Revolution underground? Critical reflections on the prospect of renewing occupation

Socialism and Democracy

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 93-116

  Ramsey, Joseph G ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84870482344     PISSN: 08854300     EISSN: 17452635     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08854300.2012.724903     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. I would want to underline at the outset the difference between the proposal to regroup and refocus Occupy by retaking a common space from myriad proposals and criticisms being directed against Occupy (often from liberal quarters) whose aim is to push the movement to settle on a set of clear, uniform (and easily cooptable) demands.
2. There have been, of course, a number of campaigns that have used the temporary occupation of a space as a tactic in a defensive struggle to stave off, for instance, eviction or home foreclosure. These campaigns should be studied and supported. But they seem to me, at least at this point, to lack the initiative as well as the critical mass that came with the outright seizure of territory which set off and sustained Occupy's initial phase. That said, as this article is being written, spokes-council meetings are underway in several cities with the goal of holding major protest actions and perhaps even an outright occupation of Wall Street on the first anniversary of OWS's launch, September 17 (known in the movement as S17).
3. See the Occupy reflections of my editor's introduction to Culture and Crisis a special issue of Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of Marxist theory and practice. Available at www.clogic.eserver.org as well as (in print)
4. From Works and Days: www.worksanddays.net
5. Jodi Dean, Occupy as a Political Form, a keynote speech at the Transmediale conference in Berlin, Germany. Posted April 12, 2012 at: http://occupyeverything.org/2012/occupation-as-political-form/
6. See also Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).
7. It's worth noting that a similar Occupy Everything spirit appears to be animating the Everything for Everyone (E4E) political and cultural festival, being organized in Seattle for August 2012 (just as this article is being prepared), by revolutionary and communist-minded occupiers, in particular those with the Red Spark collective, a communist group affiliated with the Kasama Project (see www.kasamaproject.org).
8. Writings of the Red Spark collective are available at http://www.redsprk.org/.
9. The web-page for the E4E conference can be found at http://www.everythingforeveryone.org/
10. I would refer readers to Jodi Dean's blog and in particular to her August 15, 2012 entry Paul Ryan has a twelve year plan to destroy the government. Where's Ours? http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2012/08/paul-ryan-has-a-20-year-plan-to-destroy-the-government-wheres-ours.html This short entry offers a valuable framework for a commons-based long-term political strategy.
11. I should thus mention here that, while I expect that some of the theoretical, strategic, and tactical ideas developed below may have resonance elsewhere, they have been developed very much in relation to the local situation here in Boston, Massachusetts, which has its own set of distinct historical, political, and social particularities.
12. This point has been developed well by Dean in her essay (co-written with Jason Jones), Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Representation. It should be emphasized that Dean's criticisms are put forth from a standpoint of enthusiastic support for the way the occupations staged the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, reasserting the radical antagonism running through contemporary society, in a publicly visible way that could not be ignored.
13. I should also raise here a profound possibility, one that has been voiced by my friend Fanshen Wong: namely that Occupy's weakness - its lack of a serious process for articulating, demarcating, and working through political divisions - while significant, and ultimately limiting, was also, in fact, constitutive of Occupy's power.
14. Fanshen has argued that Occupy's appearance as a mass movement or Event was predicated on this very weakness, the open and public co-existence and even cooperation of ultimately incompatible political views. He suggests that Occupy could not have in fact flowered as it did if, for instance, certain cadre of old-school socialists had succeeded at the outset in getting the movement to hammer out unified demands. The dialectical flip side of Fanshen's insight is that Occupy could not in fact overcome this weakness without abolishing its own basis, indeed, abolishing - or perhaps sublating -itself. Meaning: the movement must now assume a new and altogether different form. Such a necessary shedding of the mantle of Occupy has been announced by writers associated with the Oakland Commune in their compelling paper, Occupy Oakland is Dead: Long Live the Oakland Commune! (May 16, 2012), http://www.bayofrage.com/featured-articles/occupy-oakland-is-dead/
15. I confine listed criticisms here to the practices and habitus/patterns of Occupy, not including those criticisms which focus primarily on the social basis or demographic composition of Occupy. Such observations about who was and who was not participating actively in Occupy have their place, and are important if we are to keep our bearings in relation to the social totality. That said, while the practices and protocols of a social movement such as Occupy are something that can be transformed in a rapid fashion through acts of communication and acts of will, assuming the involvement of capable and conscious leadership, it is not immediately within the power of a social movement sequence such as Occupy to transform the social basis of which it is composed. This is not to deny that the transformation and broadening of that social basis - in particular to include more proletarianized forces - should be made a medium to long-term goal, and should be borne in mind as future actions and campaigns are selected and developed.
16. For an expression of the most compelling and critical thinking on this question within the Occupy movement, see the position paper of the Escalating Identity collective, Who Is Oakland: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation (April 30, 2012), http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/who-is-oakland-anti-oppression-politics-decolonization-and-the-state/
17. For my own take on the dialectical, revolutionary promise of the 99 percent vs. 1 percent framing of the movement, see my essay Culture and Crisis (note 3).
18. On the question of Occupy and demands, see Jay Jubilee and Doug Enaa Greene, Beyond Demands, The Boston Occupier, April, 19, 2012. http://bostonoccupier.com/2012/04/19/beyond-demands/
19. Also see Jodi Dean and Marco Desiriis, A Movement without Demands? in Possible Futures, A Project of the Social Science Research Council, January, 3, 2012. http://www.possible-futures.org/2012/01/03/a-movement-without-demands/.
20. Post-eviction, I have tried to articulate something like an Occupy ethic, in What Occupy Demands of Each of Us. Available at Counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/22/what-the-occupy-movement-demands-of-each-of-us/ June 22, 2012
21. I am tempted to trace out the correspondences here between my own experiences and observations of Occupy and the theoretical and formal terms put forth by Alain Badiou in his new book, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (London: Verso, 2012). Particularly relevant here would be Badiou's contention that what he calls historical riots (by which he means spontaneous uprisings that manage to take on a sustainable, potentially creative - not merely destructive - and thereby proto-political character) are characterized by an intensification (of subjective passion and commitment), localization (wherein a particular physical site emerges as a symbol of the universal issues at stake), and a contraction (in which a particular group of people come - for a time - to stand in for the People in general, as what he refers to as a mass minority.) Although Badiou's focus is primarily on the risings of the Arab Spring (with a comment here and there regarding developments in Europe such as the Spanish Indignados), there is obvious resonance with Occupy as well.
22. Some of the key moments of high profile state violence included: the pepper spraying of young female protestors in New York, the mass arrest of occupiers while marching across the Brooklyn bridge, the near death of an Iraq veteran in Oakland, after being shot in the face by a less than lethal police weapon, the mass pepper spraying of peaceful demonstrators at UC Davis, outright street battles between police and Occupy Oakland.
23. At a subjective level, at least at the level of potentiality, but also at the level of most folks' immediate experience, there is a marked, even a radical difference between the experience of riding the T to work and the experience of driving oneself there, particularly through the crowded highways into and out of Boston. (I know that I feel it personally, and often intensely.) On the train, we experience fellow commuters as similar to us in facing a common obstacle - at least so long as there are adequate seats available. In car traffic however we experience our fellow commuters as the barrier to our individual, personal objective. They are in our way. We see here two radically different ways of experience oneself in relationship to the people.
24. Free Radical: Taken for a Ride, by Emily Hopkins. Published in Dig: Boston. July, 12,2012. http://digboston.com/think/2012/07/free-radical-taken-for-a-ride/. One could add to this compelling statement the observation that all residents, including non-citizens, should share in this right to the city.
25. This occupation, launched on August 4, 2012 by an affinity group within Occupy Boston, was dubbed Camp Charlie, a reference to the famous protagonist in the 1940s protest song, later popularized by the Kingston Trio as Charlie on the MTA. Ironically, when the State remodeled the MBTA system's finances and appearances in 2000, it made Charlie a central icon, putting a smiling Charlie on T-posters and even dubbing commuters' T-passes Charlie Cards. Charlie, readers will recall, enters the subway and never returns because he cannot afford the fare increase (which at that time took the form of a transfer fee)
26. He rides forever 'neath the streets of Boston, because he doesn't have the money to get home. Peter Dreier and Peter Vrabel offer a fascinating recuperation of the radical roots of Charlie on the MTA in their Dissent article, Banned in Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the MTA (Spring, 2008), http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1167
27. For a recent discussion of the role Interest Rate Swaps have been playing in the budget crises of state and local governments across the US, see Darwin Bond Graham, We Have Your City, Pay Up or Else! Dollars and Sense (Spring, 2012), http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/0512bondgraham.html
28. One can follow the public history leading up to April 4th, and beyond, by reading through the links and press releases at www.occupymbta.org.
29. For more recent developments, see www.bostonfarestrike.wordpress.com