Hobsbawm on Occupy

Capitalism is making humanity obsolete.

From Adbusters Blog

Legendary British historian Eric Hobsbawm discusses the “pathological degeneration” of capitalism today.

URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9682626.stm

Occupy Davos

Capitalisms’ Cinderella’s Ball.

From Adbusters Blog

This years’ World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, marks the start of the perennial capitalist meet-and-greet summit season.

The economic equivalent of the Oscars, the WEF is a time for the 0.1% to celebrate the achievements and successes of free-markets, and to discuss how to keep the crumbling ship from running ashore; it’s also a time to get in a few good runs on the slopes, deep tissue massages and a soothing hot tub session on the 99%’s dime.

Nestled in the picturesque Swiss Alps where the melting glaciers are deceptively intact and the hotels serviced by an army of invisible temporary workers, approximately 2000 global elites discuss everything from redistributing their obscene profits (a.k.a philanthropy) and environmental sustainability, to forecasting new areas of expansion and the future of capitalism.

On this latter note, delegates will be treated to a special brainstorming session on corporate capitalism’s forecast led by the wisdom of Bank of America CEO, Bryan Moynihan. Then to jazz things up, there will be several roundtable discussions with social media and internet hotshots, Facebook and Google, on how the revolutionary elements of web organizing can reinforce market growth.

Gag. Why hasn’t a stink bomb already gone off in this place?

Here is the latest on the Occupy igloo’s outside the Davos security permitter.

Demand The Impossible

The historic task ahead.

From Adbusters Blog

This article first appeared on Socialist.org

THE PAST four months of the Occupy Movement have brought the American left to new heights. For the 99 percent, who represent the vast majority of the world’s population, the Occupy movement was long overdue.

Occupy has been a podium from which muzzled mouths have made a militant microphone. From this platform, we have mic-checked the 1 percent, and finally, it seems that we have found a voice of our own.

As with any movement, Occupy has fostered an internal debate about what tactics are necessary to take the movement forward. It’s an important question that requires careful consideration of the relation of social forces at play, the existing support outside of the movement and, perhaps most importantly, what possibilities lie in front of the movement–that is, the tangible goals the movement can set for itself.

Some Occupiers feel strongly that the movement should demand absolutely nothing from the economic and political system it’s rising up against. After all, the argument goes, the strength of the Occupy Movement thus far has been its potent indictment of the ruling class, coupled with its refusal to make any discernable demands or empower any official spokespeople.

However, by taking direct aim at the relationship between capital and the state, Occupy has raised the issue of class struggle in the U.S. That gauntlet having been thrown, the question in front of the movement is how to advance the interests of its class: the 99 percent.

In a sense, Occupy has diagnosed the ailments of the American political system, but hasn’t yet prescribed any cures. Having raised the level of political awareness, the movement must now fashion class consciousness into political action.

This task cannot be accomplished by maintaining a dismissive attitude toward the 1 percent and the state that represents them, or by failing to articulate demands against them, but by equipping ourselves with the political tools necessary to develop our movement.

To the ruling class, Occupy has been aggressive, but maddeningly oblique. “What are the demands?” Who are the leaders?” the fat cats of high finance ask. Occupy’s tactics have certainly been effective: the ruling class stretched itself thin to receive Occupy’s attack, overcompensated violently and exposed its ideological flank.

The legitimacy of the system failed, revealing its true nature. The democracy of the 1 percent is a sham; their police are but armed mercenaries. Their rebuttals to our encampments: Sanitation! Safety! Security! They are pale cover words for: Repression! Repression! Repression still! As if we are to believe that suddenly they care for the people who live every day of their lives in squalor and crime.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE OCCUPY Movement should be least concerned with what the 1 percent thinks of us, and only concerned with what the 99 percent thinks about us. And to this end, we do need demands, not to explain ourselves to the 1 percent, but rather to anchor Occupy in the daily lives of the people whom we aspire to involve in our movement.

The exposed hypocrisy of the ruling class has provided us with a blank slate. We can leverage the capitalist state’s claims to democracy against their determination to squelch free speech and the right to assembly. We can fashion the violence of the police into a tool revealing the true nature of the armed thugs “policing” our streets.

The state is the executive board of Wall Street, but Occupy is the anvil of the people. We can build our base. We can craft a culture of the 99 percent to counter that of the 1 percent. We have the ability to forge our movement into a hammer that can shape a new reality.

But what is needed to advance our movement to these bold new positions? Again, Occupy’s tactics have been effective so far, but we must anticipate that the ruling class will adapt. The coordinated repression against encampments nationwide speaks to this–as well as the 1 percent’s penchant for answering a challenge with blunt force.

Just as we must continue to challenge the 1 percent, we must also do so on a radically inclusive basis with concrete politics rooted in our daily lives. This means formulating demands and crafting slogans. However, some feel that to propose demands is only to legitimize the status quo. Take, for example, the arguments put forward by Deric Stingh in a recent Occupy Chicago DIY publication The Supplement:

Some of us have spontaneously conjured reformist schemes trying to divert us back into the very status quo we rebelled against, speaking in the voice of the Masters, “The Occupy Movement needs to have a set of concrete demands.” By doing so, we will “explain” and “justify” to “mainstream America” our actions. This is fatuous, a false prerequisite and a reflection of the poverty of imagination. These reformist schemes have been expressed in seemingly innocuous forms like “Tax the rich” or “Where’s our bailout?”

This, however, is a misstep made all too often in the movement. We can draw new people into the movement not just with our opposition to the 1 percent, but also with a message that has the potential to resonate within the awakening consciousness of the 99 percent.

In the U.S., the Occupy movement has attracted a vast layer of supporters who are not yet involved. What is needed to activate them? Politics! Not in the abstract. But concrete. With demands we can demonstrate to all the soulful refrain of the Paris Commune: “Our interests are the same.”

Furthermore, the demand of “Tax the rich” implicitly operates beyond the scope of this current capitalist economic system. This demand represents a dialogue of wealth redistribution beyond the scope of the 1 percent’s project of capital accumulation.

Likewise, the rallying slogan of “Where’s our bailout?” directly calls into question the bank bailouts of 2008 and begs the question of why the 99 percent were expected to sacrifice under this tremendous recession, while those responsible for crashing the economy have raked in billions of taxpayer dollars.

“Where is our bailout” is a fair statement in favor of both wealth redistribution and for a just and equal society. After all, let’s consider what kind of government would enact these demands: a government comfortably ensconced in the pocket of the 1 percent, or a government of the people?

This isn’t a question of asking for table scraps from the 1 percent–this is about taking a stand on issues that directly impact our lives. Giving the proverbial bird to the existing power structure in the face of unbearable living conditions the world over isn’t enough at the end of an equally unbearable day.

Remember that demands for reforms may also germinate broader, more radical platforms. Rather than dismiss them as the murmurs of sold-out activists lacking imagination, the sincere left must claim these slogans and demands for our own, infuse them with radical politics and demand greater concessions still. Will the 1 percent not concede? Then we will continue to expose them! This is our political legacy: fight for reforms to realize our collective strength and power in struggle, then continue on to actualize our revolution.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

CAN THE historic task in front of Occupy be accomplished in its current form? It cannot. This presupposes a unity that the heterogeneous ideologies that flow under the surface of the movement have yet to achieve. Occupy rests across a spectrum of politics ranging from liberal to radical, from revolutionary to reformist. Some activists are still developing their political opinions, while others carry the blueprint for a new society.

Despite this broad spectrum of views, Occupy has gone from public square occupations to attempted general strikes, from skirmishes with police to national days of action against police repression.

It is necessary to articulate demands, and grievances that are bound under a unified set of independent political principles. We cannot ignore the 1 percent–who control the media, poison our skies and seas, and whisper consumer nothings in our ears. We must topple them–they who oppress us as people of color, they who condemn us as the poor to ignorance, they who bash us as queer, they who destroy and degrade our earth, and they who have stripped us of our people’s history.

What is needed is a more potent injection of politics, reclaimed history and the fortitude to continue to fight back. We have to heal the fissures of the left–we have to scrape out sectarianism, bandage coalition and promote solidarity. When they beat us back with repression, we will return the blows with democratic organization.

The success of concrete political tactics is measurable. We can see perspectives play out, we can assess our collective actions, and we can structure our strategy to be most effective. “Going off the grid” isn’t an option; we have to face a brutish system that wants us to lose.

There are tangible ways to measure our progress–student activity, the involvement of organized and unorganized labor, and the activation of sympathetic, community support. All of this is made possible with politics.

Corporate Assault


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American unions have been in steady decline for two decades, accounting for a paltry 7% of workers today. Al-Jazeera investigates the concentrated attack by mega-corporations on labor and how #Occupy Wall Street could spark revival.

Occupy Harvard’s Latest Theatrics


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Unrepentant architects of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Harvey Mansfield and Niall Ferguson get a holiday visit from the Occu-elves.

The Ballerina and the Bull

Occupy Cinema collective project Anna Pavlova’s dying swan dance onto the bull.

One People


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Back in November over 100 dancers converged at Occupy SF & Oakland to dance the world awake.

Occupy North Pole

Naughty banks have got to go.

From Adbusters Blog

San Francisco’s annual SantaCon event delivered an extra occupy message this year, asking citizens to give the leading financial companies an extra hefty lump of coal. Catch the spirit of these holiday revelers and make this holiday season one to remember – move your cash from the big banks once and for all and join your local credit union.

The top 1%


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With 1% of Americans controlling 40% of the country’s wealth, Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines examines the gap between the rich and the rest.

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

What to expect in 2012.

by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

From Adbusters #99: The Big Ideas of 2012

What to expect in 2012.

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Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

Some of the most inspiring social struggles of 2011 have placed democracy at the top of the agenda.

Although they emerge from very different conditions, these movements – from the insurrections of the Arab Spring to the union battles in Wisconsin, from the student protests in Chile to those in the US and Europe, from the UK riots to the occupations of the Spanish indignados and the Greeks in Syntagma Square, and from Occupy Wall Street to the innumerable local forms of refusal across the world – share, first of all, a negative demand: Enough with the structures of neoliberalism! This common cry is not only an economic protest but also immediately a political one, against the false claims of representation. Neither Mubarak and Ben Ali nor Wall Street bankers, neither media elites nor even presidents, governors, members of parliament, and other elected officials – none of them represent us. The extraordinary force of refusal is very important, of course, but we should be careful not to lose track in the din of the demonstrations and conflicts of a central element that goes beyond protest and resistance. These movements also share the aspiration for a new kind of democracy, expressed in tentative and uncertain voices in some cases but explicitly and forcefully in others. The development of this aspiration is one of the threads we are most anxious to follow in 2012.

One source of antagonism that all of these movements will have to confront, even those that have just toppled dictators, is the insufficiency of modern democratic constitutions, particularly their regimes of labor, property, and representation. In these constitutions, first of all, waged labor is key to having access to income and the basic rights of citizenship, a relationship that has long functioned poorly for those outside the regular labor market, including the poor, the unemployed, unwaged female workers, immigrants, and others, but today all forms of labor are ever more precarious and insecure. Labor continues to be the source of wealth in capitalist society, of course, but increasingly outside the relationship with capital and often outside the stable wage relation. As a result, our social constitution continues to require waged labor for full rights and access in a society where such labor is less and less available.

Private property is a second fundamental pillar of the democratic constitutions, and social movements today contest not only national and global regimes of neoliberal governance but also the rule of property more generally. Property not only maintains social divisions and hierarchies but also generates some of the most powerful bonds (often perverse connections) that we share with each other and our societies. And yet contemporary social and economic production has an increasingly common character, which defies and exceeds the bounds of property. Capital’s ability to generate profit is declining since it is losing its entrepreneurial capacity and its power to administer social discipline and cooperation. Instead capital increasingly accumulates wealth primarily via forms of rent, most often organized through financial instruments, through which it captures value that is produced socially and relatively independent of its power. But every instance of private accumulation reduces the power and productivity of the common. Private property is thus becoming ever more not only a parasite but also an obstacle to social production and social welfare.

Finally, a third pillar of democratic constitutions, and object of increasing antagonism, as we said earlier, rests on the systems of representation and their false claims to establish democratic governance. Putting an end to the power of professional political representatives is one of the few slogans from the socialist tradition that we can affirm wholeheartedly in our contemporary condition. Professional politicians, along with corporate leaders and the media elite, operate only the weakest sort of representative function. The problem is not so much that politicians are corrupt (although in many cases this is also true) but rather that the constitutional structure isolates the mechanisms of political decision-making from the powers and desires of the multitude. Any real process of democratization in our societies has to attack the lack of representation and the false pretenses of representation at the core of the constitution.

Recognizing the rationality and necessity of revolt along these three axes and many others, which animate many struggles today, is, however, really only the first step, the point of departure. The heat of indignation and the spontaneity of revolt have to be organized in order to last over time and to construct new forms of life, alternative social formations.

The secrets to this next step are as rare as they are precious.

On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely producing in common and for equitably distributing shared wealth. How can our productive energies and desires be engaged and increased in an economy not founded on private property? How can welfare and basic social resources be provided to all in a social structure not regulated and dominated by state property? We must construct the relations of production and exchange as well as the structures of social welfare that are composed of and adequate to the common.

The challenges on the political terrain are equally thorny. Some of the most inspiring and innovative events and revolts in the last decade have radicalized democratic thinking and practice by occupying and organizing a space, such as a public square, with open, participatory structures or assemblies, maintaining these new democratic forms for weeks or months. Indeed the internal organization of the movements themselves has been constantly subjected to processes of democratization, striving to create horizontal participatory network structures. The revolts against the dominant political system, its professional politicians, and its illegitimate structures of representation are thus not aimed at restoring some imagined legitimate representational system of the past but rather at experimenting with new democratic forms of expression: democracia real ya. How can we transform indignation and rebellion into a lasting constituent process? How can experiments in democracy become a constituent power, not only democratizing a public square or a neighborhood but also inventing an alternative society that is really democratic?

To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible initial steps, such as establishing a guaranteed income, the right to global citizenship, and a process of the democratic reappropriation of the common. But we are under no illusion that we have all the answers. Instead we are encouraged by the fact that we are not alone asking the questions. We are confident, in fact, that those who are dissatisfied with the life offered by our contemporary neoliberal society, indignant about its injustices, rebellious against its powers of command and exploitation, and yearning for an alternative democratic form of life based on the common wealth we share – they, by posing these questions and pursuing their desires, will invent new solutions we cannot yet even imagine. Those are some of our best wishes for 2012.

Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher. In the late 1970s Negri was accused of being the mastermind behind the left-wing terrorist group the Red Brigades. Negri emigrated to France where he taught in Paris along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Hardt and Negri have published four important critiques of late capitalism and globalization: Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). These four works have been highly praised by contemporary activists. Empire, for example, has been hailed as “nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time” by the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

#OCCUPYHOMES


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With the support of occupiers across the country, a homeless family in New York occupies a foreclosed apartment in Brooklyn.

Follow the story: #OccupyHomes and OccupYourHomes.org

BREAKING NEWS

Los Angeles becomes the first major US city to vote against corporate personhood.

From Adbusters Blog

BREAKING NEWS: LOS ANGELES BECOMES FIRST MAJOR U.S. CITY TO VOTE AGAINST CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

On December 6th, Los Angeles became the first major U.S. city to vote against corporate personhood and further call for a Constitutional Amendment asserting that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights and that money is not free speech. The unanimous vote was witnessed in Council chambers packed by a standing room only crowd of hundreds of people as well as a overflow room filled to capacity by enthusiastic supporters. The resolution was sponsored by City Council President Eric Garcetti and seconded by Council Members Bill Rosendahl and Paul Krekorian with passionate support by Council Members Richard Alarcon,and Paul Koretz. The action is in response to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, which gives corporations the same 1st Amendment protections as people and allows them to spend unlimited funds on campaign finance.

Said Mary Beth Fielder, Move To Amend- LA founder, who spearheaded the effort to bring the resolution to the LA City Council. “It’s a great day for Los Angeles and it’s a great day for the United States of America. I hope this is the vote heard around the world and that it will inspire other who want to reclaim our democracy to begin organizing in their communities. Together we can build the grassroots support we need to actually amend our constitution.”

“Every struggle to amend the constitution began as just a group of regular Americans who wanted to end slavery, who thought women should vote, who believed that if you’re old enough to be drafted, you should be old enough to vote,” said Council President Eric Garcetti. “These are how American amendments move forward from the grassroots when Americans say enough is enough. We’re very proud to come together and send a message but more than that, this becomes the official position of the City of Los Angeles, we will officially lobby for this. I also chair a group which oversees all the Democratic mayors and council members in the country and we’re going to share this with all our 3,000 members and we hope to see this start here in the west and sweep the nation until one day we do have a constitutional amendment which will return the power to the people. “

“What we saw in that chamber today was the beginning of a sea change in the way people think about politics in America and I hope that this will be the first day of a long and sustained movement that changes the way we represent ourselves and the way we demand the kind of government that we deserve,” said Council Member Paul Krekorian.

“I could not believe the coalition of energy that filled the council chambers today,” said Council Member Bill Rosendahl. “It made a huge difference. It was democracy at its best! “

The Bank of Ideas


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Occupy London has opened up it’s third space and first building the Bank of Ideas calling it ‘a public repossession’ and transformed the huge abandoned offices of investment bank UBS into a space for political discussion and debate.

#OCCUPY Harvard

Serious rumblings in the aristocratic heartland.

From Adbusters Blog

After 70 students staged a walk-out of Gregory Mankiw’s infamous Econ 101 last week, graduate and undergraduate students from all departments have now escalated the struggle. Yesterday students moved into the campus’s cherished Harvard Yard. By midnight, 500+ battled through police and security to set up an encampment, and now the eyes of the nation are having a double-take. There are serious rumblings in the aristocratic heartland.

Harvard University is a jewel in the crown of America’s economic armature, and its economics department has been a platform for years of an ongoing power struggle waged by an unburdened elite. The university’s top professors and deans, from Mankiw to Dr. Martin Feldstein to Dr. Lawrence Summers, were architects of the 2008 collapse and key authorities in the intellectual campaign for systemic deregulation.

If an occupation can happen at Harvard, it can happen anywhere. Now is the time for a global walk-out. Download a poster of the True Cost Economics Manifesto at kickitover.org and pin it up in the corridor of your department. Let’s start an all out meme war against our neoclassical profs and begin the task of ushering in a new bionomic, psychonomic, ecological economics paradigm.

-Nathan Crompton and Darren Fleet