This text is at once challenging and generous: it seeks the core of
unfulfilled possibility in every limitation it critiques. Thanks for that.
You say the Occupy movement lacks strong core principles that could
serve to define itself as a transformative force in society. I agree.
That lack is betrayed in the rhetorical fiction of an overwhelming
majority: the 99 percent, which in reality includes not only the cops
but also vast armies of technocrats, financial managers, administrators,
advertisers, marketers etc, as well as all the working and unemployed
folks captured by racism and nationalism. It's clear that however it may
define itself, the Occupy movement will have many opponents among those
ranks. The initial appeal to everyone but the very top-level ruling
class can only make sense in the context of a deliberate effort to forge
a broadly appealing but also antagonistic collective will, or at the
very least, a new terrain of constructive argumentation around what such
a collective will could be. I think that's your strongest point, but it
requires some steps you don't go into very much.
For instance, wouldn't it be better to start by identifying grievances
-- that is, unbearable problems experienced and named by specific groups
of people -- rather than by stating principles and emitting demands?
That has been done to some extent (one example is the famous tumblr
site) but doesn't the raw expression need some kind of objective
analysis and categorization, so that people can see where their own
grievances touch those of others? Of course the sociology of individual
grievances does not equal a vision or a political project. But it would
provide a reality check about everything the current system does not and
cannot respond to, so that the more daring and inventive groups could
make proposals, debate them and ultimately come to validate some new
principles that would be acceptable to large populations.
You also point to two basic contradictions in what used to be called
"the Left." One is that many are weary of utopian proposals based on
full-fledged critiques of capitalism and tend to revert back to
traditional Keynesian demands for taxation of the corporations and state
investment in infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health
care. The opposite contradiction is that relatively small but very
active groups tend to refuse any social-state mediation whatsoever, with
the idea that more or less insurrectional moments of general assembly
and direct action are concrete prefigurations of a new way to live
("communization").
I agree that in the absence of core principles, we will be condemned to
a repeated sequence where the smaller direct-action groups spark
transient mass mobilizations that subsequently dissolve -- not just
because only a few can maintain permanent militancy and a permanent
direct democracy, but also because the division of labor and the social
complexity it entails are just too advantageous to be abandoned. Only
trustworthy and verifiable principles can articulate a complex division
of labor, even if we decide to shrink it from the global proportions it
has attained today. The commons we need is also an organizational
commons, a way of articulating production and sharing its surplus. But
who is this "we"? So far, only the anarchists have been able to
constitute a collectivity in which the remanents of the Left can
momentarily recognize themselves. Kudos to the anarchists!
The great question, as fundamental as the one that inspired Marx long
ago, is how to forge a new, trustworthy and verifiable logic of social
organization that is both egalitarian and ecologically sustainable --
and how, at the same time, to create the agency that can gradually
impose the new logic against forces that will bitterly oppose it?
There's no way to answer through ordered stages. You have to leap into
the midst of it, with the beginnings of a conceptual logic and the
initial kernel of the social forces that could bring it into reality.
So where to begin? Many have observed that all around the world, the
current protests are driven by debt-ridden students and graduates
without a future. The precarious middle class, in short ("lost a job,
found an occupation"). At the same time, the numbers tell us that the
worst-hit are the working and marginalized classes, mostly across the
color line. The next big movements could easily look quite different. In
all likelihood we are headed toward an even more extensive social crisis.
I think in this context and at this moment there is a potential role for
what you could call the intelligentsia (or Gramsci's organic
intellectuals) to seize the cultural and technical resources of the
university system, while bending both the rules of discourse and the
order of bodies, actively looking for different participants and more
practical-political ideas. The point is to find a cross-class,
multiracial and multigender way of dealing with social complexity --
because that has been the great claim of neoliberalism so far, and
there's no way around it, we have to do it better than them. In many
respects Liberty Square and all the other occupations are already models
for this, prefigurations if you like. What has been gained and defended
and some times lost -- but not forgotten -- is a kind of open-air
university, the diverse and embodied process of creating a collective
will that could come to grips with a complex society. But I think we
have to go further.
In 1967, at a moment just before the explosion -- which is maybe a
moment quite similar to ours -- Marcuse had exactly that intuition. I
just chanced upon his essay on "Liberation from the Affluent Society"
where he says this:
"Education is our job, but education in a new sense. Being theory as
well as practice, political practice, education today is more than
discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing. Unless and
until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the
college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless. Education
today must involve the mind and the body, reason and imagination, the
intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has
become the subject/object of politics, of social engineering... The
educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize
the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the
established policy."
http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/67dialecticlib/67LibFromAfflSociety.htm
What do you think? Aren't you planning some kind of initiative in that
direction? What does anyone else think? What are the most interesting
things going on in this sense?
In Chicago we just finished an autonomous seminar at Mess Hall, and I am
now looking for collaborators and projects to work on. For those who
will be in New York over the upcoming days, there are going to be a
series of meetings at 16 Beaver starting on Saturday. We could also talk
about it there.
best, Brian
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
