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Now’s the chance to stop the NYPD

I wrote this for In These Times: read it there at the Uprising blog.

Whether or not we think that cops can—meaningfully—be tried and sentenced in the courts, there is every reason to closely watch the class-action law-suit Floyd et al vs. City of New York. Multiple new and long-term struggles against the Police Department’s systemic, bloody, and racist violence are now converging. Among them we must count the movement for justice for Kimani Gray, Stop Stop and Frisk, Stop Police Brutality, the CPR, Ramarley’s Call—Ramarley Graham’s parents link his death with stop-and-frisk—and those still battling for justice for the “Central Park Five”. Thanks to prosecution witnesses Officers Polanco and Serrano, the police union (PBA) has recently been proven to collude in the implementation of quotas: bosses have demanded 20 summonses and 1 arrest per precinct per month. This is, it goes without saying, an interesting and an important moment for New York.

Some reminders of the facts: with 87% of those frisked being Black or Latino, and 88% innocent of any crime, so-called crime prevention would be far better off performing stops blind. The police don’t often put their hands on the group which, when stopped and frisked, is most likely to be carrying guns or marijuana. NYCLU statistics confirm this: cops do not detain and handle the bodies of white people very often at all, though when they do, they are able to seize a relatively high proportion of the aforementioned commodities. The Center for Constitutional Rights, and class action, director Vince Warren thunders, “They’re not stopping the people that have the weapons”.

Yet the premise of the policy “Stop-Question-Frisk” (SQF) is, Michael Bloomberg says, to “take guns off the street and save lives”. He alleges there is “no denying” the thousands of SQFs imposed each month accomplish this. But this means the mayor sees undeniable proof of a policy in a O.15% success rate. As Michael Skolnik explains, police would find more guns if they stopped and frisked the population entirely at random.

As decades of bitter experience under the terrors of “drug crackdowns” have taught, there is no “random” where police violence is concerned. By generalizing fear, it effectively disciplines poor neighborhoods en masse. Quotas seem arbitrary: over a million hours were wasted on petty marijuana seizures between 2002 and 2012, most of those harassed being Black and Latino. Stores of evidence have accrued that officers routinely trample UF-250 protocol, penetrating beneath clothing without reasonable suspicion, humiliating locals and aiming to produce summons- or arrest-worthy behaviors—like possessing a small amount of pot in public view, a cop having conveniently removed it from one’s pocket—through trickery, provocation and, often, sheer verbal or physical hatred. One helpful example of the latter remains Ross Tuttle’s October 2012 documentation of an arrest that included explicit threats to “break your fucking arm”, recorded as such, “for being a fucking mutt”.

In this context,  the case led by David Floyd—namely that racial profiling is unconstitutional—began on Monday just as a number of uneasy city lawmakers agonized over a deal to install an inspector general over the force. Activists are hoping to leverage Christine Quinn’s fierce opposition to Bloomberg, in support of an independent overseer, in challenging Ray Kelly’s hitherto autocratic sovereignty over the handling of officers accused of crimes. “We have a genuine chance right now”, enthused a person identified with Copwatch, present on Wednesday’s overflow room, “to win victories against this ‘rogue’ state organization”.

The City’s lawyers, Heidi Grossman and Brenda Cooke, are currently warming up to give Judge Schira Scheindlin a second week’s worth of defense arguments out of many anticipated in this long-haul class action. Both have, predictably, so far echoed Ray Kelly in passionately arguing—with bare-faced disregard of maps like these produced with the NYPD’s own data—that stop-and-frisk is not about racism, but quite simply “where the crime is”. In fact, as Warren repeats, more guns are found outside SQF hotspots. A Deputy Inspector, covertly recorded while ordering officers to frisk “the right people … male blacks 14-21” is tentatively thought to have sunk the City’s argument. Darius Charney, senior CCR staff attorney and lead counsel in the action, believes “it’s going to be debunked completely”.

Hundreds of community members, activists, mourners, and habitual victims of police violence, grouped in- and outside 500 Pearl Street this week. Some stress it shouldn’t matter whether a target of a stop does have a gun or not. “Regardless! Cops shouldn’t be shooting to kill! Yet they are shooting to kill us every time, look at Ramarley, Shantel,Kimani…” cried a woman standing with the Bronx Defenders last Friday, with reference to three notable young Black fatalities of the past year. “Can we even imagine America where the second amendment applies to Black people?” added Jamila Clark, 19, from East Flatbush, standing outside the court.

The struggle against police brutality in New York won victories against Giuliani, but now desperately needs to re-gather force within a strong left movement in order to tackle Bloomberg’s administration and escalate the issue. Slayings rose 70% last year, and SQFs have rocketed 600% since 2002. Back in 1999, thanks to a formidable movement taking the streets, the Center for Constitutional Rights successfully litigated against Police Commissioner Bratton to shut down the plainclothes Street Crimes Unitfollowing their frenzied shooting of Amadou Diallo, who died—unarmed, as is the pattern—outside his own home in the Bronx.

Now, once again, we face the question of what a just and a desirable NYPD might look like in the imagination of the communities it besieges, whose vigils it ham-fistedly beats and kettles. Contrary to Inspector McCormack’s claim that “the community overwhelmingly is supportive of it”, In These Times found no one demonstrating to #changethenypd with a single kind word for the Department. “Let the City send the Bronx some decent housing, medical, schools, you know, help with childcare!—instead of racist thugs in uniform. Then we’ll talk” suggested Elric Amin, 28.

It has been pointed out that Mourad Mourad and Jovaniel Cordova, the killers of Kimani Gray, were both sued over abuse of stop-and-frisk. Though both were themselves “minority” individuals, to take a famous phrase from Stuart Hall, race is the modality in which class is lived in New York City. A Black community fightback may continue to gain momentum, whether or not Floyd et al. gain their formal judicial breakthrough in Manhattan. Only continued mobilization by all in solidarity can ensure it. When, if not now, will it be possible to stop the NYPD?

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“Let Kimani be the last”

I was asked to write this for the Uprising blog of In These Times magazine. Read the edited version there.

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East Flatbush’s latest loss and the struggle against police brutality       

Cops killed Kimani Gray on Saturday March 9th. Every day since then, East Flatbush crowds, mourners and their supporters, have gathered to take a stand against what is widely seen to be a racist paramilitary organization operating in their neighborhood with violent impunity. Its officers murdered this sixteen-year-old, in the absence of any provocation, in the latest of an unrelenting stream of similar incidents across New York City and the US. It is mid-March; police have killed 79 already this year.

Present in last night’s demonstrations were Bronx community activists Constance Malcolm and Frank Graham, the parents of Ramarley Graham, whom the police slayed in his grandmother’s bathroom at close range slightly over a year ago. Disgracefully, this year a federal District Judge lifted the momentary ban on stop and frisk in the Bronx that had been achieved through concerted struggle by groups like Ramarley’s Call and the Stop Mass Incarceration Network in defense of young black men.

Last night, as on every night since Gray’s death, scores of police squads terrorized the growing body of participants in #KimaniGray vigils on Church Avenue. The NYPD arrested Kimani’s sister and an estimated fifty others—mainly local young people, with some outside supporters—who remain detained at several precincts. Protesters faced off police, loudly contesting efforts to net and mass-arrest them throughout the evening. Councilmember Charles Barron told Democracy Now: “this is the least that the community could do is to respond and resist.” Since 1.30am on Wednesday Twitter reports have been emerging of East Flatbush as a whole becoming a so-called “Frozen Zone” (the NYPD blithely invented this unofficial and illegal tactic around 9/11).

Heartbreakingly, Kimani was the second brother Mahnefah Gray lost, the second son of Carol Gray’s now dead. Jamar died in a car accident two years ago. Several community accounts tell how Kimani actually suffered taunts from police officers over this bereavement, as well as personal threats. Friends and relatives now bear prints of his face on their shirts and sweaters. Of course, everyone in Flatbush will tell you: many have died. It is worth noting how, ten hours before Kimani’s death, the NYPD killed Clinton James at a traffic stop in Staten Island. According to the Stolen Lives Project, the NYPD kills around two Black or Brown people a month.

So, activists’ enemy in the struggle is also the very logic that normalizes cop-on-gun-violence and permits us to rationalize Black deaths when they involve “gang members”. Kimani has been smeared as a ‘Blood’ and a gangster, as though this (unsubstantiated) fact would make his unprovoked death at the hands of the state OK. In the UK, where gangs hardly exist, police murdered Mark Duggan, sparking riots across the country; Prime Minister David Cameron likewise dragged up the unrelated issue of so-called “gang culture” as a smear tactic. Those out last night refuse to see lives devalorized in this way.

A spokesman for the Police Department declared that the gun “found on the scene”, which, we must repeat, no one except cops has seen, contained four live rounds. So, we are supposed to believe that Kimani, who was attending a baby shower, had a gun on him. He was by all accounts a young man with common sense, too well acquainted for comfort with the dehumanizing ubiquity of Stop and Frisk. Yet we have to believe that he whipped around like Rambo to aim at some plainclothes cops when they suddenly confronted him. This means Ray Kelly is asking us to believe there was reason to shoot, even though Kimani never shot the phantom gun. Even though he pleaded for his life.  Even though the first two bullets knocked him down. Cop message-boards are of course calling this “a justified shooting”. Yet, after the first, Kimani received another six bullets out of the eleven—eleven!—fired at him. Either the plainclothes sergeant, or the officer, is said to have instantly cried out “oh god!” Much, much too late.

We still don’t know the names of Kimani’s murderers. But we know that these trigger-happy “protectors of the peace”, who fired eleven rounds into Kimani’s body, have alleged that he pointed the .38 at them upon being told to freeze for adjusting his waistband “in a suspicious manner”. “Birds’-eye-witness” Tishana King’s testimony directly contradicts the police version of events: King saw that Kiki had nothing in his hands. As Lichi D’Amelio (Ramarley’s Call) commented, the details of the NYPD’s unaccountable and contradictorily narrated murders of, amongst others, Mohamah Bah, Shantel Davis, Reynaldo Cuevas, and particularly Noel Polanco in the last year has lent widespread credence to the claim that it is in fact systemic police practice to lie and even to plant guns at the scene of the crime.

D’Amelio sums up the struggle against police brutality in New York:

“We are not yet at the point where those in power feel that they would be taking enormous political risks by allowing police to continue to kill with impunity. It is up to us, now, to build a movement that can use campaigns such as the fight for CSA and the conviction of Richard Haste to tip the balance of forces in our favor, without losing sight of the goals of ending SQF [Stop, Question and Frisk] and police violence once and for all.”

As the voices from the street put it: let Kimani be the last.

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Man Down

I wrote this the day after the SWP emergency conference and Nina Power’s Hour of Power that reflected on two years fighting in court for Alfie Meadows and Zak King.

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Man Down: There is a need for a “creeping feminism” that can revenge the rapes. 

The rapes, in this world, they don’t seem to ever stop, and so we can never stop howling in outrage, never stop thinking and talking about rape, nor yet be free from wanting revenge. Do you remember how, in 2011, there was an extraordinary hit single that some people tried to ban, in which a fictional black woman shot her rapist “in front of a big ol’ crowd”, and she sang the spine-tingling sound of her own vindicatory drum-roll, ram-pa-pa-pum, ram-pa-pa-pum … Man Down? Other than this, how many mainstream rape revenges are there in our imaginations? I can only think of Thelma and Louise, whose rapist dies in the car-park. There, the revolt against male oppression inside and outside the home has not yet become revolutionary at the point where they drive off the canyon—but one cop is certainly changed forever.

In Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s decidedly un-mainstream Baise-Moi (2000), it seems that gaining revenge for the full quantum of violence Manu and Nadine have experienced is impossible, at least, when pursued via sexual means behind closed doors. But Baise-Moi still strikes fear into men’s hearts, and for that I love it.

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Baise-Moi.

These four women are all ‘bandits’, though, who come unglued from the world. My hunch is that truly daring to want what you desire (to take Žižek’s phrase) will mean keeping the demand for vengeance firmly glued to a collective world, even if the price can be personally exacted. More interesting, then, has been the real-life example set by Nevin Yildirim in Yalvaç, Turkey, late last year, who calmly handed herself into the police once she had avenged herself on her rapist by cutting his head off and dropping it in the town square. “Don’t play with my honor!” she is reported to have added, as it rolled towards a café. She cooperated as she was marched away. What makes Yildirim’s courage so incredible is this willingness not to exit the world whose logic she has ruptured. I want, somehow, to reach her, to make it so that she is not alone. Rape by its very nature keeps us alone. I am afraid to imagine all the things that have been said to the Socialist Workers Party member ‘W’, the woman who brought to light what Martin Smith did to her years ago, a rape whose consequences are still percolating now.

Nevin Yildirim (Al-Jazeera)

Nina Power was not speaking specifically about rape on The Hour of Power last weekend when she induced tears via Resonance FM’s radio-waves, asking in the aftermath of Alfie Meadows and Zak King’s trial, if justice is not indeed another name for revenge. “There are those people I want to exit existence, which is not the same as wanting them dead”.

“It is no surprise that governments prefer secret courts… The human element that surrounds the world of the court, the world of colour, of love, of affection, of mutual aid, of support, threatens it, not because it is peaceful, but precisely because it has the power to be anything but.”

It is the form of our violence, which Žižek has argued is never necessary, but always legitimate, which we need to think about: what would ‘an eye for an eye’ mean (after all, we cherish anti-violence, and we desire no more), for us? And for all those who have been brutalized and continue to be brutalized, for Nirbhaya, or for Kimani Gray (shot dead in East Flatbush last weekend)? For Brandy Martell (to replicate the Lies collective’s list of the “recently fallen, whose memories serve to remind us of the urgency of struggle”), for Esme Barrera, Paige Clay, Anna Brown, Mark Aguhar, Shelley Hilliard, Marilyn Buck, Shaima Al-Awadi, Amber Lynn Costello, Deoni Jones, Hatice Firat, Josefina Reyes, Marisela Ortiz, Tyra Trent, and far too many more?

As James Butler pointed out in conversation with Nina Power, in the age of happy-clappy ‘Like Feminism’ it is generally deemed impossible that stars or the ‘successful’ might have a vengeful axe to grind. In keeping with this incredulity, already aired in relation to Eminem and later in relation to Chris Brown’s abuses, not everyone familiar with the sound of Man Down on the radio actually realized that Robyn Fenty (Rihanna)’s persona kills this “man”, specifically because he rapes her, in fact, this detail is largely only explicit in the video clip. All she says is “If you play me for a fool, I will lose my cool, and reach for my fire-arm”, where, needless to say, “play me for a fool” is a pretty dire understatement for the systemic sex oppression she is otherwise casting light upon. But then, “playing her for a fool” is so often the phrase in the mouths of the “man’s” apologetic friends—isn’t it?—one possible toned-down account of what “he” really did, a euphemism for his violence, and for this reason, a preclusion of his ever having to confront real justice. In this sense, it makes sense to say, yes, reach for your firearm when men “play” us, comrades: we know what playing actually means, and we are not fooled.

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Incidentally, nothing about the visual supports for Man Down suggests “losing her cool” at all. Those who condemned it (the Parents Television Council and others) knew this, taking umbrage above all at a representation of “premeditated” retaliation. (She should presumably have “romanticized”, instead, recourse to the police: ideally, the supremely helpful South Wales constabulary, or New York’s Officer Gilberto Valle?) These reactionaries were unwittingly picking up, though, on a tension in the lyrics between a heat-of-the-moment justification, and a (far more subversive) crystalline telos that is undeniably feminist, more action-oriented, too, than what Robin James has convincingly characterized as goth- or shadow-feminist about Rihanna’s art-works about domestic violence (‘Rihanna’s Unapologetic Shadow Feminism’, Nov 2012).

The recurrent lyric “why did I pull the trigger, pull the trigger, pull the trigger?” rubs our faces in the correlate question, why did I have to pull the trigger (and alone)? Indeed, tragically, women and allies in general are largely absent from the world after this event: the maternal last resort, Mama, Mama, is all we’ve got. So, Rihanna’s articulation of distress stems, yes, partly from her contemplation of her attacker’s death, but primarily from mourning her own loss of community. The point of gallows speeches is often to muster solidarity even as one declares guilt, but Rihanna has to confront her total loneliness at the moment where it should be clear she is not the perpetrator, the originator of this violence. Who will stand by her? Nobody. Although she rhetorically declares “I didn’t mean to lay him down”, she is lamenting, not the act of revenge per se, but the fact that she will be caught. Ultimately Rihanna evokes a chilling apprehension of this isolated world in which she now finds herself, devoid of solidarity or public justice for women.

“Oh lord, have mercy, now I am a criminal,

Tell the judge, please give me minimal,

I’ll run out of town, dem can’t see me now.

O Mama, Mama, I just shot a man down…”

In the five-and-a-half-minute video, the revenge killing takes place as a flash-forward in the minute before the music begins in earnest, with dream-like clarity, to the muted sounds of the ocean and an urban pedestrian thoroughfare. Rihanna has been standing at a window, waiting. Then, after her index finger moves, down on the station square, the rapist collapses in a pool of blood that swiftly leaks from his head while people scatter in terror. Rihanna’s face looks stricken, but not shocked, regretful, but not repentant.

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Rihanna’s “shadow feminism” in Man Down also figures in ‘Unapologetic’ and ‘Love the way you Lie’ (above)

In the manner of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, the narrative doubles back to explain how we got to this juncture. A woman in a Jamaican village, shown to be beloved of everyone in a smiling community, walks the rounds, sips on Coconut Water, and eventually goes out dancing, where she is raped outside the club (I try to ignore the product placement). It’s an amazing offering, expressing the relentless, historic force of an insufficient yet (for Rihanna) necessary justice, all through the self-avenging victim’s sorrow for a life she has had to end. Rihanna’s character’s tormented words are: “What started out as a simple altercation/Turned into a real sticky situation/ Just thinking on the time that I’m facing/ Makes me wanna cry…/ ‘Cause I didn’t mean to hurt him,/ He could’ve been somebody’s son./ And I took his heart when/ I pulled out that gun(ram-pa-pa-pum, ram-pa-pa-pum, man down)”. There’s no stopping that drum of cold revenge. And this last claim for responsibility, “I took his heart”, frames the final limit of Rihanna’s “victimhood”. It demonstrates how it is true that she “didn’t mean to hurt him”, because the violence was wrought by, or at least through, his body—she is pointing out that, premeditated or not, she didn’t mean anything. This shouldn’t be her problem. Thus, for me, the whole thing is an object lesson in philosophically clarifying one’s grief over eliminating the males who grew up on rape culture, whose crimes are never wholly incomprehensible (and who inevitably are “somebody’s son”).

Naxalite sisters of “Dopdi” (The New Red Indian)

And sometimes they were “comrades” until now, and often, they are formally leaders. But it shouldn’t be so hard, I don’t think. We must cry for them, but let them disappear. Perhaps we have forgotten that it is, in reality, an unutterably modest requirement, that one be obliged to manage, yes, an entire career in politics with one’s dick in one’s pants, except where enthusiastic consent is absolutely clear. Perhaps we have lost the ability to see that not raping anybody, ever, is not an eccentric standard, not an unreasonable condition for participation. In India, councilors and congressman who rape are being collectively beaten to a pulp. In the US and the UK, however, rapists routinely succeed in destroying social movements. The pain that has been lived by so many people, who trusted each other, whose organizing structures and spaces were rendered unsafe, beggars belief.

In the UK, the Socialist Workers’ Party’s Central Committee has now so badly mishandled the case of a rape by one of its members that the whole party now appears to have imploded, following an extremely traumatic process of internal contestation, resignations, courageous struggle by IDOOP, and most recently, the sinister degeneration at an emergency conference. Little can be said by someone outside the party, who is nevertheless grieving, and not gloating—grieving, for these idiots, the rapists and their inflexible apologists with authority, who have scarred and betrayed thousands of people.

There is a guiding principle, many of us feel, that isn’t hard to grasp: if someone thinks that you have raped them, then you simply cannot lead anymore. You cannot lead anyone or anything—with immediate effect. We must be unapologetic if insistence on this principle brings the whole order crashing down in the sand of history. Martin Smith, an accused rapist, should have disappeared. Instead, he received a “Disputes Committee” write-off and a standing ovation. Well, at this point, it’s man down, and at what cost! People I love have lost their minds over this cultish showdown from their leadership; others are heartbroken.

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Honey of “Radio Phoenix”, Born in Flames

Lizzie Borden’s wonderful Born in Flames fantasizes a women’s army spearheading women’s struggle against the persistent “post-revolutionary” rape culture of a “socialist democracy” in America. How often do women figuratively (or literally) shoot down those who rape them in public? How can we make it so that the man does come down? What else necessarily has to come down with ‘him’? These questions were asked and answered by Mahasweta Devi when she re-wrote the figure of Draupadi from the Mahabharata as the tribal Naxalite woman Dopdi, who burns out the prince’s eye-sockets, stark naked, bruised and bleeding from her vagina under a vomiting moon. If we consider Dopdi’s “indomitable laughter”, I feel we may find that we do know what has to go, if we are to get justice. The answer is, the whole thing, the whole damn thing, by which I mean, all vestiges of the pretense that it’s OK—that core aspects of social relations are OK. Since all organizations harbor rape, all organizations will have to be reinvented such that the devastation and the damage it wreaks remain always within view.

It should not be possible for a self-designated revolutionary to utter the phrase “creeping feminism”. It should not be possible for Alexander Callinicos or anyone to re-frame a crisis about rape as the upstart intrusion of “undemocratic” “autonomism”. Ultimately, though there will always be ‘nice guys’ around who want to be on the side of gender liberation, as long as they conceive of this as “defending” what is good about existing structures, and building “renewal” in the place of the rot, they do not understand the simple, undeniable need for revenge. I, too, want the struggle for freedom from capital to be united and powerful. But that’s why I think this “bad apples” discourse is insufficient. In the end, as it is men who rape, why do we allow men anywhere near leadership positions in our revolutionary organisations? It is time to grieve these assholes, aspects of whom we have loved, and to get them out of the way.

 

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‘The Poverty of Privilege Politics’ and its critics

This is a strange way to return to a long-neglected blog, namely, with a highly specific engagement, from New York City, with what some people are saying in Manchester and Leeds. But anyway:

There appears to be a conversation starting up (again) in the UK about the significance of ‘privilege’. This piece hopes to generate mutual understanding whilst arguing for a particular conclusion, namely, a position distinguishing itself sharply both from privilege theory and, on the other hand, from the appalling “ortho”-Marxism that still lives on, which (absurdly) deems race, class and sexuality irrelevant in the struggle against capitalism. This is not a fully-formed article, but a swiftly penned response that hopes it could be a helpful intervention as well as an overview of three texts relevant to this debate. It conveys my belief that these are questions crucial to the revival of something like a Left, and indispensable to the emergence of revolutionary struggle.

In Shift (15) we find the source of some of the debates, the much-misunderstood and much-maligned article ‘The Poverty of Privilege Politics’[1]. It seems to me that Tabitha Bast and Hannah McClure wanted to make the case for an anticapitalism that is integrated, coherent, unitary, and so on, one which therefore – paradoxically for some – might actually be up to the feminist and anti-racist tasks of liberating all humans in their differently-oppressed specificity. They explain why they are “embarrassed by the simplicity of ["privilege,"] this undisclosed and undefined overarching theory,” to the point of being “concerned that it further leads a stagnant movement down more … dead ends”. In particular, they criticise the rise of well-meaning “check-lists” that have been circulated widely online (e.g. bullet-points that defamiliarize the normal/unmarked heterosexist, able-bodied, and cis-gender experiences). They lament certain “self-flagellating groups” whose workshops they dub “punkier than thou equal ops sessions” that “prop up a culture of shame”.

Although those already lambasting their piece as “manarchist” will not have perceived this, Bast and McClure are not saying that check-your-privilege tick-lists have no pedagogic uses in struggle (they do) but, rather, pointing out that power mechanisms are irreducible to such tick-lists and/or could not be eradicated even by the mass disciplined assimilation of such tick lists by individuals. I don’t think many people would disagree with this. Still, a legitimate addition to this objection to tick-listing might consist in stating how “privilege”-mitigating, consciousness-raising catechisms and protocols, despite being ineffectual at actualising a embodied, generalised equality, are actually vital transitional social accommodations on the way to something better. They are certainly clumsy, clunky, frequently counterproductive, and uncomfortable for many. Yet they are indispensable agreements symbolically carved out in the everyday violence of capitalist social relations. (Stewart Lee says as much in his stand-up about political correctness.[2]) The efforts so easily dismissed by some as “incomprehensible jargon” or “elitist babble” – when of course, like “foreign-sounding” names, gender-neutral pronouns aren’t so hard to learn when you try – are arguably a necessary but not sufficient condition for organising. In this sense they are not a “politics” or a “theory” proper but rather an imperfect, messy element of praxis.

I feel the Shift article could have avoided eliciting some of the worst, hurt, angry excesses of its ensuing comment-thread disputes, if it had started out with a simple definition of what it was critically attributing to activist populations in general, namely, an entire, allegedly “undisclosed and undefined”, theory. A Black Orchid guest post (‘Privilege Politics is Reformism’ March 12, 2012 [3]) provides an in-depth account of what privilege politics actually is. If they had incorporated that definition more fully, McClure and Bast could quite rightly, I believe, claim that “a political lens of privilege is divisive and unhelpful when we are part and parcel of a system that already thrives on the division of the working classes, through gender, class and sexual oppression”. One rather distracting or dissatisfying point Bast and McClure appear to want to make is quite simply that anti-patriarchy training for men isn’t working: “the ones who could do with it rammed down their hairy throats wouldn’t dream of attending”. This pragmatic despondency is hardly a good enough reason to desist: if need be, I would say we shall set up re-education camps. Still, I will now begin to outline the argument in favour of Bast and McClure’s conclusion.

In n+1 recently, Rosalyn Baxandall recalled the January 1969 anti-war MOBE demonstration (and Counter-inaugural Ball) at Nixon’s inauguration in Washington. The only two women speakers that had been appointed for the mobilization, “neither Shulie [Shulamith Firestone] nor Marilyn Webb could [actually] speak, because SDS guys soared onto the stage, saying, “Take her off the stage and fuck her!”" This anecdote about the white male SDS leadership gives us just one (rather breathtaking) example of ‘manarchist’ internal oppressors in another era. Nevertheless, the Women’s Liberation Movement was focusing not on interpersonal protocols that would enable it to work on more acceptable terms with other anticapitalists, but on programmatic revolutionary feminism and advancing the ‘dialectic of sex’. It strongly resisted a politics of retreat, of guilt, and even of ‘consciousness-raising’ education if these have to exist at the expense of militant action (class organising). The idea remained that the task of liberation is carried out by those most at risk, by those most oppressed. Privilege politics today focuses (well-meaningly) on protecting these people from the excessive punishment their militancy would provoke. For Black Panthers and second-wave revolutionary feminists, others (and allies) could indeed sometimes be coerced into highly conscious attitudes of ‘respect’, but this would not spell liberation.

The Black Orchid guest blogger, Will, bolsters their argument against “privilege” theory (short version: “radical sociology attempting to struggle”) by quoting Frantz Fanon. In the conclusion to Black Skin White Masks, Fanon asserted: “I do not have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined.  I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.  I as a man of colour do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race.” Will remarks that, in contrast to this, it is social interactions that are now more politically contentious to revolutionaries than the overarching facts of white supremacy, for instance, the wealth divide, the education gap, racialized incarceration numbers, and so on — though obviously, it would be surprising if (misogyny and) white supremacy did not crop up in interpersonal relations given our historic environment. A programmatic and organizational response is needed; meanwhile, though, it has to be assumed that movement participants, whilst probably chauvinistic and alienated, are not in fact white- or male-supremacists (the distinction is important). This also amounts to a call for having thick skins. Of course, it is disgusting and preposterous when white graduate students are the ones telling immigrant workers to have thick skins. But Black Orchid insists we remember the real stakes: Harriet Tubman, like Fanon, deemed life worth living through the struggle to become fully human, or not at all.

At its most polemical, the Black Orchid article thunders that “Privilege theory [in fact] thrives off the inactivity of the masses and oppressed”. Its proponents “seek only to remind the masses of its weaknesses. … [when] they actually have the power.” The author says: “I have yet to meet Privilege theorists who hold classes on revolutionary politics with unemployed people, with high school drop outs, with undocumented immigrants etc.  Privilege theory’s fundamental assumption exposes its proponents’ class background when they claim that theoretical-political knowledge is for people who come from privileged backgrounds.” Similarly, McClure and Bast discern in privilege-oriented circles ”an anti-intellectualism where both theorising and militancy are seen as privilege[s] in and of themselves”. The Black Orchid Collective, for its part, defines itself as a “multi-gendered, multiracial revolutionary collective… against capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, imperialism, ableism and the state …fighting for a direct democratic, ecologically sustainable society in which we as workers can creatively produce to fulfill human needs … developing ourselves as working class revolutionaries … reviving the Marxist method as a tool for combining the best of feminist, anti-colonial, anarchist, ecological, anti-racist, and queer liberation perspectives, while discarding all that holds us back.” As the Black Panthers recommended, when alienating and chauvinist things occur, the best attitude is “fuck ‘em”.

One rebuttal (an extensive Facebook note, ‘Politics Recognising Privilege’, by Siân O’matic on Tuesday, 9 October 2012[4]) argues that the common allegations of an “oppression Olympics” and “culture of shame” are straw arguments, and this may in many cases be so. However, this author seems to insist that the so-called “privilege” politics should rightly be called liberation politics, acknowledging the downside of it being “problematic when people with privilege demand even more attention or self-victimise”. They cite the familiar formula: it is not the unpleasant complaints of “privilege politics” which is divisive, but of course, in fact, racism, sexism, transphobia, classism, homophobia “and other structural oppressions”. This is because, in their view, “capital is not the only oppressor”. For this reason, true privilege-conscious, “liberation” or “anti-oppression” politics demands a kind of catch-all orientation that “recognises” (according to the title of the piece) all possible and existing forms of oppression. The author reasons one cannot be content that there be “an anti-oppressive string running through the rest of what we do” — the rest of what we do meaning, here, fighting capitalism.

The rejoinder to the well-meaning, harmless, but ultimately analytically weak position, summarised above, can be swift even if it does not intend dismissive harshness. Fighting capitalism can never be the “rest of what we do”, for the very simple reason that it is capitalism which produces sex, gender and race: capitalism is best understood as an expanding, intimidatingly pervasive system of social relations. Patriarchy is not an autonomous mode of production that exists simultaneously alongside capitalism (as Christine Delphy has proposed): like white supremacy, it is a non-negotiable characteristic, fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. I suspect that, for all they were able to identify “straw” enemies of class struggle, the author is still working against an entirely “straw Marx” who is characterized by determinism, vulgar materialism, sex blind categories, and economic reductionism. Better to revive the notion of social reproduction, which gives us a sophisticated, non-reductionist account of the relation between various oppressions and capitalism without falling into the impasse of dual and triple systems theories (which conventionally “added” gender and race “on”).

[1] http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=679.

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGAOCVwLrXo.
[3] http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/guest-post-privilege-politics/.
[4] https://www.facebook.com/note.php?&note_id=10151109954408004.

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Organizing for Occupation against the political economy of Percents


A much shortened version of this appeared in the OCCUPY GAZETTE, issue #4

 

What kind of person, confronted with an outburst of song, stands up in order to huddle around an auctioneer at the front of a public court-room, hurriedly nodding and gesticulating their way through a bidding process (‘$50,000’, ‘$60,000’…) for a ‘property’ that represents a poor crash-stricken Flatbush based family’s foreclosed-upon home? What kind of person ignores the brave chorus ‘Listen, Auctioneeeer! All the people here are telling you to hold all the sales right now’ for the purposes of competing cravenly, up-close and personal with other speculators, for a bargain currently-inhabited four-bedroom? Well, it’s a very ordinary kind of person. It isn’t “the 1%”, in case that’s what you were thinking.

You don’t see rich, besuited persons sitting in the front pew, snapping up those ‘clouded titles’ and the various ‘rights of redemption’ represented by home-losers’ unsettled taxes or unpaid bills. Inside the paneled confines of the weekly foreclosure auction (3pm til 4pm, or usually, 3.15 when sales are already over), one theater of the King’s County magistrate’s court on Adams street, in downtown Brooklyn, ‘the public’ sits to witness the transfer of property rights from one person to another, or vulture-like, to get in on it themselves. The type of transfer is a little complicated, divesting people usually absent – uninformed by the courts, or by the banks prosecuting their breach of promise, that their homes will be sold that particular day – of the collateral used for the mortgage they took out long ago, before the economy crashed, at a bank.

“We’re going to survive, but we don’t know how, listen, auctioneer”. The King’s Court police officers take loudly singing protesters out in handcuffs, while the traders attempt to get their business done in an improvised sign language. (I urge you to look up what you can of these scenes on YouTube.) Leaving court, those civil disobedients are thinking something like this: We’ve just tried to impede the profit-motivated divestment of somebody’s home, because the right to a home should be enshrined in law, forbidding eviction, certainly at the behest of a bank that organized brutal mortgage terms with the person in the first place, in a climate of record bank bonuses, intense working-class suffering, and stunning homelessness. But noticeably, those whomOrganize for Occupation[1] is hindering, in the most direct, theatrical sense, are not Brian Moynihan and Vikram Pandit. They are, instead, long-suffering court functionaries and hard-bitten small-time real estate investors, Italian, Chassidic, Russian, and African American: ninety-nine-per-centers, every one.

Should this be a “problem” for us, activists ponder to themselves, leaving the court? Does everyone already secretly know how perplexing ‘99%’ is, in practice, even as a stand-in for class analysis? Ultimately, is there no real diversion of impact ‘because capitalists are capitalists’ (‘Mom and Pop’ flavored or otherwise), and, as the extraction of surplus is orchestrated by much fatter cats, must one grin over any ‘collateral damage’ to the smaller reactionary wheeler-dealers? This Moratorium Now campaign of O4O’s is certainly nothing politically out of the ordinary if it seems to have to bother a lot of ‘ordinary’ speculators in order to ‘throw bodies on the gears’ the foreclosure industry, and almost any campaign appears to involve battles against foot-soldiers and functionaries of accumulation, rather than CEOs and Congressmen. The Yes Men – who have been training activists at Cooper Union’s mobile ‘Yes Lab’[2]this Spring – are an interesting exception, and seem able, by contrast, to penetrate the inner sancta (witness their recent press-release as Bank of America: ‘Today, it’s time to acknowledge that our bank isn’t working – not just for the market, but for the people, our real customers’).[3]

When capitalism is working, it hurts people; but when it has ‘crashed’, it hurts people – if possible – even more. Groups figure out how to act on this paralyzing reality in time, for themselves, but much could be learned over a shorter period of agonizing navel-gazing, in my opinion, if we listened a bit more humbly to the likes of Grace Boggs, Drucilla Cornell, and Laura Whitehorn. Occupy Wall Street is a network like any other, beguiling some previously existing campaigns to merge with it, opening its spokes-council structure to them, and yet also keeping others separate. There are many who want to focus on tenants’ and neighbors’ struggles. O4O, with its own inspiring and autonomously arrived at strategy for strong community squatting drives and resistance to owners’ foreclosure, stands apart from OWS. Yet newcomers to New York can sometimes participate in Organize for Occupation actions without realizing that they aren’t actually doing an ‘Occupy’ action. Which means, of course, that they are. The spectre is haunting Bloomberg, that’s for sure. And this paradoxical fungible specificity, which we see in our deeds, hints at what it might mean to fuse the particular with the universal, dialectically, over the course of this ominous century. Ninety-nine-percentism in itself is a naïve distributionalist mental sketch containing a superficial, populist have/have-not dispensation, and that is all, but in practice it becomes a dream of a new universalism – that “impossible and necessary object”[4] – a far more dangerous and thoroughgoing antagonistic thing.

The ‘public’ is now widely thought about through a lens labeled ‘the 99%’, thanks to some rebels in the USA having dreamed a dream about Wall Street late last year. The figures that circulated widely were vivid, but really, they were like any other figures. They told us that one-hundredth of the population possessed two-fifths of its common wealth. Or that one-hundredth of us accounted for a quarter of all income. One hundredth of us? No, no: a hundred percent of them were like that. Statistics – infamously – do funny things. It’s not just that they create containers labeled ‘us’ and ‘them’. They foster communist desires, without providing the theory of relationality, of exploitation, and of history, which might empower them. They invite the imagination to picture the scene, colored in by those vivid, shamelessnumbers, and to counter-imagine another scene in juxtaposition to it, as though the fact that numbers only go up or down indicates the possibility that the picture be drawn entirely differently – someday soon. What if every hundredth of America possessed and controlled an equal share – a hundredth, in fact – of wealth and income? As of now, there are 313,398,536 people in America according to ww.census.gov. What if each single one were equal? Every one of us would ‘control’ about 0.00000000319% of the wealth in that case. And that would be very very useful indeed to know. Would it not?

The South African constitution (2.26), backed up by the department of Human Settlements, enshrines the right to have access to adequate housing. If this were not so, to keep the faith, you might be forgiven for saying it’s high time housing was abolished as a human right. I began with a scene of intense ugliness, in which a gaggle of desperate people vied to snap up the tragic loss of another, invisible, desperate person, right in the cultural capital, or ‘big apple’, or ‘gateway’ to the United States itself. I’m often a dour old crank, but truly, the singers burst spine-tinglingly out of their pews in ones and twos, brimming with that Che Guevaran emotion, love. A crisis of legitimacy was successfully created for the bourgeois court, by the means of our courageous serenade. At Left Forum, John Holloway said, ‘We are proud to be the crisis of capitalism’; that was the feeling, there.

In the USA, and for Empire, the human ‘right’ serves to define the human in relation to a shifting perimeter of right-less-ness, beyond which only debt defaulters (and other animals) exist. Opponents of revolutionary politics here are wont to say that enshrining obligation instead of right, and commonsinstead of property, couldn’t possibly work. Suddenly they are the ones talking about the finitude of the planet, and the serfdom of being equal, and the scarcity of actually available houses in which families could have the right to live. After all “everyone wants to be in the ruling class” but not everyone can be. (Pity that. Can you show me why? Go on: on a piece of paper?) Nope. Bring down capitalism, and it would only grow again, because it’s in our nature to want to be the best we can be. So say the people who are particularly fond of the liberal notion of right. It goes: ‘You have the right to the house. So buy a house!’ But we say that the particular right of any group or agent to a house is necessarily a universal right. Indeed, when they say “our nature”, they mean theirs. “Being the best you can be” here means coalescing plentiful ‘dead labor’, private capital, around the idol of your ego. What if, instead, it were in the nature of the state to mediate its own redundancy, to help us become who we really are?

But that’s not a very good campaign. Talk like that, and you turn intoZeitgeist, horror of horrors. No, fighting the man is currently a scatter-offensive, pragmatic, skillful, universal, and particular. Like UK Uncut in Great Britain, which coagulated in order to expose corporate tax evasion within the new climate of budget cuts, welfare slashing, and austerity, at the twilight of the five-year-long activities of a very powerful, anticapitalist and anti-state, climate justice direct action network (the Camp for Climate Action), Organize for Occupation finds itself in a position where it is defending private property and inconveniencing petty entrepreneurs (or, in UK Uncut’s case, playing tax collector to the individual business and inconveniencing ordinary shoppers). It is probably right that a certain uneasiness should attend our political explanations of this messiness, this two-pronged struggle, for transitional public welfare, on the one hand, and for the ultimate destruction of the paradigm which makes welfare necessary, on the other. Like with almost anyrevolutionary group, the puertorriqueñ@ Young Lords,[5] for instance, the intervention is at the point of accumulation by dispossession: at the place of public robbery, eviction, hunger, or pollution, at the place where people are going (this in 1969) without breakfast, garbage collections, or TB testing.

The creditor in this dispute racket – i.e. the publicly bailed-out bank – dispossesses someone’s, probably a Black family’s, current home, but doesn’t want a house, nor to have to evict anybody itself. What can a bank do with a house, after all: it certainly can’t cook and sleep and shower and eat in it? Thank goodness then, that homes themselves are basic currency, by the grace of the market. The bank then profits from the re-conveyance of the ‘fee simple’, that is, the sale of various rights and remnants pertaining to the deeds or the mortgage, usually to individual middle-class petty real estate traders physically present in court, and ostensibly only to make good what it originally, poor righteous bank, was owed originally, by the long-time payers of debt and interest, who eventually had to give up.

In order for this solemn court of redemption and right removal, this tossing of a tarnished ‘title’ to the private ‘masses’ by the judiciary, this cruel farce of public expropriation, to carry on, it has to make sense to most people that some people shall have houses, because they have deserved them by the sweat of their brow, and that others do not, and shall not. Indeed, our minds must be firmly made up on this, because 2.8 million property-owners in the US received a foreclosure notice in 2010, then, three-and-a-half million in 2011 alone. Meanwhile Amnesty International estimates that there are 18.5 million vacant homes, and 3.5 million homeless. Most of us agree that some people don’t deserve homes.

Everybody lives, don’t they? Just about? But of course, there is living, and then, there is bare life, life on the street that makes us feel sick to be American, sick to the stomach at the quiet holocaust that is market democracy, sick in the way that Gandhi must have felt when he said ‘Western civilization? … I think it’s a very good idea’. And there is life like that advertised at Point One Per Cent (.com), which has broadly the same effect, really:

“Luxury: the feeling you have when every feeling you have is taken care of.

.1% may not seem like much, but to us, it’s everything. We’re a branding, marketing and strategy consulting firm, and our name refers to the wealthiest .1% of the population, a group we’re dedicated to understanding and reaching. We know how these consumers think, how they live, and what they respond to, and we translate these insights to help companies create an aspirational pull for their brands. A Point One Percent brand is held in the highest regard. … It’s a big world, and we’re the absolute experts on .1% of it.”

I think this quotation I’ve pulled speaks for itself; I wish only to suggest that as .1% is so very close to 0, those of us committed to the impossible and necessary political object, the universal, might fruitfully pay POP LLC a visit at 200 Varick Street, Suite 606, the West Village.

Comrades, I never introduced myself. I came to New York, and all its ‘terrible beauty’, its cyborg sleeplessness, in late August 2011 (just in time for the call to converge on Wall Street). I came from a rich British university town that was full of seven-hundred-year-old buildings and bicycles. The summer nights in urban Britain shortly before then had been lit up as the theater for the riotous rage of dispossessed youths of color, whose rippling, looting, fire-lighting response to the police shooting of unarmed black man Mark Duggan in north London terrified the ruling class’s media (i.e. all of it) into unanimity with a punishing, ordering, animalizing mainstream discourse. The Left failed to do anything about it, and failed, moreover, to act to change the fact that the August riots bore no explicit link to the anti-austerity politics powering the mass mobilizations of the previous ten months (in particular in November and in March). The Londoners and Brummies and Glaswegians were not rioting to save the National Health Service – the loss of which, to the neoliberals, by the way, is like a well of sorrow, right inside the chest cavity. I am now not in Oxford, instead, in New York. Both conglomerations, however, feature populations of indentured servants, non-citizens, sub-citizens, and unemployed black people, those employed to do the worst work, if that, and all, seemingly, remote from class consciousness. More unarmed and crimeless black men have been shot, or indeed executed, by the state. Dear reader, all I want to say is, though so many have said, before me, that what gets done to black people’s bodies, and their homes, will not stop until we stop it, until the black is human and her right is universal. I am frightened, but next time, you will see me on the streets.

If each of us had free access to the commons, ‘income’ and ‘wealth’ would fall away as statistically measurable concepts. Work would carry no wage, commodities would become things, and families could form at will. One would witness a giant exodus of quantity as it disappeared back into liberated quality. And the apotheosis of the historic part, of those who had always had ‘no part’ in politics (to use Rancière’s idea), would do away with the need for politics in its totality, we would merely administer our communes, share according to ability and according to need, and the last would (all) be first on earth. No percentages, in the classless society. OK. Perhaps I am not really such a wild-eyed millenarian. My desire for communization – like many people’s in the constellation Occupy! – is first and foremost a desire for the return of politics, and if there must be politics in perpetuity, as we figure out and figure out all over again how to live together on the earth, so be it. The point is that we have too lung suffered in the grip of the neoliberal anti-politics machine. If by writing (in the Journal for Occupied Studies, occupiedstudies.org) on the ‘odiousness’ of the word ‘occupy’, I sounded critical, well, the better I hoped to convey my relief, and my gratitude, for the returning of politics to the public space.

[2] The Yes Lab http://yeslab.org/.

[3] Whose bank? Our bank! The Yes Men explain their prank on BofA http://rt.com/usa/news/yes-men-bank-people-510/.

[4] Laclau (2000:58.)

[5] The Young Lords were a revolutionary movement for socialism and Puerto Rican independence. The Latina@ Education Networks Service maintains a website entitled Palante (the Young Lords newspaper’s name) here: http://palante.org/AboutYoungLords.htm.

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An Occupy Wall Street round-table chaired by Jeremy Varon: what I said at the New School’s UPSS conference

The UPSS (Union of Political Science Students) organised a conference, “New Political Movements”, and asked me to be on a round table on student occupations and OWS.

(Rough notes:)

A week or so ago, hundreds of striking students fighting austerity measures and tuition hikes were kettled for three hours in broad daylight in between two parts of their campus, then fined $444 each, by riot police in Québec, for failing to obey an injunction ordering them back to classes. The situation is Québec is being described as completely unprecedented, a sensation of general student and high schoolers’ strike in 184 student unions. In a return of a factory strike style use of physical demarcation, the strikers wear a red square; power has responded to this unification hysterically, no one displaying one has been allowed on campus for two weeks now. A fascinating detail consists of some non-striking students having forced the university to re-open classes and render protest on campus illegal; circumstances the University itself finds highly vexing. I’d just like to see a show of hands: who thinks the UQO students in Gatineau, in Québec, are going to win? The question, I think, is whether in this case occupation represents the next strategic step. This panel is convening on the subject of student occupations, in their multifarious applications, but I think it does well to open like this with a mention of action in Québec much more reminiscent of the tactic of the flying picket. Not only because it draws out yet another potential identity between the erstwhile factory and today’s university, but because it calls into question a certain reductive hierarchy of radicality, with occupation at its peak.

I’m taking some of these thoughts from Élise Thorburn, a collaborator like Jeremy in the journal for Occupied Studies I’ve started up and edit with Hannes Charen and others, and I just want to slip in here before I begin, a call for submissions to complete our second volume. Élise is organising a conference at her university in Toronto entitled the University is Ours: a Conference on Struggles within and Beyond the neoliberal university. I urge you to go!

The Université du Québec en Outaouais events notwithstanding, it is probably best to start things a little bleakly: there’s nothing worse for politics than the demented optimism of unjustified pride in a movement barely there. If the university was once a hotbed of revolutionary ambition, it too seems to have suffered the same fate as the broader culture.  That students were at the fore of a movement that brought the French state to the brink of collapse, for example, is almost unimaginable to those of us who came of age during “the plagues of Reagan and Bush”. I’m born too late and in the wrong place to have studied at an institution that provided foot-soldiers for Québec City and Seattle, but I gather that organizing towards those convergences took place overwhelmingly away from campuses. They have generally ceased to be hubs of radical agitation in the last four decades, though display some signs — in recent years — of this changing. To lament this is not to suggest that the university is somehow outside of the broader political economy and therefore to be expected to be a key source of challenge to the status quo. But neither do we want to dismiss how universities remain institutions where a certain amount of experimentation is still possible, where some opportunities still arise to enter into engagements “discontinuous with the universalizing telos of capital”.

California student fightbacks in 2009, and UK equivalent in 2010, were largely, of course, defensive efforts to preserve the status quo in the face of bold new incursions from the right. We face (says James Butler) “the increasingly paranoid and securitised institution of the university – which sees itself as a concentration of resources, a treasure-house in which potent ideas can only be unlocked by possession of the right credentials.” But also: signs that it might be possible to transform the university. Three nodes: alone, nothing much, but together, potentially enabling of broader forms of reclamation.

  1. new forms of assembly that have emerged as efforts to challenge the top-down governance structures of our universities.
  2. “militant” research strategies have been engaged as new ways to radicalize the production of knowledge
  3. Efforts have been made to wrest academic knowledge production from the hands of corporate publishers

You will note that none of these prefigurative forms of fightback against the neoliberalization of the university requires an actual occupation. They express the ideal of free education, where, of course, the word ‘free’ exploits its double meaning in English to the full. And as James, again, who was with me in the Oxford Education Campaign, says, “Free education is not something that can be achieved by resisting the most recent steps in the long march towards total marketisation, but by moving against the institutional frameworks that determine what education should contain, or should do – which are so deeply embedded in the notion of marketable ‘skills’ and corporate box-ticking that they’ve become a seeming ineluctable condition of education for those of us inside those institutions. A truly ‘free’ education requires first, and above all, an act of imagination which refuses to be conditioned on the premises of education as it already exists.”

I want to make a distinction before closing between gratitude an ingratitude. Faced with the sometimes less than eager character of the solidarity action students have been able to attract, the reluctance and the reservations divers anti-capitalist political formations seem to harbour about alliances with students, the undeniable suspicion of students’ traditional ‘labor’ allies the embarrassment of organized communities, and the benign mirth of classic conservatives, I think we have to consider how the occupation of a university has sometimes somehow become a wholly recuperated gesture of gratitude. Sometimes half-baked projects amount to tactical missteps, ad one pays for such errors politically. The grateful occupation is the occupation that isn’t really worthy of the name. Indeed, students are sometimes delighted at their own impunity, which is dangerous when combined with their university-derived desire to repeat or emulate the annexation of educational space … their unconscious desire to have a purer, absolutely non-public zone within which to self-educate. It is a misunderstanding of education, let alone of occupation, but it is completely understandable given the tricky status of the university today: simultaneously an exciting locus for the circulation of struggles, a last vestige of the possibility of engagements discontinuous with the logic of capital, and also a disciplinary machine, a factory floor for the production of hegemonic ideology.

Crucially, we must remain ungrateful. So what then, is the ungrateful occupation, and how can we seriously work towards configuring the ideal of the autonomous university whilst undertaking one, if indeed we should undertake occupations? I think in theory the ungrateful occupation is the starting point for throwing wide open the doors of education. It takes education too seriously to be grateful for the privatized, instrumentalized, marketized travesty of it. It dares to think of what it might mean to ‘free’ education. The ungrateful student understands not just that she isn’t getting a good deal, that in the neoliberal university she is labouring for the production and reproduction of herself in the image of capital and class conflict, but also what George Caffentzis describes when he calls the repayment of student debt deeply immoral. The ungrateful occupation rejects the idea that education is a privilege, but, crucially, takes the task upon itself to prove the point conclusively. If education is the most precious thing we have, that is also to say that its captive simulacrum, however important and prized, cannot come before the struggle for its liberation. The Québecois students are now facing the “problem” of having to be graded after only 7/13 classes in the semester. But they are also demonstrating in a pretty inspiring way their willingness to fight for a university worthy of their attendance.

I saw in Oxford the euphoric flooding of anti-austerity students incensed by the proposed tripling of fees into an old stone University library, part of the Bodleian, and central symbol of elite academic enclosure. Around the country, too, UK student occupations became key spaces for participation in organizing anti-cuts demonstrations and marches which attracted numbers unprecedented since the opposition to GW Bush’s opening world war.

The space of occupation does not have to be the university itself. The Really Free School in Bloomsbury, and the Bank of Ideas, near Finsbury Park, the May Day Free University in Madison Square Park, were germinal instantiations, I think, of the autonomous university as well as occupations or what would more usually be called squats. To close with one last quotation from Pierce Penniless: ”What would it be to posit a space in which the logic of acquisitive concentration was itself rejected?”

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Secure in the space of occupation: notes from a student-led experiment in New York

Secure in the space of occupation: notes from a student-led experiment in New York

 

I was involved in the occupation of the New School student study centre at 90, FifthAvenue, just off Manhattan’s Union Square, and its regrettable degeneration is the basis for this reflection. This piece did not come naturally to me. The thinking I had to do for it was tricky, and took a little courage, as it was bound up with activities and individuals I stand behind. At Open Security’s request, I am offering some arguments on feeling secure in a New York City occupation, that is to say, on creating brave kinds of safety within heterotopic space, specifically, space collectively claimed in order to be transformed by direct action initiatives like Occupy.

 

The student rally on November 17th (N17, widely experienced in New York as a day of glory) was on Union Square in the early afternoon. Then it got moving, in order to join the unions’ and “labor” activists’ rally downtown on Foley Square, by City Hall. Imagine you are a part of the throng snaking along East 16th Street and south onto Fifth Avenue. Imagine nearing the TD bank on 14th, and realising that something very exciting is happening above it, where the glossy glass-fronted student study centre is situated. A scuffle at the entrance. Marchers – not all of them necessarily students – thronging in and up the escalator. Police scrambling to prevent entry with plastic blockades. Building superintendents angrily ejecting insurgents from the freight elevator at the side-entrance. The main door threatening to split. A cluster of students visibly supporting those inside receiving baton blows. Banners already fluttering out of the first-floor windows: ‘Free Space’, ‘Zuccotti is dead: the virus has spread’; ‘All-City Student Occupation’; ‘All Welcome’; ‘This is not a New School Occupation’; ‘Students and Labor Unite’; ‘Labor & Students Take the City Back’. Do you attempt to go in? Then, or hours later (once President van Zandt had ‘allowed’ the occupiers to proceed), would you sleep there? If you surmounted your inhibitions, your nerves, and the adrenalin-fuelled, densely-packed chaos of that moment on the street, if you exited the heavily policed universe of the ‘public’ pavement that was being forcibly ‘cleared’ of human ‘obstructions’, if you plunged into the promised haven … what would you expect on the inside? What kind of society awaits you there, for your pains?

 

Occupations are – classically – houses of messy, over-determined contestation. The mainstream media often brand everyone inside them as unwashed, unemployed petty criminals with inscrutable and thus irrelevant politics. Yet it, significantly, also props up the view of space-claiming action as essentially ‘virile’ – and threateningly so – rather than ‘feminine’/’compassionate’. Thus, many actual participants, who are of course learning as they go, form their identity off the mirror of ‘public opinion’, and act accordingly in ways they deem uncompromised and uncompromising. I believe that insecurity within the space of occupation stems not from true radical vs. reformist distinctions: it stems from this (almost well-meaning) arrogance in those enjoying the dubious privilege of being stereotyped as frightening, i.e. from common or garden white/male privilege masquerading as professionalism. To give specifics: I did not feel safe within the space of occupation on the first night of its establishment, because my participation in the home-making process was squashed by undiscussed graffitiing, smoking, vomiting, and sexist jokes from young white men. I stayed anyway and regretted it: others would not. Everyone behaves badly a lot of the time. We are trained to. Most of us experience the bad behaviour of excited young white middle-class males as oppressive as well as ‘bad’, however. This is important, and Tools for White Guys help. Yet I am still identifying, primarily, a shoddy interpretation of the widely shareddesire to resist management-capital as comprehensively as possible as the source of behaviours of non-solidarity by these few towards those demanding a ‘safer space’ agreement. 

Security, after all, is their word. We, in flaunting them, should party hard and abolish rules. (So runs the reasoning.) Consequently, I was one of the only non-males who slept at 90 Fifth on day#1. And in the subsequent week, some attempts at mediation by perplexed and exhausted activists still failed to achieve the cohesive commune that might have succeeded in running and retaining the occupation. As the process disintegrated, we were forsaken not only by hoped-for allies but attacked by erstwhile supporters in positions of power. A letter with thirty signatories composed by Andrew Arato, faculty member published online on colleague Jeff Goldfarb’s blogDeliberately Considered, condemned “random violence” and argued that the liberal leadership of President David van Zant “had provided no conceivable excuse for this action”. MacKenzieWark, however, from Eugene Lang college within the same university, seems to me to make clear he deems the letter to constitute what Rancière calls the high treason of the Critical Left, opening his ‘Notes on the New School Occupation’ with the pithy sentiment “These are times when one must dispense contempt sparingly due to the unseemly number of things that deserve it.” The hebetudinous and offensive barricade-graffiti of the nihilist opportunists of ‘Occupy the New School’ is perhaps best condemned in this manner. Or, perhaps, one could invoke Slavoj Žižek’s double-edged epigram: “our violence is always legitimate and never necessary”. (One might even modify this slightly: “but never necessary”.)

 

 

Graffiti and barricades do not constitute violence. But sexism, racism, ablism, and certain forms of insurrectionary discourse rooted in class privilege sometimes do. There is good reason to expect, moreover, that environments characterised by these give rise to bodily attacks. And, based on the irony I outlined above, it is sometimes those who believe themselves to be ultra-radical who embody the domestic threat to other bodies already traditionally vulnerabilized by capital. Unpicking this often becomes a shouting match about the place of ‘identity politics’ within revolutionary struggle. Faced with this onerous task, people I would call real radicals can sometimes effect anti-sectarian magic. The role of mediation within Occupy Wall Street has been documented, for instance, in relation to the internal dispute concerning drum-circle revellers (see also Truth-Out). Sometimes documents and manifestos arise in networks in response to experiences of internally generated un-safety. The ablest mediators cannot, however, bridge gaps created by violent crimes. Recently, generalized public unconcern for the rights of the movement as a whole (following Zuccotti’s eviction) gave way to hysteria in the media in response to OWS reports of an incident of a rape on the park. This despite (or perhaps because of) its having been extremely thoughtfully handled by the ‘sexual assault survivors’ team’ (which also escorted the victim to a police station). In the New School study centre, no assault of that nature was – thankfully – reported. Yet a rhetoric of ‘divine violence’ (and outright rejection of Occupy Wall Street), emitted by some, amounted to small but meaningful assaults on others’ right to represent the occupation. It didn’t matter so much that a few blokes had drunkenly and unaesthetically graffiti-ed the walls. It mattered, however, that the enemy had been internalized. Trans, female, Black, Latin American, queer, disabled, working-class and older participants in the supposedly ‘all city student’ space were feeling indirectly targeted. And as one indignant African American New School student put it in a general assembly there she had decided to attend: “all I see here is white folks trying to tell me what radical activism consists of. Believe me, I know.”

 

I ought to mention, here, that what I have been calling an ‘occupation’ (here is a statement from its website) never substantively became one. President David van Zandt played a tricky game, killing us with kindness and enforcing an ‘academics-only’ door policy rather than anything stricter. To our dismay, moreover, very few non-academics arrived to make use of the student-ID-distribution system we ran to get around this. I should also add that I did not help plan the occupation, in fact, as an extremely new arrival in New York City, I was bedazzled enough by my new social environs to assume that the groundwork for a student occupation to mitigate the loss of Zuccotti had been more extensively carried out than it actually had. In fact, not much outreach had been undertaken among the ‘labor’ and longer-term Occupy Wall Street organising structures. The meetings I attended, i.e. the penultimate and ultimate meetings before the seizure of the space – distinct from the all-city OWS student general assemblies – nevertheless had representation from diverse New York universities: not just the New School, but Columbia, NYU, Pratt, CUNY, and even Juilliard. It initially seemed possible, therefore, that the occupation could be saved from becoming a ‘New School occupation’. Had that been the case, cliques might have had a harder time sinking the collective boat. It was urgent that no place really existed, at that time, for Occupy Wall Street to assemble. Ideally, to remedy this, occupiers would have wrested control of the escalator and entrance from the New School management and the bank. The catch-22 here became the fact that achieving that required serious support from the whole movement; gaining such support relied upon an open-door policy and a sense of trust which several union branches were reluctant to give to what appeared to be a bunch of drunken kids. And why should you – comrade, out there, whoever you are – enter a space that isn’t socially secure, when you are already preparing to take enormous political and material risks with your body in order to proliferate eu-topia? If existing neoliberal market logic is utopian (in the sense implied by ‘no-place’), and eu-topian aspirations raised in recent years across the world (in the sense of ‘good-place’) are still far from fruition, thenhetero-topias are the bridge between the two, laboratories in which another world becomes possible. So, when we begin the rehearsals for revolution in our encampments and occupations, ‘their’ phobic security has got to be replaced by an alternate ordering, an unbreakable promise to one another, a sense of security that is ours.

 

‘Security’ is not a word I use comfortably, though it was not previously clear to me why – beyond its hazy association with the word ‘homeland’ and with ‘anti-terror’ legislation. After all, to be on some level se-cure, without-care, must be a precondition for equality of participation and action in concert with others. It cannot, as a concept, be given over to reactionaries, police commissioners, border vigilantes, and surveillance-fetishists. Ways in which so-called ‘security’ issues play out in temporary autonomous zones are often polarising, pinning those raising concerns in a camp marked ‘self-involved’ and/or ‘identity politicians’, and those to whom they are addressed in another marked ‘long-suffering true-radical’. As I have argued, the false dichotomy stems from a misunderstanding of ‘revolutionariness’ and amounts to a failure in holding open heterotopia. The space fails to be different and cannot therefore give birth to eu-topia. The stress produced by putting ourselves ‘at risk’ differs wildly – and for good reason – from person to person. The tenor of ‘safer spaces agreements’ penetrates only unevenly into the common sense. For some, ‘freedom’ still spells individualistic defiance of traditional morality, even within the temporary autonomous zone. So, which is the way to struggle against asymmetries grown insuperably visible once the prevalent, however imperfect, “sense of security” has been challenged. How do we behave to promote care-free existence, where the liberal democratic state’s panoptic gaze is stymied?

 

In Kevin Hetherington’s book The Badlands of Modernity, heterotopias are alternate (not just ‘transgressive’) orderings, “uncertain zones that challenge our sense of security and perceptions of space as fixed”. But what must also be considered, then, is whose sense of security, whose perception of space, because the more “certain” zones we inhabit by default are rife with division, hierarchy and false consciousness. We know that privately owned squares, roads and buildings, with their insurance policies based on the logic of ‘risk society’, turn into supports for public action – and private life – when people pitch their tents there. These supports for action become, in theory, safe(r) spaces, because the collectivity frames alternate ‘commandments’ for its own society. It is frequently said (for instance in David Graeber’s Direct Action) that she who has engaged in the collective rush, and experienced political ‘take-off’ on the streets, when bodies in alliance suddenly take notice of their common sense, gains sudden understanding of the miraculous ability of mutual acting to re-make space. But the radical equality that seems to beproduced in mutual acting must be repeated, again and again, or else it falters. It arises, in part, negatively, out of opposition uniting all whose bodies provoke the common – baton-wielding – enemy. Even here, vulnerability differentials require attention: arrest is a more serious matter for Black people. The equality I’m talking about arises positively, however, when a home can be made, a meeting-place defended, a people’s library stocked, individual traumas soothed, bellies filled, a social welfare net autonomously woven around the bodies in alliance, in resistance. Security is nothing if not that equality. Yet the radical equality of the commons is threatened constantly by consciousness copied from capitalism. Bearing this in mind, then, shall we try again?