Pre-election thoughts on the protests at that time

I wrote this material about three months before the election in response to the massive protests that were occurring at the time.  In many ways, the spirit of these protests continued on through to the first few months of the Trump administration, particularly in the form of the protests at the airports that occurred when the Muslim ban was first announced, but also in the form of street fights with the so-called alt right and the far more legal and formal protests of the women's march.  It also took a far smaller and local form through protests of representatives and phone calls as well.  However, it seems like that high tide of protest has at least ebbed.  My hope is that we will see such forms of ungovernability soon and in larger numbers.  I put up the essay as a marker of the time period.  I'm not sure if I would write it the same way at this point, but I still think its worth putting up.

            In the proliferation of such a massive amount of political action within the past year, particularly around the Black Lives Matter movement, I found myself thinking of a passage within Rosa Luxemburg's treatise on the Russian revolution of 1905, titled "The Mass Strike".  Luxemburg exams the phenomenon of the mass strike within the revolution as both a critique of the top down notions of struggle as developed by mainstream of the main intellectual of the SPD, Karl Kautsky, along with the ahistorical concept of the mass strike as developed by anarchists.  In opposition to both, Luxemburg emphasizes the mass strike as a phenomenon that arises out of the self-development of the proletariat through the process of the class struggle.  Through that engagement, Luxemburg emphasizes both the multiplicity of the struggle, along with intensity of the struggles.  She notes:

            The mass strike, as the Russian Revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. Its adaptability, its efficiency, the factors of its origin are constantly changing. It suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty. It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena. And the law of motion of these phenomena is clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself nor in its technical details, but in the political and social proportions of the forces of the revolution. (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike)

            At the most immediate level, we can see that Luxemburg recognizes what Louis Althusser might later refer to as a moment of revolutionary fusion as occurring within the years of her analysis.  An almost infinite array of discrete and concrete struggles or contradictions came together, aligned themselves in a manner to challenge the very nature of the empire.  But her insight moves beyond that initial insight.  If we see a moment of revolutionary fusion, it does not take the form of a synthesis.  Instead the struggles maintain their multiplicity, their inability to form a whole.  At the same time, the struggles are marked by a form of indistinction, of mutation, 'peaceful wage struggles' become 'street massacres, barricade fighting'.  Through this description, we can see an embrace of what Hobbes phobically linked to the figure of the multitude, a disjointed and militant mob that refuses to become a people and refuses to be governed.  Luxemburg draws on the naturalistic metaphor of the sea to describe the pervasiveness of the social movements of the time and their ability to adapt and mutate themselves in the face of a multiplicity of efforts to repress that refusal.  The movements ‘bubble forth’ ‘ceaselessly’ move, and constitute a ‘changing sea of phenomena.’  She ties that movement to the strength of the revolutionary forces in the country, to the logic running counter to capital.  One one hand, these movements reflect the multiplicity that is at the heart of the concept of use value, the multiplicity of needs that continually exists exogenously to the logic of exchange, even as exchange is absolutely dependent on that multiplicity.  On the other hand, the movements constitute a kind of counter flow to the flows of labor and commodities that define capitalist accumulation.  It’s a flow that refuses the coagulation into the logic of exploited dead labor, the infinite exchangeability of labor time.  Inasmuch, these movements point to an alterity always present within capital, the potential for another way of life.

            In the past year, we have been seeing a similar moment in our own country, albeit with a smaller magnitude than the one that Luxemburg discusses, largely, but not exclusively around the phenomenon labelled Black Lives Matter^[1].^[2]  To rehearse material that is undoubtedly familiar to the audience, we have seen an explosion of demonstrations in response to police violence.^[3]  That violence has become a focal point to challenge the ever-changing structures of white supremacy that at are so significant in structuring the logic of capitalist accumulation, both at the present moment and through the entire history of the country.  It’s taken the form of insurrectionary violence^[4] in Ferguson and other cities, objects hurled at police officers, freeway occupations around the country, peaceful marches of school children, lock-downs of police stations, demands made to Democratic presidential candidates, and a variety of other conventional protest.  The truth is that any effort to document the rich variety of protest will necessarily fail in capturing the rich diversity of activities that has occurred in the past year, and any effort to demarcate these protests as being a part of a particular moment is necessarily going to erase the histories that feed into these protests and inform their logic.  At the same time, we can see a particular language of action, slogans, and social formations that are particular to this moment. And we can see the impact of those movements on the presidential campaign through the disruption of the Sanders and Clinton campaigns, through explosive protests against the racist authoritarian nature of the Trump Campaign.^[5] Through those actions, it has introduced a genuinely democratic and agonistic dimension to the stage managed theatrics of the presidential campaign.  The movement has also challenged the connections between the traditional trade union movement and police unions, and has succeeded in creating a meaningful wedge between these formations.  It has also formed alliances with elements of those traditional structures.  But perhaps most significantly, it has transformed the freeway, that representation of the flow of labor, of commodities, into a representation of a profound refusal, through its blockage.  We’ve seen this tactic not only employed in cities traditionally associated with protest, but across the country.^[6]

            Within this web of activity, we can see the possibility of a new form of live, although perhaps only in a negative form, through the refusal of so many to be governed by the same oppressive institutions that have committed such violence.  We can perhaps see the capacities of such a movement in its spectral form, in the phobic descriptions of the movement by the recent comments by Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke at the Republican National Convention.  Clarke marks the organization, along with the Occupy movements, as breaking an unspoken and unwritten code of conduct for the country, and therefore standing outside the respectable conventions of protest, and representing anarchy.  It’s initially difficult to negotiate this description with the often quite modest political reforms called for by the official representatives of the movements, but it makes sense when we look at the protests themselves, which have pushed far beyond these official demands in their radicality.  It also makes sense when we see the refusal of even the reform branch of the movement to be formally incorporated into the political system.^[7]  If anything, we have seen an intensification of this refusal in the continuation of street protest, despite the calls for official calls for calm after sniper attack in Dallas.  Through such actions, we see a movement that is increasingly unconcerned with the preservation of the forces of the status quo.  At the same time, it would be a mistake to ignore the precarity of the contingent web of alliances that created this potential historic bloc.  At the most obvious level, there is the threat of the opportunistic incorporation of this formation into the Democratic Party, a threat that is most notably media personality and former mayoral candidate, DeRay Mckesson.  However, the conflicts that defined the freeway occupation in Minneapolis between activists seem like a greater threat.  Without getting into the details, the arguments represent long historical divisions that intersect questions of identity and tactics.  They represent the profoundly divided nature of the proletariat itself, and aren’t easily resolved through simple slogans.  The question the movement and those who wish to see it succeed have in front of them is how to make this multiplicity productive and grow.  We can see the violence of the backlash beginning to grow.

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^[1] Although it may actually involve more people than were involved in the insurrectionary activities in the Russian Empire at the time.

^[2] Given some of the confusions around the slogan, I should note that I am referring to the larger movement that has congealed around the term, rather than the specific network that has named itself Black Lives Matter.  The distinction is important since the movement is far larger than the network and contains both elements far more insurrectionary than the network, along with highly opportunist individuals and groupings tied to the Democratic Party and Teach For America.

^[3] There is a need more a more intense engagement with the logic of policing, one that could be informed by the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who draws from the earlier work of Marx and Foucault amongst others.  There is also a larger conversation within the Black Radical Tradition, as well.

^[4] It’s important to note that this has been largely limited to property damage, but not exclusively.

^[5] Which was produced by a large intersection of actors, but this could be said about the broad phenomenon, as well.

^[6] The tactic itself deserves more discussion than provided here, and it would be a mistake to think of the action as a unified.  Instead, we have seen very different approaches to taking over freeways.  Some have been mass actions, while others have been controlled protests by small groups.  Some are deliberately designed as acts of civil disobedience, while others are taken up by parties who are not interested in being arrested. 

^[7] Once again, we definitely see some opportunist exceptions, but the network has largely refused this incorporation.

Noting the Backlash: The Response to the Student and Worker protests of the U.C. system

       Many of you have probably already seen or heard about the footage of Officer Kemper pulling his gun on student protesters in San Francisco in response to dropping his baton, along with the extensive use of pepper spray on protesters. For those who haven't seen the footage, I have included it below.



Most of the coverage has gone to these incidents, but I don't want to focus on them. Rather, I want to focus on a set of events that have occurred on a number of campuses within the day to day activities of organizers and activists. I'm not dismissing those incidents. They are significant. We should also recognize the students and workers involved in the protests, and their willingness to resist the continued privatization of the university. But, we need to recognize that our ability to fight the efforts of the regents, President Yudof, and the upper administration to privatize the university is dependent on our ability to congregate, demonstrate, speak, and communicate to the broad public of the university. That ability is currently being challenged by the university in very practical terms.
Those challenges have taken very practical forms on the University of California-Irvine campus. Student groups ranging from the Muslim Student Union to the Worker Student Alliance have had difficulties obtaining permits for demonstrations in the so-called 'free speech' zone of the university. The university has made unprecedented demands on those groups, such as lists of speakers and the content of the speeches. Furthermore, the administration has sent threatening emails, attempting to curtail the activities of those demonstrations. Additionally, student activists were briefly detained by police for chalking the campus, and a significant activist group is being threatened because they were associated with a protest action put on by an unknown group of students. That action involved releasing helium-filled balloons with messages into a number of lecture halls. Each of these actions effectively reduces the ability for activists to communicate a message of an alternative vision of the university to the broad base of students and workers of the University of California-Irvine. (see below for footage of the UC Berkeley balloon action, a minimally disruptive action, designed to re-purpose public space.)



      Perhaps, these activities should be expected on the famously conservative University of California-Irvine campus, but similar responses to student protest have been occurring on the University of California-Berkeley campus as well. There have been police responses to simple activities such as chalking and fliering with police ripping down fliers and harassing students for the use of chalk. More notably, police have been posted outside of public meetings of student activists.  Once again, these forms of repression have been in response to traditional forms of activist communication on the university, attempts to communicate a message to students, and to freely assemble for peaceful political action.

       While the activities of two campuses cannot stand in for the entire UC system, these actions can't simply be dismissed as anomalies.  There has been an increased effort on the part of the UC system to shut down the protest movement against privatization through curtailing the rights of protesters.  It has been a response that has taken the most visible form of police presence, but it has also included disciplinary threats to students and organization, attempts to divide organizations by administrators, etc.  We should see these actions as the other side of privatization, the restriction of the ability of students and workers to utilize the public sphere of the university as a commons for assembly and communication. It is as much of a threat to the public status of the university as fee and tuition increases and military contracts, because it restricts the ability of students to use the space for their own purposes.

       I suspect that most of my readers will be sympathetic to this basic premise, but in case there are some folks who aren't because of the disruptive or volatile nature of the protests, I'll add a couple comments about those concerns.  To begin, there has never been a successful protest movement that has not been disruptive.  Events that we take for granted as positive for our society, such as the Civil Rights movement and the fight against Apartheid in South Africa were not seen in that light.  Instead, the demands of those movements were seen as threatening, creating unnecessary tensions, and disruptive to daily life.  I would recommend reading Martin Luther King, Jr.'s A Letter From a Birmingham Jail to get a sense of the conflicts created by the Civil Rights Movement.  The attempt to divest from South Africa was met with similar confrontations.  Change,  as Frederick Douglass noted, does not occur without a demand, and that demand can only occur through confrontation.

     Additionally, those who claim to be concerned about disruption are ignoring the more profound disruption of students who are unable to complete their education because of the fee increases, and the disruption in students lives because their increased debt load.  There is also little concern for the reduced classes available to students.  Nor does there seem to be much concern for the disruption in workers' lives because of layoffs, cuts in hours, and other austerity measures.  Within that context, the short disruption in a class or in the functioning of an administration building becomes an ethical act, both marking the more substantial disruptions created by the changes put in place by the regents, president, and administration, and simply refusing to allow the functioning of the structures that created those disruptions to run unopposed.

   
      The administration of our school system can simultaneously celebrate the legacy of that type of protest institutionally, while refusing to recognize our claim as students to draw from that same legacy.  Perhaps more disturbingly, students often are willing to accept this logic, as well, through a combination of the threat of reprisal and the privatized forms of common sense that pervade our campuses, as well as a sense of despair.  Within that context, it is also important to remember that the threats that we face as student protesters are very mild compared to most social movements, and that the vast majority of participants have suffered at most by having to listen to a bad speech or two.  Additionally, the protests have limited the ability of the administration to take further actions, even though they have not advertised that fact.  Within that context, the consequences for all of us if we don't act are substantial.  They open the floodgates of a fully privatized university.

       But beyond that rhetoric, we are still placed in a difficult situation.  What should we do in response to the combined despair of the massive body of students, and the attempts to restrict our rights to speak and organize on the part of the administration?  It seems that we need to do a couple things.  First, we need to defend our rights on campus, by practically challenging the restrictions being placed on our rights to speak and assemble.  On the UCI campus, a small group of activists is organizing a chalking action on Monday, November 22nd at the flagpoles at 11am to challenge the university's restrictions of that activity.  Despite some of my disagreements with people involved in that action, I commend their action, and if well executed, it may constitute a way forwards.  Second, we need to be willing to defend folks who are using their rights to assemble and speak to fight the austerity measures and privatization.  I recognize with the conflicts that occurred last year, that this proposal is easier to state than execute, but we need to recognize this as a form of self-defense.  But beyond these immediate practical responses, I'm not sure what to do.  But without the practical organizing that is enabled by our ability to assemble and speak, no solution is possible.

Part II: On the attack on Behind The News with Doug Henwood

Part two of a loosely structured argument.  Part One which deals with the Deficit Commission is here. 

       To escape from the increasing abstraction that often drives me around the bend with other analyses, I would like to turn to a tangentially related topic, that of the current situation with Doug Henwood's show, Behind the News, which up until recently was broadcast on the Pacifica station, WBAI.  I've been intending on writing about this situation for a few days, but have gotten caught up in the work of day to day life.  However, it struck me that the situation was relevant because of Doug's ability to discuss and write about the subject of economics with such thoughtfulness and clarity, a skill that is often missing from the current Left.  For the few who don't know about Doug, he is the author of an excellent analysis of the U.S. finance system, entitled Wall Street, as well as an analysis of the post-tech bubble economy, entitled After the New Economy.  These works, along with his newsletter, the Left Business Observer, and his radio program have created a body of works that activists can use to understand and critically engage with the occluded and mystified world of finance and economics, tools crucial to fighting the upcoming process of austerity.  The radio program provides weekly updates on the current economic situation and brings in a variety of guests to discuss the economic, cultural, and political news of the day.  It's a great show.  For those who haven't heard it, Doug has an archive, and you also can get material from itunes.
       Unfortunately, the station has decided to cut back severely on Doug's program moving it from Thursday evening to Saturday morning, and transforming it from a weekly show to a bi-weekly show.  These actions were taken in a context in which Doug's show has been regularly canceled for dubious fundraisers which have promoted all sorts of quackery from 9-11 conspiracy theories to new age nonsense.  Doug has decided to quit in response to these pressures, although the show will continue on sister station KPFA.  Here is his statement on the matter.  Additionally, he points to these email addresses to protest the decision.  I plan on writing a complaint over the weekend, and I highly recommend that you do so as well.  It's important to recognize this is occurring in a context in which some of the best programming on Pacifica is being threatened with cancellation, including Against the Grain, which has presented interviews with a wide variety of left public intellectuals, on a multiplicity of topics, and the recently canceled KPFA morning show, despite the fact that it was one of the most popular shows on the air.  (Here is Pacifica historian Matthew Lasar's take on the morning show issue.)  At the point in which we desperately need a radical political, social, and economic analysis, Pacifica is offering us a toxic blend of conspiracy and new age nonsense, destroying the legacy of one of the largest radical media projects in the United States.  For more on this see the analysis of Ian Boal.  (Boal also points to ways to get involved in the struggle.  Also see the website of KPFA Worker.)

Part I: On the initial proposal of the Deficit commission

      I had initially intended to write about the Deficit Commission proposal and the Pacifica situation in the same posting, but it struck me that these might be slightly more digestible as separate postings.  Here is the first of them with the material on Pacific to follow in a couple seconds. Here is part two.
     Some of you may have taken note of the recent proposal by the bi-partisan Deficit commission created by President Obama.  For those of you who haven't, here are a couple descriptions of the initial proposal.  From the standpoint of the vast majority of the country, workers and future workers, the proposals are devastating.  The commission has proposed major cuts to social security and medicaid, as well as proposing removing a number of tax benefits for the middle classes and the poor, including tax credits for parents with children.  Additionally, the commission proposes to make substantial cuts to domestic spending.  At the same time, the commission has proposed to reduce corporate taxes and continue tax credits for research.  Precisely at the moment when the world is in the largest economic crisis since the depression because of the policies of neo-liberalism, we offered more neo-liberalism.
         We should recognize the proposals for what they are, a project of class domination.  Not only do we need to recognize this reality, we also need to respond in kind.  Within the context of where I am, the context of the university, this really can take two forms, introducing the conversation to students in the form of education, and bringing up the issue within our events and protests.  Most substantially, we need to link this issue to the fight over fees and tuition that began last year, and continues this year.  However, the ability to respond effectively is ultimately dependent on the trade unions and the less venal players in the non-profit sector and community organizations.  The trades have already begun to respond, but that response has to break out of the stultified, bureaucratic forms that it currently feels are safe.  Real social movements are participatory and democratic.  The same reality must occur within the community groups and ngos (those that are on the sidelines of the what some have called the industrial complex... we need to get another term to describe that, really.)
      Some may question why the urgency for a proposal that 1. is only in its initial stages, and 2. highly unlikely to pass in the form that it is in.  My response is simple.  This bill sets up the topography of struggle for the next couple of years at least, and we need to make it clear that taking away these resources can only occur at a substantial cost.  We need to take a page from our colleagues in France and England and recognize these benefits as our rights gained from struggle, or perhaps in the language of Sylvia Federici, as forms of the commons created in the struggle against  Fordist capital.  Our inability or unwillingness to do so allowed the government to destroy the welfare infrastructure, strip our ability to organize ourselves into trade unions, and the ability to attend a university without amassing extraordinary debts.  Each of these was enacted with only the faintest of whispers on our part, and has produced the conditions in which attacks on policies and institutions that benefit the majority of the country have been naturalized and enacted by both political parties.  Without action, that process will continue.
     We also need to recognize that the attack on the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society has largely been legitimated and structure by white supremacy.  The attack on welfare programs has been legitimated as an attack on the Black body, as has the increased power of the police and prison systems.  White activists additionally have to recognize that this structure of white supremacy is not a simple enactment from above, but is linked into social fabric of whiteness, particularly through the social policies of the New Deal, although the history is much longer.  The current Tea Party movement also marks the extent that unthought white supremacy is linked to the defense of austerity measures.  At its heart, a project of class recomposition has to confront this dimension of the conflict, neither denying nor minimizing it.
       Perhaps Marx phrases it best in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, when he notes that the fight against the proletarian class in the struggle of 1848 was organized on the platform of "property, family, religion, order" as a sign of conquest.  This platform is equivalent to the platform of Reagan, Thatcher, and continues to today for practical purposes.  Within this context, the attacks on women's rights, on the GLBT community, etc. are the cultural face of this new platform of class domination.  At the practical level, this means that we must continually approach our struggles through an intersectional lens, and make our actions and programs continually engaged in these questions.  This also requires breaking out of the generalizations that I am currently engaged in, and thinking about struggles at the institutional level, and the history and terrain of struggle within those institutions.  I'd be interested in hearing from folks about what they have been involved in within this context, and also from fellow students and university workers on their thoughts on how to incorporate this into our struggle around privatization, and how to link this into a larger anti-austerity struggle.