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.

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.