A popular inquest into the almost innumerable crimes of the chemical corporation and agribusiness giant, Monsanto. In Carbondale on Jan 28, 2012. Check it out at the blog of the Compass group/Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, here.

Also check out the film by Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

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by Bernard Harcourt

Occupy Chicago, Oct 15, 2011 – before the bust

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The reduction of American democracy to a façade punctured everywhere by states of exception is made painfully clear by the legislation just passed in the Windy City. The chill here is not just the snow.

It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.

Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn’t a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent. As Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom in 1982 – and as Klein so eloquently describes in her book:

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function … until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Today, it’s more than mere ideas that are lying around; for several decades now, and especially since 9/11, there are blueprints scattered all around us.

Step 1: hype a crisis or create one if there isn’t a real one available. Easily done:with images from London, Toronto, Genoa, and Seattle of the most violent anti-G8 protesters streaming on Fox News and repeated references to anarchists and rioters, the pump is primed. Rather than discuss the peaceful Occupy Chicago protests over the past three months, city officials and the media focus on what Fraternal Order of Police President Michael Shields calls “people who travel around the world as professional anarchists and rioters” and a “bunch of wild, anti-globalist anarchists“. The looming crisis headlines Rahm Emanuel’s draft legislation, now passed: “Whereas, Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“Nato”) and the Group of Eight (“G8″) summits will be held in the spring of 2012 in the City of Chicago” and “whereas, the Nato and G8 Summits continue to evolve in terms of the size and scope, thereby creating unanticipated or extraordinary support and security needs …” The crisis calls for immediate action.

Step 2: rapidly deploy excessive force. Again, easily done: Emanuel just gave himself the power to marshal and deputize – I kid you not, look at page 3 – the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and the entire United States Department of Justice (DOJ); as well as state police (the Illinois department of state police and the Illinois attorney general), county law enforcement (State’s Attorney of Cook County), and any “other law enforcement agencies determined by the superintendent of police to be necessary for the fulfillment of law enforcement functions”.

As one commentator suggests, the final catch-all allows Emanuel to hire “anyone he wants, be they rent-a-cops, Blackwater goons on domestic duty, or whatever. For a city that has great problems keeping its directly sworn officers in check, this looser authority is an even greater license for abuse.” Thanks to the coming G8 meeting, the Chicago police department has just gotten a lot bigger! According to Fox News, “there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands of federal agents here.”

Not just that, but Emanuel has also given himself the power to install additional surveillance, including video, audio and telecommunications equipment. And not just for the period of the G8 and Nato summits, but permanently. These new provisions of the substitute ordinance apply “permanently”: there is no sunset provision on either the police expansion or the surveillance. On this second, the new ordinance reads:

“The superintendent is also authorized to enter into agreements with public or private entities concerning placement, installation, maintenance or use of video, audio, telecommunications or other similar equipment. The location of any camera or antenna permanently installed pursuant to any such agreement shall be determined pursuant to joint review and approval with the executive director of emergency management and communications.” [my emphasis]

Thanks to the mobilization of the Occupy movement (including their funeral for the Bill of Rights) and other groups like the ACLU, some of Emanuel’s other draconian provisions were scaled back. Emanuel dropped his proposals to increase seven-fold the minimum fine for resisting arrest (including for passive resistance) from $25 to $200, to double the maximum fine for resisting arrest from $500 to $1,000, and to double the maximum fine for violations of the parade ordinance from $1,000 to $2,000. But the rest of his proposals – including the three-fold increase in the minimum fine for a violation of the parade ordinance – passed the City Council Thursday.

Step 3: privatize the profits and socialize the costs. In Chicago, that translates into Emanuel outsourcing city services to private enterprises, but making sure the public will indemnify those private companies from future law suits. This is a two-part dance with which we have become all too familiar.

First, city services are outsourced, often to circumvent labor and other regulations, and the income side of the public expenditures are shifted over to private enterprise and employees. Under the ordinance (see page 4):

“The mayor or his designees are authorized to negotiate and execute agreements with public and private entities for good, work or services regarding planning, security, logistics, and other aspects of hosting the Nato and G8 summits in the city in the Spring of 2012 … and to provide such assurances, execute such other documents and take such other actions, on behalf of the city, as may be necessary or desirable to host these summits.”

Second, the agreements can be entered “on such terms and conditions as the mayor or such designees deem appropriate” and these terms include, importantly, “indemnification by the city”. In other words, any lawsuits will fall on the city taxpayers. The public will be left holding the bag if there is, for instance, police abuse or other mismanagement by private employers.

Step 4: use the crisis to expand executive power permanently and repress political dissent. Most of the ordinance revisions, it turns out, do not sunset with the departure of the G8 or Nato delegates. To be sure, there’s a sunset provision for those contracts that specifically involve “hosting the Nato and G8 summits.” That provision expires on 31 July 2012; but not the expanded police powers, nor the increased video surveillance, nor the other changes to the protest permit requirements.

The new rules affecting permits for protests and marches include details that impose onerous demands on dissent. As noted earlier, the minimum fine for a violation of the parade ordinance will increase from $50 to $200. On the parade permit applications, the protest organizers now must provide a general description of any sound amplification equipment that is on wheels or too large for one person to carry and/or any signs or banners that are too large for one person to carry. These may sound like small details, but they are precisely the kinds of nitpicking regulations that empower and expand police discretion to arrest and fine, and that make it harder to express political opinions.

It’s another glaring example of what I have called The Illusion of Free Markets and the paradox of “neoliberal penality”: the purported liberalization of the economy (here, the privatization of city services) goes hand-in-hand with massive policing. Scott Horton captured the idea well in Harper’s, under the rubric “The Despotism of Natural Law”. Notice the neoliberal paradox: the fact that the city claims to be incompetent or unable to performs its ordinary functions implies that we need to both outsource city services and augment city police powers.

It was accomplished so quickly and seamlessly – passed practically overnight – that few seem to have noticed or had time to think through the long-term implications. There’s not a mention in the New York Times and only a small story in the Chicago Tribune. The crisis and fear of outside agitators, professional anarchists and rioters – splashed on the TV screens direct from London, Toronto, Genoa, Rome, or Seattle – is enough to create a permanent state of exception.

To make matters worse, this cookbook implementation of mini shock treatment follows on the heels of a severe crackdown on the Occupy Chicago movement that resulted in the arrest of over 300 Occupy protesters in Grant Park in October 2011. The prosecutions are still ongoing today and the effect on political dissent has been chilling.

In those 300 arrests, Rahm Emanuel and his police chief rigidly enforced a park curfew without finding reasonable ways to accommodate the political speech interests of the protesters, and beyond any semblance of a legitimate governmental interest. The massive arrests raise a clear first amendment problem – one that has been raised by the Occupy protesters and will be heard en masse at the Daley Center on 15 February. (Ironically, Emanuel and his police will effectively “Occupy the Daley Center”.)

The first amendment argument is compelling, especially when you consider the disparate treatment that political expression receives in Chicago. Recall, for instance, how different things were in Grant Park on election night 2008. Huge tents were pitched, commercial sound systems pounded rhythms and political discourse, enormous TVs streamed political imagery. More than 150,000 people blocked the streets and “occupied” Grant Park – congregating, celebrating, debating and discussing politics. That evening, President-elect Barack Obama would address the crowds late into the night and the assembled masses swarmed the park to the early morning hours. It was a memorable moment, perhaps a high point in political expression in Chicago.

Well, that was then. The low point would come three years later, almost to the day. On the evening of 15 October 2011, thousands of Occupy protesters marched to Grant Park and assembled at the entrance to the park to engage, once again, in political expression. But this time, the assembled group found itself surrounded by an intimidating police force, as police wagons began lining up around the political assembly. The police presence grew continually as the clock approached midnight.

Within hours, at the direction, ironically, of President Obama’s former chief-of-staff (was Rahm Emanuel at Grant Park after hours, a few years earlier?), the Chicago Police Department began to arrest the protesters for staying in Grant Park beyond the 11pm curfew in violation of a mere park ordinance.

Emanuel could have ordered his police officers to issue written citations and move the protesters to the sidewalk. In fact, that’s precisely what the police would do a few weeks later at a more obstreperous protest by senior citizens at Occupy Chicago. On that occasion, 43 senior citizens who stopped traffic by standing or sitting in the middle of a downtown street were escorted by police officers off the street without being handcuffed, and were merely issued citations to appear in the department of administrative hearings. (Those arrests, however, took place under the watchful eye of Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Democratic Representatives Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley.)

But not on 15 October or the following Saturday night. Instead of issuing citations, the Chicago police arrested over 300 protesters, placed them in handcuffs, treating the municipal park infractions as quasi-criminal charges, booked them, fingerprinted them and detained them overnight in police holding cells, some for as many as 17 hours. They are now aggressively prosecuting these cases in criminal court.

That’s precisely the type of practice that chills political expression. The inconsistent treatment of political dissent in Grant Park or at the Chicago board of trade reflects the colossal amount of discretion that mayors and police chiefs have over political discourse today. Police discretion is wide, political expression is fragile.

Rahm Emanuel’s message on the G8 and Nato meetings has been loud and clear – and chilling: the DEA, FBI, ATF, DOJ, state police and many other law enforcement agencies will be out in force; it will be harder to comply with the protest laws; and any deviations or errors will be costlier and punished. What’s really troubling is that the G8 and Nato will come and go, but these reforms are with us in Chicago to stay. Chicago’s mayor seems to be following in the footsteps of other municipal officials (recall Rudy Giuliani’s idea of staying on as mayor for an extra three months), who, with a touch of Potus-envy and perhaps a small Napoleonic complex, begin to act like minor tyrants.

It’ll be interesting to follow the first amendment litigation brought by the Occupy protesters. Their cases have been joined – there are about 100 of them in the challenge now – and their free speech claims will be heard by the chief judge at the Daley Center on 15 February 2012.

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Source: The Guardian, Jan. 19, 2012

The sweetest and most generous person in the world.

Excerpt of “Liberation from the Affluent Society”
by Herbert Marcuse (1967)

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We all know the fatal prejudice, practically from the beginning, in the Labour Movement against the intelligentsia as a catalyst of historical change. It is time to ask whether this prejudice against the intellectuals, and the inferiority complex of the intellectuals resulting from it, was not an essential factor in the development of the capitalist as well as the socialist societies: in the development and weakening of the opposition. The intellectuals usually went out to organize the others, to organize in the communities. They certainly did not use the potentiality they had to organize themselves, to organize among themselves not only on a regional, not only on a national, but on an international level. That is, in my view, today one of the most urgent tasks.

Can we say that the intelligentsia is the agent of historical change? Can we say that the intelligentsia today is a revolutionary class? The answer I would give is: No, we cannot say that. But we can say, and I think we must say, that the intelligentsia has a decisive preparatory function, not more; and I suggest that this is plenty. By itself it is not and cannot be a revolutionary class, but it can become the catalyst, and it has a preparatory function – certainly not for the first time, that is in fact the way all revolution starts – but more, perhaps, today than ever before. Because – and for this too we have a very material and very concrete basis – it is from this group that the holders of decisive positions in the productive process will be recruited, in the future even more than hitherto. I refer to what we may call the increasingly scientific character of the material process of production, by virtue of which the role of the intelligentsia changes. It is the group from which the decisive holders of decisive positions will be recruited: scientists, researchers, technicians, engineers, even psychologists – because psychology will continue to be a socially necessary instrument, either of servitude or of liberation.

This class, this intelligentsia has been called the new working class. I believe this term is at best premature. Its members are – and this we should not forget – today the pet beneficiaries of the established system. But they are also at the very source of the glaring contradictions between the liberating capacity of science and its repressive and enslaving use. To activate the repressed and manipulated contradiction, to make it operate as a catalyst of change, that is one of the main tasks of the opposition today. It remains and must remain a political task.

Education is our job, but education in a new sense. Being theory as well as practice, political practice, education today is more than discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing. Unless and until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless. Education today must involve the mind and the body, reason and imagination, the intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has become the subject/object of politics, of social engineering. I emphasize, it is not a question of making the schools and universities, of making the educational system political. The educational system is political already. I need only remind you of the incredible degree to which (I am speaking of the United States) universities are involved in huge research grants (the nature of which you know in many cases) by the government and the various quasi-governmental agencies.

The educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the established policy. And in this sense we must meet this society on its own ground of total mobilization. We must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom. We must each of us generate in ourselves, and try to generate in others, the instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality, and without stupidity. And we must see that we can generate the instinctual and intellectual revulsion against the values of an affluence which spreads aggressiveness and suppression throughout the world.

Tahrir by night

This text concludes the Three Crises series with an exploration of the collapsing Western middle classes, our entanglement in finance capital, our relations to the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, our inexorable proletarianization and revolutionary potentials. Happy New Year, gentle reader. De te fabula narratur.

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I want to begin, not with a curse but with a very beautiful convergence, one that is widely held to be real, but shrouded in mystery for millions of people. I’m talking about the “movement of the squares” unfolding on both sides of the North/South divide. And here’s the question: What is the hidden link between the middle-class and precarious movements against the dictates of finance capital – Occupy Wall Street and the European Indignados – and the far more perilous struggles to end dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East? What relationship could possibly be sustained between the regions that concentrate global wealth and those from which labor, resources and interest payments are relentlessly extracted?

Immanuel Wallerstein claims that the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa pit two historical groups against each other. One he calls the “1968 current,” which consists of non-violent, directly democratic grassroots movements that challenge all forms of exclusion and abuses of power, in the name of an equality that includes respect for fundamental differences. The other group consists of people who oppose such movements and seek in whatever way to capture, contain and neutralize them – and in North Africa and the Middle East, that chiefly means holders of oil wealth and US-backed dictators. For Wallerstein, today’s uprisings are a continuation, after decades of latency, of “the world-revolution of 1968,” which lasted by his account from 1966 to 1970.1

If this is true, then the people out in the streets today at least share a history. Because the world-revolution of 1968 also took place in Europe and in the United States, where it revolved crucially around solidarity and direct cooperation between Northern middle-class students and intellectuals and oppressed people in the South – which in the US meant not only Vietnam and Latin America, but also the South of our own country. Whites went to Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi to work with the civil rights movement. Oppressed minority groups, especially the Black Panthers, read Frantz Fanon and other anti-colonial thinkers, and came to designate themselves as Third World peoples. The New Left sought to express its support for the Vietnamese revolutionaries by “bringing the war back home.” A vast, unruly and often failed experiment in cross-class, cross-border collaboration defined the “1968 current.” But is this historical memory enough to explain the convergence of direct-democratic practices in the movement of the squares?

I don’t think it is. To uncover the more complex grounds on which we meet, it’s necessary to look back to the reactionary surge that followed 1968, ultimately giving rise to neoliberalism. It began in the US with the election of Richard Nixon. He ran on a law-and-order platform, and his administration crushed domestic dissidents with covert operations, legislated “spatial deconcentration” programs for inner-city gentrification, invented SWAT teams for attacks on the ghettos, launched the prison-industrial complex and offered support to the military regime of Pinochet in Chile, opening the door to the coordinated repression of the Latin American left by Operation Condor in the later 1970s. Nixon also presided over the settlement of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the OPEC embargo. That led on the one hand to the US stabilization of Egypt (with military aid formalized in 1979 as part of the Camp David accords), and on the other, to the new petroleum prices and the introduction of a capital circuit linking Western banks, engineering firms and armament makers to the most oppressive oil-exporting regimes. The whole process cemented the position of authoritarian leaders in the Arab world and provided the cash for a major round of predatory lending to developing countries across the planet. The dictators that have recently fallen in North Africa and the Middle East date from this period. Thus both domestically and internationally, the 1970s saw the installation of a police and military order that sought, and still seeks, to capture and contain the “1968 current.”

As police rapidly militarize in the North, the experience of repression becomes another thing that today’s movements share – unequally, as usual. Yet again that’s not the whole story, and a further moment of history must be considered. In the US and throughout the developed countries, student protest and the emergence of a counter-culture appeared to herald the rise of a “new class” capable of grasping the levers of power in increasingly bureaucratic systems. This “new class” consisted of administrators, scientists, engineers, educators, social workers, opinion-makers and artists.2 It was nurtured in the liberal universities of the welfare state, at a time when the functions of government had dramatically expanded, leaving the old patricians behind. Decision-making by committee had replaced the leadership of “great men,” and the private ownership of corporations was increasingly considered a legal fiction.3 To neoconservative eyes, the student revolt threatened to radicalize what was already a mainstream trend toward collective control of the American political economy. The societal struggle of the 1970s, at a time of deep economic crisis, revolved around furthering or blocking this possible takeover of power.

More recent sociological thinking observes that after the period of widespread alienation accompanying each major crisis, a reformed and transformed capitalist system has to succeed in reintegrating its qualified managerial and technical personnel along with the producers of artistic and intellectual culture.4 The new order has to recover the confidence of those who will be charged with administering and reproducing its logic. How was this achieved from the 1980s to today, with respect to the professional-managerial classes of North America and Europe, and indeed, to similar strata in the developing world? The answer to this question will reveal both the glaring divide and the hidden links between the Northern and Southern movements.

Here’s my idea: the integration of the professional-managerial classes to the neoliberal phase of capitalism has been accomplished by a complex, but unified and deeply pervasive mechanism, which may be called the financial apparatus. Or you can just call it the casino. Its operations can be felt across the spectrum of society, not only in business but in art, education, public administration, technology, the media, urbanism, diplomacy, and most acutely of all, in social psychology. The necessary converse of systematic military repression is an adrenaline-charged roll of the electric dice. When we occupy Wall Street in the global financial capital of New York City, or any other financial district in any other city, what we do is to oppose the integrative strategy of those who seek to capture, contain and neutralize the effects of world revolution. In this way we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the North Africa and the Middle East (and in Latin America and other regions) by taking actions which are in no way identical, but instead run parallel to theirs. Could one cross the line, to direct cooperation? Let’s hold on to that question.

Global Gamble

Marxists like David Harvey interpret the financial turn that began in the early 1970s as a class strategy to restore the prerogatives of ownership, giving rise in our time to the power of the worldwide 1%.5 Others such as Michael Hudson or the late Peter Gowan concentrate on the strategies of the American state: structural support for neoliberal finance is Washington’s “global gamble” to maintain control over the international monetary system.6 Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy integrate both approaches, but they also introduce a crucial class concept. In their view, Keynesian Fordism represented a compromise between the middle and working classes, while under neoliberalism (or Neoliberal Informationalism) the middle classes have been sucked back into the service of capital.7 The question we will have to ask is, how did the cultural formations of the welfare state metamorphose into those of corporate globalism? What were the ethical and aesthetic pathways of this political power shift? The “global gamble” is not only a capitalist or governmental strategy but above all a societal passion, one that has acted to disable any emancipatory moves within the professional, cultural and educational spheres until very recently.

To understand the results, let’s look into one of those agitated scenes that currently holds the middle classes so deeply in thrall. I’m thinking of the UBS facility in Stamford, Connecticut, some thirty-five miles north of Manhattan.8 It’s the world’s largest trading floor: 103,000 square feet of desks, computers, keyboards and monitors, with designer seating for some 1,400 traders exchanging up to $1.5 trillion a day beneath a single overarching roof. Zurich-based UBS specializes in foreign exchange and wealth management, but like other transnational megabanks it deals in everything: stocks, commodities, bonds, money markets, derivatives, asset-backed securities and all the arcana of structured finance. Staring endlessly into personalized arrays of three to eight screens, the traders watch Bloomberg news feeds, spread sheets, continually updated price displays and database graphics showing candlestick charts and moving averages as well as their own market positions and trading histories. They buy and sell through single-key voice-broker telephones, networked dealing systems and automated trading programs, and they communicate with each other through glances, gestures, brief comments, the occasional shout and an intensive use of MindAlign chat and video-conference software. Group leaders, software designers, middle managers, computer techs and other support personnel share the same open floor plan, to maximize interactivity. The bank is wired into a securitized global network of fiber optic cable provided by Hibernia Atlantic, with a special low-latency link to the UK under construction today, so that high-frequency traders can take advantage of transoceanic speeds down to 60 milliseconds.9 Of course, by the time the new cable kicks in the bank may have already collapsed or been restructured, since UBS took major hits on subprime mortgage derivatives and has since been plagued by leadership issues and rogue trading, as well as persistent difficulties in recruiting qualified personnel for this location too far from Wall Street and Park Avenue. Stability, in any case, has never been promised by today’s financial institutions. Instead they claim to manage risks.

UBS trading floor, Stamford CT

The official functions of banks like UBS are to raise capital for long-term productive investments, to provide liquidity for the month-to-month and day-to-day borrowing on which all business and public-sector activity now depends, to offer investors appropriate rewards for risks incurred, and to hedge against every kind of natural and artificial disaster that might affect the invested sums – including those disasters generated by the dealers themselves. The unofficial function of the banks is to make obscene profits by whatever means necessary, to distribute as much of them as possible to insiders by way of bonuses and stock options, and to shunt losses off to naive individuals or government guarantors. Recent events, from the gigantic bailouts distributed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to the direct takeover of the Greek and Italian governments by technocrats from planet money, have dramatized the extent to which public policy is now set and destroyed according to financial imperatives. Finance is effectively a global government, represented on the media stage by the G-20 summit of finance ministers, but obeying no laws except its own. Yet the question why its rule has been tolerated for so long, and still is tolerated by the middle classes, cannot be answered by simply reiterating a litany of abuses. Instead we should consider the activity of the trader – the lowest level of “golden boy,” who can strike it rich, but also fail abysmally – and see how it epitomizes the conditions under which all professions are now exercised.

On the one hand, he faces streams of primary data that are considered entirely objective. They are prices, market facts generated by anonymous buyers and sellers whose collective judgment is supposed to provide real information about goods and services. Trading acts to smooth out minor differences in price through the process of arbitrage, buying slightly lower in one place, selling slightly higher in another. In this way it is supposed to correct innacuracies and perfect the system. The idea that market prices assure a perfect equilibrium between supply and demand, leaving only a residual fluctuation that is ultimately random, is known as the efficient market hypothesis.10 It underwrites an enduring faith in the neutrality of financial speculation.

At the same time, the trader is lionized as an exception, a maverick, a genius. He is possessed of unique knowledge, lightning speed, unparalleled aggressivity and an uncanny “feel” for changing trends. Through his manipulation of information that is theoretically available to everyone, the trader constantly creates value for the bank and its clients. He does so in the strictest separation from the fate of any real goods or services, since he can make money on numbers going either up or down. He keeps his own book of profit and loss, and even though he is dealing with other people’s money he must make singular and original choices, since he is rewarded for acting only on those particular risks where he can make a profit. The trader is defined by what economic theory deems impossible: the ability to “beat the house.” Hypercompetition and virtuoso skill make him the middle-class hero of Neoliberal Informationalism.

Never mind that the entire environment is relentlessly fabricated and controlled; that the price information is shaped into patterns by the abstruse calculations of particle physicists whose math no one else could possibly understand; that this math in its turn is translated into automated programs unleashed more or less blindly into the labyrinths of computer networks; that the traders themselves are incessantly coached, cajoled and managed by their team leaders guiding everything with a hidden hand; and that the very layout of the floor, the curve of the architecture, and perhaps some day, the dreams of the people inhabiting it are subjected to a calculus of interactivity that subsumes every behavior to an optimal outcome whose shadow in reality is continuously monitored for negative deviations from the norm.11 Because that’s the way it is, and it’s no secret to anyone involved. For generations of business geeks raised on video games and Terminator films, financial trading remains the closest thing to professional paradise yet imagined. The ethics and the aesthetics of the neoliberal period have been shaped by this central institution, to which the university, the cultural-intellectual sphere, the government itself and even the industrial world are now simply adjuncts.

Apparatchik

How does a narrow class strategy, concentrated into specific technical functions, spill over into an entire era and lend its coloration to a whole diffuse period of human coexistence? In a 1977 interview, Michel Foucault gave a definition of one of his key concepts: the apparatus (or dispositif). His discussion, though highly abstract, reads like a cartographer’s key to our financialized society. The apparatus is the “system of relations” that knits together a set of seemingly unrelated elements: “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.” It is a “formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.” Yet beyond this urgency, the apparatus is constructed to sustain both “a process of functional overdetermination” and “a perpetual process of strategic elaboration.” Finally, Foucault notes that “in trying to identify an apparatus, I look for the elements which participate in a rationality, a given form of co-ordination [une concertation donnée].”12 The aim is to grasp the operations of a ruling idea within an interlocking series of social forms.

The most well-known example of a Foucaultian apparatus is the observational system of the Panopticon: a circular prison outfitted with a central tower concealing the invisible but all-seeing gaze of the warden.13 Its intended effect was to diminish the need for disciplinary force, by gradually installing an inner censor at the heart of each prisoner’s self-consciousness. Beyond this immediate need, the apparatus responded to a larger strategy, which was that of producing docile and trainable bodies for the factories and armies of industrial society. But it also exemplified a situation where distanced observation actually produced a norm. This functional excess, or overdetermination, made the social relation of the prison into a generative matrix for both scientific disciplines and standardized individuals. The Panopticon fit centrally into the coordinating rationality of industrial modernism.

By 1977, however, Foucault had realized that the panoptic schema was already obsolete, along with the Keynesian-Fordist society that it served to critique. In his course at the Collège de France on the prehistories of neoliberalism he turned instead to “apparatuses of security.” His first example was an 18th-century redevelopment plan for the city of Nantes, which involved cutting out new streets to serve four overlapping functions: the aeration of unhygienic neighborhoods; the facilitation of trade inside the city; direct connection to long-distance transportation networks; and the surveillance of traffic in an urban environment that is no longer walled or subject to curfew. Instead of developing closed, precisely defined spaces for exclusive uses, the plan creates a series of multifunctional corridors that can expand in various directions, according to future patterns of growth that can only be foreseen as probabilities. Other examples of security apparatuses include the mitigation of famine by economic regulations that discourage the hoarding of grain, or most interestingly, the treatment of smallpox by means of the disease itself, that is, vaccination. In each case, the nature of an existing phenomenon and its effects on a population are carefully analyzed before any measures are taken.

Security apparatuses come into play as enabling frameworks. Their primary effect is not to impose anything on anyone, but instead to select the most favorable elements from the spontaneous behaviors of a given population, then shape an environment to optimize them still further, until their very predominance excludes unwanted traits. The idea is “to reduce the most unfavorable, deviant normalities in relation to the normal, general curve.”14 Intervention takes place not on the individual players, but on “the rules of the game”;15 while outright repression is reserved for “dangerous” elements that could perturb the system. Over the last three decades, exactly such a schema has defined the preferred relations between the holders of concentrated capital and their servants, the professional-managerial classes.

Had Foucault lived through the speculative boom of the late 1980s, he would have recognized transnational finance as the crucial security apparatus of the neoliberal era. Computerized trading applies a logic of risk optimization to circulating capital flows, and it does so within precisely defined technological, informational and legal environments. Let’s consider how those environments emerged, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange-rate treaty in 1971. The urgent need to which currency futures, options and other derivatives responded was that of managing transnational business operations under conditions of unprecedented volatility, where values fluctuated hour by hour and prices were subject to multiple forms of risk. Sophisticated mathematical models combined with networked price-information systems not only helped to mitigate those risks by complex hedging strategies, but also served to generate liquidity for a wave of mergers and acquisitions, at a time when corporations were scaling up to the global level. Yet the financial turn also fit into a larger strategy for the reintegration of the professional-managerial classes, whose younger elements had been alienated by the standardization and regimentation of Fordism.

The strategy hinged on the recognition of individual difference as constitutive of human capital, whose promised “returns” would be offered in compensation for the suppression of public facilities and entitlements. The fiscal crisis of the welfare state could be resolved if the expenses of social reproduction – health, education, transportation, housing, unemployment, retirement – were assigned to individuals as investments in their human capital, for which credit could be furnished by private banks, at interest. Ideology, patriotism and family values no longer had much sway over the members of the “new class,” but the tantalizing prospect of accessing some speculative capital, combined with the monthly oligations of student loan payments and homeowner or consumer debt, furnished more precise means of behavioral control. As the university retooled to serve the knowledge economy, the most popular artists and intellectuals became culture stars and a few scientists began drawing profits from intellectual property. Meanwhile, at the elite end of the spectrum, ownership prerogatives were restored when shareholder value became the governing principle of enterprise. Instead of focusing on production, corporations would now pursue a single goal: generating cash, and therefore social power, for their owners.

These are tremendous changes with respect to Keynesian Fordism. But one could go further and show how the cybernetic calculus of finance operates as a coordinating rationality for just-in-time production, distribution and sales. When the G-20 finance ministers strive to forestall a transnational credit crunch, it is this just-in-time system that they are serving. The rhythms of finance have come to govern the entire circulation system of the world economy.16 However, if we want to understand how the social relations of the trading floor have spilled over to reshape contemporary culture – through a “functional overdetermination” of the financial apparatus – then we will have to turn back to the micro level, and look more closely at what actually happens inside the casino.

An obscenely powerful hedge fund dude

Starfuckers

The sharpest observations emerge from fieldwork by Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger among a team of UBS currency traders in Zurich. What they claim to have discovered there is a “post-social relationship”: an intellectual, perceptual and visceral interaction with the “market on screen,” experienced by the traders as “a complex ‘other’ with which they are strongly, even obsessively, engaged.”17 According to these sociologists, the market that coalesces into presence on the screens is indistinguishable from a “life form,” constantly fluctuating, elusively shifting and changing. Its complexity arises from a double aspect, for it is both a flow that one enters and alters, and a quasi-conscious other that one encounters with a shock of recognition. As Bruegger and Knorr Cetina write: “the transfer of the market onto the screen has meant that traders are now able to simultaneously position themselves inside the market in the sense of becoming players in its overlapping networks, and to relate to the market on screen as an exteriorized other, a sort of master being that observes all transactions and includes their contextual conditions and motivations.” The interaction with the market is tumultuous and passionate, oscillating between the desire and fear of volatility, the narcissistic elation of profit and the violent shock of loss. Failure is expressed in graphic metaphors where sexualized aggression turns inward from the market to the trader: “I got shafted, I got bent over, I got blown up, I got raped, I got stuffed/the guy stuffed me, I got fucked, I got hammered, I got killed.” All of that, remember, is happening at work, via an apparently cool and technocratic gaze on three or six or eight computer monitors.

Borrowing a page from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s text on the “mirror stage” of human development, the two authors compare this relationship with the market on screen to the infant’s relationship with its own reflection, experienced as the tantalizing image of a bounded whole that appears to be the self, yet remains irreconcilable with the bodily experience of uncoordinated movements, partial objects and chaotic drives. The fluctuating nature of the market, the incompleteness of the information it offers at any particular time, thus becomes the motor of a dynamic relationship. The key thesis that undergirds all of Knorr Cetina’s work on flux-objects is this: “we maintain that traders’ engagement with markets is based on a match between the self as a sequence of wantings and an unfolding object that provides for these wantings through the lacks it displays.” The interconnection of organic and electronic rhythms – the push-pull of greed and market signals – is the basis of postsocial relations. Yet beyond this rhythmical relation of wanting and lack, of unfolding object and inchoate desire, there is always a tantalizing image of the whole: the star trader just one row over, the Hollywood star out on a yacht in the bay, the millionaire exec just returning from China – or the market itself when it suddenly coheres, complete and ravishing, as an opportunity within reach.

For architectural critic Norman Klein, the “scripted spaces” of Las Vegas casinos are the epitome of urban design in financialized culture. Klein homes in on slot machines, which “turned risk into a consumer thrill.” They now include screens displaying special effects from the movies, feature realistic showgirls giving players the come-on, and integrate narrative devices from quiz shows and other popular TV series. Yet their major function is statistical control. As Klein observes: “They became the most integrated software network in entertainment, practically a metonym for the globalized electronic economy. They stand in for cybernetic controls across many markets at once. Today computerized tracking services perform like a bot for the house: tracking players, slots, tables, revenue services, doing the taxes, providing ‘up to the minute WIN reporting,’ player photos, electronic signature identification, messages for players in their hotel rooms.”18 At the heart of the slots, where the wheels of fortune spin, is a subtle equation whereby the player at once “senses an internal design” (the math that governs the payback) but also feels “the illusion of luck” (the possibility of a chance event). Profit for the house is ensured through strictly calculated probabilities.

The electronic trading floors that provide a model for contemporary casinos are also theaters of passion subject to integral statistical control. Yet unlike casinos, they are incapable of achieving cybernetic closure. The calculus of probabilities is too vast to master, despite the mathematical efforts of quants writing unique equations for personalized over-the-counter derivatives. Storms, earthquakes, meltdowns and other events continually intervene, at historically unpredictable rates due to the ecological consequences of an over- heated global economy. Populations wear down, unable to repay the loans that injected more capital in the system to increase the illusion of luck. Then governments take over with quantitative easing programs that expand the money supply for a further round of the global gamble. As I write, the passionate involvement between traders and the internalized “other” of the market has turned violent: major banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies collude to threaten the economic stability of the entire European continent, provoking conditions of volatility that offer fresh occasions for high-frequency trading and more obscene profits. The ice-cold cerebral activity of finance takes on the aura of a strangely frenetic sacrificial rite. It’s as though the theater of greed and desire had suddenly become a gladiatorial arena. The rest of us – the people in the street – sense that we could be the “other,” that is, the victims.

Profane Communication

Separation, for Giorgio Agamben, is the essence of the sacred. It removes objects, places, activities and people from the world of common usage, transferring them through rite and myth to the sphere of the divine. “Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation preserves within itself a genuinely religious core.”19 This sacred divide is carried over into the value-form of the commodity, whose abstraction reaches a height in the semiotic universe of the financial markets. But Agamben does not call for any return to genuine religion. The urgency of his thinking is clear in his concept of secularization:

Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy into an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact.

All of contemporary capitalism effects a repressive secularization, transforming the absolute divide between priestly and secular status into class hierarchies where economics fully replaces aura. For this reason the grand strategy of Enlightenment, demystification, can no longer apply to the basic operations of power in our societies, which contain no obscure core of mystery, but only obsessional procedures for the imposition of rationalized myths and rites. In place of secularization, Agamben proposes the act of profanation: “Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.”

Chris Cobb for Fake Fox News

In societies dominated by the mediatization of two destructive rites – financial crisis and war – the act of profanation becomes necessary to the very existence of democratic politics. By converging on sites of global decision-making, such as international summits, a previous wave of protesters was able to displace social attention at the very locus where it is concentrated and synchronized with the commands of power. Agamben refers to a kind of defunctionalizing play, which “frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it.” Those were the tactics of the “carnivals against capital” at the century’s turn. But at a moment when political control is being ceded to financial traders operating 24/7 through abstractive global networks, the outbreak of embodied dissent on Wall Street and in other financial centers has greater force than the protest carnivals – all the more so because the occupations continue day and night, incarnating another life rather than a disruptive moment. The spillover into the media is tremendous. Once the place of power is altered, its name acquires a different valence, it becomes an invitation to further questioning and defiance, rather than a reminder of disempowerment and cynical manipulation. At issue is a cultural resistance to the depressive effects of scripted society. To describe the nature of profane play, Agamben quotes the linguist Émile Benveniste:

The power of the sacred act, he writes, lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it. Play breaks up this unity: as ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive. “If the sacred can be defined through the consubstantial unity of myth and rite, we can say that one has play when only half the sacred operation is completed, translating only the myth into words or only the rite into actions.”

What could this mean in a secularized context, where myth has been replaced by media, and rite by the instrumentality of mathematical models and computer programs? Consider first of all the most striking emblem of the recent occupations, which is the signage. Oscillating between an endless list of grievances, an angry J’accuse! and a warm invitation to satirical disbelief, these handwritten signs fascinate participants and bystanders, floating above the crowd like headlines from everyday existence. The signs are not yet demands: they are discursive and affective information for the movement itself, clarifying the collective perception of social problems that have been censored from the major media. No less powerful in this regard, despite its purely web-based appearance, are the letters of people abandoned by the system, the sorrows of the 99% that have never made it into any statistic.20 Wordplay is everywhere at the occupations, substituting direct address and shared invention for the laborious and repressive fabrications of the corporate media. The will to interrupt one-way speech is so strong that even where amplification is available and legal, the occupiers have used the “people’s mic” so as to make sure that a speaker’s every word can be tested (and tasted) in one’s own body before being received as truth. All of this is done in the absence of functional expertise, and of any “demands” whatsoever: the connection between ideological myth and instrumental rite is interrupted. The displacement and release of both direct and mediated speech opens up new faculties of critical intelligence, not only among the protesters on the spot, but across the world.

Through the irruption of a social movement, political-economic analysis is returned to common use among the people who are typically on the receiving end. That’s fundamental, it’s the biggest gain so far. Yet to be effective in breaking the dependence of intellectuals and cultural producers on elite patronage and models of human capital, this expressive intelligence will have to be pushed further into both professional life and everyday practice. There is an irreverence that equalizes, that cuts through privileges and lies, it’s the essence of profanity. Like this: a guy at Liberty Square holds a Fox News camera made of cardboard, with a hand-drawn, one-dimensional mic that he thrusts insistently in the face of anyone claiming to be important. The gesture dissolves the repetition-compulsions of the media into pure play: the ethical departure point of profane communication.

A different use of speech is possible when the occupations shatter the narcissistic mirror, mingling bodies, upsetting class and race divides. This is possible because a major crisis of capitalism brings all kinds of people out into the street. The question is how to go on talking with those you formerly ignored. They could include scientists and technicians who shape behavior through machines, or managers who organize productive collaborations. Normally these people provide services to our rulers. Could they break the connection between instrumental technology and mediated myth?

Engineering, a central concern of communism, was more or less abandoned by the ‘68 current – to disastrous effect, because a movement without têchné can’t convince anyone of its capacity to materially reorganize society. But younger activists have been able to find a new way in, mainly by way of networks. When global computer exchange links are hacked away from the official capitalist ideologies that bind them to the financial apparatus, what results is the open proliferation of a powerful tool. The Global Revolution streaming video network is one example. Among the founders is Vlad Teichberg, who emigrated from Russia to the US when he was ten years old. In an interview with Democracy Now he speaks about the roots of OWS in the Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignado movement. Those who wonder about the struggles of technologists inside the financial apparatus definitely have something to learn from this guy:

I was a derivatives trader. I was basically working for large banks, betting their money on derivatives products. And my job was understanding how those products work… For me… the whole globalization philosophy that was being pushed in the early/mid-nineties, [the idea] that it would be the ultimate equalizer for the world, turned out to be faulty, because of the effect of multinationals. Toward the late nineties I think a lot of people came to the same conclusion: globalization was doing more harm than good… And that’s pretty much when I started shifting out of being a supporter of this Ayn Rand approach to looking at the world.21

A programmer like Teichberg is no longer glued to any established combination of discourse and practice. Refusing hierarchical separations, he’s able to divert certain aspects of the financial apparatus toward other ends, to create a planetary network for common use. The failure of neoliberal globalization, which became obvious to him ten years ago, is now a palpable fact for everyone. The potential for a political use of skills that were formerly subordinated to the 1% is suddenly enormous. The contradictions of the “new class,” absorbed for decades by opportunities in the financialized economy, are returning to the fore. But the only way to keep them alive – and to save them from being captured, channeled and neutralized – is to use them, not just out on the street, but in whatever field you occupy every day. Profanity is only a departure point. The beginning is near, as an OWS slogan has it.

Closing It Down

I started this text in mid-November, with technocrats taking over European states and robocops evicting occupations across the US. While British workers pushed for a general strike and Chilean students radicalized their revolt, images of epic street fights poured in from Tahrir Square. Just as Wallerstein had claimed, the “1968 current” was back. It turned out that the same factory – Combined Systems Inc of Jamestown, Pennsylvania – was supplying tear-gas to the American and Egyptian police. On Al Jazeera I found a text by William Robinson: “The immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.”22

At last it has become obvious that this is a major crisis of capitalism. As in the 1930s and 1970s, it will only be resolved by changing basic parameters of the system. The point is to take part, to generate an agency that can make changes for the better.

It’s impressive to learn that as far back as 2007, a financial think-tank working for the British military had already understood that under the pressure of crisis, “the middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” Here’s what they said:

The globalization of labor markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

Now such futures are beginning to be realized – and immediately repressed by the capital-state. The question is, what happens next? Can today’s intellectuals and cultural producers of the North, acting in parallel with oppressed peoples in the South, spark a movement on the scale of the world-revolution of 1968? Can we use the solidarity brought by economic crisis to create an alternate hegemony? Can we intervene in a new way, to provoke not a violent reaction, but instead a positive structural change in the repressive course of what is currently being called “necropolitics”?24

The middle-class revolts of the North will never be comparable to those of people facing hunger and dictatorship. But the secret link of our criss-crossing histories is that ultimately we share the same opponents. Behind the desiring-machine of the financial markets, the authority of the generals lies in wait. It was obvious throughout the last decade, when the dot-com bust was followed by global security panic and two brutal wars; but the course of everyday life went on unperturbed, in a period of massive complicity between the middle classes and our rapacious elites. The point is to tear away from the imperatives of the 1%, which have reshaped public institutions and penetrated the cultural-intellectual sphere very deeply. This requires playing a different game, no longer a gamble. Without tangible proof of a change of loyalties – achieved essentially by means of projects constructed outside the professional economy – there is no way to gain the trust of others. Without the capacity to reach into established fields and workplaces – achieved essentially by a courageous defense of philosophical principles against the current rules – there is no way to gain the capacities of social transformation.

Similar dilemmas have already confronted the growing professional-managerial classes of the South. One finds an important insight in the chronicles of Mark LeVine, a young University of California prof who has been on the scene in Egypt. Recounting a midnight visit to Tahrir, he discusses the desire of the movement’s informal “leaders” to create a space directly on the square for the poetry, music, cinema and other cultural forms that have sustained the revolt since its beginnings:

In other words, the leaders of Tahrir want to institutionalize the incredible creativity of the revolution, from musical performances and film to artwork, poetry and story-telling. These activities have sustained protesters during the darkest days of violence and have helped to attract hundreds of thousands of “ordinary Egyptians” to the Meidan during each of the occupations since January. This would constitute a permanent counterpoint to the state media and other mechanisms that the government and elite have at their disposal, through which they try to convince Egyptians that the Tahriris are little more than “thugs” who don’t have their interests at heart.25

In the corrupt and declining countries of the North, artists and intellectuals need to rediscover this desire for a culture outside the financialized state – a profane culture that is powerful, sophisticated and deep, but open to common use. Only in this way can we strengthen the affects of resistance and build the capacity to create alternatives. And there is no time left for ambivalence. A structural crisis can only be resolved by major transformations, for better or for worse. Social movements inevitably intervene, but often with unwanted consequences, as became obvious in the Nixon years. The challenge today, in societies dominated by the aging and fearful rich, is to hold off police violence while pushing defiantly for economic and ecological transformation. At some point over the next few years it will likely require decisive action, like those days when the people of the former East went out into the streets and didn’t leave. But we won’t get there by just hoping – because if financial chaos really hits, the generals have a plan.

Class strategies are formed by the aggregation of small decisions. Ask yourself, ask those around you, what it will take for us to close the casino.

* * *

Occupy Chicago

NOTES

1 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Contradictions of the Arab Spring,” on Al Jazeera English (Nov. 14, 2011), http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111111101711539134.html.

2 Three books on the new class appeared in a single year: Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979); A.W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury, 1979); and B. Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class? (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1979). The first reprints a crucial essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich on “The Professional-Managerial Class” and the third gives neocon viewpoints.

3 For the issues of ownership and control, see A. A. Berle and G.C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1968/1st ed. 1932); James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York: John Day, 1941); and J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

4 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005/1st French edition 1999), as well as my text “The Flexible Personality” (2002), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en.

5 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford U.P., 2005).

6 Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism (London: Pluto Press, 2003/1st ed. 1972); Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble (London: Verso, 1999).

7 G. Duménil and D. Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Harvard U.P., 2011), esp. chs. 1 and 5.

8 For a photo-essay about the site, see http://www.advancedtrading.com/photos/trading-floors/ubs.

9 http://www.hiberniagfn.com/network.php.

10 Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

11 On the math, see Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006).

12 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977), in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1980); translation slightly modified.

13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1978/1st French ed. 1975).

14 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007/1st French ed. 2004), p. 90.

15 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008/1st French ed. 2004), p. 260; also see lectures 9 and 10 on the concept of human capital, discussed below.

16 See my article “Do Containers Dream of Electric People? The Social Form of Just-in-Time Production,” in Open 21, “Im/mobility” (2011), http://www.skor.nl/_files/Files/OPEN21EN_P30-44.pdf.

17 Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Breugger, “Traders’ Engagement with Markets: A Postsocial Relationship,” in Theory, Culture & Society 19 (December 2002). All quotes in this and the following paragraph are from this article.

18 Norman Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York Press, 2004), p. 340.

19 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007/1st Italian ed. 2005); further quotes are from the same essay. Agamben also develops the notion of profanation in What Is An Apparatus? (Stanford U.P., 2009/1st Italian ed. 2006). However he does not deal with the material and discursive complexity of any specific apparatus, nor with any particular acts of profanation.

20 http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com.

21 Interview with Vlad Teichberg, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/18/the_revolution_will_be_live_streamed.

22 William I. Robinson, “Global rebellion: The coming chaos?”, on Al Jazeera English (Nov. 29, 2011), http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121556567265.html.

23 “The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme, 2007-2036,” http://www.frequencyclear.tv/strat_trends.pdf.

24 Achille Mdembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15-1 (2003), http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/Mbembe.pdf.

25 Mark LeVine, “Tahrir’s late night conversations,” on Al Jazeera English (Dec. 5, 2011), http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112511219971906.html.

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The new booklet by Platform London, entitled “Not If But When: Culture Beyond Oil,” is available for free download here. For well over a decade this art-activist group has been informing the public of the vast ecological damage attendant on the operations of the two British oil majors, BP and Shell. Platform’s recent campaigns have focused on BP’s sponsorship of the arts – what you might call “culture washing.” See the video above for a response!

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The secret is out: less than 1 percent of our planet’s population is destroying our world for their profit.

This shocking fact has been known for as long as any thinking person can remember. It is the chief characteristic of the political-economic system known as neoliberalism. But now something has changed. This truth can be stated in public.

On the street and in the media, it can now be openly said that we have a ruling class, with all the abuses of power that the very existence of such a class entails. The disaster of Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, like the more recent Chevron oil spill off the coast of Brazil, counts among those abuses.

Is it not time to begin asking what other truths have remained unspeakable? Here is one of the most obvious:

Our consent is vital to the rule of the 1 percent.

In every arena of daily life, particularly where knowledgeable bodies gather, the 1 percent disburses huge sums of money in the form of what we may as well call propaganda, in order to ensure the continuity of their rule. They spend billions of dollars to construct, in our  heads and hearts, what they call “the social license to operate.” This is the function of elite sponsorship of the arts. Shall we not learn to say that in public too?

Are Shakespeare and Leonardo going to matter when the earth has been ruined by climate change? Is French impressionism beautiful when people are starving in the street? Do you want your art to become a tool of the corporate elites?

If the answer is no, then Platform London has a great suggestion:

Withdraw your support from the sponsorship of the 1 percent.

The social movements that have appeared across the world this year give courage to everyone. They encourage us to speak up. To ask why things must be done in the way they are done today.

Platform London is one of my great inspirations. Check it out. Let’s stop the pollution of our planet. Let’s end the rule of the 1 percent.

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]]> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/culture-beyond-oil/feed/ 0 Brian Holmes http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/sign-the-petition-against-uc-davis-chancellor/ http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/sign-the-petition-against-uc-davis-chancellor/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 20:41:59 +0000 Brian Holmes http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/?p=2839 ]]> Nathan Brown socks it to Linda Katehi

Watch the police brutalize the students and retreat in shame.

Then please sign the petition here.

18 November 2011

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown

Assistant Professor

Department of English

Program in Critical Theory

University of California at Davis

Source of this text:

http://bicyclebarricade.wordpress.com/2011/11/19/open-letter-to-chancellor-linda-p-b-katehi

Plus:

Chancellor Katehi takes walk of shame before silent students

Afterwards, students celebrate and demand her resignation

]]> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/sign-the-petition-against-uc-davis-chancellor/feed/ 0 Brian Holmes http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/this-wont-all-end-so-easily-mr-bloomberg/ http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/this-wont-all-end-so-easily-mr-bloomberg/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:11:12 +0000 Brian Holmes http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/?p=2830 ]]> Updates

    * 3:36 a.m. Kitchen tent reported teargassed. Police moving in with zip cuffs.
    * 3:33 a.m. Bulldozers moving in
    * 3:16 a.m. Occupiers linking arms around riot police
    * 3:15 a.m. NYPD destroying personal items. Occupiers prevented from leaving with their possessions.
    * 3:13 a.m. NYPD deploying sound cannon
    * 3:08 a.m. heard on livestream: “they’re bringing in the hoses.”
    * 3:05 a.m. NYPD cutting down trees in Liberty Square
    * 2:55 a.m. NYC council-member Ydanis Rodríguez arrested and bleeding from head.
    * 2:44 a.m. Defiant occupiers barricaded Liberty Square kitchen
    * 2:44 a.m. NYPD destroys OWS Library. 5,000 donated books in dumpster.
    * 2:42 a.m. Brooklyn Bridge confirmed closed
    * 2:38 a.m. 400-500 marching north to Foley Square
    * 2:32 a.m. All subways but R shut down
    * 2:29 a.m. Press helicopters evicted from airspace. NYTimes reporter arrested.
    * 2:22 a.m. Frontpage coverage from New York Times
    * 2:15 a.m. Occupiers who have been dispersed are regrouping at Foley Square
    * 2:10 a.m. Press barred from entering Liberty Square
    * 2:07 a.m. Pepper spray deployed — reports of at least one reporter sprayed
    * 2:03 a.m. Massive Police Presence at Canal and Broadway
    * 1:43 a.m. Helicopters overhead.
    * 1:38 a.m. Unconfirmed reports of snipers on rooftops.
    * 1:34 a.m. CBS News Helicopter Livestream
    * 1:27 a.m. Unconfirmed reports that police are planning to sweep everyone.
    * 1:20 a.m. Subway stops are closed.
    * 1:20 a.m. Brooklyn bridge is closed.
    * 1:20 a.m. Occupiers chanting “This is what a police state looks like.”
    * 1:20 a.m. Police are in riot gear.
    * 1:20 a.m. Police are bringing in bulldozers.

We Will Reoccupy!

Peacefully and non-violently, the students attempted to set up an Occupy Wall St encampment on Sproul Plaza, right exactly where (among so many others) Mario Savio spoke in the 1960s. And look at how odious the machine is today! I sent the following letter to the despicable Chancellor Birgeneau who should resign now, both for the indignity of this violence and for his own lack of any minimal respect for the democracy which these students have somehow learned to practice, despite him and his peers: the 1% who rule us and treat us like dogs.

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Chancellor Birgeneau -

As a native Californian and UC Berkeley PhD graduate, I too have a stake in UCB. I follow closely what happens there. Today I read the following statement that you made to the extended UCB community:

“It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.  By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent.  These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.”

This is ONE OF THE MOST HYPOCRITICAL STATEMENTS  I have ever read. The idea that linking arms is not non-violent civil disobedience flies so far in the face of common sense that it is sufficient to condemn you entirely as an administrator. Far from honoring anyone, you have cast immense shame on yourself and have committed a physical and verbal assault every aspiration and ideal that the people of California have invested in OUR university.

In your actions one clearly sees that you choose to represent and enact a police state rather than a community of democratic debate. If you believe that the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King is reducible to blind obedience to the orders of men wielding clubs, then you have severely misunderstood the meaning and power of the civic philosophies which have been elaborated and taught within OUR public university. Such a profound lack of understanding disqualifies you from the position you hold, and I call on you to step down from it. No other action could remove the shame of the statement you have made.

In the absence of your immediate resignation, I sincerely hope that one day soon I will have a chance to link arms along with thousands or tens of thousands of others to protest the tyranny that your administration manifests.

Brian Holmes

The fourth session of the collaborative seminar THREE CRISES: 30s – 70s – Today was held at Mess Hall on Saturday Oct. 29 — another great discussion with an amazing lecture on the San Francisco State Strike by Sarah Lewison. The seminar materials, readings, recordings and a pdf version of this text are available here. The archive of readings is particularly good for this session.

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The second major crisis of the 20th century began in the late 1960s and stretched all the way to the early ‘80s. It was an overaccumulation crisis, caused by the spread of Fordist production methods to Western Europe and Japan, resulting in a saturation of global markets and a decline of the profit rate in the mass manufacturing industries. It was also a crisis of Keynesian deficit financing: repeated attempts to stimulate the economy through counter-cyclical spending gave rise to stagflation, or the combination of stagnant growth and ever-increasing inflation. The period was punctuated by what are usually seen as economic events: the onset of wage-price spirals in 1966; the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods exchange-rate system in 1971-1973; the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979; and finally, the Volcker interest-rate shock and government-induced recession of 1979-82, which decimated entire sectors of industry and ushered in the era of financially driven neoliberalism. Yet none of these events were simply economic. The crisis of Keynesian Fordism was intensely political. It came to a climax in advance of the major economic trends, when seemingly isolated struggles from around the world suddenly revealed their interrelatedness, if not their unity. And this time the strictly political aspects of the crisis were not far away in Europe, as they had been during Great Depression. Instead they converged on the United States.

To grasp this convergence, consider a series of posters printed in Cuba from 1967 onward by the OSPAAAL, or the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The first shows a white policeman threatening a black protester with a club. The text is the word “NOW!” – referring to the civil rights slogan “Freedom Now,” used by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the US. Another from 1971 shows an upraised black fist and reads “Free all political prisoners Solidarity with the AfroAmerican People.” It commemorates August 18, declared a day of solidarity after the Watts riots in 1965. A third, apparently from 1967, is the most striking. It shows the face of a black man with a machine gun framed within the borders of the United States, with a text reading: “We will destroy imperialism from the outside/They will destroy it from the inside.” For Third World revolutionaries galvanized by the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the most encouraging signs on the international horizon, beyond the resistance of the Vietnamese themselves, were undoubtedly the great uprisings of Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967, followed a year later by a surge of urban and campus unrest that appeared to be tearing the US superpower apart on its home ground.

Where did these images come from? The OSPAAAL was formed at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in January of 1966. From that date forth it published a magazine in Spanish, French, and English, under the title Tricontinental. Cuba in those years represented the most radical pole of Third World struggles, going beyond the diplomatic strategies of the Non Aligned Nations to forge alliances with national liberation movements including those unfolding in Guinea-Bissau, the Congo, South Africa, Angola, Vietnam, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Chile and the Dominican Republic. Tricontinental magazine had an audience in these countries, and more broadly, in Latin America and Western Europe. It disseminated a theory of guerrilla warfare based on the concept of the foco, or “flash point” of vanguard insurgency, as developed by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and disseminated by the French writer Régis Debray in his book Revolution in the Revolution?, which was published in five different languages in the year 1967. Che himself, who had left Cuba for revolutionary activities in Africa, delivered a famous “Message to the Tricontinental Conference” where he called for greater unity among anti-imperialist forces. As he wrote:

How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world! And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people – how great and close would that future be!

In reality, the years 1968-75 would mark the crest and fall of the great wave of Third World liberation struggles that had begun with the decolonization movements of the post-WWII period. The major victory was Vietnam. On January 31, 1968, the People’s Army and the National Liberation Front launched the Tet Offensive, assailing over one hundred cities and towns in a two-week period. Images of the attack on the US Embassy in Saigon burst onto American TV screens and convinced the population that the war could not be won, even though the offensive was rapidly put down. The final collapse of US power in Southeast Asia in 1975 is directly related to the domestic antiwar movement. Former North Vietnamese Colonel Bin Tui underscored its importance in a 1995 interview in the Wall Street Journal:

Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us…. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.

How did American radicals internalize the Third World struggles to spark a political conflict at home? What were the class dynamics that gave the conflict its national basis? And what was the elite reaction? How did it affect the restructuring of the US economy after the deep recessions of the 1970s?

To begin answering these questions we can take some inspiration from another contributor to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference: the Guinean revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral. In a text entitled “The Weapon of Theory” he reflects on the neocolonial situation, where a pseudo-bourgeoisie under foreign domination is limited in its ability to develop the national economy, such that no strong proletariat emerges. For this reason a vanguard organization is needed to bring the masses of the peasantry into alignment the nascent rural and urban working classes. Cabral believes such a vanguard must be largely drawn from what he calls the petty bourgeoisie (that is, small landowners, merchants and minor state functionaries). Yet he also claims that this class cannot ultimately take power, for it neither generates the modern productive forces (as the working class does) nor controls them (as does the international bourgeoisie). Envisaging the moment of victory, Cabral writes:

To retain the power which national liberation puts in its hands, the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to give free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois, to permit the development of a bureaucratic and intermediary bourgeoisie in the commercial cycle, in order to transform itself into a national pseudo-bourgeoisie, that is to say in order to negate the revolution. This means that in order to truly fulfill the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.

Undoubtedly that sounds like some strange historical curiosity, or maybe just Marxist bullshit. What I’ll suggest is that Cabral’s analysis comes very close to the situation faced by the American antiwar movement. To grasp the parallel, all we have to do is replace the neocolonial condition by that of a post-industrial society – and the petty bourgeoisie by the professional-managerial class.

Naming the System

The civil rights and antiwar activism of the 1960s emerged against a background of prosperity for the middle classes. The boom had many sources: but one of them was government spending for the largest welfare-state programs since the 1930s. The expansion began under Kennedy in the areas of unemployment insurance, Social Security, urban renewal and tax breaks for home ownership. Johnson’s election in 1964 along with landslide Democratic victories in Congress gave rise to the “Great Society,” including the War on Poverty, Medicare and Medicaid, Pell grants and low-interest loans for education, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, public broadcasting programs and still more spending for transportation and urban renewal. Legislation was passed in favor of women and minorities, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, plus labor and environmental laws. All that created jobs, institutions, bureaucracies and gave a major boost to the public university system. It’s tempting to think that if welfare-state policies could bring about progressive social change, these would have done so. Yet they tended to benefit those already in the middle classes, while technological unemployment, accelerated by automation and cybernetic feedback control, continued to sap the livelihood of workers. The laws and entitlements could not erase continuing white resistance to black civil rights; nor could they mask the escalation of the war in Indochina. As Che Guevara wrote in his “Message to the Tricontinental”:

Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people – to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the ‘Great Society’ have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.

The history of the civil rights movement is conventionally told as the tale of Martin and Malcom, of love and rage, non-violence and black power. That of the antiwar movement centers on Students for a Democratic Society, and gets divided into four phases: formative idealism; civil rights campaigns in the South; resistance to the draft; outright revolution. The whole thing, people say, came to a bad end shortly after 1968, with riots, internal strife, FBI infiltration, a desperate shift to armed rebellion, and then the dissolution of politics into the counterculture. The remaining questions – like whether you prefer LSD and music to books, marches and meetings – can be settled pretty quickly.

It would be more difficult, but probably much more useful, to conceive both the collaborations and the breaks between the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s as more-or-less conscious efforts to transform the normative pattern of class relations, not between whites and blacks in general, but between the two poles of the welfare state. By that I mean the administrators, social workers and moralizers under government employ, and the increasingly unemployed populations whom they were supposed to serve and protect. If the Great Depression marked the emergence of this relation, the Great Society marked its crisis. That’s clear in the very title of a 1968 pamphlet by an SDS affiliate, the Movement for a Democratic Society: it’s called “Welfare, The Exterminating Angel.” To understand why social programs did not calm domestic strife, one could therefore examine the co-evolution of these two separate but intimately connected social groups, and consider the reasons that led significant minorities within both of them to begin altering the terms on which they met. Such a study would focus on the role of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a mediating link between the intellectual radicals of SDS, and the black militants on the streets. This approach would ask about governance and obedience as it is experienced in the flesh by social subjects, and not only as it is represented on the level of official politics. It would also reveal a broader relation between the American university – or “multiversity” – and the world society that its technocratic experts were charged with modernizing and rationalizing, by force of arms if need be.

Now, another thing to realize in this regard is that since the ‘60s, libertarian and neoconservative writers have relentlessly analyzed the interdependencies of what New Left fellow-traveler Murray Rothbard termed the “welfare-warfare state” – and they have done so in order to justify the abrogation of any redistributive programs. As I will show later on, the cooptation of specific aspects of New Left critique was an essential part of the elite strategy for resolving the crisis. What I want to suggest right here is that we try to recover an oppositional project in all its social complexity: a cross-class effort to break away from an entire system and transform that system at its roots. Only by retracing the emergence and development of this project could one see what results it actually had, and how it influenced the resolution of the larger crisis of Keynesian-Fordist society.

Such a study can’t be done in a few pages, so I’ll just sketch its outlines. We can begin with a famous antiwar speech made by SDS president Paul Potter at the first March on Washington, on April 17, 1965. Potter raises the question of Communism, suggests that it might not be as bad for Vietnam as the destruction of the war, then goes on to ask about the nature of American society itself:

What kind of system is it that justifies the United States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose? What kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves millions upon millions of people throughout the country impoverished and excluded from the mainstream and promise of American society, that creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies and makes those the place where people spend their lives and do their work, that consistently puts material values before human values – and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world? What place is there for ordinary men in that system and how are they to control it, make it bend itself to their wills rather than bending them to its? We must name that system.

The great thing about SDS is that they had the capacity to ask a question and then, on the basis of collective work and political will, to answer it. So here is the answer delivered by Carl Oglesby, the new SDS president, at the second March on Washington on November 27, 1965:

We are here again to protest a growing war. Since it is a very bad war, we acquire the habit of thinking it must be caused by very bad men. But we only conceal reality, I think, to denounce on such grounds the menacing coalition of industrial and military power, or the brutality of the blitzkrieg we are waging against Vietnam, or the ominous signs around us that heresy may soon no longer be permitted. We must simply observe, and quite plainly say, that this coalition, this blitzkrieg, and this demand for acquiescence are creatures, all of them, of a Government that since 1932 has considered itself to he fundamentally liberal.

The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war — those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.

But so, I’m sure, are many of us who are here today in protest. To understand the war, then, it seems necessary to take a closer look at this American liberalism. Maybe we are in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.

The key concept that SDS deployed for the critique of the American economic and military system was corporate liberalism. In Oglesby’s speech it appears as something like a legitimating mask (“It performs for the corporate state a function quite like what the Church once performed for the feudal state. It seeks to justify its burdens and protect it from change”). But a more intricate development of the concept can be traced through a group of radical historians, notably including William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein, contributors to the journal Studies on the Left. For them, corporate liberalism was a way of preemptively adopting reforms that had arisen from intense labor struggles, in order to functionalize them for the expansion of organized capitalism. Both Kolko and Weinstein concentrated on early 20th century Progressivism, essentially to show that Woodrow Wilson’s sudden conversion to total mobilization for WWI, and his induction of corporate personnel to government for that purpose, was no accident but rather a destiny inscribed in the governing philosophy of Progressive businessmen. As for the intellectuals, Weinstein wrote the following in his 1968 book The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State:

To the extent that various independent liberals deceived themselves – and most of them seemed better to know what they were doing than they would later admit – it was in confusing their own pragmatic or problem-oriented liberalism with that of the corporate liberalism of the highly ideological business and political leaders. If they allowed themselves unwittingly to be used, it was because they had the conceit to consider their intelligence and social values equal to the influence of the industrial and financial institutions that were the heart and muscle of American power.

The conclusion had already been drawn by SDS: what Kolko and Weinstein described among the Progressives also applied to the New Deal and its transformation in WWII. This was the crucible of the welfare state and the imperialist wars of the 1960s. Corporate liberalism was the name of a double system. The point, for the New Left, was never again to be the useful fools of a political-economic leadership that could convert any grassroots demand for reform, not only into window dressing, but worse, into a functional component of a more efficient imperialist machine. The goal had to be that of finding what Oglesby called an “authentically humanist” intellectual practice that would not perfect the existing state. Yet strangely enough, that would mean turning away from the civil-rights campaigns on which SDS was founded. Naming the system was a fundamental act of disidentification, of rupture, leading to a reformulation of the student protest movement.

Struggles in the Edu-Factory

The impetus for this existential change came from SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael. At stake was the very definition of what political opposition could mean, for two revolutionary groups which up until this point had been confined within the class positions assigned to them by the dominant society. In the spring of 1966, SNCC published a position paper entitled “The Basis of Black Power.” There one reads:

It must be offered that white people who desire change in this country should go where that problem (racism) is most manifest. The problem is not in the black community. The white people should go into white communities where the whites have created power for the express purpose of denying blacks human dignity and self-determination. Whites who come into the black community with ideas of change seem to want to absolve the power structure of its responsibility for what it is doing, and saying that change can only come through black unity, which is the worst kind of paternalism. This is not to say that whites have not had an important role in the movement. In the case of Mississippi, their role was very key in that they helped give blacks the right to organize, but that role is now over, and it should be.

The influence of Frantz Fanon – and of Third World struggles broadly speaking – was foundational for the second generation of black radicals, those who looked to Malcom X for inspiration. That influence is clear in this text, which closes with the following line: “The broad masses of black people react to American society in the same manner as colonial peoples react to the West in Africa, and Latin America, and had the same relationship – that of the colonized toward the colonizer.” For SDS, which had been deeply invested in the kinds of collaboration that SNCC was now identifying as colonial, this declaration necessarily marked a turning point. A text was drafted in response, under the title “Resolution on SNCC.” It rejects the idea of “racism in reverse” that was being leveled at Black Power: “Now that SNCC is under fire from a variety of liberal organizations and publications we feel a special urgency to restate our support. Let it be clear that we are not merely supporting SNCC’s right to its views, we are welcoming and supporting the thrust of SNCC’s program.” The text continues with a proposal for a new orientation: “If we really want to help we will be organizing primarily among the powerless, the disenfranchised, the dependent whites – poor, working class, and middle class – toward their power in communities, unions, and professions, so that they may move toward authentic alliance with the organizations of black power.” It was this orientation that would lead SDS “from protest to resistance,” in the phrase coined by Greg Calvert. Resistance meant all-out opposition to the very sources of the corporate-liberal compromise. In a speech entitled “In White America: Liberal Consciousness versus Radical Consciousness,” from February 1967, Calvert offered a distinction that would become crucial for the student movement:

The liberal reformist is always engaged in “fighting someone else’s battles.” His struggle is involved in relieving the tension produced by the contradictions between his own existence and life-style, his self-image, and the conditions of existence and life-style of those who do not share his privileged, unearned status.

Radical or revolutionary consciousness perceives contradiction in a totally different fashion. The gap is not between oneself, what one is, and the underprivileged, but is the gap between “what one could be” and the existing conditions for self-realization. It is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed – and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.

Calvert held a low-level teaching position in Iowa when he was elected president of SDS in the Spring of 1966. He belonged to the second generation, part of the “prairie power” turn away from the East Coast origins of the movement. His speech (according to Kirkpatrick Sale’s history) had been collectively authored by the leading figures of the movement at that time. Under their impulsion, mass resistance to the draft would become the centerpiece of SDS action, whose focus now shifted to the campus itself. The same shift would give rise to a startlingly new analysis of education and labor in the advanced capitalist societies. A group called the “praxis axis” emerged, rallying around a complex technical studying jokingly entitled “The Port Authority Statement” (since much of it had been composed in a student apartment near the New York bus terminal of that name). As the radical shock groups burned their draft cards, this group attempted to refound SDS on an updated Marxist basis.

The most provocative SDS document from the period of 1967-68, and the most relevant today, is Carl Davidson’s agitational essay “The Multiversity: Crucible of the New Working Class.” By critically interpreting University of California president Clark Kerr’s book on The Uses of the University, Davidson reveals the key institution of modern American society to be a “factory” producing what he calls “the new working class.” The concept was borrowed from the French sociologists Serge Mallet and André Gorz, who studied the contemporary division of labor and its relations to class politics in the mid-1960s. Mallet focused on the revolt of factory technicians against technological alienation and their corresponding desire for workers’ control of the production process; while Gorz, with a more philosophical bent, inquired into possible strategies for workers’ movements in affluent societies, seeking revolutionary possibilities where a philosopher like Marcuse could only see one-dimensional dead-ends. For Davidson, the concept implied that not only the technical skills, but also the values and orientations of the new working class (what we would now call its “subjectivity”) are produced on campus by the interlocking interests of the corporations, the military and the social state. Yet here too arise the forces that can challenge the production of subjectivity; for, as Davidson writes, the university “has turned our humanitarian values into their opposites and, at the same time, given us the potential to understand and critically evaluate both ourselves and the system itself. ” The last remark brings the whole movement full circle: in a reversal of power, students understand that the best of their education is exactly what allows them to transcend and destroy it. This was the dialectical transformation implicit in the demand for an “authentic humanism” that Oglesby had formulated at the second March on Washington. From this theoretical point forward, the protest marches against the war give way to the great student strikes of 1968.

For anyone with experience of contemporary activism, where critical knowledge and bodies on the line are clearly inseparable, it’s impressive to reconsider the April 1968 occupation of Columbia University. A film by the Newsreel collective, entitled Columbia Revolt, makes this possible. Instead of a voice-over, the film uses audio recordings of students’ remarks and speeches during the strike, creating a complex and fragmented multi-perspectival narration. One sees the Columbia students joining the mobilization of the neighboring black community against a proposed gym, dubbed “Gym Crow,” which would have come down the slopes of Morningside Heights to encroach on a Harlem park, condescendingly offering black residents a back-door entrance into the basement. After the police quash an invasion of the gym construction site, the demonstrators return to the administration building, where they discover papers relating to the university’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis. Black students insist on holding the building, splitting from the whites, whom they radicalize in the process. Five buildings are taken and held for a week, until a brutal police crackdown finally dislodges the occupiers; but strikes continue until the end of the semester, when a breakaway graduation is held, invalidating the official degrees. Writing two years later in a text entitled “Toward a Critical University,” Davidson describes the shift from an illusory quest for “student power” (the equivalent of “workers’ control” over schooling) to a more pragmatic confrontation with the really existing institution:

This revaluation of student power led directly to the current strategy of the student movement – institutional resistance. Although the focus is still primarily on university training and research processes, the approach has shifted from general and abstract (“control” or “drop out” of the process) to an attack on various specific end results of those processes. Instead of lamenting the “publish or perish” syndrome, radicals expose and attack specific military and CIA contracts. Rather than protect the change from the “community of scholars” dialogue to corporate job training, they confront recruiters from the military, DOW Chemical and the CIA and often throw them off the campus. Finally, since the university itself is a corporation, radicals attack its business practices: expansion into ghetto neighborhoods, racist recruitment, and exploitative treatment of non-academic employees.

This program, and the facts of university occupations in collaboration with other social movements, are exactly what could become powerful again today. A first step, driven largely by adjunct professors, was made on the University of California campuses in 2009-10, under the pressure of abusive tuition hikes and the sudden realization that supposedly public universities were being surreptitiously privatized. Once again the movement was global, responding to much larger student actions in Europe and Latin America. As in the 1960s, critical research into the functioning of the university was inseparable from bodies on the line. In these respects, today’s radical intellectuals have much to learn from the New Left and SDS in particular.

Yet critical activism is hard to sustain, particularly in the United States. The lines of race, class and gender still exist and still pose difficult problems when it comes to articulating a mass movement. With anticapitalist sentiments currently on a welcome upward rise, it is easy to gloss over the problems and hope for bigger demonstrations tomorrow. I think everyone who supports the Occupy movements should begin thinking about the questions of class and inclusivity today. As Amilcar Cabral explained in his text, “The Weapon of Theory,” it is to the weaknesses of our forces that we should pay special attention.

Revolutionary Classes

In 1977, nearly a decade after SDS splintered into warring factions relegated to oblivion by the adventurism of the Weather Underground, Barbara and John Ehrenreich published an article in Radical America devoted to “The Professional-Managerial Class.” The first paragraph points to a major paradox of the US left, which might seem obvious if it were not deeply repressed by a majority of the people directly concerned:

To generations of radicals, the working class has been the bearer of socialism, the agent of both progressive social reform and revolution. But in the United States in the last two decades, the left has been concentrated most heavily among people who feel themselves to be “middle-class,” while the working class has appeared relatively quiescent. This “middle-class” left, unlike its equivalent in early twentieth-century Europe or in the Third World today, is not a minority within a mass working-class (or peasant) movement; it is, to a very large extent, the left itself. It has its own history of mass struggle, not as an ally or appendage of the industrial working class, but as a mass constituency in and of itself. At the same time, most of the U.S. left continues to believe (correctly, we think) that without a mass working class left, only the most marginal of social reforms is possible.

Unsatisfied with the catch-all category of the middle classes, the Ehrenreichs propose the concept of the “professional-managerial class” (PMC) which they define as “consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” The PMC comes into existence from the late 19th century onward, under the conditions of organized capitalism (or what the Ehrenreichs, following Baran and Sweezy, call “monopoly capitalism”). What it does is basically to manage. On the one hand, members of the PMC are involved with “social control or the production and propagations of ideology,” which requires “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.” On the other hand, they are “middle-level administrators and managers, engineers and other technicians whose functions… are essentially determined by the need to preserve capitalist relations of production.” The second sector corresponds to the Taylorist movement of scientific management, where not only the planning of production but also the design of the technologies can be seen as a mode of social control.

The new class arises a gradient between labor and capital. It expands with the growth of industry, but also with the commodification of workers’ familial and cultural activities and with the emergence of state bureaucracies devoted to the employment, health, and education of the laboring population. All of this begins in the Progressive period, from 1880 to 1920, when members of the traditional middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie “feared their own extinction in the titanic struggle between capital and labor.” According to the Ehrenreichs, this is why they devoted themselves to the reform of the capitalist system. Their role was “to mediate the basic class conflict of capitalist society and create a ‘rational,’ reproducible social order.” This drive to create a rationalized version of capitalism comes to its height in postwar period and particularly in Johnson’s Great Society.

The PMC, in the Ehrenreichs’ presentation, remains firmly under the domination of the capitalist imperative of accumulation; but at the same time it tends toward the establishment of its own autonomy, generating hostilities toward both the capitalist and working classes. In this sense it is a very different concept from the French theorists’ idea of a “new working class.” The PMC tends to organize itself into professions which are able to express both its own aspirations and its claims to legitimacy in the eyes of the others. The basic characteristics of the professions are “a) the existence of a specialized body of knowledge, accessible only by lengthy training; b) the existence of ethical standards which include a commitment to public service; and c) a measure of autonomy from outside interference in the practice of the profession.” Access to the professions is regulated chiefly by the possession of credentials.

Using this definition of the professional-managerial class, the authors assess the development and significance of the New Left in the 1960s in the second part of their article. They proceed very much as I have done here, with a similar emphasis on the relations between the student radicals exemplified by SDS and the black civil rights and black power movements. They pay particular attention to a tendency within SDS known as the “radicals in the professions,” where former students attempt to prolong their critical activities within the professional spheres to which their education destines them. As they write: “The great importance of this direction, or strategy, of New Left activism is that it embodied a critical self-consciousness of the PMC itself – a kind of negative class consciousness. The radicals-in-the-professions challenged the PMC not for its lack of autonomy (as the student movement had in the early sixties) but for its very claims to autonomy – objectivity, commitment to public services, and expertise itself.” At stake, in short, was a generalized refusal to blindly inherit the foundational axioms of corporate liberalism. The broader aim was a deep transformation of capitalist society:

In a sense, the New Left represents a historic breakthrough: a first conscious effort to recognize and confront the conflict between the PMC and the working class. Learning in part from the Cultural Revolution in China, with its emphasis on the gap between mental and manual labor and its populist approach to technology, and in part from their uneasy alliance with (mainly Third World) working class community movements, the radicals of the sixties began to develop a critique of their own class. The feminist movement extended that critique, exposing the ideological content of even the most apparently “neutral” science and the ideological functions of even the most superficially “rational” experts.

` Surprisingly, the text makes no mention of another important phenomenon of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, whereby minorities and women sought to transform the central institution of the reproduction of the PMC itself – the university – in order to permit the entry and favor the cultural development of people from vastly different horizons, whose subject positions in no way corresponded to the professional-managerial schema. I’m talking about the great struggles for the formation of minority and womens’ studies programs, which, like the one at San Francisco State, were often accompanied by major student strikes and social movements in the associated communities. If we include these “revolutionary classes” in the story of a broader New Left (and everything in the Ehrenreichs’ text and subsequent commentary encourages us to do so), what then emerges is a complex strategy of hegemonic transformation that aimed to make the universities, along with community cultural and educational facilities, into the sites of a metamorphosis of the US class structure and, by extension, of the larger political economy which that structure sustains across the world. Like Christopher Newfield in Unmaking the Public University, I believe that this strategy did exist, that it gained a lot of ground in the 1970s and ‘80s – and that it was perceived as a threat by the elites.

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As if by coincidence, not one but two books were published on the US class structure at the close of the decade in 1979. The first, on the left, was entitled Between Labor and Capital. It was directly provoked by the Ehrenreichs’ characterization of the PMC, and included the essay itself along with a series of reactions. But it was an extraordinarily sad affair: because with the exception of two working-class authors who stressed just how obvious and painful this class distinction was in everyday life, the book consisted of thunderous academic Marxist denunciations of any class concept that could not be subsumed by the two structural poles of labor and capital. Each one of these academic authors claimed to know how Marx really understood class. None of them seemed to grasp the idea that the New Left had involved the co-evolution of highly self-aware and radically militant fractions of American society, whose aim was not to secure advantages for their particular category, but instead to struggle with and potentially dissolve the repressive class structure of capitalist society as a whole.

The other book, entitled A New Class?, was a coordinated multi-author study including liberals and leftists, but with an explicit neoconservative bias. Its touchstone or foil was a 1967 volume entitled Power in America: The Politics of the New Class, by David Bazelon, a New York liberal with political ambitions. Bazelon had written: “The New Class – by educational certification, actual training, and organizational position – holds something better than union privileges, and more important than property ownership: it ‘owns,’ it is, it identifies with, the organizations themselves. It will, then, as a class, operate the power mechanisms of the new world.” Like Bazelon, but with opposite aims, the neoconservative authors began by assessing the power shift from investors to corporate managers, as chronicled by A.A. Berle (one of Roosevelt’s “brain trusters”), James Burnham (the former Trotskyist and author of The Managerial Revolution) or J.K. Galbraith (who coined the concept of the “technostructure” in The New Industrial State). These writers had observed the growing importance of a technical-managerial stratum in the governance of advanced societies. The neocons, writing in the era of Jimmy Carter, feared that this governing role, formerly dominated by liberals, could now be taken over by the radicals who had caused such an uproar in the 1960s. As the centrist author Seymour Martin Lipset put it, “If, in Hegelian terms, the contradiction of capitalism was its dependence on an ever-growing working class brought together in large factories, the contradiction of post-industrial society may be its dependence on large numbers of intellectuals and students for research and innovation on great campuses and a few intellectuals centers of communication and influence.” But for the neoconservative lead author Norman Podhoretz, the problem took on considerably larger dimensions. His text is devoted to the present fortunes of an “adversary culture” whose origins lay in a bohemian opposition to the business-oriented values that had predominated in American life since the end of the Civil War in the late 1860s:

In the past intellectuals had constituted a tiny minority of the population, but with the tremendous expansion of higher education in the period after World War II, millions upon millions of young people began to be exposed to – one might say indoctrinated in – the adversary culture of the intellectuals. To be sure, very few of these young people actually became intellectuals in any real sense, but a great many were deeply influenced by ideas which had once been confined pretty much to the intellectuals community itself. Thus what had formerly been the attitudes of a minuscule group on the margins of American society now began assuming the proportions of a veritable mass movement.

In his text, Podhoretz explains that from the late 1960s onward this situation became more complex as a supposedly “middle-class” opposition to the new culture began to coalesce around publications such as Commentary and The Public Interest (edited by himself and the arch-neocon Irving Kristol). At stake, quite clearly, was a struggle for the cultural and intellectual control over what mainline sociologist Daniel Bell had recently called “the cultural mass.” Here lay the root of the future “culture wars.” Yet there was much more at issue than a battle over mores and taste. As Podhoretz continued, “These intellectual adversaries of the adversary culture were often called ‘neoconservatives,’ a definition happily accepted by some (like Irving Kristol) but rejected by most others, who continued to think of themselves as liberals. ‘Neo-liberal’ would perhaps have been a more accurate label…”

In effect, it was. In the decades following 1968, neoliberalism would be developed as an economic doctrine and a calculus of government in an elite attempt to regain control, not really over the “new working class,” but over what the Ehrenreichs called the professional-managerial class – that fickle counterpart, in the advanced capitalist economies, of the neocolonial petty bourgeoisie that Amilcar Cabral had identified as the necessary but fragile vanguard of the revolution. The financial turn in the economy, initiated in 1979 by the so-called “Volcker interest-rate shock,” would be a major vector of this political-economic strategy. To the neoconservative attacks on radical culture would be added, much more powerfully, the neoliberal attack on welfare and any form of state redistribution. The critique of the “welfare-warfare state,” invented by the libertarian Murray Rothbard in close proximity to the radical left and the opponents of corporate liberalism (and still employed vociferously in Congress by Ron Paul today) would form part of a complex rhetorical arsenal that has been deployed strategically by governing elites with the aim of dismantling every institution of equality – without, however, doing the slightest thing about corporate corruption or deficit spending for the military.

In his concluding remarks Podhoretz adopted a prophetic tone, speaking in the past tense about the future prospects of the “adversaries of adversary culture.” Apparently he could see something coming:

The effect the new dissidents might have on the future course of events was difficult to predict. But as the first – and last? – century of the era of business domination in America drew to a close, the very existence of a significant party of intellectuals to whom the defense of middle-class values seemed necessary to the preservation of liberty, democracy, and even civilization itself, was already casting an anxious shadow over the otherwise cheerful prospects of the adversary culture in the realm of ideas and attitudes, and of the New Class in the arena of economic and political power.

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