The New School Reoccupied

NYU Solidarity Statement with Cooper Union Occupation

reoccupied — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:02:02 +0000

December 5, 2012

Dear Occupied Cooper Union,

We were inspired to hear of your occupation and see the red fabric unfurled from your windows, so near our own. We have visited, hung around, and we will continue to do so and offer whatever we have that you might need. The past 48 hours have energized us, have challenged us to seek the places we could revivify our struggle on our campus, have helped us to remember fully and to refocus our attentions. But even as we are prompted to look back and recognize the many student struggles that feed your occupation, we equally recognize the absolute urgency of today. We hope this occupation will be infectious. We need it to be so. December 2012 is a tipping point for Cooper Union, but Cooper Union today must be a watershed for our student movement. We are grateful and excited.

In the president’s meeting today, some in the crowd shouted that to expect free tuition is incomprehensible. This position – that education without tuition is ludicrous – is often bolstered by comparing no- or low-fee institutions like yours to those like our own, whose undergraduate fees amounts to a sum more or less equal to the median yearly income of NYC households. Somehow, our situation, in which the entire yearly earnings of a family would be spent on one students’ tuition, in a city in which income and work are so thoroughly striated by gender, race, and legal status – this is somehow more plausible.

What logic makes something that was possible in June seem unthinkable in December? Cooper Union was free, just as CUNY was in 1970 (following an occupation by Black and Puerto Rican students demanding open admissions). Why not now? Administrators claim spikes in tuition are a natural offshoot of the crisis, as if it wasn’t the administrations’ plans that made the university vulnerable to the vicissitudes of capitalist crisis in the first place. Jamshed Bharucha rehearses an argument typical of adminstrators’ euphemistic austerity boosting: Cooper Union’s funding structure was “shortsighted.” Cooper Union is a relic in an age of student debt, that mechanism that perpetually defers the crisis by deflecting it onto working class futures. We do not let pass without notice the deep irony of calling free education shortsighted while the average trade of financial equity brokers lasts a matter of microseconds.

As we roam through the rubble of financialization’s impact on higher education, it is clear that pressuring administrations to find new investors for endowments is not a solution. Should, then, we press for a reclamation of the welfare state, and recenter public education in the production and stabilization of a fully-employed working class? Let us be clear: there is no going back. Industrialists like Peter Cooper founded free schools in capitalist societies, and we live this contradiction coming to a head. So, we turn away from administrators, from capitalist benefactors, from the talking heads and the haters. We turn to your occupation, recognizing it as the only kind of place in which we can think through and construct the education, and society, we want.

Yours,

Some feminist faculty and students at NYU

New School Students Stand in Solidarity with Cooper Union Occupiers!

reoccupied — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 21:42:22 +0000

We, students of the New School, stand in solidarity with Cooper Union students who are currently occupying the 4th and 8th floors of the Foundation Building to protest threatened tuition implementation. At the New School, we are by now very familiar with tuition increases to fund enormous new development, a lack of financial transparency, and the barring of student participation in decision making. As the 60 5th Avenue building continues to rise we are sinking into more private and federal debt.

We support Cooper Union’s Save our School’s demands:

1. Cooper Union maintains its commitment to free education

2. Cooper Union immediately implements increased financial transparency

3. That President Bharucha step down.

Standing in front of the CU occupation, we are reminded that nothing will change unless we continue to fight together and show solidarity across schools and universities. We see this struggle in the context of the privatization of education and the crisis of capitalism.

President Bharucha told CU students today that CU has reached a limit for free education. How is it that an institution like Cooper Union, which survived for 159 years (through other crisis) suddenly faces an insurmountable crisis that challenges its core principles of education ‘as free as water and air’? In our struggles as student and workers, we resist the idea that shouldering their debt is the solution.

The way the administration chooses to deal with this crisis has been to push this burden onto students, workers, and faculty. How is it that while the students around the world (Canada, Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico, Italy, Greece and many others) continue to fight for free, accessible education, we in the United States are expected to accept a fate of limited exclusive education and ever increasing debt?

We support Cooper Union students who have taken necessary measures to make their voices heard. When the administrators prevent access to information, when the board members decide the future of students behind closed doors, it becomes clear that we as students have no choice but to occupy behind barricaded doors.. Students and workers should not depend on leaked documents about the financial future of their schools. It is absolutely necessary, in all schools, that we directly participate in the discussion of budgets and projects through action.

SOLIDARITY WITH COOPER UNION// WE WILL NOT PAY FOR YOUR CRISIS//

ALL POWER TO THE OCCUPATIONS!

From Passive to Active Spectacle: Afterimages of the LA Riots

reoccupied — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:41:41 +0000

via bayofrage.com

[written to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the LA riots, one of the most significant events in recent US history – r&d]

LOS ANGELES, March 3, 1991 – On the shoulder of the freeway, police are beating a man. Because we are in the US, and because the man is black, we will know that this is a routine event, an ordinary brutality, part of the very fabric of everyday life for non-whites. But something is exceptional this time. There is an observer, as there often is, but the observer holds in his hands an inhuman witness, a little device for producing images which are accepted as identical with the real. The images – grainy, shaking with the traces of the body behind them – enframe this event, defamiliarize it, make it appear in all its awfulness as both unimaginable singularity and example of a broader category of everyday violence. The recorded beating of Rodney King marks, as many have noted, the beginning of one of the most significant episodes of US history. But few have examined this event in terms of the transformative effects it exerted upon contemporary spectacle and its would-be enemies. By spectacle, we mean here those social relations and activities which are mediated directly by the representations, whether visual or verbal, which capital has subsumed (that is, remade according to its own imperatives).

For us, the advent of the Rodney King video marks the first major shift in the political economy of spectacle, which we choose to describe as a passage from passive to active spectacle, from spectacle as pacifying object of passive consumption to spectacle as the active product of the consumer (whose leisures or recreations have long since become forms of work). In its classical form, spectacle creates a situation in which “spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other” (Debord.) But at a certain point in its development, spectacle dispenses with the need for centralization, finding that passive consumers can quite easily be recruited to the production of spectacle. The shift from unilateral toward multilateral relations does not promise an end to isolation, but rather its perfection. We might think of the distinction here as the difference between the television screen and the computer screen, but since we are talking about a set of social relations as much as technological apparatuses, we should be careful to avoid identifying such relations with any particular technologies. The video camera is merely one of many devices which assist in the transformation of administered life into self-administered life.

But back to the origin story (like all origin stories, it’s partly myth). The mutation from passive to active spectacle begins, as seems properly literary, square in the middle of one of the most significant nerve-plexuses of the spectacular world: Rodney King is beaten to the edge of death a few miles from the studios of Burbank and Hollywood, while celebrities whizz by in Porsches and Maseratis. A routine event, an ordinary brutality, an everyday violence: a black man is pulled over by white police officers. They have some reason or another. There is always a reason, if only raison d’État. They beat King savagely, until he is almost dead. Perhaps they have gone a little too far this time, gotten a little overexcited? In any case, it’s nothing that can’t be taken care of, made to disappear with a few obfuscatory phrases in the police report. Except that, somehow, everything is different here. Recorded, duplicated, transmitted, broken down into the pixels of a million television screens, the video tape is more than evidence. It is self-evidence. And because these images are drained of all affect, reduced to pure objectivity, they can become the vehicle for the most violent and intense of affects.

The release of this video marks, more or less, the entrance into history of the video camera as weapon, as instrument of counter-surveillance. For a brief moment it does seem, for many, as if the truth really will set us free. As if the problem with capitalism was that people just didn’t know, just didn’t understand, just hadn’t seen what it’s really like underneath the ideological mist. Noam Chomsky’s politics as much as Julian Assange’s seem to hinge upon this kind of moment – so rare, really – when the release of information becomes explosive, as opposed to the thousands of other moments when the leaked photographs of government torture camps or the public records dump indicating widespread fraud and corruption fail to elicit any outrage whatsoever. From here and from the related forms of media activism which the Rodney King tape precipitates, there flows an entire politics of transparency, based on a correlation between the free circulation of information and freedom as such, which we will recognize as the politics of Wikileaks and the more-libertarian wing of Anonymous. But this is also the matrix from which emerges the ideology of the Twitter hashtag and the livestreamed video that so animates the Occupy movement and the 15 May movement in Spain, an ideology that seems incapable of distinguishing between OWS and #ows, between the massification of “tweets” around a particular theme and the massing of bodies together in an occupied square. As many of us will know from the experience of the last year, this is an ideology that speaks of democracy but reeks of surveillance, whose wish for a world transparent to all means that it sees a provocateur behind every masked face and unassailable virtue in all that is visible and unmasked.

But we have already skipped to the end, it seems, far from the infancy of active spectacle. At first, it’s true, the mass media display a certain hostility to these newer “participatory” forms of media distribution and production, which seem to threaten the centralized, unidirectional spectacle upon which the mass media are built. The various conglomerates even resort to outright repression on occasion. But from the very beginning it is startlingly clear that recuperation and neutralization are a far easier path. Take the industry of “news reporting,” for instance. As the cable channels shift over to 24/7 reporting, it is no longer sufficient to pursue the old spectacular schemata, creating, rather than merely reporting on, the various scandals and sensations. It is not enough to simply position the cameras in a certain spot and observe their effect on the filmed. The news must become co-extensive with the time of life itself. One must, therefore, do more than simply create novelties. In the era of active spectacle, one must create the proper conditions for the novel and newsworthy. But, as we know, the news has been manufactured to produce certain effects since long before the appearance of active spectacle. Reporters rarely pursue their prey, as one is led to believe. Instead, the reported-on must actively solicit coverage, since the various agencies will rarely venture out into the wild of lived experience. Why would they need to, when so much material is already manufactured to their specifications by corporations and governmental entities? Therefore, the periodization described above must be complicated a bit. The transformation that emerges with the video camera and social media is really a generalization of the capacity to produce the true which was, during the classical era of spectacle, limited to certain elites. Active spectacle was, in its way, always nascent within passive spectacle. You just had to pay more for its privileges.

Every scandal loves a trial. And this is the age, let’s remember, of the blockbuster trial, the totally televised trial, followed droolingly by the recently developed 24/7 cable news channels still looking for content to fill out the hours. The 1990s: one could tell its story solely through the names King, Simpson, Clinton. And so the trial of the police officers begins, a trial that puts at stake the institution of the police itself, if only because the state must insist, in defending the officers, that their conduct was merely exemplary, that they were simply doing their job. But it is a trial in another sense, an experiment with a new form of publicity and sensationalism that places the courtroom square in the middle of every living room: it is a putting-on-trial of a new kind of reason, a new affect, and the various powers are reckless here in stoking a paranoid desire for apocalyptic violence. (Later, they will understand their own capacities better, and exhibit more circumspection in deploying such powers in unpredictable environments).

No one, therefore, is really all that surprised when – after the police officers who beat Rodney King are pronounced not guilty – thousands upon thousands of the invisible residents of this hypervisible city rise up to smash and burn and loot the very machinery which determines who gets seen and how. In this sense, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are a rare example of a struggle over the terms of representation which is not a diversion from struggle on the material plane but rather an incitement to it, perhaps because this is not a struggle for representation as much as it is a struggle againstrepresentation, one that puts into question the very means of deciding what gets seen or said, rather than the content of such seeing or saying. For a few nights, it promises the self-destruction of all our ways of making things visible or heard, a bonfire of the means of depicting and speaking which the most adventurous avant-garde could only dream about.

As noted, none of this controverts the extent to which these were bread riots, or their late 20^th-century equivalent – organized, as is the case with all looting, around a material expropriation of necessaries and luxuries alike. But perhaps, more importantly, crystallized around the hatred of commodities, a hatred whose satisfaction means, in fact, the slaking of a thirst almost as urgent as the need for the use-values themselves. We have to understand this as a period of outright war, when the number of people – black men, in particular – serving prison sentences increased by an order of magnitude, when cops were being trained by Special Forces who brought the “lessons” of the Central American counter-insurgency wars home to South Central Los Angeles. Which is to say that these were matters of life and death as well as recognition – closer to the original Hegelian story of life-and-death struggle for recognition than its pale electoral successors . One must see people stealing the video-cameras and televisions – the big-ticket appliances of which they bad been, for so long, the object – as an attempt to secure their very reality. To become subject, not object. Spectacle, for a brief moment, reveals its own fragility: transmitting, disseminating and relaying antagonism rather than muting and deflecting it. For a moment, self-representation is not the newest face of domination, an internalization of the enemy, but promises the destruction of all mediation, all intermediaries. Bill Cosby goes on TV to urge the rioters to return to their homes and watch the season finale of The Cosby Show.

In a certain manner, this project of expropriating the means of representation and transmission is an eloquent literalization of the music of the riots itself, hip hop, a music based upon the transformation of consumer electronics – the turntable, the home stereo – into instruments of musical production. Technologies which were once means of production – capital goods, in other words – become consumer products. But then, in a final turn, these consumer products become, once again, the means of production for a new generation of untrained musicians whose output is based upon appropriation and sampling, which are a particular kind of consumption-become-production. All the dreams of decentralization and horizontality which we will fondly remember in their suffusion through the 1990s begin here: the politics of the rhizome, the network, the galaxy, the autonomous nuclei. They begin here, with mass-produced consumer electronics whose drive is not only toward cheapening but miniaturization. It’s not just that information wants to be free; it wants to become a kind of gas, an array of volatilized nano-machines, circumambient, hyperlocative. “Copwatch” organizations and other counter-surveillance projects – taking the Rodney King video as their clarion call – spread faster and farther as the price of the camcorder falls, as it becomes smaller, lighter. They spread at the same rate as CCTV spreads, adorning every street corner in cities like Chicago and London. And, of course, tactical representation finds itself eminently suited to the politics of representation that dominates the liberal multiculturalism of the 1990s. An entire ethos is built upon this pedagogical and epistemological basis. Information and its dissemination becomes the means by which everyone can have their voice. The independent media initiatives that emerge at the end of the decade essentially elaborate upon this foundation: the free circulation of information as a placeholder for other freedoms.

In Los Angeles during the 1990s, this made a certain sense. We will render power visible, we thought. We will show everyone that the emperor has no clothes. We will show everyone who they are. Like the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s They Live, capable of revealing the slithering horror beneath the familiar present which our normal (that is, ideological) vision construes – the camcorder would disclose what others couldn’t see. It would be visceral and immediate in a way that language cannot, even if language is capable of making finer distinctions. But it would also make things seem unreal. It would also be an instrument of de-realization, shifting struggle from the ground of praxis toward the ground of epistemology, and from there toward questions of knowledge and ideology which, presumably, only the technicians of politics can solve for us. And so, in the wake of the riots, the recuperation begins. Like all recuperations, it will seem to precede, somehow, the acts of resistance from which it sprang, if only by erasing their real origin.

The shift from static, passive spectacle to dynamic, active spectacle is nothing other than this process of recuperation and subsumption. Charged with reproducing the social relations necessary for the continuation of capitalism, spectacle adjusts to its critique, subsumes it, offers up a series of false alternatives decorated in the bracing negativity of the day. Spectacle stages its own negation, the way a hunted criminal might stage her own death by leaving behind someone else’s corpse in place of her own. Spectacle in its classical phase proceeded by replacing all exchanges between persons with dead phrases and images subject to the whims of the commodity, with static and chatter designed to baffle and delay any intelligent action. It thwarted any meaningful activity by all manner of phantasms, false leads, cul-de-sacs and proxies. But its weakness was that it required the constant ministrations of a class of petit-bourgeois intermediaries, clericals, creatives and technicians, themselves the group most deeply colonized by spectacle. Active spectacle, on the other hand, does away with some portion of this class. Active spectacle is, first and foremost, a labor-saving device. It is a way of getting the consumer of spectacle to become the producer of spectacle, all the while pretending that this voluntary labor is, in fact, a form of freedom and greater choice, an escape from the stultifying imposition of this or that taste which the vertical power of the passive spectacle forces on us.

This is an alternate way to talk about the recuperation of negativity which has been ongoing since the 1970s. Everyone is familiar with this – the graffiti kids who add value to a neighborhood by fucking it up, giving it the right degree of color and edginess, and perhaps inspiring, with their visual style, some future generation of designers and advertisers. Eventually, as we all know, the great spread of alternative lifestyles and forms and subcultures that follow in the wake of the aborted liberations of the 1960s and 1970s find their final resting place in the boutique or the museum, and this process – let’s call it the turnover time of recuperation – is constantly accelerating. But the paradigmatic case here, the final profusion, comes in the realm of technology: the merger of home and office, work and leisure, effected by the personal computer means that one finally becomes the consumer of one’s own self-designed fantasias. These are tools for taking the dream of autonomy concealed in the notion of self-management and converting it into an efficient machine for exploitation and control – a way of making the cop and the boss immanent to our every activity. The miniaturization of information technology – which also means the recession and involution of all its working components, so that the surface can be humanized, made aesthetically pleasing – allows for control to be decentralized, networked, built from the ground up in new shapes and flavors. It is a way of spreading the bureaucratic protocols of office technology across the entirety of society.

Once the internet is streamlined, cheapened, and made easy-to-use, an entire political ontology gets attached to “the net”– its origin in military-industrial and bureaucratic protocols hidden beneath warm, “user-friendly” layers which promise the end of a merely unilateral media, promise a new media based upon participation, self-actualization, democracy, promise to free us from reliance upon authoritarian or hierarchical communication. It is a media, as many will claim, which encourages dissent rather than suppresses it, a media no longer dependent upon the massifications and conformities of the broadcast form. No longer the passive receiver of consumable representations, we become the co-creators of the conditions of our own subordination – we don’t merely choose from the 1001 flavors of horror on offer but actively create them, share them, use them as the basic substance of our connections to others, whether friend, enemy, or acquaintance. We are free to make and remake ourselves endlessly in the shape of a thousand avatars and personae. Never mind that these technologies depend, at root, upon standardized lumps of silica and copper and plastic, on the smoothing of electrical switches into reified patterns and routines, on the transformation of matter into algebra. For the various “independent media” initiatives, the internet is as fundamental an apparatus as the video-camera was for the copwatch programs.

The advent of blogging and the various social networking sites – MySpace, then Facebook, and finally (once everyone realized that anything worth saying in such fora could be said in 140 characters or not at all) Twitter – essentially build upon the protocols, models and values established by “independent media.” They represent the depoliticization of these forms, something easy to do since, from the start, “indymedia” as a concept was built around a false formalism. Because the website proved itself such an effective tool for the coordination of thousands of bodies at the counter-summit – distributing information about the location of rioting, tactical weaknesses, arrestees, food and medical services – it was obvious that it could also serve to coordinate thousands of bodies in other kinds of campaigns: advertising campaigns, fundraising drives, mobilizations for this or that political candidate. Social media: the term means that our sociality itself has become what is communicated, has become content, not form. No longer do we merely read the news: now we can write it, now we can make it even more banal and empty than before. Yes, everyone their 15 minutes of celebrity, except now these 15 minutes are broken up into millisecond-sized atoms of time, salted throughout our hours and days, held by invisible readers and contacts and “friends.” Here the voyeur meets the exhibitionist. Here the exhibitionist meets the voyeur. Here the most gregarious sociality and the most contorted narcissism are absolutely identical. Tellingly, new cellular phones now contain two cameras – one facing out into the world, away from the screen, and one reflecting back upon the ego.

But because active spectacle takes hostility toward spectacle as one of its primary fuel sources, because it is always cultivating such antagonism at the same time as it neutralizes it, there is always the possibility of explosive breakdown, the possibility that a violent proletarian content may become contagious. Such was the case when the WikiLeaks affair – initially subsumed almost completely by a libertarian logic of transparency and the free flow of information – transformed into a low-intensity cyberwar with the arrival of Anonymous, LulzSec and others. Although originally entirely devoted to a kind of Assangiste framework that cared only about the free flow of internet information (namely, porn, pirated media and software) – a position that still dominates much of their discourse – these groups eventually became frameworks into which more and more radical content could get injected, and now one routinely hears Anonymous communiqués cite various insurrectionary watchwords, and describe their enemy not as censorship but capitalism and the state as such. Perhaps more significantly, we can note the way in which technologies like Twitter – originally developed so that we could better market commodities to each other – are now used for all-out assaults on the commodity, used to organize proletarian flashmobs and rioting in the suburbs of London, in Baltimore and Kansas City and Milwaukee.

10 years later, we all recognize the limits of the anti-globalization movement, limits that still constantly reimpose themselves even if we have moved into a new age of austerity and riot. The antiglobalization movement failed by winning all that it won on the ground of representation alone. Not only were its politics essentially a representational critique of the representational (direct democracy); not only did it fight via representational means (media activism); but more importantly its focus remained limited to the representatives of multi-national capital: the institutions and ambassadors responsible for maintaining the international monetary and trade system. Over and over again, the countersummit conflated the representative institutions for the thing itself – moving back and forth between an attack on a proxy for capital, and capital itself.

It is obvious that this imprisonment within the imaginary is an effect of the very basis – a technopolitical basis – upon which these struggles are conducted, rather than the other way around. Representation is means, content and form: everyone has a camera at the protest and the dangers here are not only that one is unwittingly capturing evidence for the state, but that we are therefore entrapped within the imaginary, our finest moments rendered pornographic – that is, made into a simple conduit for charge or sensation, upon which any idea, no matter how fascist, can be overlaid.

Let’s put it bluntly: with only a few exceptions, the journalists whose presence at the demonstration or riot is vouchsafed by the camera are nothing other than the agents of the state, little different than informants in their attitude toward what transpires. Their feigned neutrality is the neutrality of “the citizen,” of public opinion, an enemy position. Except when used with incredible care and sensitivity and artfulness, the camera is basically an instrument of neutralization. We can have no tolerance for those who attempt to use our antagonism as stepping-stones in their career; nor can we tolerate the special rights and privileges which journalists want to claim, as if holding a camera or press-badge entitled them to exceptional status. This is liberalism’s phantasm – the materialization of the abstract personhood which has mangled our lives for centuries. In any case, the police no longer give a fuck. Everywhere there are new laws prohibiting the filming of police and they now routinely arrest peoplebecause they have a camera, not only to protect themselves from scandal but to collect evidence.

Surveillance and countersurveillance, spectacle and counterspectacle, then, merge together into one representational surround. Riot footage becomes an advertisement for jeans, as if shopping and destroying a shop were equivalent activities. If counter-surveillance aims to light up the unevenesses, the blotches and stains that the picture of the world hides, it also runs the risk, as all struggles do, of fighting on the ground of representation alone, and of winning thusly the mere representation of winning. Though we do not use the term in this sense exclusively, this is what it means to speak of “politics” in the pejorative sense – the translation of struggle to the realm of representation, either through the substitutionism of the assembly, the party, or the image-world. It means to fight representatives and proxies endlessly and pyrrhically, because capital is nothing more than this process of creating proxies. The catch is that, because they still believe that the question of representation is the question that must be answered, many anti-representational strategies – the participatory democracy of the general assembly, for instance – remain trapped within politics in the same way that the atheist remains trapped within religion because he or she takes seriously the question of god’s existence.

The one exception to this story of diversion to the ground of representation is the black bloc, which by its very nature refuses visibility. The black bloc emerges as a counterweight to the regime of hypervisibilty, emerges as the avenging angel of all that has been cast into the burning hell of the overlit world. It conjures a black spot which makes the illumination of the world all the more severe; it is a kind of “darkness visible,” as Milton says of Lucifer’s resting place. But at what point does this darkness become only its own visibility, a set of predictable movements and moments, easily recognized simply because it is the thing which refuses recognition? How often is it the case that the plate glass of the bank is shattered but the camera lens, with all of its frightening transparency, remains? One of the problems, here, as others have noted, is that the black bloc often distinguishes itself from the larger mass of people in the streets. Even if all identity inside the group is quickly liquidated by masks and black clothing, the bloc still affirms an identity – albeit a negative one – with regard to its environment. Rather than attempting an absolute negation of visibility, we might instead cultivate a kind of chiaroscuro effect, attending to the ebb and flow of light and shadow naturally at play in such situations. True anonymity is the anonymity of the crowd, the anonymity of people in regular dress who begin to throw rocks at cops, loot stores, and burn cars, and whose anonymity comes from their subtle commonalities with thousands upon thousands of other figures. (Though, of course, concealing one’s face is a precaution that can never be dispensed with, and should be actively encouraged on all occasions). The more it becomes possible for the active minority to merge with the anonymous crowd, to dissolve and abolish its own specificity at the height of the attack, the closer we come to the kind of riot which continues past the first night. Whether people continue to use black blocs is a practical matter, of course, and has to do with local conditions which cannot be evaluated in the abstract. But we must be honest about the limitations of the form, and note that there are anonymities superior to the black bloc, forms of self-abolition that do not establish a radical identity apart from the larger mass of people in the streets.

It is not, therefore, merely a question of creating “zones of offensive opacity.” Every opacity has its complementary transparency, and we must attend to both. We must be willing to make ourselves visible here, invisible there, and neither everywhere. Language, in this sense, is often superior to the photograph’s ontological trickery. We all recognize the power of the well-written communiqué or manifesto, the well-designed poster with the explosive phrase. This power is art, poetry, art that lives on, nevertheless, after the death of art. Taken up on the field of battle, conjoined with real practices of negation, this poetry – the beautiful language of our century, as it was once called – has a real explosive force, one that does not pass through reason and understanding alone, but which trades on affect, perception, sensation. The technical means we have at present for conveying such affects and perceptions are, let’s admit it, very weak – a series of pre-given filters and plug-ins which we can apply to this or that image or idea. Why is it, then, that the various radical milieus do not at present produce more films, more poetry and novels, communicate through drawings and illustrated stories as well as photographs? Why must we subordinate ourselves to a barren plain-style, on the one hand, and a mawkish sentimentalism on the other? Why do we accept the self-evidence of the very images which the state uses to speak about us? In expanding our capacities for thought and communication, in expanding the formal and technical means for such, we must learn to speak of and to each other in a way that takes exception with the way we are spoken about, which takes exception with the language of the status quo, the state. This is a matter of how we say such things as much as what we say. Active spectacle, let’s remember, hides the issue of content by allowing for modest transformations of the form of communication. This is why the transposition of the locus of questioning from what to howrelies on a weak understanding of recent history. Asking how has, for a long time now, been a counter-revolutionary question.

Late in life, in the midst of his drunken melancholia and paranoid rumination, Guy Debord entertained himself by inventing a chess-like game of war in which the chief innovation was the establishment of lines of communication between pieces. Pieces that were unconnected via intermediating, communicating pieces could not move at all. Debord understood, in this game as well as in his writing, that all struggles have a communicative dimension. The difference, however, between the situation we confront and the situation in Debord’s game is that we are forced to use the very same lines of communication as our enemy. Every one of our communications is at one and the same time an enemy transmission, part of the enemy system, part of spectacle. To operate effectively, to turn spectacle in its active form against itself, we have to examine our communications both from our own standpoint and the enemy’s, developing forms of communication which are transparent for us but opaque for them, which allow us to communicate and expand our ability to think and perceive collectively without assisting the state in its attempts to monitor and obstruct us, and which reach out to sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and comrades without giving away vital information to the enemy.

In this regard, matters of style are at one and the same time matters of survival.

Research & Destroy
Oakland, CA
April, 2012

Enter the Vandalists

reoccupied — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:41:53 +0000

(repost from magicmuscle blog)

Picture of the occupied condo building in Williamsburg by Stephanie Keith

On Saturday night a group apparently semi-related to Occupy Williamsburg threw a party in a vacant condo building. The party and its riotous aftermath have been covered by the New York Times, Village Voice, and the Daily News to name a few, but so far only one statement has been released from the occupationist side: a tract posted on anarchistnews.org titled “Enter the Vandalists” and signed by the “Geiseric Tendency,” possibly a reference to the historicVandal King.

Resorting to an automatism characteristic of their class, the gentry of Williamsburg summoned their militia to dissolve the siege being laid to a conspicuously empty palace of banality, newly erected in the heart of their  spectacular playground. The vandalists had recognized the inhospitablility to life of this sarcophagus for the young professional class, and did not shy from the conclusion that it lent itself only to defilement. The object of their critique was not limited to the class for whose consumption the condominiums that cover Williamsburg are  produced, but included the extreme boredom that the proliferation of these kinds of spaces induce. The prevalence of the condominium is a symptom of the spreading homotopia that is the Metropolis—the endless repetition of the same  forever.

The vandalists will not reconcile themselves to merely appropriating these habitats—designed for gradual atrophy, optimized for the most comfortable postponement of death. Rather, they want to see them recycled in the urban biosphere; turned into manure from which unforeseen species might emerge.

It will not only be the police, the rich, and the reactionary press that will slam the vandalists—activists  will likely join in as well, decrying the occupation as not being social enough, not populist enough. Why did it have to  be a party, with booze, hip hop music, and NO RULES? Why not an attempted squat? Why was the media not called?  Why was the action not ‘consensed’ upon in some public group? No one will understand the vandalists because they are not of either world; they seek neither professionalist capitalism nor professionalist activism. Perhaps if squatting a social center were still sometimes tolerated this desperate mayhem would not have occured, just as if there were anything to be  gained from joining Organized Labor or Revolutionary Parties perhaps we would not see the global masses chaotically rising against singular abstractions of all authority (Wall Street, Mubarak, the IMF, Money, etc).

Activists call protests, the vandalists instead call potlucks. Potlucks of destruction.

We can expect more Occu-parties and general bad citizenry from these vandalists leading up to an ultimate act of  descecration, an intelligibility strike, on May First.
-Geiseric Tendency

While the text undermines the social element of the occupation: a criticism of property relations in a city where there are more abandoned living spaces than homeless, it also speaks to an element of occupy many of its proponents want to bury: unruliness. In Oakland after the thwarted occupation of an abandoned convention center, a group of protesters broke into City Hall, damaging everything in site and burning an American flag. A building was alsooccupied, vandalized, and used for a party in Minneapolis.

Oakland Mayor Quan observing a damaged diorama in City Hall, comparing the riot to the 1906 earthquake.

Some commenters, such as the poster of this fantastic Youtube video showing hundreds of Oakland occupiers evading mass arrest, have observed a sea-change in the occupy movement as its repression increases:

I have no doubt that the number of marchers will increase next time. This group started with camping – The city’s responses seem to be slowly turning them into some kind of militia.

But without the use of arms, what sort of militia is this? A commenter on this NY Post article about an occupier’s disruption of an arraignment court proceeding says:

This is exactly why Occupy Wall Street has even been repudiated by the Far Left, who want nothing to do with the anarchists, druggies, homeless, and other disenfranchised who have hijacked this movement.

Oakland and New York are now officially building General Strikes for May Day, and it is still being discussed weather the strikes will follow in a traditional mold of labor marches and picket lines, or if it will be something more in line with the developing style of the “hijackers” and “vandalists” who are keeping Occupy strong through the winter, indeed some sort of“intelligibility strike.”

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)