Does anyone remember how the Tea Party began?

 

The Tea Party, which the media constantly tell us is an authentic grassroots social movement of outraged working-class Americans, began on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – the center of the global derivatives market – when an enraged CNBC Business commentator, Rick Santelli, began screaming on camera about the Obama administration plans to offer some mortgage relief to people faced with foreclosure. Santelli said the people being kicked out of their homes were “losers,” and to prove it he appealed to the authority of the CME traders, whom he called a “cross section of America.” This was the “rant heard around the world” that launched the Tea Party.

THE TEA PARTY IS THE PARTY OF THE 1 PERCENT!

Sign on the Chicago Board of Trade (owned by CME group)

And when you’re done diggin’ THAT, check out the photos of OWS and other occupations collected more or less daily on cryptome.

Are the newspapers still saying these are kids with air between their ears? This is the most intense and expansive American social movement since Seattle. Shout out some respect to North Africa, ’cause they showed us the way. Occupy your own town, occupy your own brain, occupy everywhere.

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And by the way, here’s some news from Occupy LA:

BETWEEN THE GRASSROOTS AND POWER

Social Movement Politics in 1930s America

The second session of the collaborative seminar THREE CRISES: 30s – 70s – Today was held at Mess Hall on Saturday Oct. 1. The seminar materials, readings, recordings and a pdf version of this text are available here.

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On Dec. 30, 1936, workers at the Fisher Body no. 1 plant in Flint, Michigan, heard the rumor that the dies of the stamping presses – a strategic link in the General Motors national production chain – were to be removed that evening. The technique of the sit-down strike, pioneered in the tire factories of Akron, Ohio, was the immediate response of the United Autoworkers Union, an affiliate of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The strike lasted 44 days, mobilizing women alongside men and drawing solidarity pickets from across the Great Lakes region. After several weeks it escalated to the point where National Guards with machine guns were brought in to keep the peace, and ultimately to clear the factories. On February 3, 1937, in the face of a court order to vacate the premises, the strikers sent a telegram to the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy:

We feel it proper to recall to you the assurance you have many times given to the public that you would not permit force or violence to be used in ousting us from the plants. Unarmed as we are, the introduction of militia, sheriff or police with murderous weapons, will mean a blood bath of unarmed workers. The police of Flint belong to General Motors. The sheriff of Genesee County belongs to General Motors, and the judges of Genesee County belong to General Motors…. It remains to be seen whether or not the governor of this state also belongs to General Motors. We have decided to stay in the plants. We have no illusions what sacrifices this decision will entail. We fully expect that if violent efforts are used to put us out, many of us will be killed. We take this method to make it known to our wives, our children, and to the people of the state and country, that if this result follows from the attempts to eject us, you are the one who must be held responsible for our death.

Roosevelt himself intervened. The Democratic governor, aligned with New Deal policies, did not give the order to fire. The right of workers to form unions, to strike and to engage in collective bargaining had already been guaranteed, first by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, then by the National Labor Relations Act, or “Wagner Act,” of 1935. Now that formal guarantee stood the test of reality. The strike reached a climax on Feb. 11 when the UAW gained exclusive representation of union employees. A wave of sit-downs then unfurled at GM plants across the country, extending to Chrysler and, unsuccessfully, to Ford. The rise of the CIO’s industrial unionism had begun. The sit-down strikes were a pivotal event in the consolidation of the New Deal policies that have continued to shape the United States up to this day, when their last remains are being taken apart before our eyes.

The Great Depression of the 1930s is a fascinating historical period in the United States, not because of the Crash of ‘29 or the machinations of the financiers, but because hard times revealed the nation to itself, giving visibility and agency to those at the bottom. In labor and agricultural history, literature and popular culture, the filmic and photographic record, everywhere you find traces of a multifarious desire to survive, to improve the conditions of daily life, to beat back the forces of capital and to resolve the paradox of scaricity amid abundance and overproduction. Through the intermediary of governmental reforms running parallel to technological and managerial changes, these struggles would ultimately result in a transformation of the American class structure and the emergence of a new, increasingly educated service class. Let’s frame our questions in that perspective. How did the social movements of the 1930s come into being? What made their victories possible? Where did Roosevelt’s New Deal lead the country as a whole? And then more urgently: What kinds of actions could gain the transformative power of the sit-down strikes today? Who could carry them out, in which kinds of alliances, where and when? And finally, how do we control the trigger-fingers of the police?

National Guard, Flint, 1937 / Miami police, FTAA Summit, 2002

On the radical left today there are two rival approaches to the history of social movements, both of which hail from Italy. First, the autonomous Marxism of the 60’s and 70’s – from Mario Tronti to Toni Negri – says that labor is the dynamic force of history, and that workers’ struggles are what provoke organizational, technological and political change. The sit-down strikes are proof of that, since they alone created labor’s bargaining power. In works like Marx beyond Marx, Negri has elaborated an ontology of living labor as a protean capacity of self-valorization which, when collectivized, give rise to a constituent power able to reshape the social order. This view celebrates organized militancy alongside resistance, subversion and exodus, and it rewrites leftist defeatism as veiled victory. Capital’s only power, for the autonomists, is that of capturing and channeling working-class self-assertions. This has the great advantage of focusing on agency from below. In the English-speaking world there are equivalents from E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class to Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many Headed Hydra. The concepts of self-valorization and constituent power reveal the creative force of social movements in the three major crises of modern American capitalism.

The second approach derives from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. There the former communist party leader shows how in the absence of a successful leftist program, the energies of the subordinated classes are channeled into a “passive revolution” where technological and organizational transformations are guided from above and social struggles are neutralized by an all-pervasive ideology. The key concept is hegemony, understood not as pure coercive force, but as the set of conciliatory cultural images, institutions and discursive reflexes that make up what the international relations theorists now call “soft power.” Hegemony is established in the wake of violence. It uses both real and imaginary compensations to quell class conflicts, dispel the very possibility of more radical demands and ultimately create what Gramsci calls an “historic bloc” that can effectively shape the course of social evolution. Italian fascism was the prime example; but Keynesian Fordism would be another, and neoliberalism yet another. The approach allows us to asses the powers of capital in its institutional, cultural and even psychosexual forms. It also uncovers the contours of recent struggles beneath the apparent complacency of normal behaviors, and points to the sources of latent divides and alternative pathways. But it can be disempowering, as in much of academic Marxism; and Gramsci is rejected by the autonomists because he seems to consider integration as the inevitable destiny of all struggles. Still the concepts of passive revolution and hegemony can’t be ignored. Recent US and European history has done far too much to substantiate them.

How to engage with the successive formations of North American and global society using these rival concepts? I think they should be seen as the opposing poles of a highly charged social field. What matters is what happens between them. To theorize an ontologically pure force of emancipation is to turn away from real human beings; while to continually chart the dynamics of integration is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in your own perception. If what’s at stake is a malleable social field whose human forces are shaped by assertions from both fundamental poles of the class system, then we have to pay more attention to those in between, the so-called “middle” or “service” classes, who were both a leading sociological factor and a focus of popular aspiration throughout the twentieth century. These commercial, administrative, scientific, technical, cultural and care-giving sectors are themselves subservient to the upper classes, but also tend to function as relays of domination. Yet they began in the 1930s to gain new degrees of autonomy by representing and channeling the forces of the working and excluded classes in a struggle against capital – a struggle aligning them with elements of the state. Through that very process, the size and agency of the middle strata increased considerably. So although I’m aware of the morass of compromise that awaits on this path, I still think the historical projects and trajectories of the intermediary strata have to be taken seriously and analyzed in their diversity and contradictions, alongside the working and owning classes. This is the only way to map out the successive transformations of the social field, and grasp our own potentials for agency in the present.

Defending UC?

Here’s a particularly interesting snip from a debate I have been having with Blake Stimson, a UC Davis professor, and others on the iDC list. At stake among other things are the relative merits of publicly funded and autonomous education, which is being called DIY education on the list, particularly in reference to various online schemes which are not all corporate. The entire debate can be found in the archives of the list for the month of September.

–It’s great to sustain the public debate, Blake. It’s the only way to get beyond the usual schiz of promotional confidence and total cynicism.

> I assume that we both agree that the root issue vis-a-vis education today is something like the progressive displacement of socially-minded critical thinking by opportunistic, self-interested calculation and the role this has played in the antidemocrati redistribution of wealth and power that defines our times.

We agree on that!

> I understand you to see bureaucratized higher ed as the bigger cause of this whereas I take the future of DIY higher ed to be more significant. In the 1960s I would have agreed with you that institutions are the problem. Now that the most successful challenges to the Establishment arise from the unholy marriage between Tea Party resentment and Wall Street greed, I think institutions are less of a problem than the larger cultural effort to dismantle them.

But here our analysis diverges, because I think that universities have already been largely repurposed along neoliberal lines. I don’t think UC is public anymore. The ethos of equality does not exist in the system, because the administrators are frankly on the take, the majority of professors are paid off the wage scale and most of teaching is done by adjuncts under vastly unequal conditions. If Schwartz’s analysis is right, there is no public support for undergraduates since their tuition pays for their entire education, while the government, corporate and endowment money goes to sports and research labs. To this extent, “the market” is not exterior to “the institution.” Rather, since the time of Reagan and Clinton you have a powerful and partially completed trend towards a “market institution.” There is a lot of frustration and anger across the board in the face of this situation, and the point is to elevate those sentiments into a constructive leftist and social-democratic critique of that which founds them in reality. I am, by the way, a taker when it comes to names, references, projects elaborating such critique. Without it the left is just nostalgia.

> In the best light, the future of DIY higher ed seems rightfully enough labeled “iTunes U,” with large corporations serving as clearing houses for, say, a progressively defunded and deregulated science curriculum that ranges from biopolitics to evolution to creationism.

Here again we agree. I think the ideal corporate model is functional knowledge piped directly into your brain by networked media without any of that subversive classroom and discussion stuff. As a complement, the traditional upper classes and their more recent imitators have no intention of letting go of the Ivy League schools where more agile and powerful forms of subjectivity can be cultivated.

> Looked at in a poorer light we might imagine future higher ed to be more like the US insurance/healthcare industry now–with market dynamics progressively disenfranchising a growing segment of the population through voucher policies and democratically-minded politicians increasingly vilified for their efforts to provide some minimal measure of equal access. Further, it will surely be significantly harder to fight for any standards of equal access to education because it is less important than healthcare.

This will definitely be the case if the marketization of the state university systems is completed! That’s why I am saying it’s nuts to “defend UC” without a deep critique of what’s already indefensible in it. The grad student/adjunct population has a very sour view of the institution today, largely based on their economic experience doing the majority of the teaching without ever having a career. So the so-called public university is supported on a foundation of seething resentment. Without a simultaneous recognition of the situation the graduate teachers are describing and an effort to campaign against it very actively and at all levels – analysis, department and university politics, activism, state and national politics – there will be no social forces to resist the kind of Tea Party populism that is shown in the sinister Lebed “College Conspiracy” video you linked to, which is worth watching for sure (link here). We do need a critique of neoliberal financialization, which is the target of that video. But we don’t need *their* critique, because it will turn us into morons under the boot of the right-wing oligarchies.

> To repeat for emphasis, I am not saying that DIY initiatives from Wikipedia to many of the projects referred to on this list are not valuable. Nor am I saying that existing higher ed institutions should not be critiqued and transformed. Instead, I am saying that such critical DIY initiative needs to be pursued with a clear sense of larger social, political, and economic interests that circulate through the huge education economy so that it can most effectively pursue its own aims and not be a pawn in someone else’s game.

Here we go! We perfectly agree. However probably I take it a good deal further than you and I’m curious what you and other people may think.

I think we need to create a strong left civil society that can make ideas politically active. This is urgent because the right is doing their version of it, and after the long Reagan and Clintonian transformation of the New Deal institutions, this effort of the right cannot be fought by just defending the eviscerated shells of formerly public institutions. To create a powerful left praxis with only a weak institutional base and no billionaire Koch-brother resources is going to require several things. The creation of intense discursive communities outside the university. The movement of people between universities, critical communities, workplaces and social movements. The forging of a new egalitarian political discourse and a cooperative aesthetics. The creation of supple and resilient networks to link all that. Ultimately, new political platforms based in this expansion of critical civil society and social movements.

It sounds like a lot, but otherwise it looks to me like the writing is on the wall for social democracy, let alone the “communist horizon” that Jodi Dean is talking about. I guess university professors would have to begin by reorienting their research and publishing activities towards areas that have some use value for people outside, while simultaneously elaborating meta-discourses to prove to themselves, first of all, that this is not about populism or the watering down of their subjects, but instead about the creation of a more rich and socially complex form of knowledge. Personally I find that kind of creativity the most passionately interesting one!

further, Brian

“Goldman Sachs rules the world”

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While the protesters occupying Wall Street are beaten by the cops and sprayed with gas for nothing, those who incarnate the ideals of neoliberal society – the traders – admit they dream of a great crash where they can make tons of money while millions of people lose their savings and an entire continent plunges into chaos. Apparently this is not our friends the Yes Men (inquiries have been made – proving nothing at all) but as my brother says, maybe this guy had his own little strategy to move the markets. The thing is, everything he says conforms to well-known mentalities and established patterns of financial history. So exactly like the Yes Men it rings true. Felix Stalder, who sent me this, gets the final word: we live in astonishing times.

First Meeting: THREE CRISES

The first session at Mess Hall was truly excellent. Thanks to all. The seminar materials, readings, recordings and a pdf version of this text are available here. As we spoke at on Saturday, protesters in New York made a move to OCCUPY WALL STREET! Give them your eyes and your ears and your support. As the police bash heads in NYC, Rivera’s great mural (detail above) is timelier than ever.

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1. The Idea
On the third-floor balconies beneath the central dome of Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes – a Neoclassical wedding cake whose construction had been halted for decades by the Revolution – two murals stare at each other across a great divide. They were painted on state commission when the building was finally completed in 1934, by two rival artists who opposed each other in every way. Diego Rivera’s work, Man at the Crossroads, shows capitalist and communist pathways for the industrial mass production system that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century. That machine system, as Rivera understood, was now in crisis. José Clemente Orozco’s mural, which he left untitled but has come to be known as Catharsis, is also about the power of the machine. But here it is a power of lust and disarray, of horror and murder, a force of pure violence.

Orozco knew very well what Rivera’s composition would be, and he responded directly to it. Both had just returned to Mexico from extended stays in the the United States, and in both cases, their work was informed by the US experience. Rivera’s multi-year travels from San Francisco to New York included a long stopover in Detroit, where he painted the technological and social articulation of the new Ford plant on the Rouge river: the prototype of the vast production complexes that would be built during the Second World War. As a communist, Rivera believed he understood the central significance of this machine system for the future development of life on earth. He reiterated that understanding in the initial version of Man at the Crossroads in New York, with a political framing that resulted in the work’s destruction by the man who had commissioned it, Nelson Rockefeller. As for Orozco, he lived in New York City from 1927 to 1934, where he attracted the critical attention and patronage of the historian, philosopher and urbanist Lewis Mumford, the author of Technics and Civilization. Mumford’s vision of the domination of Western civilization by the machine is visible in the fresco cycle Epic of American Civilization at Dartmouth College, in the juxtaposition of Cortez and the Cross with a crude and brutal image of The Machine. Orozco was a humanist, his cycle culminates with Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life. But he returned to the theme of domination in the late 1930s at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, where he painted the devastating portrait of a gigantic steel-limbed Cortez striding through the New World with a bloody sword.

I knew none of these details last fall when I returned to Mexico City for the first time since the 1980s and went to see the Rivera mural once again. I rediscovered the grand narrative sweep of the composition, which pits capitalist armies in gas masks against proletarians personified by wailing women in red scarves, and contrasts dissolute bourgeois gamblers to a portrait of Lenin clasping hands with workers of all races (the very image that had so infuriated Rockefeller). The rioters on the New York streets call for bread and the mounted police beat them down with clubs, as they still do to us today, while groups of people on either side look on through lenses prefiguring TV. Like everyone I was fascinated by the image of “man the controller,” thrust ahead into space by some sort of dream propeller whose surrealistic wings reveal macro and microcosmic dimensions. The Greek statue holding a fascia emblazoned with a swastika has its head cut off at the neck: I found it amazing that in 1934 Rivera had already foreseen that the enduring conflict would not be between America and Germany, but between West and East, capitalism and communism.

click for a larger image

Yet these were things I already new, histories you learn in school. Like a hungry tourist I circled around the balconies, drinking in the other murals, especially those by Siquieros and Camarena. Then I was stopped short by the strange and bloody painting of Orozco: the flames, the rifles, the guy getting knifed, the other assassin who seems to emerge headless from some twisting metal camshaft, and of course, the bejeweled woman lying legs outspread with a rictus of pleasure, the bank vault sprung open, the scattering crowds, etc. As I stared at this apocalypse and then back across the gap at the Rivera mural, I gradually realized these paintings were in dialogue, I was sure of it. In the mid-1930s, having seen the first major crisis of organized corporate capitalism along with the rise of both Nazism and Stalinism, the two artists were looking into dramatically different futures of the industrial system. Rivera’s confident analytical and ideological masterpiece was directly contradicted by Orozco’s premonition of mechanized horror – an image of what Lewis Mumford called “the new barbarism.”

click for a larger image

What I found so impressive about this historical site in Mexico City, so promising and challenging all at once, was the simple fact that individuals with diverging ideas and ideals, real people with eyes and hands and hearts, could stand within a great economic, social and technological crisis that affected them directly, that they could try to analyze it and assess it, and that they could use all the means at their disposal to engage a public debate about what would happen next – what kind of society would emerge from the crisis. In Mexico in 1934 that effort could be made monumental in a public institution: no one censored it, no one emended or moralized it, and even if there is no direct indication within the space today that the current caretakers really understand what was at stake in this dialogue, still the paintings are there for all to see. The public dimension, the absence of censorship, the effort of analysis, the courage to present an ideology and a cosmovision, and finally, the frank disagreement which is also a form of attention and respect, all that made me feel more alive, more in tune with the present, even if what I was seeing was only a relic, a historical ruin like so many others.

The question that struck me then, and continues to strike me now, is this: How could we do such a thing in our time, today? Are we not embroiled in a great historical crisis? Do we not perceive the major outlines of this crisis, at the same time as we are viscerally oppressed by the absence of any public debate? Doesn’t the direction that will be taken by our society, and indeed by civilization in the future, depend crucially on decisions that are being made now and that will be made over the next five or ten or fifteen years? Isn’t it high time to begin analyzing and assessing the present crisis, in order to find the means of expression that could lead to a meaningful debate and from there, to political action? But when and how and where to do such a thing? And above all, with whom?

Visiting the Planetarium

Images of the Black World

 

Text for Trevor Paglen's show at the Vienna Secession

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Clouds, fields, forests, country roads, empty skies: the video image shows you a landscape seen at random, or for purposes utterly unknown. Its shifting perspectives appear through the visual overlay of a targeting system, controlled by a distant operator. This is a drone’s eye view. The signal was captured from a satellite transmission, maybe intended for Creech Air Base, Nevada. We see a date and a local time, but the position remains blank—it could be in Kosovo or elsewhere in southern Europe. There’s something hesitant, furtive or even lost about the way the drone is scanning through the territory. Suddenly a large wall clock flashes up on the screen. Its face is emblazoned with a dragon-winged creature, threatening and strange, but typical of the emblems used by Air Force reconnaissance teams. Is it supposed to mark a significant moment, a planned operation, a hit? More likely it’s the cypher of some airman’s utter boredom, alone in a cubicle, glued to a monitor, staring at meaningless foreign landscapes whose very banality has become part of the secret.

The video was given to Trevor Paglen by one of his collaborators—people who are intensely curious about what goes on in the restricted zones of the Pentagon’s “black world.” It was then edited and folded into a larger body of work, to be shown in galleries and museums. Thus it has the status of a clue, an index, rather than a document strictly speaking. It points to a set of pressing questions that involve the uses of vision, the potentials of art and the bases of sovereignty. These questions coalesce around a major paradox: the existence of a secret world that is increasingly palpable, increasingly present. Why has the invisible become so banal, why does it crop up everywhere? Paglen does not answer individually. Instead, he seems intent on exploring—and, to whatever degree possible, on reversing—the social conditions of perception that allow multibillion-dollar weapons systems and vast clandestine intelligence networks to “hide” in the broad daylight of a democracy that is also an empire.

The work is investigative and journalistic, producing an impressive stream of books and articles. At the same time it is existential, leading the artist on journeys to countries like Afghanistan to look for military prisons, or on climbs up desert mountains to scrutinize forbidden sites. More recently it has revealed a deep involvement with the history of aesthetics, as he walks in the footsteps of nineteenth-century frontier photographers to make technically complex images of spy satellites against stunning natural backgrounds. The exhibition at the Vienna Secession takes this venture into aesthetics even further, with a cloud study recalling avant-garde photographer Alfred Stieglitz; a colorist abstraction that evokes the violent disorganization of visuality in the painting of Turner; or a grid of contact prints in the manner of Eadweard Muybridge. But what can such historicizing gestures bring to a contemporary politics of perception?

Got Plutocracy?

Americans like to keep things simple and direct, so here it is: they rule. For the simple reason that they (the ruling class) have all the money. The top 5% of US citizens own almost  2/3 of the country’s wealth, or 63.5%. Compare that massive share to 12.8% for the bottom 80% — that is, “the rest of us,” as Rhonda Winter puts it in the excellent article from which this pie chart is taken.

Now go a little further, into the research she drew her chart from — a briefing paper of the Economic Policy Institute called “The State of Working America” — and you find that the top 1% holds over 1/3, or 35.6%, of the country’s net worth. Elsewhere, in The Nation, you will find such interesting tidbits as “In 2006, the top 0.01 percent averaged 976 times more income that America’s bottom 90%” — a thousand-fold gap between “them” and “the rest of us.”

click it for the big picture

The whole point is, though, that very few people go any further, because very few people have any idea how unequal the United States has become. We are, apparently, a nation of idealists, which is a good thing. We are also, however, a nation of blind idealists, which is a pretty bad thing across the board. A couple of psychologists named Norton and Ariely did a study comparing people’s ideas of what inequality is and what it should be with the actual facts on the ground. Anyone interested in creating a more progressive political order should turn up the attention meter right here.

It turns out that in strictly economic terms, Americans are not full-on egalitarians, but on average, they think everyone should have at least a piece of the pie. They think the top 20% should have around 30% of the wealth, the bottom 20% should have around 10%, and so on according to a smoothly sliding scale. They realize it’s not true, of course, and they estimate that the top 20% may in reality be holding over half of the spoils. What they do not realize is not only that the top 20% swallows a whopping 85% of the pie (with, of course, the top 5% taking the lion’s share of that). Even more crucially, they also do not realize that the bottom 40% — what economists call the 4th and 5th quintiles — are for all practical purposes off the chart, simply invisible, because they (or maybe “we,” depending on who you are) own only 0.2% and 0.1% of the wealth respectively. Let’s put that in plainer terms. Almost half the people in this country get almost nothing from the deal.

                              source: Norton and Ariely, pdf here

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I would draw two conclusions from this psychological study. The first is that the United States is ripe for (and even wildly overdue for) a political revolt against the plutocracy. No doubt you will reply, “But that’s exactly what the Tea Party is calling for!” And so they are, in part. But every day the newspaper shows that most of the Tea Party rage against Wall Street is being successfully channeled into rage against Big Government, while the resentment against taxation acts to preserve the massive tax cuts that for the past thirty years have overwhelmingly benefited the super-rich. An atavistic fear of Obama’s black skin and a constant barrage of ideology from Fox News and the Koch brothers’ think tanks and political action committees seem to be doing the job just perfectly for the plutocracy. However, as unemployment rises even while the profits of the super-rich increase, I am not sure this situation can go on indefinitely. Beware the day when right-wing rage from the red-state grassroots finds a serious political translation, because even if it castigates the rich, the sound of that vengeful and nationalistic voice will not be agreeable to your ears.

This leads to my second conclusion. We organic intellectuals on the Left — and this “we” is finally serious, I am speaking to those who might actually read this blog — are not doing our job. We don’t have no Tea Party. We are for equality, social democracy, outright socialism, a workers’ revolution, all power to the multitudes or whatever, but we are not getting the word out to the left-of-center masses. We have the information, thanks to studies like the ones I have been quoting, but we are not able to turn information into action, not even on the simplest of demands: tax the rich and control the banksters. Yet these very simple demands could lead directly onwards to more progressive policies that we are all support, such as cutting the military budgets, achieving universal health care, restoring public education and replacing the prison economy with job-producing community development programs. It’s clear that the Dems will not do these things, because in their vast majority they belong to the upper 5%. So we have to create the conditions for a political revolt from the grassroots, and we have to do it in a way that is not simply cooptable by smooth-talking people like the current president.

Here’s one idea, only one among many. Copy the image at the top of the article and take it down to your local button-making shop. Pick a fat button and ask them to put big letters around the bottom that say, “Got Plutocracy?” Get a whole bunch of those buttons, wear them, distribute them and start talking to whoever you meet about the facts and figures that are discussed in this blog post and in any of hundreds of readily available left-of-center publications. Start an open, public, regularly meeting group to discuss those facts and figures and many other things that make the present what it is. Do your job as a public intellectual, educate the people around you and learn from them, build grassroots awareness and rage wherever your roots happen to be. Hold the course in that direction as the unemployment figures rise, and make contact with as many similar groups as you can find. All of this will lead in very interesting directions. Keep it up and maybe soon we’ll all get together for a big ‘ole political banquet and finally eat the rich!

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DO CONTAINERS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PEOPLE?

The social form of just-in-time-production

A map of global transport systems. Source: http://globaia.org/en

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This text was published in Open no. 21

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The British sociologist John Urry has come up with an unusual idea: defining society by the ever-accelerating mobility of its members. To do this he proposes the concept of mobility-systems: “Historically most societies have been characterized by one major mobility-system that is in an evolving and adaptive relationship with that society’s economy, through the production and consumption of goods and services and the attraction and circulation of the labor force and consumers…. The richer the society, the greater the range of mobility-systems that will be present, and the more complex the intersections between such systems.”1 Urry devotes chapters of his book Mobilities to four infrastructural systems: pathways, trains, automobiles and airplanes. Interestingly, he suggests that these infrastructures are complemented by cultural systems serving to represent the movement of people and things, to communicate about it and to imagine its further possibilities. Yet strangely, in a book that gestures toward the concept of a technological unconscious, he says next to nothing about production and distribution. What’s missing from his “mobilities paradigm” are container shipping and intermodal transport, with their associated representational, communicational and imaginary techniques. What’s missing is the social form of just-in-time production.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Urry believes that in the postnational era “there is no such thing as society.”2 He’s against what has been called the “container theory” of the social, which relies heavily on spatially bounded categories, reinforcing methodological nationalism.3 In Mobilities he refers to Foucault’s concept of governmentality, observing that “state sovereignty is exercised on territories, populations and, we may add, the movements of populations around that territory.” In contrast he insists on the increasingly transnational movement of populations, and claims that “such a ‘mobile population’ is immensely hard to monitor and govern.”4

Urry is an innovative sociologist, seeking patterns of emergent order in the vertiginous circulations of neoliberal globalism. At its best, his work reads like a kaleidoscopic register of contemporary life. However, like other complexity theorists describing the dynamics of open systems, he fails to take into account the powerful drive toward closure that inhabits all large-scale system design. Thus he ignores the determinant social form of informational capitalism – as though, entranced by mobilities that exceed the capture of the nation-state, he had fallen into the very unconsciousness that contemporary technologies impose.

How to awaken from electric dreams? In this text I will describe both the technical and the cultural dimensions of what is arguably the major mobility-system of our time: the distributional machinery of intermodal transport that circulates commodities through the global economy. The vector I will use to approach this far-flung system is an imaginary one.

Hershey Co. Exploits Cultural Exchange Students

Travel to exotic Palmyra, Pennsylvania, pay double market rate for a flophouse apartment and kill yourself lifting boxes in an outsourced chocolate factory

 

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Our motto is “Founded on Friendship”. We believe that the world becomes a smaller, friendlier place when we build bridges across cultures. This is why we offer a wide variety of quality programs that enable students from around the globe to work, study, travel, and receive professional training abroad.

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That’s the pitch on the flashy CETUSA website recruiting young college students from around the globe to work shit jobs in the US, on J-1 visas ostensibly for cultural exchange. In this case, CETUSA delivers the students to SHS Onsite Solutions, a temp agency furnishing workers to Exel North American Logistics Inc. The latter, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL, manages all the labor and operations at the big Hershey warehouse, packing and distribution center. The students pay around $3,000 to get into the program, then earn around $8 an hour, from which exorbitant rent and other fees are docked till they get down to somewhere between $140 and $40 PER WEEK of intense factory labor. Check out the video above, the article in the New York Times and the formal complaint they just sent to the State Department. This is not just a national disgrace and a bitter disappoointment for all these kids who came here to make friends and see what’s great about America. It’s also an extremely graphic lesson in the kind of flexible exploitation practiced by Hershey and the corporate order in general, not only on foreign nationals but also on US citizens. Neoliberal capitalism doesn’t just steal the money in your bank account through financial crises; it grinds the younger generations into the ground with abusive labor practices. It’s hard to believe that such complex and sophisticated systems exist just to earn a few pennies more through temp labor, while denying local inhabitants a better job with a decent wage.

Obviously all this is coming to light because of a new collaboration between the AFL-CIO, the SEIU and an organization called the National Guestworker Alliance, which was formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when guestworkers from around the world were kept in labor camps under unbearable conditions. Only this kind of organized protest can bring multinational corporations to account. Remember that Rosa Parks did not sit down in the bus by herself! She did it with immense personal courage as part of a vast and complex campaign to end racial discrimination. Today these kids from Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia are showing us how to fight back against a corporate system that exploits workers to the bone, impoverishing everyone both economically and culturally. It’s a chance for the unions to get back to real advocacy and it’s a school of solidarity across borders, against the transnational system. Let’s talk about it and let’s participate, to help these kinds of movements, to keep the big unions honest and to point beyond immediate goals, toward deep transformations of an unjust and unsustainable society. To see actions like this makes you realize that amidst the current crisis, the left can have a powerful future.

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The Philosophy of Finance

Six Propositions

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Text for the exhibition “Volatile Smile” by Geissler and Sann, at NGBK

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1. Interaction

In his work on surveillance, Michel Foucault identified a characteristic relation of power. Its terms were these: distanced observation – coercive force – internalization of the law. This disciplinary relation was embodied and exemplified by the Panopticon, where the gaze of an unseen warden gradually becomes part of the prisoner’s consciousness, alleviating or eliminating the need for forceful intervention by the guardians. The panoptic diagram spread throughout the Western societies: it molded productive subjects to the demands of a military and industrial order.

In our financialized era something new comes to the fore, redoubling if not entirely replacing the previous paradigm. Its terms appear as a dialectical reversal, and therefore a sublation of the discipinary relation. These new terms are: immediate participation – enabling communication – reflective proliferation. The interactive diagram is embodied and exemplified at the desks of the high-frequency traders.

On the trading floor knowledge is no longer distanced, invisible, authoritative: it springs into presence on the waiting screens, always connected to a keyboard. Coercion has not disappeared from society, but at the desks it’s not an issue: communication networks exist to suggest and transmit every decision. No internalization of the law is achieved or even demanded by the flickering screens. What happens is a multiplication of self-reflections, an outpouring of subjectivity into electronic connections. Communication produces infinite variations on a single theme: an explosion of pulsating terminals that build cities around themselves, the mirror-architecture of contemporary capitalism. The screen-relation spreads throughout the globalized societies, at a pace with megagentrification. At each stop it releases smiling wizards into the expanding trap of their own creativity.

Listen to a man from London

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I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool, it’s happening in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment. — Darcus Howe

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It’s shocking to the BBC, but to me it sounds like the reality of the streets.

As in Paris in 2005, entire populations of poor suburban areas have reached the limits of what they can bear: inequality, poverty, job discrimination, racism and brutal policing. This insurrection is not shocking: it’s the conditions of contemporary society that are shocking. This insurrection is a call for social justice. Those who write, who create images, who form representations and shape opinions, have a responsibility to interpret the positive content of social movements. Turn away in fear and you will only be greeted with more of the same. What this world needs is a transformation of the social deal, offering everyone the chance to flourish. It can’t be done by austerity, it can’t be done by bailing out the banks, it can’t be done by simple clashes with the police. But it can be done by transforming rage into political will. And that is what the media refuses. Respect for Darcus Howe. Take the time to listen to this man from London.

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[Here is what I wrote in Paris, six long years ago:

“So now I want to suggest a kind of thought experiment. Next time you see images of fire, with smashed schools, burning cars, and confrontations with the cops, think about all that’s behind them, and try asking a few questions. What would it take for every group of people, with their faces, their problems, their qualities, their locations, to become visible to each other in a society that wasn’t sealed off into hermetic zones and dead-end streets? What sort of education could be an entirely liberating experience, that gives direct access to tools you can use? What kinds of mobility can be built into the urban fabric, and how do people find their paths through a society that has become radically unequal? Finally, what confrontations could be staged with the outdated forms of the state, that wouldn’t bring us face to face with the eternal return of the police?

“If it becomes possible to see the images of fire in this way, as a blazing language of unanswered questions awaiting their response, then maybe, just maybe, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna won’t be dead for nothing – “mort pour rien,” the words you could read on the tee-shirts, as the witnesses walked silently through the city of Clichy-sous-Bois on Saturday the 29th of October, 2005.”

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Gracias a los compañeros de desRealitat por habernos comunicado esta voz tan cargada de experiencia y de sentido. Hay algunos, sí, que hacen su trabajo de ampliación y articulación de las luchas.

Quote of the day:

“America’s zombie consumers need to repair their damaged balance sheets.”

Bravo Stephen Roach. Spoken like a true Morgan Stanley economist.

 

THREE CRISES: 30s-70s-Today

A self-organized seminar at Mess Hall, Chicago

Wisconsin protests, Feb. 15-17, 2011
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The failure to achieve any basic transformation of the world financial system provides for just one outcome: greater chaos, deeper turmoil. Yet at some point systemic change will occur, as it did in the early 80s. What we got last time was neoliberalism. What will happen this time, under vastly different circumstances? Can we develop a political culture to inflect the change when it finally becomes inevitable? Those are the questions behind an autonomous seminar, to be held at Mess Hall from September to December of 2011.

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GOALS: The seminar program seeks to develop a framework for understanding the present political-economic crisis and for acting against and beyond it. Historical study is integrated with militant research and artistic expression. The program is a first step toward a self-organized university, including Internet resources for sharing research notes and reference materials.

FORMAT: Eight two-part sessions, each four hours long with a half-hour break in the middle. The first part of each session will be a course delivered by Brian Holmes, with readings that may be done in advance or afterwards. Each installment of the course will be accompanied by another presentation, screening, artistic event or organizing session offering some parallel to or resonance with the material; these are developed by a collective working group. Readings will be posted on the web and full course notes as well as reference materials will be made available immediately after each session. Distanced particpation or parallel sessions in other cities are welcome.

CONCEPT: The development of capitalism is marked, every thirty or forty years, by the eruption of extended economic crises that restructure the entire system in organizational, technological, financial and geopolitical terms, while also affecting daily life and commonly held values and attitudes. In the course of these crises, conditions of exploitation and domination are challenged by grassroots and anti-systemic movements, with major opportunities for positive change. However, each historical crisis has also elicited an elite response, stabilizing the worldwide capitalist system on the basis of a new integration/repression of classes, interest groups, genders and minority populations (whose definition, composition and character also change with the times). In the United States, because of its leading position within twentieth-century capitalism, the domestic resolution of each of the previous two crises has helped to restructure not only national social relations, but also the international political-economic order. And each time, progressive demands that emerged from the crisis period have been transformed into ideologies covering a new structure of inequality and oppression. By examining the crises of the 1930s and the 1970s along with the top-down responses and the resulting hegemonic compromises, we will cut through the inherited ideological confusions, gain insight into our own positions within neoliberal society, identify the elite projects on the horizon and begin to formulate our own possible agency during the upcoming period of instability and chaos.

SESSIONS:

Wu Mu Cosmology

Pathways through the Modern World-System

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“China has one big advantage over the United States,” launched our friend and collaborator Dan S. Wang, as a closing provocation to the audience of sociology students at Wuhan University. “That advantage is, Chinese people don’t believe in God.”

It might have sounded out of the blue, wild n’ crazy. But that declaration followed earlier remarks on the wave of protests that pitted social-democratic activists against a union-busting Republican governor in Wisconsin. In the US we have many reasons to link right-wing religiosity with an unreasoned drive to the endless accumulation of capital. Dan sees the next chapter of Wisconsin’s activism as concerted opposition to the Republican-mandated opening of taconite mining activities in the north of the state. He was aiming to suggest the possibility – and the reality – of intensified grassroots opposition to mining in China.

His remarks sent a surge of feeling through the crowd, a good way to open up the questions about the lecture on Continental Drift (pdf here). But after the public session was over, our new friend from the HomeShop group, Qu Ge, came up to take issue with Dan’s materialist hopes for China in the 21st century. What he said, as I heard it anyway, was basically this: The lack of any other spiritual belief only opens the floodgates to intense consumerism, the lust for profit, infinite corruption.

We made no collective reflection on this debate, except to echo it, to recount it to each other, to wonder what it could mean. And it kept echoing beneath the surface, as we moved from Wuhan to the Lijiang Studio run by Jay Brown and a family of Naxi farmers in Yunnan province, near Lijiang city, on the edge of the Himalaya in Southern China.

Peach Paradise

What can be done with a non-profit arts organization and a ten-year lease on a traditional housing compound in the Lashihai basin, surrounded by apple trees, fields of corn, peas, potatoes, cabbages and whatever else the farmers can grow on small plots with ox-drawn plows, animal fertilizer and lots of human labor? The still-unfolding answer lies in a series of collaborations between the organizers, the local family, visiting artists and residents of the area, mostly of the Naxi minority (pronounce “Nashee”) who have lived here forever and seen their lands transform into a major Chinese tourist destination. Our connection to Lijiang Studio came through Sarah Lewison and her son Duskin, who worked here on an ecological project “illuminating the solar economy,” with hands-on public research into the cycles of growth and decay, mostly involving mushroom cultivation and beer-making work that eventually culminated in the hilarious World Heritage Beer Garden Picnic. Via Sarah we met Jay Brown, a soft-spoken and extremely capable Chinese-speaking American who has moved from art historian to events organizer and quiet advocate of Naxi culture. Standing alongside a car out in the ruins of Detroit, we agreed it would be great to go together to China. That’s how this whole adventure began. And now, after our seemingly endless travels through the mega-gentrification of the coastal cities, after the industrial and commercial sprawl of Wuhan, we were finally going to reach a longed-for destination: the countryside.