sustained and intensifying disruption and destruction of the apparatuses of capital in order to make this movement a threat to capitalism, aiming to outflank the state by generalizing these tactics. We will also explore the developments in this direction so far as well as some future potentials.

I. The Destruction of Experience

When a half-completed action, which has been suddenly obstructed, tries to carry on further in a form which it hopes will sooner or later allow it to finish and realize itself – like a generator transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy which will be reconverted into mechanical energy by a motor miles away – at this moment language swoops down on living experience, ties it hand and foot, robs it of its substance, abstracts it. It always has categories ready to condemn to incomprehensibility and nonsense anything which they cannot contain, to summon into existence-for-Power that which slumbers in nothingness because it has no place as yet in the system of Order. The repetition of familiar signs is the basis of ideology.

– R. Vaneigem

The rise of interdependency of people and technologies has left us with the destruction of experience. Experience can be found not in reading the news, with its abundance of remote fragments of information, nor during the journey through the nether realms of the subway; not in the demonstration that suddenly blocks the streets; nor in the cloud of tear gas slowly dispersing amid the buildings downtown. It does not suffice to move about, to lose and acquire things, to have encounters, or even to witness more dramatic acts such as political resistance and violence in order to have experience. Wherever we turn experience eludes us. Experience is transmitted not by the extraordinary but by the everyday and it is the very ability to share and communicate everyday experience that has been lost. We have, therefore, “events”–staggering quantities of them–but they are assimilated into no real experience.

To arrive in a space, for the purposes of this essay, we begin in New York city, amidst half a billion people and an embryonic social movement. It could superficially appear to be somewhat of a break from the character of the typical everyday life, emptied of experience. To the contrary, the unifying slogan of the Occupy movement, “we are the 99%,” is a shining example of this profound loss of meaning. Hundreds of people, especially in the first days of the occupations, stood before a crowd, many for the first time, to share their stories of dispossession living under modern capitalism. To mention the slogan again, “we are the 99%,” the intended meaning of which is “we are 99% of the population and it is the 1% –the elite class– which reaps the benefits of our misery,” is not an innocuous statement, whatever truth may be found therein.

Some of the first images of the occupation at Zuccotti park were taken from cell phone cameras, but this tendency to distance oneself by standing behind a camera is not the only reason these moments too lacked experience. One could also witness the lack when, in the early days of the occupation, Slavoj Zizek gave a speech which was naturally captured on video and viewed widely on the internet. For the first time people around the country and around the world saw the self-proclaimed inventiveness of the Occupy activists at work. The ‘People’s Mic’ is a technique which developed out of the police prohibitions of voice amplifying devices, such as microphones and megaphones, and has rapidly become a symbolic tool for the expression of a unified voice in lieu of any pretense of individuality.

It would be a misreading of this text to assume an elitist tone from the characterization of the Occupy activists as one and the same. In fact we would like to point to the divisions within this 99% that are irreparable, unalienable and inexorable. This slogan functions in favor of control through inclusion. It is an ideological position prevalent throughout liberal democratic society, that of multiculturalism and the insistence upon tolerance, which has emerged as a right-hand-man to Order, intent on wiping out any agitational forces within the movement, even calling in back up forces of control, i.e. the police. Upon seeing the video on Youtube of the aforementioned speech in which Zizek states “we are awakening from a dream which has turned into a nightmare,” one cannot help but feel a bodily chill provoked by the repetition from the audience. The mob repeats these words like a nightmarish brainwashing, reaffirming its unity by simultaneously raising its cell phones to capture the event. Perhaps a certain truth is revealed in the natural emphasis given to certain words of speeches due to the tendency for one to repeat only what she feels resonance with and more loudly, with greater verve. Yet, it is evidence only of the fundamental loss that these subjects have suffered that this repetitive game comes with such ease, and seemingly without a sense of fear, much less a sense of irony.

The reports about this tactic of repeating the words of fellow occupants consistently takes a positive tone. It is implicit in these accounts that the visceral effect of this process has an all-out beneficial outcome, that unanimity is a desirable end, and that unanimity could even call itself diversity. What is lost here, besides half the time on the clock to allow for repetition, is an analysis of the ways in which the People’s Mic contains the same coercive effects as watching the television news or sitting behind a computer screen. The People’s Mic, like the news, or the internet, relies upon the subject’s passivity, while at the same time presenting the dangerous illusion of participatory action. It is the loss of unmitigated communication has created pervasive passivity. The reliance upon a distanced intake of information, and the conclusion of respect for the authority of a speaker behind a podium or at the occupied park, hints at the authority of the event.

What would be truly inspiring is if the situation was turned completely around: if the crowds refused this ventriloquism in favor of the hundreds of conversations waiting all around them. Imagine the occupation flipped on its axis, its inhabitants acting together based upon true affinity and setting their spectator role alight; the chaotic environment consumed in a cacophony edging toward real experience.

II. The Events of the ‘Occupy’ movement

Wall Street was the initial line that divided the colonists from natives, the “civilized” from the “savage,” and after the wall fell, what came to divide individuals was what Wall Street controlled: the flow of capital. The obvious significance of such a target has previously been noted by the enemies of power. On September 16th, 1920, Wall Street was bombed as an act of revenge for the state’s framing and execution of the Italian immigrants and anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. The bomb, carried within a horse drawn carriage, shattered the autumn morning in the financial district of New York, killing 38 people and injuring nearly two hundred more, in an explosion of light and sound. The actors left a trail of leaflets which read “Remember, we will not take it any longer. Free political prisoners or it will be sure death of all of you,” and was signed by “Anarchist Fighters.”

The Washington Post, at the time, called the bombing “an act of war.” In the pages of American History this attack, which shut down the economic nerve center of American capitalism, is considered the first act of American terrorism. No surprise then that ninety-one years and one day later–September 17th 2011–a call issued by the Canadian anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters to shut down Wall Street again–this time with a 20,000 person occupation– warranted extra attention from the state. But on the day of the proposed action, a demonstration of only a few thousand people neared Wall Street, protesting economic injustice. The police successfully pushed the demonstration to Zuccotti Park (which occupiers later renamed Liberty Park) sweeping the demonstration from the very space which it sought to disrupt and into the corner. This park, like most parks and squares in American cities, has gradually been emptied of life by anti-social ordinances to keep people from inhabiting it, or even sharing any meaningful amount of time within it. Thus ensued the ‘festival’ atmosphere which would characterize much of the ‘Occupy’ movement. This celebratory tone of social movements is familiar to activists and wholly apart from the realm of conflict. The speed with which this was accomplished was not only due to the size of the demonstration, a mere 2,000 people, but also a result of the strength of the planned police repression by the city.

The level of police control over the event signals the potential threat that occupations contain. There was nearly one NYPD officer for every 15 people present, including police in full riot gear. The NYPD issued a 10 pm curfew for the area and shut down the power on the blocks of the occupation in order to encourage people to leave. After the police arrested 700 people for marching on the Brooklyn bridge, occupations appeared in numerous cities around the nation. The tactic of occupying public space generalized to hundreds of cities in the U.S. within weeks and within a month there were more than one thousand occupations nation wide.

As diverse as the context of the occupations may have been given their relative geographic proximity, the organizing committees were united by a central theme: insistence upon lawfulness. The official calls to “Occupy” were thick with the language of the law, going so far in New York as to insist “the sovereign people of any nation have the right to guide the destiny of their nation and may do so by respecting the law.” September 17th was to be peaceful day of rage. The internet overflowed with ‘how to’ manuals designating appropriate, and legal, demonstrator tactics.

The occupations in the United States claimed inspiration from North Africa and Europe, and in doing so reduced the rebellious occupations of Tahrir Square to calls for Western-style democracy. By understanding the Egyptian insurrection as a non-violent movement for democracy, the American occupy activists affirm their own pacifism and cry for so-called “real democracy.” This obscures from view the general discontent with the global capitalist system.

The 2011 Oakland General Strike

Oscar Grant Plaza is named after a man who was killed by Bay Area transit police on New Year’s day in 2009. In response Oakland saw days of rioting. When an occupation began in the plaza in October of 2011, and shortly thereafter received an eviction notice from the city government, it thus came as no surprise that the occupiers’ response was uncompromising. The memory of those riots, and a widespread hatred for the police in general, formed the back drop of a scene ripe for social upheaval. The response to the eviction notice read:

Social rebels from around Oakland have created a genuine autonomous space free of police and unwelcome to politicians. Whereas other occupations have welcomed police and politicians into the occupation, negotiating with them, Oakland has carved a line in the cement. That line of demarcation says: If you pass, if you try and break or shadow this autonomous space, you are well aware what we are capable of.

Nonetheless, the government’s attack came on October 25, with police from 18 Northern California jurisdictions – from cities as far away as Vacaville, Fremont, and Palo Alto – and was a militarized operation. The 600 cops, outfitted with riot gear and backed by armored vehicles and helicopters, moved in, preemptively shooting tear gas canisters and “beanbag” rounds and throwing flash-bang grenades.

Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen had his skull fractured by a tear gas canister which was fired directly at his head, and as others came to his rescue another cop threw a grenade directly at them. Videos of this went viral on the internet, helping to catalyze the growing anger into concrete actions. On October 26th the General Assembly of Oakland called for a General Strike for November 2nd. In the United States only 11.9% of the working class is unionized; for much wider involvement would be required for a successful general strike.

No General Strike has happened in the United States since 1946 when, also in Oakland, one hundred thousand people successfully shut down the city. On the day of November 2nd no one was certain if the general strike would indeed occur. We have yet to see a thorough analysis of the composition of strikers that day, but tens of thousands of people–as many as 100,000 by larger estimates–turned out to the marches and, despite serious conflicts with non-violent activists and citizens protecting property from people intent on destroying it, the day was considered a victory. In fact, the crowds of otherwise good citizens cheered when bank windows were shattered, a reaction seldom seen in the United States and surely an indicator of growing discontent with the capitalist order. The ports of Oakland were shut down for the day both by the mobs of demonstrators surrounding them, and by the Longshoreman union of port workers, who participated in the strike.

Since the general strike in Oakland the occupied encampments have been contested terrain, with police evicting them and demonstrators re-occupying.

Police Repression

The police repression of most occupations has been swift and brutal. In Atlanta the police evicted a group of 200 people from Troy Davis park with 100 police including riot squads, helicopters, and cops on horseback. In North Carolina, after a building was occupied for only one day, the police invaded with assault rifles to evict the occupation in the early hours of the morning. This display of force is intended to dissuade occupy activists from escalating the situation further by taking buildings, action which constitutes a real threat to capitalism.

The state is employing a familiar tactic to disrupt this movement–tiring people out with the threat of lengthy court procedures and serious legal charges. In the first month of occupations there had been over three thousand arrests, and hundreds more since.

While the overt repression by the police makes their role inarguable, there are less apparent forms that police disruption could take. Repeatedly, some elements of the movement call for police to join the occupations as part of the 99% and police unions have endorsed the occupation in Baltimore, Maryland. Clearly, the asphyxiation that the inclusion of police would have on the already pro law-and- order occupations is one possible dead end that the occupations face.

All across the country the state employs a two fold strategy to strangling the occupations: the inclusion of the occupations within the paradigm of the law and the simultaneous exclusion of its violent potential force. In places such as Sacramento district attorneys have refused to prosecute protestors, speaking up in support of the movement. In Orange County, California, tents were declared by the city to be legally protected “free speech.”

In Seattle, where occupiers have refused to cooperate with city officials and instead have used the encampment as a base to plan actions against banks and foreclosures, the police have attacked demonstrators indiscriminately. They are now under scrutiny after a crowd was wildly pepper-sprayed while complying with police by moving out of the street and on to the sidewalk. Among them was an 84 year old woman. The image of her tear-streaked face became the photo opportunity for the pacifists to tout their self-fulfilling logic which mistakes publicizing the brutality of the police for a substantive critique of the police-state-apparatus. She has now appeared as a guest on international progressive media such as Democracy Now. Also among those attacked by the police at this demonstration was a pregnant woman, who the police kicked and hit in the stomach with a bicycle, then pepper sprayed.
She was rushed to the hospital, but still suffered a miscarriage. This very brutal and publicized attack comes as another in a long string of unprovoked violence from Seattle police, who faced both a militant anti-police movement in the streets and the beginning of a Federal investigation last winter.

More interesting still, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted to a conference call between at least 18 other city leaders to address the problem of the occupations, and specifically to address the problem of anarchist involvement:

I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them. And what I think you’re starting to see is that the Occupy movement is looking for more stability. I spent a lot of last week talking to peaceful demonstrators, ones who wanted to separate themselves in my city away from the anarchist groups who had been looking for a confrontation with the police.

The conference calls were organized by the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group, one of the 17,000 police agencies in the country. The former Seattle chief of police, Norm Stamper, in an interview following the most recent brutal incident of police repression in Seattle, articulated the insidious strategy that police agencies across the country should be employing against Occupy demonstrations:

If the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard –and it is hard work– to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, “We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue.”

The triumph of American policing is this partnership that Stamper eludes to. Programs devoted to the furtherance of identification with authority are the most effective way that the policing apparatus functions, at once reducing the material role of the police in society and more than doubling its unpaid workforce.

A society whose central strategy for control is observation and localized containment sees its greatest threat in that which it cannot identify. Thus, by identifying the conflictual elements as “anarchist”, the police and politicians have gotten something right and at the same time made a gross and self-assuring leap. The forces of disorder in this situation are not, in fact, anarchist alone. They are much more broad, more multitudinous than the forces of order have imagined.

III. Dead Ends

The Ballot Box as Coffin

In a moment we will explore the potentials for the Occupy movement to become a real threat to capital. For now, we will dedicate some thought to the various dead ends the movement may face.

Overt repression of a movement is the simplest termination to understand, but also the least likely that this movement will face. A brutal or violent suppression of a protest movement that has mostly agreed to play by the rules could cause a crisis of legitimacy for the American state and cause the demonstrations to increase rapidly in size and intensity. In United States society, even the staunchest of good citizens holds the belief in “freedom of speech” as a practically sacred right. For this and other reasons, a far more likely outcome, and a more efficient avenue for the state, is the violent suppression of any uncontrollable elements of the movement combined with the seamless recuperation of its more digestible elements.

The more liberal of America’s two political parties immediately moved to absorb the Occupy movement as a movement for voters in next year’s presidential election. There is a reason that the reigning president of the United States and other political functionaries of the Democratic party have officially endorsed the Occupy movement. It is important to remember that Obama’s last election campaign was experienced as a “grassroots” “activist” event for so many American voters who essentially cast a ballot for “change” from the stifling climate of the Bush era. The swindle was effective, and Obama was voted in wearing the mask of the activist politician; he then proceeded to carry on business as usual. Like the most formulaic of Hollywood sequels, it would be completely unsurprising for the Democratic architects to repackage the same script again. Their campaign to woo occupiers could even be timed cleverly: a long winter spent sleeping in tents and being beaten and pepper sprayed by police could revive the exhausted, naive belief that one’s troubles can be voted away.

The citizens’ values that the middle class carries into the movement prepare the occupations to be buried in the ballot box. Through insisting on a discourse and practice grounded in non-violence and at times even legality (highlighted, for example, in the ridiculous claim that the Egyptian insurrection was a “non-violent revolution,” a common farce in the American movement at least until Egyptian comrades addressed it directly in their beautiful statement, “Letter from Cairo”), one that affirms the very same values the state claims to defend and honor, such as free speech and democracy, and limited to a critique of “corporate greed” rather than the alienating and dispossessing social relationship of capitalism, liberals attempt to remove any rough edges that would prevent the movement from integrating smoothly into the dominant political apparatus. Furthermore, in contrast to acting directly to abolish alienation together for ourselves and our desires, as in insurrection, to center activity on indignation and protest implies a continued belief in some authority who can hear and possibly grant our demands. Here we recall an anecdote from the indignados movement of Barcelona: the same pacifists of the plaza movement who would cry “non-violent movement!” and “provocateur!” at individuals who dared to so much as block traffic during the occupation of Plaza Catalunya nonetheless took a liking to the common Catalonian anarchist slogan, “No one represents us.” It soon became a popular slogan in the indignados movement, but in passing from the anarchists to the pacifists its meaning altered significantly without the changing of a single word. Whereas anarchists have used the slogan to mean “we won’t allow anyone to represent us,” the new significance seems to be, “we are protesting because we have been insufficiently represented.” This position begs for the response of better representatives.

One perspective from U.S. comrades has been that, while a critique of these limiting ideologies must be persistently present in the occupations in order to keep the situation from becoming controlled by political parties or would-be leaders, it is only through participation in struggle that American citizens will lose their illusions. For example, the infuriating and common argument at multiple encampments that the police should not be vocally–and certainly not violently–opposed because “they too are a part of the 99%” will not die out because of superior anarchist arguing against the role of the police in the protection of capital, but through citizens’ own direct experience with police brutality. Indeed, already

the tone of the relationship between demonstrators and police has changed as police have repeatedly used chemical weapons and so-called “less lethal” ammunition to disperse peaceful protestors. But the strength of the citizen identity should not be underestimated: one popular reaction to the police violence has not been to fight back but to claim that police should not be beating passive demonstrators, but rather doing their jobs and arresting them. In Seattle, a protest against police violence recently took the position that police should join the movement. In Washington D.C., when members of the encampment were asked by the media why the police had let them be while encampments in New York, Oakland, and Portland were being evicted, they cited their “very good working relationship with the police” and, of course, their commitment to non-violence.

The seemingly tireless drive to keep the movement as civil and non-threatening as possible has not barred some radicals from predicting that the political apparatus will incapable of co-opting the Occupy movement. It’s worth remembering that the anti-war movement of the early 2000s swelled to massive proportions (with 800,000 marching against the ruling political party in New York City in 2004, dwarfing any given day of all occupations in America combined) but was in the end completely disempowering, more or less terminating in the dead end of a failed voter’s movement against Bush. But this situation is different: whereas the anti-war movement was largely dominated and organized by liberal and leftist non-governmental organizations, according to reports from comrades in the U.S., their attempts to co-opt or control the current movement have been laughably inadequate. Combining this with the simple fact that for a long time very few people have taken elections seriously in the U.S., with the majority nearly always abstaining from voting at all, perhaps it is true that the electoral machine will be powerless to transform the Occupy movement into a voter’s mobilization. Still, this conclusion merely begs the question of what form recuperation will take, and to answer this we must look more closely at the more insidious pitfalls that may be laid by radicals themselves.

Prefiguring What? On Guarding the Old World in the Shell of the New

The more optimistic of radicals have not hesitated to call the Occupy movement a “true revolutionary moment.” Indeed, the movement seems to be growing, and for the most part the overt repression we have already described has only seemed to bring more people into the streets. It remains to be seen if this will continue after the latest wave of coordinated evictions described above. But assuming for a moment that the occupations will in fact continue to grow, we must analyze exactly what kind of revolution might be happening. Those who make revolutions by halves are only digging their own graves, and any revolution that fails to constitute a real crisis to capitalism–the realization of communism and anarchy–will wind up providing capitalism with the modifications it needs to survive the superficial crises of its own design. To some, it may seem extraordinarily pessimistic to propose that what some are considering the most inspiring social movement of their lives may actually be the creation of the new forms of social organization through which the dominant order will survive. But it isn’t hard to imagine that, in a world turned upside down by capital, social movements would be animated by the need to resolve the internal contradictions of capitalism in order to ensure its survival for another era, rather than the drive to set the world on its feet.

History is the graveyard of all our ancestors’ half-revolutions, and anarchists should know the tombstones by heart. Here we would like to offer a very recent example of the ways that new modes of struggle offered by radicals quickly become the dominant and ubiquitous modes of alienated survival under capitalism. In 1999, Indymedia was developed in Seattle as a way to break capitalist control of the media through decentralized, participatory content generation, publication, and editing. The new potentials of communication that were opened by the technological developments of the internet age were seized upon by radicals as new opportunities for self-representation and self-organization. Less

than a decade later, the internet is completely dominated by user-generated content and self- representation, from Facebook to news blogs–but this is almost entirely corporate controlled and for- profit. Social media is the most glaring example of modern alienation–individuals brought together in their isolation–and it is also widely known that the State relies heavily on social media to spy on activists and radicals. Meanwhile (in the United States at least) the Indymedia network has largely fallen into disuse. The change Indymedia activists offered in the way news was communicated was a “radical” change in the sense that it was drastically different from what preceded it, but the social movements it was a part of were not sufficiently “radical” in that they did not successfully cut to the root of the alienation. As such, the tactical developments of radicals of that era sadly look, in retrospect, to be voluntary experimentation to discover the new forms of domination.

The optimistic radicals and anarchists are cheerleading the forms the Occupy movement has taken–the widespread use of occupation as a tactic, the creation of self-managed encampment communities, the refusal of leaders and the use of general assemblies and consensus–but we must also consider that the experimentation offered by this movement may in time pave the terrain of the future repressive society. Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and progressive author, has spoken in defense of the occupations by characterizing them as “prototypes for a new way of living.” In his article for CNN, “Beta-testing the New Society,” he explains that occupiers are developing new social forms, such as an alternative currency, that will help society change from a “competitive, winner-takes-all” attitude to the “mutual aid” of “local production and commerce, credit unions, unfettered access to communications technology and consensus-based democracy.” If we are to believe Rushkoff, the occupations are not a tactic for the abolition of capitalism and government but rather the catalyst for the adaptation they need to survive after the crisis. This argument compliments the position of an article from the capitalist journal International Business Times entitled, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” which explains the occupations should be understood (from a pro-”corporate capitalism” perspective) as “’round one’ of a reform process” for “economic and fiscal reform” against the “risk and greed” that caused the meltdown of 2008. This brings to mind the unfortunate image of occupiers carrying signs reading “We’re not anti-capitalism; we’re anti-greed!” after the routine red-baiting of right wing news stations.

If the occupiers cannot develop strategies to truly threaten capitalism, the best they will be able to accomplish is a self-managed austerity. While the economy cannot or will not provide jobs and homes for people, and while the state cuts the meager amount of social spending that existed before, self- organized encampments provide food, makeshift shelter, entertainment, a feeling of community, some semblance of medical care, and free classes, as well as the personal fulfillment of participation in a political process. This last point is important, because it is critical to understand beyond material elements what the occupations may be providing for people that they can no longer get from the political system. At the same time that disillusionment with democratic representatives soars, capitalism seemingly no longer has any use for the people who have relied on the dual role they are now denied–worker/shopper–for their very identities. This could create a very volatile and unstable situation for power, and left unaddressed would likely contribute to an increase in riots that generalize– with insurrections that are totally irrational and uncommunicative to democratic government and capital becoming the “general strike” of the new era.

From this vantage, it becomes clear that the real risk the occupations face is worse than the usual “pressure release” feature of social movements; rather, what we could see is the self-organization of communities for survival and self-fulfillment out of the way of the capitalism that no longer has place for them in its chains. Democracy can even survive–and function more efficiently–as a totalitarian social mode by moving from the ballot boxes to the squares, carried on in the hearts of the good citizens who make up the assemblies. If the Occupy movement can only manage to become a

revolution by half, it is prefiguration of the worst kind: the living death of participatory austerity capitalism; an inversion of an old anarchist slogan: the preservation of the old world in the shell of the new.

IV. Potential

“Popular struggle is obviously not fit to strike any large scale blows but like something vaporous and fluid it should not condense anywhere.”

–Clausewitz

From Event to Experience

In order to discern, in the chaotic confusion of the Occupy movement, where exactly the potentials lie, it is indicative to look at where power reveals itself to be threatened. It’s significant that, for the first two months, most cities have been somewhat accommodating of the occupations–as long as they stay stationed in innocuous spaces, away from the machinery of power they could disrupt. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg again took the position, as with the 2004 demonstrations against Bush, that the city government was happy to respect the “free speech” of protestors, so long as they remained within the confines of the law–and the police barricades that kept them off Wall Street.

A lesser-known example illustrates this: in Seattle, occupiers first camped out in a park at the heart of the city’s financial district. The mayor of Seattle–a progressive–publicly endorsed the occupation while also calling on the police to routinely harass protestors by enforcing the law to its most absurd extent, including a rule against tents and against sleeping in public parks. While the demonstrators were enduring the rain and the harassment of police who arrested anyone who so much as sat down with an umbrella, and who shined their flashlights in the eyes of anyone trying to sleep, the mayor graciously extended an offer for the encampment to move to the property surrounding city hall, where the occupiers would be welcome to set up tents and use the public restrooms. After much debate between the liberals who were willing to work with city officials and who saw the offer as a victory and the more radical elements who instinctively distrusted the invitations of the powerful, the camp decided to stay at the park and face the police harassment. The Seattle occupation eventually moved its headquarters to a university campus, using the encampment as a center to plan actions against banks and the occupation of foreclosed homes in the area. Because the occupation has deliberately chosen to maintain its oppositional power, the police continue to wage war on it, as described above.

As we have noted, it is precisely where the occupations have boldly moved from symbolic protest to active disruption of the apparatuses of power that police have enacted the most heavy-handed violence. If we accept, then, that the encampments themselves as protests are not threatening to the state or capitalism, and that the violent repression of any movement in the direction of occupying private property reveals how this movement might actually become threatening to power, how do we explain the coordinated evictions of encampments in New York, Portland, Denver, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Oakland a little over a week ago? Without discounting the valuable contributions of

some lesser-known occupations, in our analysis the coordinated evictions are the state’s response to the Oakland occupation’s strategic escalation against capital, and its fear that such action may spread to other occupations. The developments in Oakland are inspiring and unprecedented. From its beginning, the Oakland occupation–or the Oakland commune, as some have taken to calling it–has insisted on its autonomy from the state and from capital. It has shaped itself to be not a protest encampment but a realization of a radical being together in which police and politicians are explicitly unwelcome and the laws and property of capitalists are disregarded. It has openly evoked the power of the city’s recent riots. In fact, the mayor of Oakland, who has tried to play a similar game as the mayor of Seattle in simultaneously endorsing the occupation while also authorizing police violence against it, was chased from the occupation by the angry crowd when she tried to address it. Most importantly, the occupation has not contented itself with being a mere alternative to the larger society outside of it, and has reacted to repression with an offensive against capitalism: the call for a general strike. While, for the sake of strategic clarity, the significance of this event should not be exaggerated or mythologized, it should be noted that this first call for such a strike since 1946 did not come from the labor bureaucracy’s representatives, but from an autonomous assembly.

The coordinated evictions that followed the general strike were the state’s preemptive blow to prevent such developments from spreading. When thousands of demonstrators stormed and occupied capitol building of Madison, Wisconsin in 2011, police first fiercely guarded the government halls, and then were called off so that the movement against austerity could be defeated elsewhere: in the courts. The truth is that, in our era, the real reason for the police to viciously defend a territory is to keep an unruly population from discovering that there is nothing there, and that power resides elsewhere. The developments in Oakland have provoked the state to evict as many encampments as possible not in order to keep people from holding the parks (or, even more ridiculous, because of the health and safety hazards cited by local governments to justify the raids.) Rather, by breaking up the encampments, the state has temporarily forestalled the possibility of people discovering that the plazas and parks mean nothing other than an opportunity to break with everyday life, find each other, and then spread the occupations everywhere else, including the major power arteries of the capitalist system all around us. It is only by relentlessly pursuing war against the dominant social order that the occupations can become communes, and not the experimental ground from which capitalism is reformed.

From Intelligible to Inoperative

What next? In response to the coordinated evictions, the Oakland commune has again gone on the offensive, this time calling for the coordinated shutdown of all West Coast ports on December 12th. All West Coast occupations now have their work cut out for them to plan their own attacks under the duress of the police attacks on their material bases. The trap that is laid now is for occupiers to fall into circular battles merely to keep the parks as protest spaces–especially if those battles are largely played out as courtroom dramas, as is happening currently in New York.

While occupying everything is a tall but necessary order for the still young Occupy movement of America, demanding nothing seems to have occurred quite naturally. Although Adbusters advised that demands could be decided at Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly, thus far the movement has presented no official demands. This is to its benefit. The Occupy movement has been far too undefinable, fluid, leaderless, and chaotic to reach consensus on any list of demands, and any list that could be compiled from participants would be self-contradictory. It has not even been formally decided to demand nothing–this is just the de facto position of a movement whose participants are motivated not by a common program or platform, but by general discontent and a preference not to continue on with business as usual.

Needless to say, any effort to speak on behalf of the movement and offer an intelligible demand to power should be resisted and shut down, and this is far easier to accomplish in a movement organized through general assemblies than in previous social movements dominated by non-governmental power concentrations. The more the Occupy movement has no regard for capitalism and its laws and protectors–the more its aims are incomprehensible to power–the better. What some have described as the confusion of this movement is in fact one of its greatest strengths in that it contributes to the movement’s uncontrollable nature. By declining demands–or any dialogue with power–while expanding their occupations, the occupiers can refuse to acknowledge any authority other than their own. This undefined opposition is far more threatening to power than articulate protest, which can be digested and reworked back into the system.

The most revolutionary potential of this situation lies not in the building of a movement of some mass identity, but in the Occupy movement superseding itself by remaining a fluid, moving, and thickening fog of non-subjects realizing their desires and material needs in the immediate. This is a far cry from the current situation, and would require the destruction of the very identities now used as fortresses from which to wage struggle. We have already seen that the old forms of struggle, the general strike, can be invoked not by the old powers of labor bureaucracies or leftist political parties, but by the incoherent commune of Oakland. On this new terrain, we will witness the clashing of inoperative resistance and the identity of the middle class citizen, which will either crack under duress or which will prove itself strong enough to carry on the values of the old world–its cult of work, democracy, and alienation. We necessarily must also bring on the destruction of radical identities. The anarchist, with all her preconceived notions of how a revolution is set in motion, must also lose her specialized role in the fog, although not her wits. It is more important to find all the new pathways to generalizing revolt than to have the biggest, strongest, or most destructive black bloc. If an insurrection is to come, we will need more and more riots–not specialized rioters.

It is fair to recognize the difficulty and the immensity of the tasks of the revolution that wants to create and maintain a classless society. It can begin easily enough wherever autonomous proletarian assemblies, not recognizing any authority outside themselves or property of anybody whatsoever, placing their will above all laws and specializations, will abolish the separation of individuals, the commodity economy and the State. But it will only triumph by imposing itself universally, without leaving a patch of territory to any form of alienated society still existing.

Lost Children’s School of Cartography, November 2011

Denouement

reoccupied — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:33:20 +0000

211. IN THE LANGUAGE of contradiction, the critique of culture manifests itself as unified: unified in that it dominates the whole of culture — culture as knowledge as well as culture as poetry; unified, too, in that it is no longer separable from the critique of the social totality. It is this unified theoretical critique that goes alone to its rendezvous with a unified social practice.

Occupiers Evicted From the New School; Graffiti Is Left Behind
November 26, 2011, 3:49 PM
via nytimes

A weeklong occupation at the New School in Greenwich Village ended with a whimper on Friday morning when university officials evicted the handful of remaining protesters from a campus gallery that was defaced sometime before they left.

But the events leading up to that point were uncertain, as some of those who had participated in the occupation said they did not know who the evicted demonstrators were or why slogans were scrawled on the walls of the ground-floor gallery. (One read, “Spoiled New School Anarchists.”)

“I don’t understand how people could’ve painted that and no one notice,” said Chris Crews, a graduate student at the New School who participated in the protest. “It’s unclear how they even got there.”

Senior administrators, including the university’s president, David E. Van Zandt, entered the gallery about 9:30 in the morning. They found it covered with graffiti. They also found about five people, some of whom were sleeping. When none of them produced identification, school or otherwise, they were asked to leave, a New School spokesman said.

Most of the people looked like they were more than 30 years old, said a university spokesman, Peter Taback, who accompanied Dr. Van Zandt.

The New School demonstration started at the university’s student study center on the second floor of 90 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 14th Street, to protest the escalating costs of higher education. But the school leases the space, and the landlord, a company controlled by the real estate developer Aby Rosen, wanted the protesters out of the building.

Dr. Van Zandt — who was chosen last year as the successor to Bob Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska and presidential candidate — had offered the nearby gallery, at 2 West 13th Street, as an alternative location, but on the conditions that the protesters not sleep there or scrawl graffiti on the walls, as had been done in the other space. He said, however, that the gallery, which was not displaying any art, would be open 24 hours a day.

Dr. Van Zandt’s offer was a controversial proposition within the New School protest, which began on Nov. 17 with about 100 participants after a rally in Union Square and was an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Protesters and their supporters met in the study center Tuesday evening and voted to move to the new space. Some made their way to the gallery on West 13th Street throughout the week, with their numbers fluctuating by the day, but did not spend nights there. A small group of hard-line protesters, however, refused to leave the original space, on Fifth Avenue.

“To occupy a space that was given to us is antithetical to what many of us believe in,” said Ian McKenzie, who identified himself as a student at Pratt Institute and was one of the final demonstrators at the study center.

End of the Beginning of the End of the Beginning

reoccupied — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 23:51:12 +0000

808. However, the other aspect of spirit’s coming-to-be, history, is that mindful self- mediating coming-to-be – the spirit emptied into time. However, this emptying is likewise the self-emptying of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This coming-to-be exhibits a languid movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of pictures, of which each, endowed with the entire wealth of spirit, moves itself so slowly because the self has to take hold of and assimilate the whole of this wealth of its substance.