From NYC: Oct 15 - Massive Marches, The University in the Streets, and Overcoming the Arrogance of the Left

BLOOMBERG BACKS OFF, WHAT'S NEXT?

Occupy Wall Street stared down the billionaire media barron and financier Micahel Bloomberg and won Friday night. Threatened with eviction for the “cleaning” of Liberty Plaza, a privately owned public park (indeed, you heard right) OWS mobilized somewhere between 3000-5000 people to either camp in the park through a thunder storm or rise early to stand in solidarity at 6am. Supporters of OWS from Manhattan to Mumbai, from New York to New Zealand barraged the Mayor with their opposition. Bloomberg was testing the waters, and found them too hot to handle. He's back off, for now.

Today, October 15, will mark almost a month since the Occupation began, and it is a day of massive marches, culminating in a convergence on New York's iconic hub of commercialism and corporate glorification, Times Square at 5pm. I'm typing now from the library of New York University and just outside, in Washington Square, tens of thousands of people are marshalling.

 

Having failed to evict OWS, we should expect Bloomberg and his bankster cronies to employ the cops to try and discredit the movement.  Today, they will likely employ agents provocateur to mask themsleves as protesters and committ acts of violence and vandalism.  Other Occupy movements should take note, and watch out!

UNIVERSITY IN THE STREETS

Yesterday, I had to work here in New York. I gave a presentation at the Mobility Shifts Summit with fellow members of the Edu-Factory Collective. Edu-Factory is a global collective and network of higher education activists dedicated to charting how the university has become a key vehicle for (re)producing a newer, more callous and austere global capitalism. This is from my talk:

Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements it has inspired, then, are inchoate attempts to turn the streets into what the university might have been, what the university sometimes can be, and what the university could be: not only spaces for exploring new ideas and for the relentless criticism of all that exist, but spaces to become new people, together.  The Occupy movements are doing the work taht the university-as-Edu-Factory has forgotten how to do. At its most utopian, the university offered a place where the immeasurable potentiality of human life and living knowledge could reflect upon itself and give values to itself, a space to experiment in new ways of living and being together. In a moment when capitalism desperately seeks to harness and co-opt Living Knowledge, where it has transformed the university into a dystopian laboratory for the development of new forms of exploitation, the utopian spirit of the university has exploded beyond the academy, and manifests itself in the streets.

There is much to criticize and complain about in the Occupy movements.  But when we understand them as the bubbling up of surplus knowledge, surplus creativity, surplus sociality and surplus relationality we can understand better why they thrive (to a fault) with ideas, conspiracy theories, ephemeral ideologies, impossible plans, internal criticisms, and why they are more concerned with developing a process than they are with solidifying an agenda.

THE WAR OF IDEAS AND THE ARROGANCE OF THE LEFT

Last night, academic celebrity Slavoj Zizek inaugurated two days of discussions here in NY on “Communism, a New Beginning?” I like Zizek's work, generally, although I get a little tired of his antics, and especially the antics of his aficionados, who are almost always arrogant young men. So I gave this $20 a seat, sold out event a miss and headed instead to this event at the fabulous Bluestockings Bookstore for a thrilling debate hosted by a newish political magazine called Jacobin that included professor and writer Jodi Dean, Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood, New York Times writer Natasha Lennard and others.

The debate trod familiar ground, for those familiar with the Left over the past 10 years, but positions were expressed with clarity, sincerity and intelligence. In general, this division came between anarchists and socialists (revolutionary and reformist), with the former celebrating OWS for creating a space of new possibilities and relationships and the latter skeptical of the ability of such a disorganized and politically immature movement to materialize into real social change. Jacobin intends to post the debate to their website, and it's well worth watching for everyone, not just those here in NYC, as it offers a very compelling picture of where the radical Left is at when it comes to OWS.

I'll say only this. In some ways, rehashing this debate, which has been going on since The Paris Commune and the (in)famous war between the cantankerous Marx and the belligerent Bakunin, is actually, for all its acrimony, an easy, familiar and, ultimately, unimportant pursuit. The radical Left, anarchist and socialist alike, need to have a little humility in the shadow of OWS. The kids in Liberty Plaza have managed to do something we career agitators have failed to do: create a movement with popular support that has, for better or worse, captured the world's attention. To be clear, I'm not taking aim at the participants on the panel.  But part of me feels that the secret question of last night's debate, which was never articulated but undergirded our assumptions and seems to animate so many of our conversations on the Left in relation to OWS, was “how should we really smart, politically mature people teach OWS? How can we make this movement succeed, as it is destined to failure?” 

Now I actually agree that those of us who've been around the protest block a few (too many?) times do have an important role to play in helping to guide this movement through and beyond the pitfalls we ourselves have fallen into (eg. acknowledging and working through privilege; developing intersectional analyses) and that those of us with an understanding of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and other systems of power do all we can to influence and educate others. But I think there's something a little to arrogant and assumptive about our approach, and we need to have a bit more self-reflexivity.

The kids on the streets are not waiting for us to emerge from our sage debates to give them our wisdom (if only “we” could agree what wisdom to share!) They feel they are doing just fine. I think they're not, but if we are going to succeed in influencing these movements for the better, it will be less about convincing them that anarchism or socialism is the path to social change and more about just sharing basic knowledge and ideas about how the world works: why the Federal Reserve is not the root of all evil; why conspiracy theories sidetrack us from fighting the open and plain power structures that work through boardrooms, not backrooms; the way capitalism  works  in sophisticated ways; why the crisis is not merely the responsibility of an evil “1%”; how the economic system is related to the system of racism, (hetero-)sexism, homophobia and colonialism; and why the abolition of capitalism, not merely tinkering around the edges, must be the goal.

I fear that even the best among us have forgotten how to talk to non-activists, that we have traded our rhetorical skill and passionate and tireless power of persuasion for political and theoretical sophistication. 

Debating each other is easy; convincing others is hard, but worth it.