a short response to debates on Occupy

       At the height of the set of encampments and actions that made up the phenomenon called Occupy, there was an immense outpouring of celebratory articles and essays.  Occupy was the long needed response to the crisis, whether in terms of fiance capitalism, inequality, or a number of other social phenomenon.  At last the dam broke, and 'we' were finally acting.  Politics as usual was dead, or at least dying.  Several months later, with the collapse of the encampments and the shattering of the political alliances that produced the encampments into dozens of smaller projects as well as a lot of folks dropping out, we see the opposite response, a blistering attack on the phenomenon, most notably from Alexander Cockburn shortly before his death, and most recently from Thomas Frank, in the revived Baffler.  The same set of techniques and approaches to the political so often celebrated in those earlier essays and response now become the focus of attack, leaderlessness, the emphasis on process, critical theory, etc.  Frank, in particular, demands that the 'movement' look like the social movements of the past, movements that were not abject failures in the way that Occupy was.

       Both celebratory gestures and withering critique contain a common error of analysis, the homogenous Occupy movement never existed in the way that they imagined it.  Instead, Occupy was at best a structure of feeling, a resentment and the spark of hope that brought together a fairly strange assemblage of disappointed Obama voters, marxists, anarchists, Ron Paul supporters, conspiracy theorists, and others.  The movement not only divided on those ideological concerns, but substantially divided on regional concerns.  The movement in Los Angeles looked nothing like the movement in Oakland, which looked nothing like the movement in New York.  Different encampments formed and succeeded or failed depending a radically contingent set of circumstances, ranging from who formed the original groups to organize the actions to the responses of the police.  Furthermore, the most successful encampments were linked to earlier struggles, adding to the distinctions between the various actions.  Moreover, the inclusion of supporters of Ron Paul, David Icke, and others created antagonisms that made the typical divisions between radicals and liberals or anarchists and marxists seem fairly tame.  Those divisions within the multiplicity both made the phenomenon look so appealing, but also created the inevitable divisions that we now seen in the shattered projects of the aftermath.

     Ultimately, Occupy is better understood as a set of constitutive possibilities and limitations within the various fragments and groupings of counter-systemic movements within the United States, rather than as a movement in any meaningful sense.  To put it differently, it gestures towards a movement through a number of useful and problematic potential symbolic forms, rather than being that movement.  In a curious sense, we can see the history of our movements running through the vast horizontal network of assemblages that linked and broke apart within the past year.  Our ability to produce what Gramsci calls a historical bloc is dependent on our ability to recognize and negotiate this long and complex history of revolt and complicity, of resistance and compliance.  Mike Ely from the Kasama project has a useful way of thinking about this.  He notes that earlier socialist projects were often built on the notion of the new man, the subjectivity built out of the furnace of socialist struggle.  What we need to conceptualize now is the way that we can build a radically new society with the people that exist and the here and now.  Although I'm not sure that Ely would go as far as this, I think this means rejecting the notion of the revolutionary 'subject' altogether.  Radical transformation occurs through the creation of new assemblages, new organizations, new collectivities, not the fantasy of a sort of collective subject.  Those formations will be both remarkably new to us and very familiar because they will arise as a result of people who have been formed in the old social formations that map the terrain of struggle we live within.

     Our engagement with those phenomena should be less concerned with the notion of victory or defeat than the social possibilities and limitations that exist in our attempts to produce some sort of more substantial counter-systemic project.  That means getting a sense of the vast multiplicity of projects that occurred under the Occupy umbrella, from legal actions to home defense to occupations of space.  My suspicion is that there was a lot more going on than what has been reported.  It means talking about what succeeded, what didn't, and perhaps more significantly, how those various tactics and strategies can be built upon.  I largely agree with the analyses presented by Jodi Dean and other about the question of representation, and the political.  There needs to be more thought given to the question of representation that escapes the easy formulation of a refusal of the question altogether.  (This deserves a longer conversation, but I would recommend Jodi Dean and Jason Jones essay discussing the question here.)  At the same time, it would be a pretty substantial mistake to imagine Occupy in some sense constitutes the only spaces of resistance within the country,  As a lot of anti-racist activists pointed out, there were distinct limitations to who was represented in the movement, and how questions of racialization were approached in the movement.  We also need to recognize the need to keep the Ron Paul supporters, the conspiracy theorists, and weird monetarists out of the movement.  To draw on Dean's analysis, we need to draw divisions between our radical project and the racism and quackery of the right.  But all of this is contingent on recognizing the fissures and contradictions within the multiple formations under the umbrella of Occupy.  Until we do that, our understanding of the movement will be fundamentally mystified.

Jacobin Debate on Occupy Wall Street, featuring Malcolm Harris, Jodi Dean, Doug Henwood, Natasha Lennard, and Chris Maisano

      I'm far from the first person to put this debate held by the Jacobin magazine on their blog, but it seems like an important discussion to spread around.  There are some limitations to the debate, leaving out the voices of activists of color, to point to the most significant lack in the debate.  One also has to accept that the format is a little scattered.  That aspect of the debate didn't bother me.  Maybe its my aesthetic education in punk, but I enjoyed the chaotic aspects of the debate.  It showed that there was some real energy in the room, and overall, I feel that this material is worth the two hours of time, even from the small screen of a computer.  I don't feel much need to lay out the terms of debate, because even if you don't know these people, the terms are established fairly quickly.

a debate on #occupyws from Jacobin on Vimeo.

Links on the Occupy Phenomenon

      As I said yesterday, I'm going to put up a bunch of links about the Occupy events that I have been reading and have influenced my thinking on the process.  (Look here for the original posting.)  Unlike the last posting, I'm going to put up material that covers a multiplicity of events, rather than simply focusing on the Los Angeles situation.  Some of this material is pretty critical, but I think these criticisms gesture precisely to the potential productivity of these actions, rather than their failure.  I'm pretty excited about the present, and perhaps more optimistic than I have been in a while, but I think critique is a crucial aspect to successful activism and movement building.  Movements that don't listen to internal and external critique wind up become small, isolated, paranoid, and stultified.  I know that it's really easy to become defensive when you're pouring all your energy into something, but that defensiveness never helps a movement.  Anyways, here are the links.  There is no particular focus.  Just a lot of stuff that was of interest to me.

     Doug Henwood has produced a number of thoughtful commentaries on the Occupy Wall Street protests.  I'm more sympathetic to the horizontal organizing than Doug is, but he has provided some thoughtful criticism of some of the problems in the nascent movement.

1.  Occupying Wall Street
2.  The Occupy Wall Street Non-Agenda
3.  Shaking a Fist at the NYPD
4.  99%

Jodi Dean has some material on her blog, approaching things from a similar position to Henwood.  Worth a read.

     The Kasama project has put up a lot of material about the movement over the past few days, from a multiplicity of positions.  I would point out productive posts, but there are just too many of them, so I'll just link to the website as a whole.

      Hena Ashraf--Brown Power at Occupy Wall Street

     There is some useful material at Racialicious, and some problematic material.  I'll put out a sampling.
1.  An organizing statement by activists of color in Occupy Wall Street.
2.  This response is a little more problematic
3.  So Real It Hurts
4.  A Mix of Useful Critiques

     Disoccupy has a lot of great material, some of it significant to my analysis of Occupy LA
1. Some Thoughts on Occupy LA General Assembly
2. a follow up piece

      Another good blog on the LA situation.  The more I read, the more exceptional the LA situation seems to be.  This isn't to say that there aren't some real problems elsewhere, but those problems seem to be dealt with and acknowledged in collective decision making processes in ways that we aren't seeing in LA.

Shag posted up this useful comment on the confrontation of sexism in Boston The entire blog is worth a look.

Louis Proyect put up a nice set of interviews from Boston to remind us why folks are out there in the first place.   Additionally, he put up some more interviews and a first impression from himself.  He has some other good material if you take a look at the blog.  I'd avoid the comments, though.

Tonight, We're Going to Party Like its ? (A Critical Reading of Jodi Dean and Slavoj Zizek)

       Over the past few year, there has been a sort of nostalgia for the party form entering the discourse of a select set of left academic thinks.  The most notable of those is Slavoj Zizek, but this phenomenon certainly isn't limited to him.  Probably the most recent concrete expression of this desire can be found in Jodi Dean's thoughtful talk, The Communist Horizon, but it also can be found in Zizek's recent polemic on the riots in England in far more simplistic terms.  Perhaps more significantly, these responses have found a fairly wide audience amongst those interested in the intersection of radical and academic discussions.  There have been fairly lengthy discussions of these works both on a variety of websites, as well as on Doug Henwood's Left Business Observer listserve.  I want to provide a critique of these engagements, in order to discuss some of the limitations that I see in this recent formation, focusing primarily on the more thoughtful engagement of Dean's, but also bringing in Zizek's more problematic formulation, as well.  However, I want to make it clear that this critique is made in a sympathetic light, at least to its sympathetic reception.  I want to use this response as a way of seriously pushing forward the discussion about collectivity, solidarity, and the construction of institutions pushed forward by these reconsiderations of the party form.

      Jodi Dean opens her argument with a brief sketch of the three dominant forms of contemporary left organization today, which she labels as anarchism, democracy, and liberalism.  She argues that these forms of organization are unable of creating strong forms of stable solidarity needed to challenge the powerful engines of expropriation and dispossession that define the contemporary regime of neo-liberal capital.  Contemporary democracy exists primarily to neutralize dissident voices, while liberalism and anarchism replicate the forms of individualization that exist at the core of the neo-liberal formation.  In this sense, Bhaskar Sunkara's critique is wrong in arguing that Dean's concept of 'communicative capitalism' is irrelevant to her larger argument. While I certainly agree with Sunkara's argument that Dean ignores the history of anarchism and democracy, I think Dean has productively captured a sense of the present moment, or, at very least, a particular present.  We can see that Dean is identifying that all three of these dominant forms of organization creation or conceptions of collectivity as symptoms of this new regime of accumulation, which might be identified in more conventional terms as 'flexible accumulation.'  Within this context, Dean can be seen in dialogue with the work of the Italian Marxist Paulo Virno, and the recent interventions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri without necessarily accepting the optimism contained in the latter formulation.  (I would be interested to see what Dean would do with Virno's concept of the multitude, a conceptualization that sees that formation as the result of a failed revolution, defined by cynicism, opportunism, and fear.)

        At the same time, I think that Sunkara's historical critique points to some of the blind-spots in Dean's thinking.  Most notably, as Sunkara notes, "Dean can’t separate parliamentarism from democracy."  This perhaps is one of the areas where I still most profoundly agree with Hardt and Negri, despite other disagreements I have with the thinkers.  Democracy cannot be simply interchanged with the conceptual framework of liberalism.  Instead, the two frameworks, democracy and liberalism, are by their nature antagonistic, a fact that most historical liberal thinkers have recognized.  Our ability to collapse the two concepts together has depended on a lengthy and deliberative process, one that has been dedicated to the neutralization of any meaningful, participatory democratic framework.  While I agree with Dean that any belief that we can create substantial transformation through the ballot is illusory, I simply disagree that we could call such a system democratic.  There are also a set of organizations that Dean leaves out, trade unions, non-profits, etc., or a whole world of reformism that exists in a variety of states of moribund.  I suspect that Dean left these organizations out of the conversation because of the audience, but I would be curious how they would work within her framework. 

      Turning Back to the argument, Dean then argues that we need to return to the party form in order to counter the forms of individualization that define the contemporary moment.  We need forms and structures of solidarity that go beyond modes of localism, and that have a more substantial duree than the temporary formations that often define contemporary politics.  For Dean, this need is subsumed under the term, 'discipline.'  The party forms allows for and perhaps even demands that its participants think beyond the parochialism of the local to question on the terrain of the national-popular, and even the international.  At the same time, it creates a set of forms of solidarity that break away from the temporary arrangements of volunteerism.  Dean does a fairly good job of dealing with some of the most obvious critiques within the question and answer session, pointing out that organizations have the ability to recreate and reinvent themselves, that organizations have the possibility of distributing power within their structures as well as accumulating power, and pointing out the fact that much of the criticism of the party form operates within the logic of the red scare.  In short, Dean recognizes the modes of liberal anti-communism that haunts these critiques, both in the liberal and the anarchist forms of critique.

     At the same time, Dean's concept of the party remains an empty signifier, neither engaging with the history of the party form, as Sunkara points out in his critique, nor thinking through why this form may has lost its traction.  As Sunkara points out, the revolutionary party form is hardly extinct.  One can find versions of it in a variety of small sectarian formations such as the U.S. version of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party and larger version such as the Left Party of Germany, the UK Socialist Workers' Party, or the new anti-capitalist formation in France.  Sunkara wants Dean to distinguish her vision from these various forms of anti capitalist parties, but I'm struck by a different question.  If the party form is such a strong approach to organization, why haven't these various grouplets succeeded in creating new counter-hegemonies or historical blocks?  Perhaps more significantly, why has the party formed suffered such a decline, a decline that began long before the advent of our current neo-liberal formation?  Such questions would demand an engagement with the Leninist party form as a historical, rather than ideal social formation. An additional question might be posed, why does the only alternative to spontaneity (as it is currently envisioned)  have to take the party form?

      Turing briefly to Zizek's polemic, we can see a more pronounced version of some of the same issues contained in Dean's discussion.  So far, most of the critical attention paid to Zizek's comments have focused on some of the problematic language in his essay, focusing on his use of the word, 'rabble' and the way he gestures towards certain anti-immigrant tropes.  Without dismissing that train of thought, I want to follow a line of thought.  Throughout his comments, Zizek continually finds the protests wanting, lacking a sort of conscious political subjectivity.  Rather than reading the phenomenon a complex and dense network of actions, collectivities, linked together with a variety of communication strategies, Zizek can only read them in terms of negation.  This is not to entirely dismiss the range of critiques that Zizek brings into the second half of his essay, but to note in the case of the incidents in the UK, Zizek makes no particular effort to think through the political dimension of the riots.  Or perhaps to put it another way, Zizek's fixation of the revolutionary subject blinds him to engaging with the contingent and contradictory forms that proletarian revolt has actually taken over the years.

    Years ago, I found myself frustrated with a talk given by Michael Hardt.  Hardt insisted on distancing his concept of the multitude from the descriptive one offered by Virno, arguing that he and Negri were proposing a project, or perhaps, a potentiality.  Accepting that premise, I found myself wondering how were we supposed to move from the depressing reality offered by Virno to the new revolutionary assemblage.  Beyond a few references to 'Turtles and Teamsters,' Hardt offered very little.  I can't help but thinking that we have the same issue with this project.  Dean points to a real need in political organizing, and offers a useful symptomatic reading of the present, but I'm not sure how we get from A to B.  I think that one might identify a common theme within my critiques, and one that is not terribly new to the terrain of critical theory, the questioning of categories.  Dean (and, to a much lesser extent, Zizek) introduce a set of useful categories for engaging with the present, but leave those categories in a reified state.  We might ask along with Hegel, 'what is that is being glossed over in the contemporary forms of common sense?" and along with Marx, we might ask, "What is the history of struggle that animates the formation of these categories, and how does that affect our engagement with them?"

Addendum:  I realized that I left out something rather significant in my effort to work through Dean's text, which was a comment on Sunkara's intervention.  Although I don't explicitly mention it, I was strongly influenced by his argument, and I highly recommend reading his intervention.