Platypus International Convention, Chicago 2012 (March 30th-April 1st @SAIC)

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Plenary 1: The 1990s Left today (Friday, March 30th, 2012)

Description: After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and collapse of the Soviet Union soon after, a new political era opened, in which Marxism was discredited and anarchism became predominant on the radical Left. The most pressing challenges of post-Cold War neo-liberal globalization came amid an era of prosperity at the supposed “end of history.” Postmodernist disenchantment with “grand narratives” of emancipation meant a turn against “ideology.” Social “justice” rather than freedom became the watchword for a better world. “Resistance” and “horizontal” or “rhizomatic” politics provided a model for “changing the world without taking power” (as John Holloway, inspired by the Zapatistas, put it). Information technology — the rise of the internet — matched the new cosmopolitanism. The global order of “empire” confronted by the “multitude” demanded access to the “commonwealth” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri). The “death of communism” challenged the Left’s imagination of an emancipated future. “Black bloc” protest and “communization” theory replaced traditional socialism, as the 20th century came to an uncertain close.

Plenary 2: The 2000s Left today (Saturday, March 31st, 2012)

Description: As a result of the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror rekindled anti-imperialist protest, even while it seemed to deliver a grave blow to the newly emergent World Social Forum, “alterglobalization” movement. Neo-conservatism in the U.S. presented the specter of growing divisions in the global order, to which the world’s most vulnerable might fall victim. Religious fundamentalism appeared to surge. Disenchantment with capitalist development accompanied the social imagination of ecological crisis and economic downturn: the desire for a “green economy” and apparent need for decreased consumption. At the same time, new intensification of global migration of workers presented challenges for political integration. The U.S. and allied wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, were met by an anti-war movement and a new generation of radicalization. But the wars were eclipsed by financial crisis and Obama’s election, bringing anti-austerity protests (setting the stage later for #Occupy), as the first decade of the 21st century ended with the economic crisis lingering and even deepening, scotching hopes for a reversal of neoliberalism and return to “Keynesian” social investment policies. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism both stood in disrepute, but without presenting a clear alternative for the future. Continue reading

“What would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?” (Guest post by Paul Brennan)

El Lissitzky - Sketch for PROUN 6B

by Paul Brennan

Like revolution, socialism, communism, and Marxism, like any conception that would have it that there is an alternative to capitalist ontology, today the avant-garde is as extinct as the proverbial dodo. The age of militant artistic publicity seems a long, long century ago. Back then there was still a future, one that could be determined by the productive, social imagination. The historical avant-gardes, pitting themselves against the demarcation that separated the creative from the social and political, were natural allies of revolution. Not always the right kind of revolution, of course, as the example of Italian Futurism, with its militarism and misogyny, and later fascism, shows. And not always, or even often, without a large quantity of crankery and self-indulgence to go with the inspiration. Still, surveying the early twentieth century scene, it is striking how different was the conception and practice of art compared to today. True, there were painters and writers and composers for whom art remained a trade, a form of petty commodity production, but there were others, many others, at work on projects which they pursued with an idealism that would make them a laughing stock today. These could be those like Breton or Maiakovskii, for whom the creative was inseparable from the idea of a new society, or those like Joyce or Pound, politically equivocal or even downright reactionary, but who made it so intensely new that to imagine proper readers for their works was to imagine an entirely different order. Today, figures like Joyce and Pound seem to belong to an entirely different world.

Last year Penguin Books published 100 Artists’ Manifestoes: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. It is an enthralling read, at least initially; after the excerpts from Situationist writings — and surely Situationism is the moment when the avant-garde achieves its most fully realized conception of the need to erase the boundary between life and art — the sad truth begins to sink in that the avant-garde has become a joke. The movements that define the boundaries of the text tell a story. Marinetti’s Futurists represent the Ur-form of the avant-garde — the moment when it was possible to declare that “time and space died yesterday” on the front page of Figaro and not only become a subject of mockery. By the time of the Stuckists any mockery one can imagine the artist’s tracts receiving seems completely justified. It is avant-gardism — or at least an avant-garde gesture — against the avant-garde, a silly, merely reactive whinge against conceptualism and a call for a return to figuration in painting.

One reviewer of 100 Artists’ Manifestoes suggested that Alex Danchev could have improved his book by including a selection of the documents published by a group that appeared in 1999, the International Necronautical Society, which threw down its marker by publishing its first manifesto, in an homage to Marinetti, on the front page of the London Times (http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html). The INS deserves attention; not at all because it has rekindled the true flame of the avant-garde, impossible anyway, but because it at least evinces some ambition and does represent a focused, immersed response to the historical avant-gardes and their place in modern cultural and political history.

The INS is a “parodic” or “ironic” avant-garde, indeed it styles itself a “semi-fictitious avant-garde network,” but it is not the self-consciousness of this organization that distinguishes it from the historical avant-gardes. Self-consciousness was a built-in, preconditional quality of those movements. The classic account of this may be Peter Bürger’s, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1972). In this now somewhat derided text (it flatters no one and is hostile to any claim that there can be a valid “tradition” of the avant-garde) Bürger charts the history of modern art as a story of autonomy achieved (in the moment of the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century) and then relinquished, when artistic self-consciousness, by the time of the late nineteenth century found itself dissatisfied with the available alternatives of artistic practice as either petty commodity production or aestheticism. The avant-gardes, for Bürger, wished to surrender their autonomy in return for an art rejuvenated by social relevance — hence the radical politicizations of art of the early twentieth century.

The self-consciousness, the reflexivity, of the INS is different. It is a organization that at once holds itself aloof from the narrowness of (particularly) contemporary British art and literature, but seems equally incapable of taking seriously the utopian projects of the historical avant-gardes. For this reason it presents itself as a kind of parody of a totalitarian state or party, merged with the attributes of movements like Surrealism and Situationism. Members can be expelled for the slightest infraction, if not shot. There are committees and sub-committees, communiques, and “agents.” The military aspect of the avant-garde is maintained, but with acknowledgment that it is more appropriate today, in our society of spectacular capitalism, to think of such activity as a kind of espionage. All of this with tongue firmly in cheek.

More striking is the death-obsession of the INS. Its members conceive of themselves as “necronauts,” travels or voyagers into death. This seems to me symptomatic of the place that the avant-garde has arrived at. It is no longer possible to think of an expansive, adventurous artistic activity, one outside of the Culture Industry, other than as life placed in a relation of perpetual adjacency to death. Its “General Secretary,” the now well-known novelist Tom McCarthy (http://www.surplusmatter.com/) gives special importance to the Freud of the Death Drive, to Heidegger, Bataille, and to Blanchot. The philosophical stance of the group (Simon Critchley is the INS “Philosopher in Chief”) is decidedly anti-humanist, with a particular hostility to Hegel and Marx. The emphasis falls on the post-structuralist “textual” author, on literature and art as networks, and on technology.

If the near-corpse of the Left is to be revived, then art will have to be revived with it. In the past leftists argued over what a healthy form for a radical art might be. In the age of great realistic fiction, Engels criticized novelists too quick to believe that they had to sacrifice verisimilitude for the sake of propaganda. Trotskii, in Literature and Revolution (1924) endorsed the idea of the avant-garde, but had many cogent criticisms to make of the artistic and cultural schools of this day. Lukács provided a defense of the realist novel against modernism in The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno conducted a seminal discussion over the questions raised in the former’s “Artwork” essay (1936). Benjamin argued for an art appropriate to the “environment” which was “being prepared for us by technology” and advocated a practice that would seek to hurry along the extinction of the “aura” and that would be, at the very least, “completely useless” to fascism and its “aestheticization of politics.” Radical art would be a marriage of technology and tendency. Adorno responded by insisting on the value of artistic autonomy, emphasizing artistic technique over technology, as a last-line resistance to the onslaught of commodification. Examples could be multiplied, for Marxism has a rich legacy of aesthetic debate and discussion. (One place to look is the Fredric Jameson-edited anthology, Aesthetics and Politics, which contains writings by and exchanges between Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Sartre.)

Today art and literature mostly seem to be a business. One could be forgiven for characterizing them as merely a niche industry supplying a rather snooty form of entertainment commodity. The situation visàvis the critical understanding of art is little better. Who cares, you may say, there are other priorities. But the idea of art is inseparable from the idea of the imagination and the imagination is in turn inseparable from the idea of another world, and so I ask, what would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?

The movement as an end-in-itself? An interview with David Graeber

January 31st, 2012

Ross Wolfe

Platypus Review 43 | February 2012

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On  December 16, 2011, Ross Wolfe interviewed David Graeber, Reader at Goldsmiths College in London, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), and central figure in the early stages of the #Occupy Wall Street Movement. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

Indie folk singer Tea Leigh at #Occupy

Ross Wolfe: There are striking similarities between the #Occupy movement and the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Both began in the last year of a Democratic presidency, were spearheaded by anarchists, motivated by discontents with neo-liberalism, and received the support of organized labor. As an active participant in both the anti/alter-globalization and the #Occupy movements, to what extent would you say that #Occupy is a continuation of the project inaugurated at Seattle? What, if anything, makes this movement different?

David Graeber: I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance.

At the same time, I think one reason why the tactics seem appropriate in either case is because, in a way, we’re talking about two rounds of the same cycle of really the same debt crisis. One could make the argument that the world has been in one form of debt crisis or another since the seventies, and that for most of that time, the crisis was fobbed off onto the global South, and to a certain degree held off from the North Atlantic, countries and places with the most powerful economies, which more or less use credit as a way of staving off popular unrest. The global justice movement ultimately was a quite successful form of popular uprising against neoliberal orthodoxy, Washington Consensus, and the tyranny of the debt enforcers like the IMF and the World Bank. It was officially so successful that the IMF itself was expelled from large parts of the world. It simply can’t operate at all in many spaces within Latin America anymore. And it eventually came home. So it’s the same process: declaring some kind of financial crisis which the capitalists themselves are responsible for, and demanding the replacement of what are termed “neutral technocrats” of one type or other, who are in fact schooled in this kind of neoliberal orthodoxy, who’ve been in the economy for wholesale plunder on the part of financial elites. And because #Occupy is reacting to the same thing as the Global Justice Movement, it’s not surprising that the reaction takes the same form: a movement for direct democracy, prefigurative politics, and direct action. In each case, what they’re saying is that the tools of government and the administration are inherently corrupt and unaccountable.

RW: Against the malaise that followed from the dissolution of the anti/alter-globalization movement after 9/11, you argued that the primary reason for its eventual defeat was that it did not know how to handle the shock of its early victories, its participants had become “dizzy with success” along the way. “[O]ne reason it was so easy for [the global justice movement] to collapse, was…that once again, in most of our immediate objectives, we’d already, unexpectedly, won.”[1] In other words, for you the path to defeat was largely paved by victory. In an uncanny way, this appears to mirror, albeit from the opposite direction, Karl Marx’s counter-intuitive understanding of June 1848. Marx wrote that “only the June defeat has created all the conditions under which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricoleur become the flag of the European revolution—the red flag!”[2] For Marx, then, the path toward victory was seen to be paved by defeat. How, if at all, are these two seemingly opposite views related? Do they mutually exclude one another, or are they perhaps complementary? Is it proper or even possible to speak of a “dialectics of defeat”?[3]

DG: That’s an interesting analogy. One would have to ask: “Was Marx right?” He said that defeat was necessary for the ultimate victory, but it’s not clear that that victory ultimately did occur. It’s certainly true that certain sorts of defeat can be mythologized, and may turn into victory, or things that seem like defeats on the field are in fact victories that you didn’t realize you had. I think that happens quite regularly in revolutionary history. In a way, tactical defeat is almost randomly related to strategic victory. There’s no predictable pattern, kind of like Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of the series of world revolutions starting with the French revolution, the world revolution of 1848, which didn’t achieve tactical victory anywhere, but radically transformed the way governments operated in Europe. That’s where you get universal education, redistricting, etc.

RW: The French Revolution even failed internally, insofar as it was turned into an empire by Napoleon. But it still helped spread the nationalist and liberal/republican ethos.

DG: Absolutely. There were institutional, concrete forms that came out of that that have remained with us ever since. Same thing with 1917: It only was successful in Russia, but it had almost as much of an effect on other countries as it did at home. Nothing was the same afterwards. Basically, Wallerstein argues that 1968 was a similar revolutionary moment, sort of along the lines of 1848. He’s now talking about the world revolution of 2011. But it really isn’t clear which model this is going to resemble.

This made me think of what neoliberalism is really about: It’s a political movement much more than it is an economic movement, which is a reaction to those series of victories won by social movements in the sixties, whether the anti-war movements, feminism, the counterculture, and so on. That became a kind of a sanction, in achieving political victory by preventing any social movement from feeling that it had been successful in challenging capitalism in any great, empowered way, or providing any sort of viable alternative. So it became a propaganda war that was continually hierarchized, over creating an actually viable capitalist system. The way the Iraq War was conducted is another great example of that. It’s very clear that the real obsession on the part of the people planning the war was to overcome what they called “the Vietnam syndrome,” i.e., the wave of anti-war demonstrations in the sixties that had really prevented the U.S. from deploying large ground forces in any kind of major land war for 30 years. In order to get over that, they needed to fight the war in a way that would prevent widespread opposition and resistance at home. What they calculated was that “body count is everything,” therefore they had to create rules of engagement such that few enough American soldiers would die that there would be no mass uproar in the form of an anti-war movement. Of course, in order to do that, their rules of engagement meant that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians died, which in turn pretty much ensured they couldn’t win the war. But it seemed more important to them to prevent the anti-war movement than to win the war.

Of course, the anti-war movement of the last decade was put in a terrible situation by the attacks of 9/11, an attack on U.S. soil on a scale that hadn’t ever happened. Now, it’s also true that there’s a pattern where 9/11 came at a very opportune moment, and had it not been for that attack, they probably would have tried to come up with some other excuse for an overseas war. Because it seems that when you finally see a grassroots political movement, whether it’s the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the global justice movement, or any kind of glimmering, that is what happens. The remarkable thing to me is how immediately the ruling class panicked and felt that they had to make massive concessions and invariably seem to commence some sort of overseas war. It seems like they’ve trapped themselves in something like a box. It’s clear that we’ve got a situation here in America, but it’s not really clear who they’re going to attack, or who they could attack overseas.

RW: One of the central debates within #OWS is over the degree to which the movement remains ideologically inclusive and open to all. From early on, the demonstrations at Liberty Plaza drew a number of neoliberal ideologues: Ron Paul supporters, Tea Partiers, and right-wing conspiracy theorists. While their visibility within the movement has perhaps diminished in recent weeks, they remain an undeniable, if marginal, presence at #Occupy events. Some have rejected the very idea of being placed along the political spectrum of “left” and “right,” as they both consider these categories to be too constrictive and fear that identification with one or the other risks alienating potential supporters. Would you say the language of “right” and “left” still has any utility with respect to #Occupy Wall Street? Does #Occupy represent a new popular movement on the Left?

DG: There is an unfortunate tendency to identify “the Left” not as a set of ideals or ideas but of institutional structures. A lot of individualists, anarchists, insurrectionists, and primitivists see the Left as the various leftist political parties, labor unions, what we would generally call “the verticals,” and I can see why one would feel rather chary about wanting to identify himself with these. But at the same time, we’ve been hearing at least since the end of World War II that the difference between right and left is no longer relevant. It’s something that’s said about every five years in making some great pronouncement. And the fact that they have to keep doing it so regularly shows that it isn’t true. It’s sort of the way that people keep making these grand declarations that the whole narrative of progress is gone. They make that about once every generation. But why would they have to announce this every generation if it was actually gone? So I think that these concepts remain.

The Tea Party was also claiming that they weren’t a right-wing group and that they were a broad populist rejection of the structure of the existing political order, in the same way that people want to see #Occupy Wall Street. But one is a very right-wing populist rejection, while the #Occupy movement is inspired by left-wing principles. And a lot of it has to do not even with one’s attitude towards market economics but corporate capitalism. It has this utopian ideal about what capitalism should be, which is actually far more utopian than any conception of what socialism, or whatever else would exist for the Left, would be. So the ultimate utopias of the Tea Party and #Occupy are profoundly different, which indicates a difference in their basic orientations. And #Occupy Wall Street is, in the end, anti-hierarchical. And I think that’s the key. The Right is not, in the end, anti-hierarchical. They want to limit certain types of hierarchy, and promote other types, but they are not ultimately an egalitarian movement. So I think that ignoring that broad left legacy is kind of silly. It strikes me as patently dishonest. I understand that it is sometimes tactically useful to throw as broad a net as possible, because there actually is a lot of common ground. Many right-wing populists have certain sincere objections to, for example, the monopolization of culture, or the fact that there is objectively a cultural elite. A certain social class monopolizes those jobs whereby you get to engage or pursue forms of value that aren’t all about money. The working classes have an overwhelming hatred of the cultural elite and a celebration of the army, to support our troops. It comes down to the fact that if you come from a working-class background, you have a very slim chance of becoming a successful capitalist, but there’s really no possibility that you could become a drama critic for The New York Times. I think it would be wonderful if we could find a way to appeal to such people in a way that wouldn’t be patronizing. But still, rejecting this split between the Right and the Left entirely, strikes me as going in completely the wrong direction.

What we have is this terrible synthesis of the market and bureaucracy which has taken over every aspect of our lives. Yet only the Right has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s a really simple-minded critique, but the Left really doesn’t have one at all.

RW: Some have characterized the #Occupy movement as sounding the alarm for “class war.” They cite the now-ubiquitous #Occupy Wall Street motto, “We are the 99%!” as evidence of this fact. As the ostensible originator of this slogan, do you believe that #Occupy Wall Street is an outward manifestation of the latent class struggle underlying civil society? Whatever its rhetorical effect, does this metric provide an adequate framework for the analysis of class struggle?

DG: I don’t think of it as an analysis so much as an illustration. It’s a way of opening a window on inequality. Of course, a slogan doesn’t ever answer the real structural question of how social classes get reproduced. What a slogan does is point you to how you can start thinking about a problem that you might not have even known existed. It’s been remarkably effective at that, for two reasons: one, because it points out just how small the group of people who have been the beneficiaries of the economic growth, of our productivity has been. They basically grabbed everything. Also, the slogan has successfully made #Occupy inclusive in a way that other social movements have had trouble with before. So I think that’s what was effective about it. Obviously there are infinite shades of difference between us, and class is a much more complicated thing than just the fact there is a certain group of people that is super rich or has a lot of political power. But nonetheless, it provides people with a way to start talking to each other about what they have in common, thus providing the form in which the other things can come to be addressed. You have to start with what you have in common. And that’s one thing we’ve had a really hard time doing up till now.

RW: Most within the #Occupy movement recognize the raw fact of dramatic social inequality, but disagree over the method to pursue in looking to resolve this problem. Many hope that #Occupy will provide the grassroots political momentum necessary to pass a set of economic reforms, which typically would come by way of legislation passed through the existing channels of government. Others see #Occupy as potentially revolutionary, as pointing to something beyond the merely “economic.” These two perspectives seem to indicate radically different directions this movement might take. Would you characterize this movement as “anti-capitalist”? Should it be? If so, what is the nature of its “anti-capitalist” politics?

DG: I’ll start by saying that the people who were originally involved in the creation of #Occupy were overwhelmingly anti-capitalist, very explicitly. Whether we thought we were going to be able to overthrow capitalism in one go, well, obviously no. We’re working toward that as an ultimate goal. That’s why it’s key to have an effect that will genuinely benefit people’s lives. #Occupy certainly doesn’t contradict that revolutionary impulse, and helps move us in a direction towards greater freedom and autonomy, by which I mean freedom from the structures of both the state and capitalism. Now, to create broad alliances along those lines, you’d have to be very careful about your organizational and institutional structures. Because one of the things that is revolutionary about the #Occupy movement is that it’s trying to create prefigurative spaces in which we can experiment and create the kind of institutional structures that would exist in a society that’s free of the state and capitalism. We hope to use those to create a kind of crisis of legitimacy within existing institutions.

Of course, I can only speak for myself. But most of the people I was working with, who were putting the vision together, had this belief in common: that the great advantage we had was that people across the political spectrum in America shared a profound revulsion with the existing political system, which they recognize to be a system of institutionalized bribery that has very little to do with anything that could be meaningfully called democracy. Money clearly controls every aspect of the political system. Thus, we would only had to delegitimate a system that has already almost entirely delegitimated itself. We adopted what amounts to a “dual power strategy.” By creating autonomous institutions that represent what a real democracy might be like, we could provoke a situation for a mass delegitimation of existing institutions of power. Obviously, the ones that are the most violent are the hardest to delegitimate. In American society, for various ideological reasons, people hate politicians, but they have been trained to identify with the army and police to a degree that is hardly true anywhere else in the world. There’s been relentless propaganda to create sympathies for soldiers and policemen, ever since the cowboy movie turned into the cop movie. I think that it would be a terrible mistake to go from these prefigurative structures to running some sort of political candidate. But even the idea of turning into a lobbying group pursuing a specific reformist agenda is wrongheaded. The moment you engage with a system, you’re not only legitimating it, you’re delegitimating yourself, because your own internal politics become warped. Even accepting money has pernicious effects. But the moment you’re interfacing with vertically organized structures of power, which are ultimately based on coercion, it poisons everything. By actively delegitimating the structure, we are in a position, perhaps as a side effect of our actions, to create the forms that will actually be of the most benefit to ordinary people.

RW: One division that emerged early on among the occupants concerned the need to call for demands. You have in the past rejected the idea of politics as policy-making, feeling that demands focused on electoral reform or market regulations would only steer the movement in a conservative direction. If not demands, what kind of “visions and solutions,” as you’ve put it, do you think the #Occupy movement should provide?

DG: There is a profound ambiguity in the language of protest politics. I always point to the grammar of signs or slogan. Someone says “Free Mumia” or “Save the whales.” But who are you asking to do that? Are you talking about pressuring the entire system do so? Or are you calling on us as a collectivity to pressure them to do so? So yes, one could make the argument that the distinction between “visions,” “demands,” and “solutions” is somewhat arbitrary.

When we were first putting together the idea for #Occupy Wall Street, there were some who argued that we could make a series of demands that are part of the delegitimation process, by making demands for things that are obviously commonsensical and reasonable, but which they would never in a million years even consider doing. So it would not be an attempt to achieve the demands, but rather it would be a further way to de-structure the authority, which would be shown to be utterly useless when it came to providing what the people need. What we’re really talking about here is rhetorical strategies, not strategies of government, because #Occupy Wall Street does not claim to take control of the instruments of power, nor does it intend to. In terms of long-term visions, one of our major objectives has already been achieved to a degree which we never imagined it could have been. Our goal was to spread a certain notion of direct democracy, of how democracy could work.

For spreading the idea, the occupation of public space was very fruitful. It was a way of saying, “We are the public. Who could possibly keep us out of our space?” They adopted a Gandhian strategy. By being studiously non-violent, a group of people who couldn’t possibly pose a threat to anyone might bring out how much the state is willing to react with extreme violence.  Of course, the problem with the Gandhian strategy has always been that you need the press to cover it that way. One reason the window-breaking in Seattle happened was that a majority of the people involved had been forest activists who had previously used exclusively Gandhian tactics — tree-sitting, chaining themselves to equipment to prevent the destruction of old-growth forests, etc. The police reaction was to use weaponized torture devices. So these activists had decided that Gandhian tactics don’t work; they had to try something else. Now suddenly the Gandhian approach has been relatively successful. There has been this window, and it’s interesting to ask yourself: “Why?”

RW: One of the tropes of #Occupy Liberty Plaza was that its participants were working together to build a small-scale model what an emancipated society of the future might look like. This line of reasoning posits a very intimate connection between ethics (changing oneself) and politics (changing the world). Yet it is not difficult to see that most of the services provided at Liberty Plaza were still dependent on funding received from donations, which in turn came from the society of exchange: Capitalism. Since the means for the provision of these services can be viewed as parasitic upon the capitalist totality, does this in any way complicate or compromise the legitimacy of such allegedly prefigurative communities?

DG: I think the “capitalist totality” only exists in our imagination. I don’t think there is a capitalist totality. I think there’s capital, which is extraordinarily powerful, and represents a certain logic that is actually parasitic upon a million other social relations, without which it couldn’t exist. I think Marx veered back and forth on this score himself. He did, of course, support the Paris Commune. He claimed that it was communism in action. So Marx wasn’t against all experimental, prefigurative forms. He did say that the self-organization of the working class was “the motion of communism.” One could make the argument, if you wanted to take the best aspects of Marx (though I think he was deeply ambivalent on this issue, actually) that he did accept the notion that certain forms of opposition could be acted out prefiguratively. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that he did have profound arguments with the anarchists on this matter, when it came to practice.

I think that the real problem is Marx’s Hegelianism. The totalizing aspect of Hegel’s legacy is rather pernicious. One of the extremely important disagreements between Bakunin and Marx had to do with the proletariat, especially its most advanced sections, as the necessary agent of revolution, versus the peasants, the craftsmen, or the recently proletarianized. Marx’s basic argument was that within the totality of capitalism, the proletariat are the only ones who are absolutely negated and who can only liberate themselves through the absolute negation of the system. Everyone else is some kind of “petit-bourgeois.” Once you’re stuck with the idea of absolute negation, that opens the door to a number of quite dangerous conclusions. There is the danger of saying that all forms of morality are thrown out the window as no longer relevant. You no longer know what form of morality will work in a non-bourgeois society, thus justifying a lot of things that really can’t be justified.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s much more sensible to argue that all social and political possibilities exist simultaneously. Just because certain forms of cooperation are only made possible through the operation of capitalism, that consumer goods are capitalist, or that techniques of production are capitalist, no more makes them parasitical upon capitalism than the fact that factories can operate without governments. Some cooperation and consumer goods makes them socialist. There are multiple, contradictory logics of exchange, logics of action, and cooperative logics existing at all times. They are embedded in one another, in mutual contradiction, constantly in tension. As a result, there is a base from which one can make a critique of capitalism even at the same time that capitalism constantly subsumes all those alternatives to it. It’s not like everything we do corresponds to a logic of capitalism. There are those who’ve argued that only 30–40% of what we do is subsumed under the logic of capitalism. Communism already exists in our intimate relations with each other on a million different levels, so it’s a question of gradually expanding that and ultimately destroying the power of capital, rather than this idea of absolute negation that plunges us into some great unknown.

RW: The version of anarchism that you subscribe to stresses this relationship of means to ends. You’ve written that “[anarchism] insists, before anything else, that one’s means must be consonant with one’s ends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; in fact, as much as possible, one must oneself, in one’s relations with one’s friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.”[4] It seems that you tend to endorse a “diversity of tactics” approach to direct action. If one insists upon a strict identity of means and ends, might not a violent course of action violate the principle of attaining a non-violent society?

DG: The idea of the identity of means and ends particularly applies to the way revolutionaries deal with one another. You have to make your own relations with your fellow comrades, to be an embodiment of the world you wish to create. Obviously, you don’t have the liberty to make your relationship with the capitalists or the police into an embodiment of the world you wish to create. In fact, what I’ve found ethnographically is that this boundary has to be very clearly maintained. People used to criticize the global justice movement because it would use terms like “evil,” but really what that word indicated was a borderline. There are certain institutions that we can at least deal with, because they’re not fundamentally inimical to what we’re trying to do. There are others that are irredeemable. You just can’t talk to them. That’s why we refused to deal with the WTO. “Evil” meant, “we can’t extend that prefigurative logic to them.” When dealing with people who are “in” the circle of our prefigurative practice, you have to assume everyone has good intentions. You give them the benefit of the doubt. Just as (and this is another anarchist principle) there’s no way better to have someone act like a child than to treat him as a child, the only way to have someone act like an adult is to treat him as an adult. So you give them the benefit of the doubt in that regard, as well-intentioned and honest. But you have to have a cutoff point. Now, what happens at that cutoff is where all the debate takes place. What would one do in a free society if he saw people behaving in ways that were terribly irresponsible and destructive?

RW: While the democratic ideology it represents has certainly helped popularize the #Occupy movement, many have complained that within the consensus decision-making model, process ultimately becomes fetishized. The entire affair can be massively alienating, as those with the greatest endurance or the most leisure time can exert an inordinate amount of influence the decision-making process. Another perceived problem with consensus decision-making is that only the most timid, tentative, or lukewarm proposals end up getting passed. Either that, or only extremely vague pronouncements against “greed” or “injustice” get passed, precisely because the meaning of these terms remains underdefined. The structure of consensus, passing proposals that most people agree upon already, tends to favor the most unambitious ideas, and seems to me an inherently conservative approach. Do these criticisms have any legitimacy with regard to the #Occupy movement?

DG: You can’t create a democracy out of nothing without there being a lot of kinks. Societies that have been doing this over the long term have come up with solutions to these problems. That’s why I like to talk about the example of Madagascar, where the state broke down, but you couldn’t even really tell. People carried on as they had before, because they were used to making decisions by consensus. They’d been doing it for a thousand years. At the moment they have a military government. But in terms of the day-to-day operation of everyday life in a small community, everything’s done democratically. It’s a remarkable contrast to our own society, ostensibly more democratic in terms of our larger structures. When was the last time a group of twenty Americans (outside of #OWS) sat down and made a collective decision in an equal way?

Yes, you’re right: you’ll only get broad and tepid solutions if you bring everything to the General Assembly. That’s why we have working groups, empower them to perform actions, and encourage them to form spontaneously. This is another of the key principles in dealing with consensus and decentralization. In an ideal world, the very unwieldiness of finding consensus in a large group should convince people not to bring decisions before this large group unless they absolutely have to. That’s actually the way it’s supposed to work out.

Extract from Eduard Bernstein's Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie. Text reads: „Das, was man gemeinhin Endziel des Sozialismus nennt, ist mir nichts, die Bewegung alles.“ (What is commonly called the ultimate goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything.)

RW: To what extent do you think that the goal of politics should be freedom from the necessity of politics? Is ethics even possible in a world that hasn’t been changed? Theodor Adorno remarked in Minima Moralia that “the wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” In other words, can we even speak of ethics in the Aristotelian sense of the good life within the totality of the wrong? Or would this require a prior political transformation?

DG: I think that kind of totalizing logic ends up requiring a total rupture. Perhaps after the revolution we can imagine a rupture, whereby we now live in a totally different society, but we all know it’s not going to happen through a total rupture. And if you really adopt that Hegelian logic, it begins to seem as if it’s not possible at all. It almost necessarily leads to profoundly tragic conclusions and extremely quietist politics, as indeed it did with the Frankfurt School. I don’t think that politics can be eliminated. And just as the perfect life cannot be achieved, the process of moving toward it is the good life.

I think that in terms of ethics that is the case. I can’t imagine a world in which we aren’t revolutionary ourselves, and revolutionizing our relations with one another, and revolutionizing our understanding of what is possible. That doesn’t mean that we will not someday—perhaps someday soon, hopefully—achieve a world whereby the problems we have today will be the sort of things to scare children with stories of them. But that doesn’t mean we’ll ever overcome the need to revolutionize ourselves. And the process by which that comes about is the good life.

RW: So does the movement itself become the goal? Must this process become an end-in-itself?

DG: It has to be. I mean, what else is there to life? |P


1. David Graeber, “The Shock of Victory,” in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (New York: Minor Compositions, 2010), 17.↑
2. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1851, in Collected Works, Volume 10: 1849–1851 (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 70. Available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm>.↑
3. See Platypus’ discussion at the 2009 Left Forum: Dialectics of Defeat: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression. Available online at <http://www.archive.org/details/PlatypusDialecticsofDefeatLeftForum2009NYC041809>.↑
4. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 7.↑

The final chapter of Mikhail Lifshits’ The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933)

Here is the final chapter to the Russian philosopher and aesthetician Mikhail Lifshits’ groundbreaking 1933 book The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx.  Lifshits was the closest friend of Georg Lukács in the Soviet Union.  The two met in 1929, and though Lifshits, like Lukács, eventually proved to be an incorrigible conservative and anti-modernist when it came to aesthetics, I’d say that The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx is a valuable text. Consider, for example, its final chapter:

The historical role of the capitalist mode of production is to bring into the sharpest possible focus the contradictions of social progress; at the same time it prepares the ground for the annihilation of all these inequalities and antagonisms. The very division of labour gives rise to contradictions between the three ‘elements’: ‘productive forces’, ‘social relations’, and ‘consciousness’. The social division of labour is not, however, an eternal category. As a class stratification of society it disappears, and as a professional hierarchy it withers away in the transition to communist society.

But what does this transition mean with regard to aesthetic creation? Does it not mean the destruction of all distinctions between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic in art, just as in life the contradiction between the artist and the ordinary mortal is removed? Does not collectivism, generally speaking, suppress all individual originality and talent? Such are some of the bourgeois objections to communism. These objections Marx and Engels dealt with in criticizing Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. Stirner, one of the founders of anarchism, distinguished between ‘human’ work, which can be organized collectively, and ‘individual’ work, which cannot be socialized in any manner. For who can take the place of a Mozart or a Raphael?

‘Here again, as always,’ wrote Marx and Engels, ‘Sancho [i.e. Stirner] is out of luck in his choice of practical examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your music in your stead, or execute your designs for a painting. Raphaers works can be done by no other.” But Sancho should have known that not Mozart himself, but someone else, largely composed and completely finished Mozart’s Requiem; and that Raphael “executed” only a small portion of his frescoes.

‘He imagines that the so-called organizers of labour wish to organize the whole activity of every individual, whereas it is precisely they who make a distinction between directly productive labour, which must be organized, and labour which is not directly productive. As far as the latter kind of labour is concerned, they do not think, as Sancho imagines, that everybody can work in Raphael’s place, but rather that everybody who has a Raphael in him should be able to develop unhindered. Sancho imagines that Raphael created his paintings independently of the division of labour then existing in Rome. If he will compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he will see to what extent the works of art of the first were conditioned by the flourishing of Rome, then under the influence of Florence; how the works of Leonardo were conditioned by the social milieu of Florence, and later those of Titian by the altogether different development of Venice. Raphael, like any other artist, was conditioned by the technical advances made in art before him. by the organization of society and the division of labour in his locality, and finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality maintained relations. Whether an individual like Raphael is able to develop his talent depends entirely upon demand, which in turn depends upon the division of labour and the consequent educational conditions of men.

‘In proclaiming the individual character of scientific and artistic work. Stirner places himself far below the bourgeoisie. Already in our time it has been found necessary to organize this “individual” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had the time to produce one-tenth of his paintings if he had considered them works which “only this individual can accomplish”. In Paris the tremendous demand for vaudeville and novels has given rise to an organization of labour for the production of these wares, which are at least better, at any rate, than their “individual” competitors in Germany.’ Thus bourgeois society itself makes attempts to organize the higher forms of spiritual labour. ‘Needless to say, however, all these organizations based upon the modem division of labour achieve results which are still very inadequate, and represent an advance only by comparison with the short-sighted self-sufficiency existing until now.’ But we should not confuse this so-called ‘organization of labour’ with communism. In communist society those confounded questions concerning the disparity between highly gifted persons and the masses, disappear. ‘The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in certain individuals, and its consequent suppression in the broad masses of the people, is an effect of the division of labour. Even if in certain social relations everyone could become an excellent painter, that would not prevent everyone from being also an original painter, so that here too the difference between “human” work and “individual” work becomes a mere absurdity. With a communist organization of society, the artist is not confined by the local and national seclusion which ensues solely from the division of labour, nor is the individual confined to one specific art, so that he becomes exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc.; these very names express sufficiently the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labour. In a communist society, there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, so paint.’

Collectivism, far from suppressing personal originality, in reality provides- the only solid ground for an all-sided development of personality. Marx and Engels stated this emphatically in The German Ideology. They knew full well that a new cycle of artistic progress can begin only with the victory of the proletariat, the abolition of private property, the spread of communist relations. Only then can all the forces now exhausted by capitalist oppression be liberated. ‘The destruction of private property is the complete assimilation of all human feelings and characteristics.’ The new society, wrote Marx, in criticism of ‘crude’, leveling communism. does not stand for the ‘abstract negation of all education and civilization’. It does not propose ‘to suppress talent by force’. Quite the contrary, ‘in communist society — the only society in which the original and free development of individuals is no mere phrase — this development is contingent precisely upon the very association of individuals, an association based partly on economic premises, partly upon the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and finally upon the universal activity of individuals in accordance with the available productive forces. Thus the question here concerns individuals on a definite historical level of development, and not any random individuals…Naturally the consciousness of these individuals with respect to their mutual relations is likewise altogether different, and as remote from the “principle of love” or “dévouement” as from egoism.’

Communist society removes not only the abstract contradiction between ‘work and pleasure’ but also the very real contradiction between feeling and reason, between ‘the play of bodily and mental powers’ and ‘the conscious will’. Together with the abolition of classes and the gradual disappearance of the contradiction between physical and spiritual labour, comes that all-sided development of the whole individual which the ‘greatest social thinkers hitherto could only dream about.’ Only communist society, in which ‘the associated producers regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power’, can establish the material basis for ‘the development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom’. ‘…The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.’

According to Marx’s doctrine, therefore, communism creates conditions for the growth of culture and art compared to which the limited opportunities that the slaves’ democracy offers to a privileged few must necessarily seem meagre. Art is dead! LONG LIVE ART! — this is the slogan of Marx’s aesthetics.

You can download the entire book here:

Mikhail Lifshits — The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx

Interview with Ross Wolfe of on #Occupy, the role of criticism in relation to theory and praxis, and the “return to Marx”

Untitled

Conducted by C. Derick Varn of
The Loyal Opposition to Modernity

Here’s Derick’s introduction to this interview:

Ross Wolfe introduced me to the Platypus Affiliated Society and is a member of my Aesthetics, Politics, and Theory: Red and/or Black (of which Symptomatic Redness is a project).  Ross Wolfe is currently a graduate student at the University of Chicago.  The main focus of his work is in Russian history, but he is also interested in Central European history, Jewish studies, philosophy, and Marxism.  He writes primarily about the history of avant-garde architecture, contemporary political issues (activism, current events), and topics such as the environment, technology, utopianism, and the history of the Left.  He blogs at the Charnel-House.

More from Derick’s ongoing Marginalia on Radical Thinking series can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

C. DERICK VARN: So you have been working with and critiquing Occupy Wall Street from your vantage point in New York.  How did you get involved?

ROSS WOLFE: I was first alerted to the #Occupy protests going on down at Liberty Plaza about one week after it began, by someone much further from the scene than I was — my good friend Steve McClellan, a graduate student in Central European history at Oregon State University.  At that point, the movement had barely made any sort of splash in the mainstream media, and mostly established itself through YouTube videos and other decentralized, user-based means.

So I decided to take a visit down to Zuccotti Park to try and get a better sense of what was going on there.  What I saw there (especially at this early point) was largely ideological incoherence.  The politics on display at Occupy Wall Street were symptomatic in very much the same way that they had been at the resurgent anti-globalization protests against the G-8 in Pittsburgh back in 2009 and the G-20 conference in Toronto in 2010.  Needless to say, my first reactions to the demonstration were fairly pessimistic.  This was reflected in my initial write-up of my experiences. Continue reading

#Occupy movement roundtable discussion: An invitation to a political dialogue hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society

El Lissitzky's "Beat the White Circle with the Red Wedge" (1920)

FIRST ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Friday 7pm | October 28, 2011

Kimmel, Room 406.  NYU

60 Washington Square S., NYC

What is the #Occupy movement? (PDF version)

The recent #Occupy protests are driven by discontent with the present state of affairs: glaring economic inequality, dead-end Democratic Party politics, and, for some, the suspicion that capitalism could never produce an equitable society.  These concerns are coupled with aspirations for social transformation at an international level.  For many, the protests at Wall St. and elsewhere provide an avenue to raise questions the Left has long fallen silent on:

  • What would it mean to challenge capitalism on a global scale?
  • How could we begin to overcome social conditions that adversely affect every part of life?
  • And, how could a new international radical movement address these concerns in practice?

Although participants at Occupy Wall St. have managed thus far to organize resources for their own daily needs, legal services, health services, sleeping arrangements, food supplies, defense against police brutality, and a consistent media presence, these pragmatic concerns have taken precedent over long-term goals of the movement.  Where can participants of this protest engage in formulating, debating, and questioning the ends of this movement? How can it affect the greater society beyond the occupied spaces?

We in the Platypus Affiliated Society ask participants, organizers, and interested observers of the #Occupy movement to consider the possibility that political disagreement could lead to clarification, further development and direction.  Only when we are able to create an active culture of thinking and debating on the Left without it proving prematurely divisive can we begin to imagine a Leftist politics adequate to the historical possibilities of our moment.  We may not know what these possibilities for transformation are.  This is why we think it is imperative to create avenues of engagement that will support these efforts.

Towards this goal, Platypus will be hosting a series of roundtable discussions with organizers and participants of the #Occupy movement.  These will start at campuses in New York and Chicago but will be moving to other North American cities, and to London, Germany, and Greece in the months to come.   We welcome any and all who would like to be a part of this project of self-education and potential rebuilding of the Left to join us in advancing this critical moment.

(The above is a general release intended for activists, organizers, and participants in the recent #Occupy movement who are interested in further exploring its political dimension.  We are open to any number of political orientations or affiliations within the broader spectrum of the Left, whether they be Marxist, anarchist, or more moderate.  Please contact me at rosslaurencewolfe@gmail.com if you would like to contribute or learn more.)

The Platypus Affiliated Society

October 2011

Platypus logo

The theatrical dimension of Occupy Wall Street: A brief excursus on the “carnivalesque” in politics

The iconic American anarchist Emma Goldman was famously quoted for her opposition to the joyless seriosity that characterized some of the more hard-nosed revolutionaries she had met in America, Russia, and around the world:

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!
If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.

I have up to this point been fairly critical of some of more theatrical elements of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  This is a an issue that is more complex than my dyspeptic attitude toward this aspect of the demonstrations would indicate.  I should like to explore this issue with a little more depth in order to clarify the root and specificity of my critique.

To be fair, staging performances at demonstrations and political celebrations does have some revolutionary precedent.  The role of festivals in the France of the First Republic has been documented by Mona Ozouf in her book, Festivals and the French Revolution.  Likewise, the young Soviet avant-garde produced numerous plays and recreations in the 1920s designed to involve the masses in the building of a new, emancipated society.  An account of these is provided in James Von Geldern’s Bolshevik Festivals: 1917-1920.

The Festival of Unity during the French Revolution, 1793

Compared with the pantomime and harlequinism of contemporary politics, however, these public displays and productions tended to be much less improvisational, less of a free-for-all — they were more organized, coordinated, and choreographed.  But despite the fact that such past festivities were successful in stirring revolutionary emotion among the people, even then they had their shortcomings.  As the famous  19th-century historian Hippolyte Taine described in an account of such a celebration held in 1789, these revolutionary political carnivals often amounted to nothing more than rote theatrical repetition:

Whatever the imagination of the day offers [the Frenchman] to increase his emotion, all the classical, rhetorical, and dramatic material at his command, are employed for the embellishment of his festival.  Already wildly enthusiastic, he is anxious to increase his enthusiasm. — At Lyons, the fifty thousand confederates from the south range themselves in line of battle around an artificial rock, fifty feet high, covered with shrubs, and surmounted by a Temple of Concord in which stands a huge statue of Liberty; the steps of the rock are decked with flags, and a solemn mass precedes the administration of the oath. — At Paris, an altar dedicated to the country is erected in the middle of the Champ de Mars, which is transformed into a colossal circus…Never was such an effort made to intoxicate the senses and strain the nerves beyond their powers of endurance! — The moral machine is made to vibrate to the same and even to a greater extent.  For more than a year past, harangues, proclamations, addresses, newspapers and events have daily added one degree more to the pressure. On this occasion, thousands of speeches, multiplied by myriads of newspapers, carry the enthusiasm to the highest pitch.  Declamation foams and rolls along in a steady stream of rhetoric everywhere throughout France.  In this state of excitement the difference between magniloquence and sincerity, between the false and the true, between show and substance, is no longer distinguishable.  The Federation becomes an opera which is seriously played in the open street — children have parts assigned them in it; it occurs to no one that they are puppets, and that the words taken for an expression of the heart are simply memorized speeches that have been put into their mouths.  (Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution, Volume 1).  Pgs. 220-221.

Taine was not alone in thus criticizing certain aspects of French revolutionary spectacles.  Even the famed Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin, who regarded Taine as a vulgar bourgeois historian, had to agree that these festivals had their limitations.  “Taine disparages the festivals of the Revolution, and it is true that those of 1793 and 1794 were often too theatrical,” Kropotkin conceded.  (Petr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution.  Pg. 177).

Harlequinism: Clowning around at Occupy Wall Street

Harlequinism: Clowning around at Occupy Wall Street

Marat

The OWS zombie march almost recalls scenes from the 1967 British film Marat/Sade, in which the revolutionary Marat is resurrected to witness the Marquis de Sade’s perverse reproduction of the history of the fifteen years after Marat’s death, held in a madhouse during the Empire with all the parts played by the inmates

In contemporary cultural theory, many postmodernists glorify the creativity, spontaneity, and ironic possibilities involved in acts of political theater.  Much of this sentiment is derived from the writings of the Situationists in France and the rediscovery of the works of Mikhail Bakhtin by the French avant-garde journal Tel Quel.  Bakhtin, a renowned early Soviet literary theorist loosely associated with the Formalist school, was the one who perhaps articulated best the way in which the “carnivalesque” can potentially act to transform social consciousness:

Negation in popular-festive imagery has never an abstract logical character.  It is always something obvious, tangible.  That which stands behind negation is by no means nothingness but the “other side” of that which is denied, the carnivalesque upside down.  Negation reconstructs the image of the object and first of all modifies the topographical position in space of the object as a whole, as well as its parts.  It transfers the object to the underworld, replaces the top by the bottom, or the front by the back, sharply exaggerating some traits at the expense of others.  Negation and destruction of the object are therefore their displacement and reconstruction in space.  The nonbeing of an object is its “other face,” its inside out.  […]

Carnival celebrates the destruction of the old and the birth of the new world — the new year, the new spring, the new kingdom.  The old world that has been destroyed is offered together with the new world and is represented with it as a dying part of the dual body.  This is why in carnivalesque images there is so much turnabout, so many opposite faces and intentionally upset proportions.  (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.  Pg. 410).

The people sing to Marat: “Four years after the revolution/and the old king’s execution/String up every aristocrat Out with the priests/Let them live on their fat/Down with all of the ruling class/Throw all the generals out on their arse/Good old Marat by your side we’ll stand or fall/You’re the only one that we can trust at all/Fighting all the gentry and fighting every priest/Businessman the bourgeois the military beast/Marat, we’re poor, And the poor stay poor! Marat, don’t make Us wait anymore. We want our rights and we don’t care how, We want our revolution now. Why do they have the gold? Why do they have the power? Do they have the friends at the top? Why do they have the jobs at the top? We’ve got nothing! Always had nothing! Nothing but holes and millions of them. Living in holes dying in holes. Holes in our bellies and holes in our clothes.”

In these passages, Bakhtin tacitly relies on a Marxist concept inherited from the Hegelian dialectical legacy — that of determinate negation.  As Hegel observed:

[T]he skepticism which only ever sees pure nothingness in its result and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is specifically the nothingness of that from which it results.  For it is only when it is taken as the result of that from which it emerges, that it is, in fact, the true result; in that case it is itself a determinate nothingness, one which has a content.  The skepticism that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss.  But when, on the other hand, the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.  (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit.   §79, pg. 51).

Hegel himself carried this notion too far in terms of what he thought was its positive speculative power.  This is something Theodor Adorno picked up on: “The nonidentical is not to be obtained directly, as something positive on its part, nor is it obtainable by a negation of the negative.  This negation is not an affirmation itself, as it is to Hegel” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics.  Pg. 158).  Nevertheless, determinate negation still underwrites the critical apprehension of the present, and opens up the possibility that a new society could be born out of its negative image.

Celebration of May Day, Petrograd 1920

This was something of which Marx was fully aware.  In an 1846 letter to the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, Marx famously called for the “ruthless critique of everything existing.”  More than thirty years later, he repeated this sentiment in the brilliant postface to the second edition of Capital, Volume 1:

In its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists.  In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary.  (Marx, Capital, Volume 1.  Pg. 103).

Dmitrii Menshikov’s poster celebrating May Day, 1920

As I see it, the biggest problem with the rock-concert atmosphere and all the myriad performance pieces one sees down at Liberty Plaza is its quasi-Situationist character.  This French group — loosely involved with the 1968 protests (according to one of their main influences and later their rival, the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, “they…greatly exaggerated their role in May ’68, after the fact”) — loosely argued for the subversive reappropriation of the spectacle as a sort of homeopathic method by which one could counteract the “society of the spectacle.”

To be sure, Guy Debord, the Situationist movement’s most brilliant exponent, did not prescribe such a course of action.  Debord remained (at least theoretically) committed to a critical approach founded upon the notion of negation, much like what we have been discussing so far and much closer the one advocated by the members of the Frankfurt School:

To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle, what is needed is men putting a practical force into action. The critical theory of the spectacle can be true only by uniting with the practical current of negation in society, and this negation, the resumption of revolutionary class struggle, will become conscious of itself by developing the critique of the spectacle which is the theory of its real conditions (the practical conditions of present oppression), and inversely by unveiling the secret of what this negation can be.  (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.  §203).

Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations, 1968

However, not all the Situationists were so prudent, and Debord’s concept of political practice largely involved the creation of theatricized “situations,” intended to disrupt the prevailing spectacular order of society.  This can be seen partially in the Situationist International’s “Report on the Occupation [!!] of the Sorbonne.”  Much like the situation at Occupy Wall Street, primarily youths (or students) set the precedent for the occupation, which were then later joined by the factory workers in the various unions.  The student-led Comité d’Occupation de la Sorbonne managed the occupation of the University of Paris throughout the uprising.  The Situationists defended the students’ “festivity” against the more ascetic and austere measures being called for by the more traditional Marxist organizations:

At the very moment that the example of the occupation is beginning to be taken up in the factories it is collapsing at the Sorbonne. This development is all the more serious since the workers have against them a bureaucracy infinitely more powerful and entrenched than that of the student or leftist amateurs. To add to the confusion, the leftist bureaucrats, echoing the CGT [the Communist Party-dominated labor union] in the hope of being accorded a little marginal role alongside it, abstractly separate the workers from the students. (“The workers don’t need any lessons from the students.”) But the students have in fact already given an excellent lesson to the workers precisely by occupying the Sorbonne and briefly initiating a really democratic debate. The bureaucrats all tell us demagogically that the working class is grown up, in order to hide the fact that it is enchained — first of all by them (now or in their future hopes, depending on which group they’re in). They counterpose their lying seriousness to the “festivity” in the Sorbonne; but it was precisely that festiveness that bore within itself the only thing that is serious: the radical critique of prevailing conditions.

Student protestors marching from the occupied Sorbonne to the Renault factory in May 1968

Within Situationist political praxis, one of the primary means of spectacular subversion was what they called “détournement” — “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble.”  As the Situationists averred: “Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old and new senses. And it is very practical because it’s so easy to use and because of its inexhaustible potential for reuse” (The Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude”).  To their credit, however, the Situationists prior to 1968 realized that this tactic of ironic/parodic disruption was itself symptomatic of the political impotence of their moment:

This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action.  (The Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude”).

Since the late 1960s, the practice of détournement has been generalized throughout post-New Left political culture.  According to Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, “Lefebvre…found [the Situationists’] strategies interesting but partial, too individualistic and theatrical.”  Brian Gallagher correctly noted the connection with this Situationist stratagem and the slogans held aloft by members of Occupy Wall Street in his comment on this post: “[T]he Situationists were attempting to subvert the status quo.  People had jobs but modern life wasn’t fulfilling.  Certainly, we see their legacy in the de facto requisite pithy slogans painted by protesters on Wall Street.”

This method, however, is unfortunately quite prone to narcissism and exhibitionism.  The theatrics one witnesses at Occupy Wall Street are politically empty.  The folk essence of political carnivals staged in societies where the agrarian peasant population still predominated has been lost, along with its freshness and ingenuous naïveté, replaced by the contrived political carnival of hypermediated youth culture.  I hate to be a buzzkill, but this atmosphere provokes my polemical temperament.

Update

A seemingly small — though I would say incredibly important — measure was passed last night (October 13) at the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street, amidst all the chaos and confusion leading up to the projected eviction.

This was a proposal limiting the deafeningly loud and bombastic drum circles that have hitherto been continuously beating for almost twelve hours a day (every day).  From now on the drum circles are going to be limited to only two hours each day, chosen between 11:00am and 5:00pm.

While this may seem like an unfair concession and an impingement of the protestors’ freedom of self-expression, I have to say — and the other members of the GA pointed this out too — that this will allow the various workshops and teach-ins being held at OWS to be much more effective. Before it was almost impossible to find any place within that cramped park where you could be heard when addressing a crowd of listeners, or engage in a meaningful dialogue.

I am not categorically opposed to festive gatherings or musical celebrations or anything, but I have felt for some time now that this aspect of the OWS protests so far — the pseudo-tribal drumming, chanting, and dancing — has by and large been a distraction, almost a sideshow.  I’m not trying to recapitulate the puritanical attitude adopted by many members of the “Old Left” (Guevarist, Maoist, or Fourth Internationalist) toward the New Left during the late 1960s.  People should be able to enjoy themselves, of course, but I think that the spectacle of costuming and practically nonstop carnivalesque atmosphere down at OWS has prevented some of the participants in the protests from reflecting on the tough political questions more seriously.  A little more politics and a little less partying could be just what the doctor ordered.

Reflections on Occupy Wall Street: What it Represents, Its Prospects, and Its Deficiencies

“Populism, not Corporate Fascism” – Placards from Occupy Wall Street

When I posted my first impressions of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, I had been down to visit the raucous scene down at Liberty Plaza only once.  On that particular occasion, I ended up staying there for barely two hours.  By that point, I felt I had seen enough for one day.  Many of the things I witnessed there were simply all too familiar to me.  The endless beating of the drums, the pseudo-tribalistic dancing and chanting, the call-and-repeat sloganizing (“this is what democracy looks like” and other populist banalities, etc.), the predictable placards, the black-bandanaed anarchist chic — all this smacks a little too much of what has become par-for-the-course in the post-New Left political culture of orgiastic partying & protesting (it is no longer clear whether the two are separate activities).  Combine this with the more generally confused hodgepodge of vaguely leftish political sentiments expressed at the demonstrations — anything from “End Corporate Greed and Corruption” to “We are Killing our Planet,” “Jobs not War,” “Endangered Species,” and “Nazi Bankers” — apparently disconnected one another as well as any broader project of social emancipation, and there you have it: Occupy Wall Street in a nutshell.

As my rather caustic tone would imply, I was not very impressed with what I saw there that first day I visited.  My initial write-up of the events on Wall Street reflected this skepticism.  The feedback I received was, as one might have expected, almost uniformly negative.  To be sure, this response was not altogether unwelcome.  My post was largely intended as a provocation, a polemical volley aimed at some of the more superficial elements of the protests.  In light of the overwhelmingly hostile and defensive reaction it elicited, I can safely say that it achieved this goal.

Nevertheless, I realized then that to simply criticize Occupy Wall Street from the sidelines was not enough.  The significance of this sudden surge of political pathos was more serious than its more superficial aspects would suggest.  To simply dismiss these demonstrations out of hand — on account of their somewhat carnivalesque character — would be all too easy.

Of course one cannot demand ideological purity from a nascent political phenomenon, and these are still early days.  So far, the only thing uniting many of the participants in the Wall Street occupation is a generalized, intuitive discontent with the status quo.  The task incumbent upon the Left (or what remains of it) must be to push these demonstrators to articulate a political vision of social emancipation, to actively engage with the protesters.  We must seek to understand their reasons for being there, ask them what they hope to accomplish through their actions, and pose the broader question of where we stand in our own historical moment.

“The Left is Dead! Long Live the Left!” – Platypus at Occupy Wall Street (I am in the blue under the black umbrella; Jeremy Cohan is the other speaker)

Since my first trip down to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, I have returned three separate times. Much has gone on in the interim — OWS’ endorsement by leftish celebrities such as Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, and Susan Sarandon; the alliance of various unions in support of the protests; the mass arrests that took place on the Brooklyn Bridge; and copycat occupations projected to take place in a number of cities in North America.

The movement seemed to be gaining momentum, and was at the very least drawing more media coverage.

This last Sunday, I joined a dozen or so members of the New York chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society (a Marxist organization with which I identify) as part of a “coordinated intervention” into the muddled political mise-en-scène of the Occupation.  Yesterday and the day before I went down on my own, equipped with a DIY placard and some free time.  There I wound up bumping into a couple people visiting on behalf of the Kasama Project, one of the more thoughtful Marxist political groupings that’s cropped up in the last few years.  All in all, I feel like I’ve got a better sense of what’s going on down in the heart of the financial district, having now spent more time there.

Me holding a homemade sign (proudly made at the #Occupy Arts & Crafts station) with the Platypus slogan “The Left is Dead! Long Live the Left!”

In light of all the recent developments that have taken place at Occupy Wall Street, and with the added insight I feel I’ve gained through my participation in it, a follow-up piece to my original post on the demonstrations is well in order.  Though I will not hesitate to criticize those elements of the protests that I continue to find problematic, this post will be more of a reflection on the movement to this point — its significance, its possibilities, its deficiencies, etc.  I hope to take stock of all that’s gone on so far, situate it in terms of its greater historical context, and perhaps speculate as to what potential outcomes it might portend for emancipatory politics as a whole.

I will therefore ask the broadest and most basic questions: What does Occupy Wall Street represent? What kind of possibilities does it open up? What sort of scenarios can we realistically expect to result from it? What are its greatest strengths? And by that same token, what are its most glaring weaknesses?

What Occupy Wall Street represents

What is Occupy Wall Street? How does one classify it?

Answering these questions is not as simple as it might initially appear.  For the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon seems too ideologically nebulous to truly constitute a political “movement,” in the strictest sense of the term.  One might argue that its status as a movement is not dependent on its having a shared platform, list of concrete demands, or clear doctrine of beliefs.  Indeed, many have suggested that Occupy Wall Street’s great strength as a movement resides in its very flexibility — its all-encompassing “inclusiveness,” its ability to entertain a plurality of political positions without necessarily endorsing one over the other.  But this would seem to run counter to the generally-accepted idea of a political movement, which tend to possess a unified set of tactics, a common Weltanschauung, and a more organized structure.

Dress-up at Occupy Wall Street

On the other hand, labeling Occupy Wall Street merely as “demonstrations” or “protests” fails to capture its remarkable longevity, especially considering the connotations these words acquired during the anti-war years.  (This despite the fact that the opposition to the United States’ overseas military adventures was never all that impressive to begin with, and has almost disappeared entirely ever since Obama took office).  During this period, the idea of a “demonstration” or a “protest” was typically a quite ephemeral affair, lasting no more than a couple days.  Protestors would come out to rally for the march but then go home at the end of the day.  Such gatherings tended to be quite temporary in their duration.  One of the most noteworthy features of Occupy Wall Street, by contrast, has been its sheer endurance over the course of more than three weeks now (and counting).  Thus, the occupation would seem to defy classification as a mere “demonstration” or “protest,” at least of the variety seen in recent years.

Costuming at Occupy Wall Street

To be certain, however, some of the scenes one finds on Wall Street bear an undeniable resemblance to the kinds of antics that were witnessed at the antiwar marches of the last decade, as well as at the nearly annual anti-globalization demonstrations that have followed since Seattle 1999.  Without portraying myself as some sort of seasoned, world-weary veteran of Left activism, I have no reservations pointing out some of the more clear-cut congruencies that exist between the activist milieu at Occupy Wall Street and its earlier counterparts in the antiwar and anti-globalization protests of the last ten years.

One encounters many of the same things: the same catchphrases and sing-a-longs, the same Black Bloc ostentation, the same pseudo-bohemian pomp and pageantry, the same multi-generational mix of leftover hippies, blue-collar unionists, aging punk rawkers, along with the more recent horde of dissipated hipsters flowing in from Brooklyn.

Apropos the various similarities shared by the post-Iraq invasion antiwar demonstrations and the current occupation of Wall Street, we might briefly highlight a rather pointed irony that exists between them.

For years now, all I have been hearing at protest marches has been “End the occupation!” Now all one hears from protestors is “Occupy [insert location here]!” It’s all very confusing.

(I won’t bother going into some of the quasi-imperialist overtones of the ongoing “Occupy!” phenomenon because I find this to be a somewhat vicious criticism, but still).

Given all its festive features, might we perhaps classify Occupy Wall Street as a sort of quasi-political festival? The atmosphere there is largely celebratory; for some it seems like nothing more than an excuse to play dress-up or hold impromptu musical jamborees.  As Ashley Weger observed in an article on the G20 protests in Toronto: “Costuming and all, modern protests feel increasingly like a less sophisticated version of live action role playing, thriving off a spectacular but imaginary conception of one’s political context, walking and talking and Molotov-cocktail throwing like a revolutionary.”

Staging performances at demonstrations has some precedent, as with this 1920 Constructivist reenactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace

Encouraging creativity at political rallies also has a long history: The unveiling of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1918)

So what is it, then, if not a movement, demonstration, protest, or festival? Some have proposed the more generic catchall of “resistance” to describe the Wall Street occupation.  Perhaps this might be the most fitting title for the occupation, given its own self-description as a “leaderless resistance movement.”

This moniker, however, comes with its own set of problems.  Ever since the close of the Second World War, the concept of “resistance” has risen to prominence within the discourse of the Left, ennobled by the French experience of La Résistance (mostly led by French communists) during the Vichy regime.  Unfortunately, the teleological valorization of resistance as a sort of virtue unto itself has had a rather perverse effect on protest culture over the last several decades.  Instead of calling for a broader project of social revolution, activists have substituted the notion of simply “resisting” the forces of structural domination that surrounds us.

Somehow — though the precise way that this operates is never made clear — this is supposed to “subvert” or “disrupt” the powers that be.  “Resistance” thus becomes fetishized as a supposedly heroic act of defiance, no matter how effective or ineffective it might ultimately be.

“Occupy/Resist” at Occupy Wall Street

Young woman arrested as part of the OWS march on the Brooklyn Bridge

On this point, members of Platypus have offered some analysis which is relevant to the present situation on Wall Street, especially insofar as it regards itself as a form of resistance.  In a panel discussion they hosted back in 2008, on “The Three Rs: Reform, Revolution, and ‘Resistance,’” Chris Cutrone noted how

[t]he Left today almost never speaks of freedom or emancipation, but only of ‘resistance’ to the dynamics of change associated with capital and its transformations.

With respect to this linguistic shift of emphasis from questions of freedom to questions of resistance, Cutrone finds “the current self-understanding of the Left as ‘resistance’ to express despair not only at prospects for revolutionary transformation, but also for substantial institutional reforms.”

Another member of Platypus, Laurie Rojas, drove this point home even further at a discussion of “The Politics of the Contemporary Student Left” that took place at the 2009 Left Forum in New York.  In the following passage, Rojas was specifically addressing the reborn Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but her observations have equal application to the self-proclaimed “leaderless resistance movement” of Occupy Wall Street:

In the absence of effective leadership and long-term goals, these campaigns amount to a politics of acting out, an unreflective and compulsive desire for “agitation” and “resistance.”  The new SDS [or if you prefer, Occupy Wall Street] has become nothing more than an umbrella organization for participating in activism and resistance without strategy or goals. The activism-for-its-own-sake in SDS [or at Occupy Wall Street] indicates that it “refuses to reflect upon its own impotence,” as Adorno once said of the student activism in the ’60s.

If Occupy Wall Street doesn’t entirely fit into any of these readymade categories, however, then what exactly is it?

The answer, I think, is that it is an amalgamation of all these things we have mentioned.  It is important to recognize, as one of the observers in the Kasama Project reminded me, that this phenomenon should not be treated as a dead object, with static components that can be mechanically picked apart.  Rather, it is better to conceive it as a still-evolving subject (albeit one that is in large part unconscious of its own activities and motivations).

Of course, this is not to say that it defies any attempt to make sense of it.  Occupy Wall Street is — at least in its present configuration — part protest, part party, some parts solidarity, other parts hangout, and so on down the line.  At least tentatively, it might be most correctly termed a “sustained demonstration.”  (For lack of a more accurate definition, we may still fall back on the terms that are now regularly applied to this phenomenon).  Even at this early point, though, Occupy Wall Street appears to represent the most substantial upwelling of anti-capitalist sentiment in the West that has happened in some time.  What it ultimately signifies, however, remains to be seen.

Potential prospects for Occupy Wall Street

What might the occupation of Wall Street potentially lead to? What possibilities might it realistically present?

1968 demonstrations in Germany

Rio de Janeiro protest, 1968

A related question for those on the Left might be: How can we prevent Occupy Wall Street from turning into a farcical repeat of 1968? Though the younger generation of activists might not have much in the way of an historical memory, there are those among the protestors who participated in and remember the momentous events that took place in May through June of that year.  For that brief period of time, it seemed, the student and worker populations were radicalized to such an extent that it appeared that revolutionary social transformation might be imminent.  Unrest in Serbia and Czechoslovakia led the latter country to proclaim its independence from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.  In the West, mass protests swiftly spread across France, Germany, Britain, Mexico, Japan, and the United States, reacting against a variety of issues — from the war in Vietnam to the greater problem of “the administrative society” of high-Fordist capitalism, with its tripartite alliance of Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government.

Protestor injured by police in 1968

1968 student uprising in Paris

Of course, the Soviets ended up crushing the attempts at democratic reforms that occurred in the short-lived “Prague Spring.”  Following the series of relatively spectacular protests, takeovers, walk-outs, and sit-ins that were orchestrated by members the New Left, the political turbulence that the major countries of the West were experiencing was calmed, and conditions generally stabilized.  Though it received a great deal of fanfare, the great political uprisings of 1968 came and went without doing much to change the existing state of affairs.

Ironically — at least compared with the radical politics of the 1960s — many of those who belong to the more moderate sections of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations today dream for nothing more than a return to either the Clinton boom years, Johnson’s “Great Society,” or even further back, to a sort of Rooseveltian new “New Deal.”  They lament the systematic deregulation of business, the high wages, and the gutting of government social programs that have followed from the collapse of Fordist capitalism in the Oil Crisis of 1973 — which thus inaugurated the era of neoliberal capitalism, in which we are still currently mired.  As the leftist historian William Sewell has noted, such “progressives” as exist in the Occupy Wall Street movement, who hope to reinstate Glass-Steagall and return to the prelapsarian social-democracy “lite” of pre-1973, are trying to reestablish precisely the thing that student radicals in the 1960s were trying to overturn:

Sixties radicalism, especially its “countercultural” moment, must be seen as a rejection of the corporate political and cultural synthesis of “big government, big business, big labor” that became dominant in the 1950s and 1960s — what has since come to be called “Fordism.”  The term Fordism designates the mode of macrosocial and macroeconomic regulation that underwrote the long postwar economic boom, which stretched from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.  The Fordist package combined mass production technologies, relatively high wage levels, stable systems of collective bargaining, Keynesian management of aggregate demand, full employment strategies, welfare state institutions, and highly bureaucratized forms of both public and private management…

From the perspective of the hypercompetitive, predatory, and extraordinarily inegalitarian American capitalism of the early twenty-first century, the Fordist mode of regulation may seem remarkably humane, a kind of quasi-social-democratic “world we have lost.”  But from the point of view of young critics of the system in the 1960s, its benefits (for example, economic stability and steady productivity gains) were hardly noticed…Meanwhile the defects of Fordist capitalism — especially corporate conformity, bureaucratic monotony, repressive morality, and stultifying forms of mass culture — were highly visible and repugnant, at least to the youthful political intelligentsia who made up the student movement.  (William Sewell, The Logics of History.  Pg. 30)

Let us not deceive ourselves:

This is certainly one potential outcome of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  The more radical elements of the movement would be pushed to the sidelines as the Democratic Party machine assuaged the more moderate participants in the occupation.

MoveOn.org already has shown some interest in “co-opting” (to use the fashionable term) the grassroots political energy on display at Wall Street.  With some luck, Obama might then come down from on high offering various concessions and campaign promises — doubtless as empty as the watchwords of “hope” and “change” used in the last election — even if he talks specifics.  This reassurance may be enough to calm down the vaguely left-of-center demonstrators that have been so outraged by Obama’s impotence in the face of (and indeed complicity with) the Republicans.

Abandoned by the more “mainstream” constituencies of Occupy Wall Street, the anarchists and the various paleo-Marxist sects would be left to fend for themselves.  The former (usually the default political orientation of young protestors) would probably soon grow bored now that no one would be paying attention to their theatrical gimmicks, while the latter (which tend to claim the allegiance of the older radicals — whether Maoist, Guevarist, or Fourth Internationalist) would pack up as soon as the media circus left town, returning to their more workaday activities of pamphleting and organizing strikes.

Another possibility, unlikely though it may be, is that Obama might promise all these things and then actually deliver them in his second term in office.  Let us say that Obama reinstitutes the old legislative and bureaucratic oversight and regulation of free market practices, taxes the top 1% more steeply, and funnels money into jobs programs, welfare benefits, and rebuilding infrastructure.  Would the protests thus have been a success? Certainly they might seem to have been in the minds of the more moderate members of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.  But this would be to simply replace one form of domination for another, exchange one capitalist constellation for one that is ostensibly more “humane.”

One thing that moderate, left-of-center “progressives” seem to share with the libertarian ideologues of the Tea Party movement is the delusion that laissez-faire capitalism is the only “true” form of capitalism.  In truth, however, state-interventionist capitalism is just as much capitalism as free-market capitalism.  Only superficially are they distinct; the underlying category of society remains the same — Capital.

This is, then, another potential outcome of the Occupy Wall Street protests:

The occupiers choose reformism over revolution, piecemeal legislation within the bounds of the existing (national) state rather than its abolition and replacement by a new state.  Such an outcome may seem preferable to some, but not to those who wish to fundamentally transform society and thereby emancipate all humanity.  Palliative reforms put in place under the aegis of bourgeois society treat only the symptoms of injustice, while leaving the disease, capitalism, untouched.

But what of the more leftist components of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations? What more radical alternatives might possibly result from their activities in these events?

The storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, 1789

Depiction of the 1848 Spring of Nations revolutions

In his immortal Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx contrasts the political character of two separate periods of revolutionary activity, the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848.  He famously remarks that

Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak.  He forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce.  Caussidière after Danton, Louis Blanc after Robespierre, the montagne [democratic socialists] of 1848-51 after the montagne [Jacobin democrats] of 1793-5, and then the London constable [Louis Bonaparte], with a dozen of the best debt-ridden lieutenants, after the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte], with his roundtable of military marshals! (Karl Marx, from Later Political Writings.  Pg. 31).

The trouble, as I see it, is thus: If 1968 was simply a farcical attempt to reenact (or perhaps even supersede) the tragedy of 1917, then what should we make of this latest wave of protests? For if 1968 is already a distant memory for some, then 1917 is even more remote from the public’s historical consciousness these days.  Of course, the danger here is that this new round of radical activity is already modeled on a farce, and might reduplicate its slapstick and its idiocies on an even grander scale.  If this proved to be the case, if we thus took 1968 the model for our action, we would thus be placing ourselves in a position twice removed from the tragic failure of 1917 — the moment at which the most concrete opportunity to realize a postcapitalist society was fatally missed.

Now, it is important that I not be misunderstood on this point.

I am not singling out 1968 as a total failure and exalting 1917 as a partial success.

The revolutionary enterprises that were associated with both of these years were failures.  (The revolution of 1917 was a failure at least by 1918-1919, when the Hungarian Soviet collapsed, and when the German revolution stalled out after Luxemburg and Leibkneckt were murdered — if not earlier, when Kautsky and the mainstream SPD voted to support buying war credits in 1914).  My only contention is that 1917, and the various figures and organizations that took part in those events, illustrate the most viable approach to the accomplishment of a worldwide revolution that have been seen to date.

Before someone leaps to correct me, I am fully aware that political and social conditions have changed drastically since that time.  That might even be the point of my contention — that certain conditions need to be fulfilled once again in order to establish a new society in the future.

One might well ask, what might be the best possible outcome we can expect from the Wall Street occupation?

Any sober analyst of our current situation, who has an adequate understanding of history and society, realizes that the Occupy Wall Street movement will not lead to the immediate toppling of the U.S. financial system, or even its spatial metonym in Wall Street.

From a leftist perspective, then, what might one hope for as the best-case scenario in which this could possibly play out?

In my view, Occupy Wall Street at best represents an opportunity, not for the immediate overthrow of the prevailing social order, but rather for the Left to engage with those who have become dissatisfied with the status quo.  The aim must be to turn this more or less intuitive sense of disenfranchisement, this generalized discontent with the capitalist social formation, and help them better understand the roots of the problem.

This is not, to be sure, a one-way street, in which elite circles of leftist intellectuals, academics, and theoreticians descend from their lofty position above the mêlée and simply “educate” the social masses.  In order for the inchoate anti-capitalism of Occupy Wall Street to acquire a more adequate historical and theoretical self-understanding, the Left must be responsive to the messiness of empirical reality, and sensitive to the legitimate grievances being voiced by those in Liberty Plaza.

Reciprocally, this will require a willingness on the part of the public disaffected by capitalism to deepen its understanding of the problem that confronts them, and commit itself to a longer-term program of political emancipation.  This means not getting impatient with the so-called “paralysis of analysis” and not simply showing up for the protests.  It will, moreover, involve a dedication to the greater project of reconstituting the Left.

Problems with Occupy Wall Street

What have been the shortcomings to the Occupy Wall Street movement so far? What are its most glaring deficiencies?

As I see it, the most problematic aspect of the Wall Street demonstrations is its inability to adequately conceptualize the capitalist social formation.

If you ask the protestors what the root of society’s woes is, one common response you will hear is “greed” or “corporate greed.”  Greed, however, is hardly unique to the capitalist mode of production.  Max Weber made this abundantly clear in his outstanding introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit.  Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.  But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.  For it must be so: in a wholly capitalistic order of society, an individual capitalistic enterprise which did not take advantage of its opportunities for profit-making would be doomed to extinction. (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Pgs. xxxi-xxxii).

Beyond this basic point, the problem with seeing “greed” as the root of all society’s evils is that it mistakes an epiphenomenal characteristic of capitalism for something more fundamental.  As my friend Jeremy Cohan (also of Platypus) pointed out with reference to this text, it is remarkable the way that capitalism tames the traits of greed and competitiveness into our everyday patterns of behavior.  Capitalism exists in such a manner that it normalizes these personality traits throughout the whole of society.

Another consequence of blaming the gross disparity of wealth that exists between the highest echelons of the capitalist social order and the rest on a mere personality flaw (the poor moral constitution of the top 1%) is that it ignores the way that the capitalists themselves are implicated by the intrinsic logic of Capital.  This misunderstanding ultimately amounts to what might be called the “diabolical” view of society — the idea that all of society’s ills can be traced back to some scheming cabal of businessmen conspiring over how to best fuck over the general public.

(The “diabolical” view of society is not all that far removed from conspiracy theories about the “New World Order,” the Illuminati, or “International Jewry.”  Indeed, it is not surprising to see that shades of anti-capitalism misrecognized as anti-semitism have cropped up amongst some pockets of Occupy Wall Street; see Moishe Postone’s excellent essay on “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism”).

Capitalism is not a moral but rather a structural problem.  Though he obviously enjoys the benefits that his great wealth affords him, it is not as if the capitalist acts independently of the (reified) laws of bourgeois economics.  He is constantly compelled to reinvest his capital back into production in order to stay afloat.  In this way, even the capitalist is made subject to forces beyond his control.

The critical theorist Max Horkheimer picked up on this in a fragment from one of his early essays on “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom”:

The businessman is subject to laws which neither he nor anyone else nor any power with such a mandate created with purpose and deliberation.  They are laws which the big capitalists and perhaps he himself skillfully make use of but whose existence must be accepted as a fact.  Boom, bust, inflation, wars, and even the qualities of things and human beings the present society demands are a function of such laws, of the anonymous social reality, just as the rotation of the earth expresses the laws of dead nature.  No single individual can do anything about them.  (Max Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline.  Pg. 50).

These laws of the capitalist mode of production are regarded by bourgeois economists as natural and thus transhistorical, operative in every society past and present.  This misrecognition of dynamics peculiar to capitalism as eternal laws of nature has been termed by Marx as “commodity fetishism,” and conceptualized by later Marxist theorists like Lukács as “reification.”

Such mistakes bear some relation to the old notion that wealth is acquired through the older (precapitalist) tactic of simple money-hoarding.  Marx himself pointed out the difference between the premodern miser and the modern capitalist, stressing the compulsive character of the logic of capital:

Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the [precapitalist] miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation. (Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I. Pg. 739).

The logic of capitalist accumulation demands that value be ceaselessly thrown back into the circuit, the perpetuum mobile, of production and circulation.  Not even the highest 1% can afford to act outside this logic.  If they try to defy it, they go under, and swiftly rejoin the so-called 99%.

Another deficiency I commonly see in the Occupy Wall Street movement is its narrow understanding of the scope of the problem of capitalism.

Perhaps understandably, protestors often frame social inequality and class oppression within a merely national context.  They talk about the various ways in which “the American dream” has been abandoned, express their disbelief at the fact that America has allowed such rampant government corruption and the infiltration of special interest lobbyists into Washington, etc.

Now there is nothing wrong with such sentiments per se, but they fail to comprehend the scope of the capitalist world economy.  For capitalism is fundamentally a global phenomenon; it does not admit of localization to one single nation, even when it comes to such economic powerhouses as the United States.  This overly narrow understanding of the problem of capitalism is what has given rise in recent years to the equation of anti-capitalism with simple anti-Americanism.

The exclusive significance of United States is absurdly overemphasized in what might almost be called an inverted “American exceptionalism,” ignoring the fact that the European Union, Russia, and China are also heavyweights within the global market, with their own imperialist interests and networks of oppression.

If capitalism is to be overcome, it cannot be done on a merely national scale; it must be accomplished internationally, at least in the most advanced capitalist nations of the world (initially).  For this reason, any radical political movement that aspires to take up the mantle of the Left must intersect with anti-capitalist groups overseas and around the world.  Such action requires coordination, organization, and communication.  Occupy Wall Street-esque gatherings may be spreading throughout North America and in Europe (where demonstrations have actually been going on independently for some time), but their focus is still too much on national reform rather than international revolution.

One might object to the fact that I take issue with Occupy Wall Street on this score, especially in light of the fact that these protests were closely modeled on recent events that have transpired in Egypt and Greece.  To be fair, there is some inkling of international solidarity at least in this respect.  But the unique circumstances of the Greek and Egyptian protests (not to mention the armed rebellion in Libya) are all-too-often overlooked.  One cannot simply transpose the tactics employed in one national situation and expect them to produce the same results in another.  The claim that some overzealous protestors have hastily made is that Occupy Wall Street is “America’s version of the Arab Spring,” a delusion if ever there was one.

In truth, the demonstrations on Wall Street have much more in common with the protests and uprisings that we have seen in Spain and Greece than it has with any of the nations of the Arab Spring.  For the nations of the recent “Arab Spring” — Tunisia (oft-forgotten), Egypt, Libya, and Syria — the primary issue at stake has been of an almost entirely political nature.  That is to say, the grievances of the public in these countries had mostly to do with the suffocating and backwards dictatorships that had held sway in the region for so long.  The protests in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria along with the bitterly violent struggle in Libya have all aimed to overthrow their existing governments, to redraft new political constitutions.

(It is important to remember that the success of the “Arab Spring” remains incomplete.  Dictators have been removed in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but the Ba’athist regime in Syria continues to hold a deathgrip on power).

Occupy Wall Street, though it patterns itself after the Egyptian experience, concerns primarily socioeconomic grievances.  Very few of the protestors down at Liberty Plaza seem to be calling for the dissolution of the existing state apparatus; all they want to do is clean out the corruption so endemic to the system.  Likewise, in Greece and Spain — which are in far more dire straits economically than the U.S. — the demonstrations have been mostly the result of rampant unemployment, decreasing wages, and austerity measures that have been put in place.  Youth unemployment in Spain and Greece is approaching an astonishing 50%.

To continue in this vein, it is interesting to note the Wall Street occupation’s selective use of examples to be followed in their demonstrations.  Now I understand that the tactic of principled and categorical non-violence and civil disobedience is contentious among certain elements of the occupation, but the overwhelming attention paid to the example of Egypt is telling in this regard.  In Egypt, of course, non-violent demonstrations were successful in ousting the country’s longtime president and dictator Hosni Mubarak, this being accomplished in a relatively short period of time.

By contrast, similar measures proved completely ineffectual in Libya, where the Gaddafi regime violently suppressed peaceful demonstrations.  The Libyan people were forced to resort to armed conflict in order to carry out their political revolution.  In Syria, non-violent protesting has so far failed to overturn the ruling Ba’ath Party regime.  Passive resistance and peaceful protesting hardly produce uniform results.

Just to be clear, I am not interested in empty militant posturing on the part of the protestors.  At this point, there are neither the means nor the ammunition to seize power in some sort of violent overthrow.  Still, I find the blind adherence to the pacifist principles of Tolstoi, Gandhi, and King to be very problematic.

In connection with this, I feel I must touch on a problem associated with one of these celebrated figures — Gandhi.  To be more specific, the issue I have concerns a motto attributed to him (one that has since become so ubiquitously quoted amongst “progressives” that its significance has almost been reduced to a mere bumper sticker): “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  At the one General Assembly meeting I attended at Wall Street, this phrase was almost immediately trotted out, which instantly set off alarms in my head.  For while (on the surface of things) this phrase may seem unobjectionable, the thinking behind it and the ideology it gives rise to is actually quite pernicious.

What I am referring to is what has been termed by many on the Left as prefigurative utopianism.  In other words, what this phrase implies is that one must accept the various evils of the world, understanding that one individual alone cannot change them.  But at the same time, it suggests that if everyone simply lived their own life the way they would if they lived in a perfect world, that perfect world might somehow be realized.  The concept of prefigurative utopianism is thus closely linked with the phenomenon of lifestyle politics.  This mentality is captured by the line — so often delivered by pontificating Hollywood celebrities — that “it all begins with YOU.”  As Chris Cutrone has noted in an article on “Adorno’s Leninism”:

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  This ethic of “pre-figuration,” the attempt to personally embody the principles of an emancipated world, was the classic expression of the moral problem of politics in service of radical social change in the 20th century. During the mid-20th century Cold War between the “liberal-democratic” West led by the United States and the Soviet Union, otherwise known as the Union of Workers’ Councils Socialist Republics, the contrasting examples of Gandhi, leader of non-violent resistance to British colonialism in India, and Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and of the international Communist movement inspired by it, were widely used to pose two very different models for understanding the politics of emancipation. One was seen as ethical, remaining true to its intentions, while the other was not. Why would…[a] Marxist [choose] Lenin over Gandhi?  [A Marxist’s] understanding of capitalism, what constituted it and what allowed it to reproduce itself as a social form, informed what he thought would be necessary, in theory and practice, to actually overcome it, in freedom.

Lately I have noticed that some of the protestors actually believe that what they are doing is constituting a real-world alternative to capitalist society.  They believe that Occupy Wall Street and its method of organization can serve as a model for an emancipated society.  While I perhaps understand this sentiment, I can’t help but find it incredibly naïve.  Nevermind that these “occupations” are nothing more than isolated pockets within capitalist society, largely funded and maintained from without through the normal mechanisms of the exchange economy.

Another related fallacy I have noticed among many of the Wall Street occupiers is their rather bizarre fascination of the notion of “direct democracy.”

For them, direct democracy is the undistilled expression of what Rousseau would have called the general will, bypassing the republican practicalities of representation in favor of the mass caucus (at Occupy Wall Street, this is embodied by the nightly meetings of the General Assembly).  The chaos, disorder, and confusion (and consequent inefficacy) one witnesses at these conventions even on the small scale of several hundred protestors makes one rightly wonder how such a political practice could ever become effectively generalized throughout the total population of a country, state, or even a single city.

The doctrinaire non-hierarchical stance taken by the “facilitators” of the General Assembly, and the amorphous political form of organizational “horizontality” that results from it, severely inhibits the potential for the Occupy Wall Street movement to formulate specific demands, coordinate decisive actions (beyond marches), and articulate a broader program of social change.  It might allow individuals to freely start up clubs or “workshop groups” by acting on their own initiative, but the nearly endless proliferation of such groups only adds to the confusion and the unstructured free-for-all of the protests.

Here the vaunted notion of direct democracy reveals itself t0 be the fetish-form of what protestors believe is the most “egalitarian” mode of coordination and administration.  In the general atmosphere of ahistoricism that permeates the demonstrations on Wall Street, people seem to forget that the only historical instance of any political organization that even resembled a direct democracy was in the ancient Greek polis of Athens, and that even on that limited scale it proved a failure (not to mention condemned Socrates to death).

This brings me to my final point of criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

One of the other pervasive problems that is encountered amongst the activists on Wall Street is the stunning lack of any greater historical perspective on what is going on there.  This is perhaps symptomatic of cultural post-modernism, with its short memory and seeming obliviousness to any knowledge of the past.  An understanding of history is vital to any emancipatory politics, not in order to resurrect past slogans or party platforms, but to understand where we stand in terms of the sequence of events that has led up to our present moment.

Of all the conversations I had with the people down at Zuccotti park, one of the most stimulating discussions I had at Occupy Wall-Street by far was with a member of the Kasama Project, over the role of intellectuals and the Left with respect to spontaneous political formations like the protests at Liberty Plaza:

We went over the nuances of the famous Russian term that Lenin used to describe the position of the party in relation to the masses in What is to be Done?: “авангард” (which can be variously translated as either “vanguard” or “avant-garde”).  The member of the Kasama Project pointed out the useful distinction between these two terms that exists in English, as a political “vanguard” standing immanently at the forefront of the mass movement versus an artistic “avant-garde,” which seems to stand outside of the mainstream and tries to influence it from without.

This all led to an important historical revelation for me: When Lenin spoke of a revolutionary party standing as a vanguard to mass political movements, he was referring to a very concrete object — the international anti-capitalist workers’ movement, which had been building and amassing support continuously for nearly seven decades.  Today, we can speak of no equivalent movement that has either such continuity or consistency as the workers’ movement of Lenin’s day.

Paleo-Marxist groups might still cling dearly to the notion that their organization must act as a vanguard to mass political movements, but the question is: What mass political movement? What exactly is there that one can be a vanguard of?

The historical recognition of the extent to which the conditions necessary to foment social revolution have disappeared over the course of the last century is vital to any emancipatory political project in the present.  It indicates to us that there is much work that remains to be done, in order to sow the seeds of social consciousness that might lead to a more sustained opposition to the capitalist social order.

To be most optimistic, we might speculate that Occupy Wall Street and the other demonstrations it has inspired might portend a reawakening of the political Left from its decades-long torpor, a revivification of anti-capitalist sentiment in social consciousness that has for some time now been all but comatose.  The cultivation and elaboration of an historical understanding of our present moment, and the possibilities that the future might hold, is vital if Occupy Wall Street wants to be anything more than a fleeting glimmer of political radicalism that is then harmlessly reintegrated into “business as usual.”

On the Left Front of Art: An Interview and Counter-Interview with the Anarchist Performance Artist Kalan Sherrard

The following interview with Kalan Sherrard, the 23-year-old self-described “anarcho-naïvist” performance artist originally hailing from Seattle, took place over the course of a series of e-mails exchanged for a few weeks between myself and Sherrard last month. I first encountered Mr. Sherrard outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he was going through one of his set interactive pieces entitled “Discourse on the Other.” Recognizing that this probably in some way related to the Levinasian/Derridean vein of recent French theory, I approached him with questions regarding his vocation as a leftist artist, whereupon he referred me to his official website, The Enormous Face. From there I set up a correspondence with Sherrard, the fruit of which is the interview (and counter-interview) that is reproduced below.

It is my hope that this engagement will form a part of an ongoing occasional series of interviews/intersections with parts of the artistic Left, both Marxist and non-Marxist alike. My intention is to problematize the political aspects of the artist’s relationship to himself, to his work, and to his world. In these ways do I believe that I can challenge the politics of the artist through an ethical, logical, and pathical examination of their existence, in keeping with the Aristotelian rhetorical schema of ethos/logos/pathos. I aim to encourage the subjects with whom I’ll be dealing to understand themselves at a critical and historical level, in order that they might situate themselves more properly to the various discourses and practices in which they take part.

It is my personal belief that contemporary art stands at an historical impasse, especially in its expression of politics. As the opportunities for revolutionary political change have dwindled, so have the prospects for genuinely revolutionary artistic innovation. Increasingly, art has struggled to deal with its own incoherence, an incoherence which has arisen historically in proportion to the incoherence of the social order out of which it has emerged. Art and politics, which have for so long struggled in common with the utopian business of imagining another world (different from our own), have arrived at a point at which they have become untethered from the transcendental basis of their own possibility. These problems of contemporary art, and especially contemporary political art, I intend to elicit through my interviews.

With respect to the present interview specifically, I should like to highlight several of its peculiarities. First of all, I would like to make clear that Mr. Sherrard, upon receiving my interview questions, proposed that he should write his own meta-interview questions to me, in an attempt to interview the interviewer. This I happily agreed to, though I will hardly be making this a standard practice or general requirement of my inquiries going ahead. Second, I have chosen to leave Mr. Sherrard’s written answers in the form in which I received them, rather than polish them up as for a more formal publication. I feel that their jagged character reflects the quasi-academic, schizoid, and confused nature of his answers in all their original urgency. I am not sure as yet if I will make this a broader policy of my interviews or if it will be observed only in certain instances. Either way, this is the form in which the interview (and counter-interview) will be published for now.

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Some Wisdom from Žižek

A few lines of wisdom from Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times:

[I]t is not enough to say that the idea of Communism should not be applied as an abstract dogma, that, in each case, concrete circumstances should be taken into consideration.  It is also not enough to say, apropos the fiasco of the twentieth-century Communist countries, that this mis-application in no way disqualifies the idea of Communism.  The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.)  (pg. 20)

As Žižek notes earlier, one must also dispel the notion that Stalin was merely a clever, cynical manipulator:

This brings us to the limit of liberal interpretations of Stalinism, which becomes palpable when liberal critics tackle the motivations of the Stalinist: they dismiss Stalinist ideology as a mere cynical and deceptive mask, and locate beneath it a brutal, egotistic individual who cares only about power and pleasure. In this way the “pre-ideological” utilitarian individual is posited as the true figure beneath the ideological mask.  The presupposition is here that the Stalinist subject related in a purely external-instrumental way towards his language, disposing of another code (the pre-ideological utilitarian one) which enabled him to be fully aware of his true motivations.  But, what if — cynical though the Stalinists’ use of official jargon was — they did not dispose of any such alternative language to articulate their truth?  Is it not this properly Stalinist madness which is obliterated by the liberal critics, ensuring that we remain safely moored in the commonsense image of a human being?  (pg. 7)