On Thursday, January 19 I spent a good part of the afternoon as a member of the crowd protesting outside the UC Regents meeting. I stood with students I’d taught, students I knew from their work with campus organizations, and students I’ve seen at other demonstrations. I stood with faculty, staff, Occupy activists from the region, and students from other campuses.

I stood right behind a barricade formed from placards painted after the cover of books used in our classrooms. This book-barricade was both a visual intervention (asserting knowledge as our choice of defense) and something that helped us to maintain our shape as a crowd.

In the two hours I was behind that barricade, we didn’t move forward or back. We just stood there, chanting, talking, expressing our anger. The crowd got bigger and louder, but its peaceful character didn’t change. The crowd successfully used Occupy Movement practices to control itself. Nevertheless, toward the end of the Regent’s meeting, a UCPD officer declared through a bullhorn that our gathering was “an unlawful assembly.”

The crowd chanted, “Tell us why! Tell us why! Tell us why!” It was an honest request.

No one on the other side made even the slightest gesture to respond to our question. And no administrator made even the slightest gesture towards negotiating with us. To do so would have been to admit that the UC Regents were trapped inside the building. To do so would have been to admit that the University of California Regents had grossly underestimated UC Riverside when it chose the campus for its meeting.

Our campus is “docile” by some standards. We don’t have Berkeley or UCLA’s history of activism. A lot of our students commute, which means that our campus environment is less condensed, less volatile.

UC Riverside is an open campus – perhaps the most open in the University of California system. Parking is relatively cheap and easy. Our students are so diverse it’s hard to imagine what person would think, “this campus doesn’t represent me.” If Berkeley and UCLA are often the sites of large protests it is partly because those campuses represent the system – participating in an action there has a unique symbolic function, as those campuses are “flagship” campuses.

Our campus represents something else. Our campus is rich with transfers from the community college system, rich with returning students, veterans, parents, kids who are the first in their families to graduate from college. Dreamers.

In the University of California system, our campus has one of the most organic relationships with its region. This makes for good press, but it also means that of the UC campuses we are the most reliant on state funds. We are the most vulnerable, our life as a public university feels quite precarious.

On some level, the people planning this meeting banked on that precarity. They banked on the notion that our students are too busy working to pay their tuition (and/or their parents’ mortgages) to get involved with a protest.

The people coordinating the Regents meeting seemed surprised by the size of the crowd, and by its persistence. The UCPD and the administration’s confusion struck a lot of us as dangerous.

When the UCPD declared our demonstration an “unlawful assembly” it implicitly announced its intention to use force to break up the crowd without seeking another way to address the situation: negotiation of an exit for the Regents. With a negotiated exit the Regents risked not violence, but the embarrassment of being shunned.

The only instruction given to us was to not advance. In two hours, there’d been no motion from the crowd indicating that we would do so. There was discussion about moving forward and also if we should back up, since many of us were crowded on stairs and if the UCPD advanced on us there, we’d likely be hurt. But we did neither. We held our ground. The barricade formed at the front helped us to do that.

Word got out that the Regents were trying to leave via the back of the building (protesters were also there, but in smaller numbers). The crowd at the front broke up as we tried to reform at the building’s service entrance.

When we got to the back of the student center, those forming the book barricade tried to take their protective stance at the front of the crowd. Someone took one of the metal barricades and pulled them towards the protesters, as we’d been doing all afternoon at various points around the building. No one had previously interfered with this.

The UCPD found their chance, though – as the crowd regrouped at the back of the student center, they used force to prevent the formation of another blockade. Later, they would describe the attempt to form a barricade as violent. When the protesters went to move barricades (again, as they’d been doing all day with no interference), it was not an act of violence. There was nothing threatening about it – the threat was that the activists were going to successfully block the street. At this point, people were shoved to the ground, dragged across the pavement and plastic pellets were shot at the crowd. I saw wounds left by these pellets on students I’ve seen in my own classrooms.

The UCPD threw people to the ground, the UCPD shot their new pellet guns into the crowd, the UCPD used force on us. There is ample video out there showing this.

By this point, I should add, people had been peacefully protesting for hours – at any point the UCPD or the campus administration might have sought another path by engaging us in dialogue.

The next day: UC administrators organized an Orwellian campaign to represent the violence of that incident as caused not by the UCPD but by the protesters. Even more bizarre was the eagerness for the administration to blame not students, but the public – as if the two should be distinguished from each other. In his weekly letter to the campus community Chancellor White claimed that “the disturbance of a few individuals” ruined the demonstration, and that they did not represent the “non-violent students and community members engaged in peaceful protest and exercising their right to free speech.” (January 20, 2012) But the people beaten and shot at by the UCPD are our students; they are our colleagues. And they are our neighbors. We were all in it together. They are the public, and the public is us.

Tell us why, Chancellor White. Why you stopped seeing yourself in us.

-1

As you know, dear reader, in the Autumn of 2011, objective economic conditions mobilized many people living in the United States. From the perspective of someone isolated in Ohio who, despite Endnotes, still cares about communization and anarchism, the developments in New York City couldn’t have gotten off to a falser start.  What happened last year in NYC was not a start at all: the current historical series of international occupations began in 2008 and 2009 at the New School and on UC campuses. The campout at Zucotti Park largely co-opted these events for the sake of a “mass movement.”

Occupy Wall Street began on September 17, but people didn’t actually occupy Wall Street. They gathered in New York City’s privately held Zuccotti Park. The campers had been called-forth by a Vancouver-based liberal consumer activist group known as Adbusters™.  Although some have mistaken Abusters™ for an anti-capitalist organization, prior to OWS, they were safely ensconced in the capitalist marketplace of ideas and goods, having done nothing but create an “environmentalist” “alternative” business. Posing as neo-Situationists, they ran various campaigns of “subvertisments” which subverted nothing, as if what used to be called detournment has the same effect today as it did 5 decades ago when capitalism was still expanding.

Adbusters™ instigated gentle flash mobs and “Google™ bombing,” confining their activities to the level of ideas and avoiding militancy at all costs.  Their material interventions consisted of selling. Adbusters’™ goods included a glossy magazine available at bourgeois gourmet co-ops, and Blackspot™ shoes made of recycled vegan materials by slightly-less-exploited workers in Portugal. They might as well have had an ownership position in the Anti-Mall in Irvine California.  None of these practices conflicted with Abusters’™ moronic ideology, which centers on the claim that we all have “authentic selves” that need to be rescued through heroic acts such as avoiding video games and spending some time away from the Internet.

In 2009, an editor at at Adbuster’s magazine, Micah White, attended one of the first occupations in the current historical series, at UC Berkeley ‘s Wheeler Hall. Despite the fact that those occupiers were motivated by a desire for communization brought on by deteriorating material conditions at the university, White decided that the action was about building “a mental environment movement [sic] capable of smashing corporations, downsizing consumer spending and building egalitarian communities” along with other such idealist nonsense. White and the rest of the Adbusters™ crew went on to co-opt the form of occupation for their own program to capture emerging revolutionary energies for a citizen’s movement made up of people already represented in the cesspool of citizenship. Needless to say, they left behind the historical content of the first occupations.

Although Adbusters™ and their associates have pretended to be revolutionaries,

they organized a reform movement aimed at getting corporate money out of politics. That sole initial demand was enough to unmask Adbusters’™ anti-capitalist front as well as any pretense they had of understanding how capitalism works. To make matters worse, anthropologist and lifestyle-anarchist David Graeber helped them plan the September event. He added to the mix a simplistic understanding of horizontality, a love for counter-revolutionary general assemblies, the myth that the people of Tahrir Square were non-violent, and a total failure to realize that the Spanish acampadas had been utterly useless.

 99% + 1% = 100%

On September 8, 2011 posts started to appear on a tumblr™ called We Are the 99 Percent set up by a new york activist seemingly known only as “Chris” and Priscilla Grim, development and marketing director for the New Media Collective. Objective conditions allowed the symbol-managers’ eponymous slogan to go viral. The posts on We Are The 99 Percent mainly feature photographs of people holding up signs bearing the rather long, touching stories of their financial misfortunes. In general, the narratives go a little something like this: “I played by all the rules, tried to be a good citizen, ended up with massive debts anyways and had to suffer consequences.”  Grim and “Chris” clearly intended the phrase and the blog to offer a point of political identification in order to grow a mass movement.

Unfortunately, mass movements function as apparatuses of capture. Despite the many entries on the blog, few, if any, posts articulated a systemic critique of capitalism. The founders of the tumblr™ did nothing to encourage such a critique. #Anyone can understand that they did not do so because such critiques would be against their interests. Grim’s job depends on the continuation of capitalism. Such critiques, too radical for quick consumption by a truly mass public, would limit the viral contagion of We Are The 99 Percent.

The United States, protector of market democracy, was the 99%’s homeland.  Grim and “Chris” seem to have derived the figure from data distributed in popular venues by players such as former World Bank Senior Vice President Joseph E. Stiglitz. Though such articles make international references, they define the top 1%, and the other 99% in terms of the US economy. The rhetoric of articles such as Stiglitz’s address the zombie citizen-worker. The labor of that zombie establishes her national civic belonging complete with rights and responsibilities. It excludes those unwilling to submit to labor or law. Sets defined by percentages of Amerikans, such as the ones drawn by Stiglitz, limit social conflict to one between people in, and largely from, the United States. They exclude those within the US who can’t, or won’t, enter representation’s hall of mirrors. Despite their claim that they want to make themselves visible, the 99% already get represented. They want to represent themselves in a new way, aspiring to become managers of capital for 100% of citizens. Steiglitz’s article typifies the economic thinking from which the 99% emerges, a reformist Keynesian scenario within which the supposed revolutionaries desire a better distribution of capital, not its end. #Anyone who has thought about revolution for more than a day can see that Keynesian regulation constitutes part of the boom and bust cycle of contemporary capitalism.

Many of those who gathered at Zuccotti Park in September identified with the 99%. The tumblr™ title became the campers’ more or less official slogan. The national data that provided the basis for the 99% figure spoke to their barely repressed love of country. The campers patriotically renamed Zuccotti Liberty Park. Instead of challenging the dominance of capital, much of the discussion there turned to rescuing the Amkerikan dream, a rhetoric that latched onto various pre-existent slogans among electoral politicians. From the beginning, the campers dragged the tradition of politics as we know it along with them. The 99% was on a brief vacation from voting, but were destined to become a voting bloq once again.

One ought not to feel surprise that the 99% call only for a reform of capitalism and not for an end to capital. They exist in a not-so-secret complicity with the 1% that they pretend to revile. Together, the 1% and the 99% constitute 100% of those assimilated within social representation. The material interests of the 99% force the group to support the democratic process. Electoral democracy is a phenomenon indistinguishable from capitalism, while direct democracy and economic democracy are nonsensical terms. The 1% and the 99% make up “society” as a whole and they need each other.

As Herbert Marcuse pointed out a long time ago, only forces from outside a given whole can negate it.

“The outside about which I have spoken is not to be understood mechanistically in the spatial sense but, on the contrary, as the qualitative difference which overcomes the existing antitheses inside the antagonistic partial whole [...] and which is not reducible to these antitheses. [...] [T]he force of negation is concentrated in no one class. Politically and morally, rationally and instinctively, it is a chaotic, anarchistic opposition: the refusal to join and play a part, the disgust at all prosperity, the compulsion to resist. It is a feeble, unorganized opposition which nonetheless rests on motives and purposes which stand in irreconcilable contradiction to the existing whole.” [Herbert Marcuse, "The Concept of Negation in the Dialectic:' Telos (Summer, 1 971): 130-132. Cited in Tiqqun. This Is Not A Program. Joshua David Jordan, Trans. Semiotext. LA 2011.]

In the contemporary United States, the 1% and the 99% make up Marcuse’s “antagonistic partial whole.” Nonetheless, the 99% has revolutionary pretenses despite being lodged firmly within the empire of capital like Leopold Bloom in Dublin. Even once and future Obama voters enjoy saying the word “revolution.” When they do, it loses all meaning.

The 99%, acts as the loyal opposition within the capitalist society. It cannot even formulate a critique of the system let alone start a revolution. Incapable of understanding itself as a diverse collection of relations, it mistakes itself for a group of individuals bound together by a desire for reform. The least radical common denominator unites the 99%. Such a low level of consciousness is an immutable feature of mass movements within the contemporary biopolitical fabric, one perhaps more pronounced in mass movements inspired by marketing professionals with day jobs that rely on the demographic logic at the heart of biopoltical governance.

Obviously, the 99% has a purely demographic form. When those who call themselves the 99% occupy a space, they do so in order to establish a provisional territory within which they can be counted. To a certain extent, elements outside the 99% have been able to instantiate other forms of life inside the provisional territories, but the 99% has so far prevented the new forms from shifting the biopolitical terrain surrounding them. The 99% can’t make war on capital’s form of life because they are part of the numerical regulation of life indissociable from democratic capitalism.  They forget that they have been counted from the time of their birth and have occupied a territory since the genocide that took place in the Americas. No co-optation necessary: the 99% can’t prevent themselves from becoming a voting bloq. Starting with its name, the 99% assumes that something different will come from within the 100% and the economic relations that determine it.

The 99% simply figures a new spirit of solidarity — one that so palpably gerrymandered that even its Galbraithio-Keynesian priests quickly started to revise the percentage downwards while claiming that 80% should count as 99%. The professionals of identity among the 99% have realized that they are an overwhelmingly white group and make condescending overtures to bourgeois people of color to join them. They look away from #anybody outside of society, or even those on it’s margins until it becomes politically expedient to acknowledge them. As a result, they can narrate their identities as the exploited, but can’t tell a story about the origin or end of exploitation. Nowhere has this been better articulated than by this reading group from Baltimore, perhaps because, in addition to knowing the literature of political economy and insurrection, they get excluded from the 100% by the 100% because of their bodies.

#Anyone who bothers to look can find a fierce pride in being Amerikans – a pride that structures the 99%’s reformist citizen-consciousness. That pride finds its clearest expression in the 99%’s naturalized rules of membership. If the set included all of the people on earth, the 99% would become part of something close to 1% of the wealthiest individuals globally. In order to survive, they must pretend their poorly drawn Venn diagram refers to an actual state of affairs. The 99%’s new spirit of solidarity is, in fact, an old and vindictive one. It arises from the fact that their wealth comes from the exploitation of others. They conceal this from themselves by abstracting, homogenizing, and objectifying the concept of exploitation, as if it were milk in a supermarket. The 99%’s citizenship-drug produces the delirium of rights, among them the right to representation, while paralyzing the movements of 99% so severely that they can’t act in any way proscribed by the rules set up for them by capital. Incapable of seriously considering armed struggle or the seizure of indoor, unambiguously private property, they want to rebuild the Amerikan dream and voice their belief that it will “live again” and that “the Ameri[k]an way is to help one another succeed.” Sadly, Mayor Bloomberg was correct to assert that both the 99% and the 1% dream of a return to boom times — boom times based on the extraction of surplus value from someone, somewhere.

Only the magic of reification allows the 99% to understand their spirit of solidarity as a static thing that paradoxically grows while obeying strict but disavowed principles of inclusion and exclusion. The repression of the contradictions that define their membership allows this process of reification to succeed.

Neither every visitor nor every camper at Zuccotti Park was fully captured by the ideological apparatus called “the 99%.” A former student of Marcuse’s, Angela Davis, was one of the few celebrity speakers to openly discuss the striations structuring the campout and the 99% in general. She stressed the importance of a dialectic of differences, of struggle within the struggle. Davis spoke of developing the occupations’ revolutionary potential, but did not make the mistake of calling the current occupations revolutionary and thereby hollowing out that word even further.

Clearly, and perhaps less than fortunately, Davis wants to “meet people where they’re at,” so she uses the rhetoric of  “the 99%,” but at least she seems to use the figure to name an element in a dialectical process that has an inside and an outside. She has been affiliated with a rather pathetic electoral politics, running for national office as a Revolutionary Communist Party member and continues to engage with Obama and his cronies. Nonetheless, she has consistently invoked those excluded from a society that pretends to be universal. In fact, she is one of the excluded. At the end of the Q & A that followed her talk in Zuccotti, she recommended that the campers identify with Troy Davis and “learn to become a dangerous class” from the prisoners who rose up at Attica in 1971.

The incarcerated and those on death row exemplify the outside described by Marcuse. In the simplest sense, society confines felons and denies them representation through voting along with other aspects of citizenship. Locked up felons don’t teach us to how to expand the 100% so that it includes them, nor do they teach us how the 99% can overcome and absorb the 1%. They teach us to destroy — to negate all extant social relations.

Naturally, Davis’s suggestions were immediately shot down by low-octane racist wannabe managers of semi-socialized capital. These Galbraithio-Keynesian’s wearing Leninist clothing felt the 99% should associate themselves with those who have power. Her attempts to change what “growing a movement” means and the reactions to them shine a light on the self-contradictory nature of the 99%.

The new spirit of solidarity reveals itself as nothing but the current face of the diffuse spectacle, social relations mediated by images which substitute death for life. The 99% clarified this when, in Washing DC, they arranged their bodies into a mass ornament, writing out 99% in a collective pose meant for aerial photography. They behave as if the spectacle were determined by the production alternative images and narratives, rather than by sets of economic relations. Predictably, their tactics and goals reflect the assumption that groups of individuals rather than sets of relations determine economies. In short they live as if trapped in a reflection on the surface of death’s mirror.

0%

Given the renewed veneration of the first full picture of the earth taken from the moon in certain European philosophy seminars, one might think that the empire of capital has universalized death’s mirror and no one escapes potential representation as a citizen and capitalist subject. We are all reflected through a glass eccentrically, but we make a mistake when we think we have no choice but to aspire to become symbol-managers who must organize “messaging” capable of invoking a multitude desiring the socialization of capital. When we willingly accept the specular sensorium of capital’s biopolitical metaphors, we collaborate with the forces that turn us into our own bosses. Due to a parallax effect determined by class composition and the division of labor, the spectacle only reflects a part of the social whole properly, showing them to themselves as silent individuals. Some of us see on death’s mirror only distorted images of our relations. We remember that we have ears and mouths as well as eyes. Not every acoustic phenomenon communicates. As Empire’s LRAD teaches us, vibrations involve physical force.

We can make noise loud enough to break mirrors too.

Those who have no right to representation and those who refuse the stasis of rights and representation, the non-citizens without any desire to become citizens, don’t form a set.  Their noise is the very possibility of the outside Marcuse wrote about. When we move as 0%, we refuse to join and play a part, we sing disgust at all prosperity and articulate our compulsion to resist with the tinkling of shattered glass. We seek to take the cities, not because we have a right to them, but because they must become communes. Position, not solidified specular identity, defines and delimits our “we.” #Anyone who moves away from capital’s empire toward the outside, #anyone who resists becomes us.

0% movements produce chaos in capital and empire. Their force increases along lines of affiance and separation based on concrete relations with others. Affiance and separation are anything but the growth associated with the 99%’s demographic counting. The constitutive disorganization and anarchistic fragmentation of 0% resistance has taught those involved that being too small to fail sometimes releases more power than being too big to fail. The lone warrior, the cell, the gang, the alliance that can shut down all the ports along a coast, the commune capable of occupying a whole city, collective sabotage, mass default: all of these 0% movements gain effectiveness from internal and external friendships and conflicts.

Although 0% movements vibrate across the globe, the region around San Francisco Bay resonates turbulently at the moment —  Oakland in particular. The forces of the outside have emerged so strongly in Oakland and vicinity because of its concrete history of struggle with capital’s watchdogs. Police departments in the Bay Area have a long history of murdering unarmed men of color.

The killing of Oscar Grant on the night of December 31^st  2008 to January 1, 2009 is the best known of series of deaths at the hands of police.

Those killings led to 0% actions among diverse groups whose internal conflicts and separations worked on each other to intensify the local rage. Because of these actions and the radical character of the UC occupations of 2009,

by the time OWS spread to Oakland, the anarchic forces of the outside could operate it much more effective than they could in New York City. The Oakland Communetook a plaza in front of City Hall and renamed it after Oscar Grant. Clearly, the communards do not intend to set up a co-operative alternative space, or a temporary autonomous zone. They intend to keep fighting until they turn the city itself into a commune that can serve as a base for the intensification of struggle around the world.

In Santa Cruz, communards took an abandoned Wells Fargo Bank building on Front and River Streets.

Though the city was eventually able to evict them, their action showed the importance of collectively taking private, indoor property as a base of operations. By exposing the willingness of the State Repressive Apparatus to act violently in defense of private property, the communards demonstrated the real stakes in our struggle. The fight against capital is a fight against the system of private property, understood as a set of social relations. The bank isn’t a quasi-public space such as Zuccotti Park. Taking it involved attempted expropriation. Unlike foreclosure occupations, the plans for a community center at the bank did not include outside activists going to a more oppressed community and doing radical charity work. The bank was taken from capital by a collective of diverse forces for the benefit of all. If we are to occupy places within which to care for one another, within which to develop our positive capacities, within which to plan, we have no choice but to defend ourselves against the intensified conflict that the state and capital will bring to us. Lessons learned in the Wells Fargo occupation have already been applied to a coming building occupation in Oakland.

Conflict also intensified on UC campuses.

The willingness of students and faculty to stand down campus police showed an ability to struggle at an increased intensity, as if, upon returning to the locations of the beginnings of this historical series, occupations had become sublated during their global travels and expressed themselves at a higher level upon their return. Communards among the activists were able to use this incident to start working on eliminating the UC administration and ending campus police forces.

The power of the communards to resonate was never clearer than during the shutdown of every port on the West Coast.

100% – 0%

Those who will not be counted do not struggle against the individuals in the 1% or against their actions; 0% struggles resist the system that produces the 100%.

The fractures created by 0% vibrations begin with positive capacities and will end in in the negation of the totality of capitalism’s economic relations.

0% movement merges lines of affiance and separation in a dialectic open to all, synthesizing the violence of capital with that of necessary resistance.

#Anybody can move through 0% positions, whether through direct action, support, care or the intensification of positive capacities.

0% noise does not sing a spirit of solidarity, it sings a circulation of bodies.

As objective economic conditions continue to deteriorate and the resistance’s diversity of tactics comes increasingly to include armed struggle imposed on it by the 100%, a dialectic of separation will redeem our vulnerability and aging.

To move through o% positions, get in where you fit in.

 All power to the communes!

The following is a list of essays and features appearing on occupyeverything.org during 2011:

January 8, 2011
A Counter-Conference: Strategies for Defending Higher Education
organized by Bob Samuels; video by Cameron Granadino

The 2011 MLA Counter-Conference took place during the annual Modern Language Convention in Los Angeles, January 8th, 2011 at Loyola Law School.  While thousands of people were meeting at the traditional convention, this one-day event centered on discussing actual strategies for making higher education more just.

January 10, 2011
A Socially Anti-Social, Dialogically Autonomous, Psychedelic Social Practice
by Marc Herbst

Occupy Everything because everything has already been occupied.
Occupy Everything because everything is a site for contestation.

January 11, 2011
knowledge commons, power, pedagogy, feminism and collective practices
interview with Cara Baldwin by Paula Cobo

 Art institutions have historically operated as corporations, with varying effects/affects. At this particular moment what interests me in terms of collective practices are those that are incredibly open.

January 30, 2011
Masks, or The Illusion of Power
by Ken Ehrlich

So… when our actions become too rehearsed, we search for ways to re-animate our own sense of what constitutes collective, direct action. We try to shake off the distracted paralysis and the tormented mask. We look for ways to inject into our cynical narratives moments of off kilter gestures, we try to most of all to surprise ourselves.

February 22, 2011
Operational Aesthetics: Briefing Script
by Michael W. Wilson

An operational aesthetic is perceptual capacity in movement. Rather than seeking the productive end (communism), it seeks the procedural dynamic (communization). In doing so, it moves its focus to systemic functionality without fetishizing design. This dynamic is, by necessity, located within a system of exchange. When the operative threatens the circulation of existing goods, services and/or values, (s)he risks losing a position within that system.

March 4, 2011
Ask About An Autonomous University: 5 Exam Questions For Life
by Louis-Georges Schwartz

Common university ideology makes us feel that our work is a labor of love, yet resentment and fear fill our days. Exhaustion grips us to such an extent that we have no choice but to withdraw, but rather than fleeing into our families, the latest 3D entertainment or the hippest new bar, perhaps we could collectively seek refuge in an autonomous school we might tolerably call our own.

March 9, 2011
Notes on Labor, Maternity, and the Institution
by Jaleh Mansoor

How do others less lucky than I make it in the global service industry (in which education and so called higher education now takes it place, now that Professors at State schools are classified as mid level managers?) How do women who have babies and work make it? They pay to work; they pay with their children. Sacrificial economies.

April 13, 2011
OCCUPY EVERYTHING [I]ntimacy and Scale
by Cara Baldwin

I am first struck by the foreign impression of my own hand hitting paper. To set out to write in this way is to see my own handwriting for the first in a very long time. It’s grown sloppy. I dreamt last night I was looking at my writing from years ago. How clearly cloying my penmanship was then. It expressed a sincere desire for legibility and understanding–even approval.

June 17, 2011
Three Crises: 30s – 70s – Now
by Brian Holmes

What we face is a triple crisis, economic, geopolitical and ecological, with consequences that cannot be predicted on the basis of past experience. Can we identify some of the central contradictions that will mark the upcoming years? Which institutions and social bargains have already come under severe stress? In what ways will the ecological crisis begin to produce political responses? How will class relations within the United States interact with crossborder and worldwide struggles? Is it possible to imagine — and work toward — a positive transformation of the current technopolitical paradigm?

July 7, 2011
CONTENTS #1: USERSHIP
by Stephen Wright (introduced by Sean Dockray)

The first issue of Contents is a contribution from Stephen Wright on “Usership.” For the past few years I’ve been fascinated by Stephen’s ideas about invisibility, use, and redundancy, all of which come into play in the writing below. In particular, I’ve wondered about the relationship between “the user” and “the worker” – on the one hand, the difference is one between playing the role of a consumer and that of a producer; but on the other hand, as users, our activity is producing value somewhere (websites, telecoms, IP holders).

July 22, 2011
The Summary Execution of Kenneth Harding and Reaction to Police Terrorism in the San Francisco Bay Area: A Timeline
by Louis-Georges Schwartz
August 5, 2011
An Introduction to Tahrir Documents
by Tahrir Documents

Tahrir Documents collects printed matter from Cairo’s Tahrir Square and its environs. Since the first week of March, volunteers in Cairo have gone to the square, usually on Fridays, to gather documents distributed at protests and rallies. The archive continues to grow as new groups emerge, rallies continue, and the production of printed material keeps pace. We also accept scanned or  photographed submissions sent in by individuals not directly involved in the project, such as friends in Alexandria documenting the appearance of printed material there.

August 5, 2011
Tahrir Documents: A Guide
by Tahrir Documents

The following is a sample of some of the documents we have collected from Tahrir Square, translated, and published in English alongside the Arabic originals. They are arranged here alphabetically by title and linked to the full-length translated document, along with a PDF of the original, on our website.

August 9, 2011
Tolerance or Universality
by Kailash Srinivasan

In August 2010, The Guardian ran a graphic segment on female genital mutilation, which represented extremely violent imagery of victimized women and girls. The piece produced, however, a mix of fascination and guilt.

August 16, 2011
CONTENTS #2: they are several
by Cara Baldwin (introduced by Sean Dockray)

An introduction to Cara Baldwin’s contribution, they are several. At the end of April, when Cara was compiling links related to a situation in which Facebook shut down the pages of dozens of anti cuts groups in the UK, I invited her to use the platform of CONTENTS (at that point more of an idea than a platform) as a tool to organize and make public this research.

August 23, 2011
Notes from Tehran (a Green Movement after the Arab Spring?)
by Milad Faraz (introduced by Jaleh Mansoor)

Two years after what has emerged as a “Green Movement”, it is the author’s critical understanding of the movement, its historical significance and the threat posed to it by what is characterized as its liberal and secularist articulations. The piece draws on critical reflections on conceptions of “religion” and “secularism” and argues for a historical understanding of such concepts in making sense of Iranian modern politics.

August 31, 2011
Eat the Rich
by Brian Holmes

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.

October 4, 2011
The Time of Crisis
by Joshua Clover

 The class is not that of Multitude, of dematerialized labor, but is the class of debt — and the politics of time, I think this is an inevitable conclusion, is that of debt default. Debt default — and perhaps this is my only claim — is the temporal complement to the specific or general strike, and is the route of solidarity with material labor, with the place of exploitation.

October 10, 2011
Open Letter Re: OccupyLA—Solidarity, Critiques, Reinventions
by paracaidistas collective

Many of us are not shy about expressing our hatred for capitalism itself, and the entrenched institionalized inequalities that stem from it. We do not believe that a legislative solution will lead us out of this crisis; the entire legislative system exists in the service of structures of power designed to privilege the few at the expense of the many, and based on profound disrespect for the needs and perspectives of the majority of the humans on this planet (not to mention the planet itself).

November 1, 2011
The Oakland Commune
by Louis-Georges Schwartz & Michael W. Wilson

 The Oakland Commune doesn’t grow by seducing public opinion in order to enlarge its membership. It grows by showing what it can do. The Oakland Commune can make Oscar Grant Plaza habitable for a large number of people; itcan run a library; it can resist assault by the police; it can fight other factions in the 99% for the right to actively defend itself against state violence; it can retake the territory from which it had been evicted by the brutal force of the police; it canspark direct action by 0%ers as far away as New York City; it can declare a general strike.

November 22, 2011
The “Pepper Spray Incident” and the Inevitable Radicalization of the UC Student Body
by Eric Lee

The participation of thousands of students across the state in the anti-Wall Street movement represents the rapid radicalization of California students, which in itself is indicative of the quick move to the left by millions of movement sympathizers. The radicalization of the students manifests itself on the busses, in the restaurants, and in the coffee shops on and around my campus, where discussion of political strategy dominates. Of course, these anecdotes mean relatively little—but the politicization of the student body is significant nevertheless. Though the process of politicization is experiencing its birth pangs, it is emotionally moving that the process has finally begun.

December 15, 2011
How Many Sexual Assaults Happened at #OccupyLA?
by Micha Cardenas

To those who would say this is a peripheral issue, I absolutely disagree. I propose that the question as to whether we can create spaces which challenging existing institutions of violence, such as economic inequality, without reproducing and even worsening other institutions of violence, such as a patriarchal rape culture, must be central to the occupation movement. Whose liberation and equality is this movement about?

[trigger warning]

I just got back from having dinner with a friend of mine who spent many nights at OccupyLA. This is a person who I think has a good understanding of gender politics and of what happened at OccupyLA. I was shocked to hear him tell me that there were probably over 10 or over 20 or more cases of sexual assault at OccupyLA. As someone who has been following the tweets, articles, blog posts and when I can the live feed for OccupyLA very closely since it began, I was incredibly disheartened to hear these numbers. My understanding was that there was one case. This says to me that people have been keeping these incidents out of public discussion to protect the movement, which is incredibly upsetting because if the Occupy movement thinks that sexual assault is tolerable in any way than I will be so ashamed that I ever supported them in any way. Clearly, a movement that is so multiplicitous and with such fuzzy boundaries as the Occupy movement can’t be said to hold many or possibly any opinions or priorities, but I would say that it seems like there may have been an effort by many Occupy organizers to keep the number of sexual assaults a secret.

Why is this such a problem? Don’t the people experiencing assault have the right to their privacy? Yes, of course they do, but as a woman and a trans person, I feel like I would have not been safe sleeping at OccupyLA and I wouldn’t have known it until I was there, possibly until it was too late because the issue was kept so well under wraps that someone following the news every day and talking to everyone they knew, including participants, organizers and scholars following the occupations didn’t know at all how prevalent the issue was.

I felt unsafe from my first time at Occupy LA, the first march to City Hall. That day, I was with my girlfriend and two men tried to hit on us and one even grabbed her arm with no invitation at all to do so. I knew from that first moment in the bright daylight that this was not a safe place for me to sleep.

I was so sad to hear these words come from my friend’s mouth, he said that every night you could hear someone yelling “get out! get the fuck out of my tent!” and that there was so much booze and drugs. He also said that the claim that there were many assaults was being used as a right wing “troll” tactic, but that is no excuse for hiding the problem if it exists. He also said that even at the General Assembly, where the issue of assault was discussed two nights, that while many people came to the mic to say that the issue should be discussed (for 10 minutes) that still many others came to the mic to say that the camp is about wall street and not about this issue. Additionally, my friend said that very few women were staying in the camp towards the end near the eviction.

I have also had numerous people ask me, when I bring up the issue of sexual assault at occupations, if this is above the usual number of assaults that happen. As if it mattered? That response is clearly a way of minimalizing and normalizing the issue of sexual assault instead of taking responsibility for the fact that as people who support this movement, even by writing and tweeting about it, we may be supporting the creation of a space where people are sexually assaulted. Now we have to certainly distinguish between different occupations, but if organizers are keeping this issue a secret how can people even know?

I am so incredibly disheartened by this news and I think that as participants in this movement, which I consider myself having been to many rallies and events, and as supporters, we need to understand the extent of this problem. Perhaps this is something that the #OccupyData hackers can try to find, a number of cases of sexual assault at different occupations? How can people accept this? I refuse to participate in a movement which would attempt to create intentional space to envision a new world in which sexual assault is acceptable and should be kept quiet.

 To those who would say this is a peripheral issue, I absolutely disagree. I propose that the question as to whether we can create spaces which challenging existing institutions of violence, such as economic inequality, without reproducing and even worsening other institutions of violence, such as a patriarchal rape culture, must be central to the occupation movement. Whose liberation and equality is this movement about?

UPDATE: 1:49pm: I want to add, to be clear, that I am fully in support of prison abolitionist and community based strategies for responding to and preventing sexual violence which increase community autonomy and do not depend on police. That is precisely why the handling of this issue in these autonomous spaces is so important to me, because we need to develop strategies collectively that do not cause more harm. Additionally, I want to add that I am in no way trying to reproduce a gender binary, white centered, class privileged analysis, I fully acknowledge that people of all genders are affected by sexual violence and the most affected groups are transgender women of color and sex workers.

Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray

When I watched Lt. John Pike and the University of California Davis Police Department violently attack our peaceful demonstration against social inequality and austerity on Friday, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation.

There is no dearth of personal recollections of this weekend’s events circulating the internet as the “pepper spray incident” and Chancellor Linda Katehi’s “walk of shame” have made UC Davis the center of international attention and outcry. In light of this, it is more important to consider the implications of these events and what they mean for the growing global movement against social inequality. Particularly, it is important to recognize the historical importance of the past week’s profound radicalization of students in the UC system and across the nation. The entrance of an organized student movement into the current social situation has deep implications, and they should be considered as the movement goes forward.

The video that has now gone viral speaks volumes and there is no need to romanticize the moments in great detail. My friends and I were approached by a small army of thugs, who violently attacked some of the kindest, most intelligent, most caring people I have ever met. I was not as brave as my friends who made history by refusing to yield to the police goons, and I have to admit that after watching their bodies react, I do not regret falling back. I saw hard working, compassionate students and teachers violently vomiting, weeping, and holding each other as that disgusting orange goo ran down their teary faces. I saw hundreds of students pour out of classrooms and the library to come to our defense. I saw the police turn tail and flee after seeing the looks of fury in our eyes. I saw the looks in their eyes, too—looks of genuine fear. I’d never seen that before in a police officer’s eyes.

So, what role will California college students play in the Occupy movement? As the worldwide revolt against social inequality continues despite the deeply disturbing intentions of the wealthiest among us to suffocate the movement, the students now have an incredibly important role to play. With the original occupiers on the East Coast forced by the cold weather and brutal police raids to reclaim less visible, unused property, the West Coast is responsible for sustaining and building the movement until spring.

And UC and CSU students are ready to rise to the occasion. 10,000 of us gathered in Berkeley last Tuesday, 2,000 here in Davis on the same day, and an Occupy camp has been set up at UCLA. Hundreds of UC students converged in downtown San Francisco last week and succeeded in shutting down a Bank of America. CSU students forced the CSU Board of Trustees to secretly flee their original meeting spot before passing another round of fee increases. UC leadership cancelled the UC Regents’ meeting last week out of fear that it would be shut down by student protestors.

The participation of thousands of students across the state in the anti-Wall Street movement represents the rapid radicalization of California students, which in itself is indicative of the quick move to the left by millions of movement sympathizers. The radicalization of the students manifests itself on the busses, in the restaurants, and in the coffee shops on and around my campus, where discussion of political strategy dominates. Of course, these anecdotes mean relatively little—but the politicization of the student body is significant nevertheless. Though the process of politicization is experiencing its birth pangs, it is emotionally moving that the process has finally begun.

This radicalization must continue to be channeled into a starkly anti-capitalist political tendency. Objective material conditions are ensuring that liberal elements of the student body will be drowned out. This is a huge break from the Free Speech Movement of the mid-60s, and even from the anti-Vietnam War movement that followed. Youth unemployment in the United States is above 20% – higher than in some “Arab Spring” countries. We’ve seen the statistics about wealth inequality: the top 1% controls the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%. Only 40% of college students graduate, and for those that do, they enter the workforce with an average debt-load just under $30,000.

And then what? A minimum wage Starbucks job at $8.50 an hour? Perhaps most importantly, though, is the current rollback of nearly every major social gain won by the working class since the 1930s. Even in the midst of the Vietnam War, after all, President Johnson’s “Great Society” at least recognized that social inequality existed and that the most impoverished Americans were worthy of minuscule levels of government support.

At least our parents got “Guns and Butter”. Now we’re stuck with just the guns.

Today, the contrasts couldn’t be starker. President Obama has escalated the war on the working class by continuing the decades-long trend of drastically slashing social services. In fact, Obama has promised to out-do the GOP in the race to see who can slash more services to deal with the massive debt our country has accumulated from years of war and tax breaks for the wealthy. He has proposed gutting services that tens of millions of Americans rely on for survival: Social Security, Medicare, SNAP, WIC, etc. The cynical Manipulator-in-Chief has invaded new countries, illegally murdered American citizens abroad, and expanded the War on Terror into Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

I spent a year working as a volunteer on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. I was drawn to his candidacy by his promises to serve “Main Street, not Wall Street”, to close Guantanamo Bay, to end the wars, to stop the mass deportation of undocumented families, and to roll-back the PATRIOT Act and the rest of the unconstitutional post-9/11 national security apparatus. I, like many in my generation, naively thought that a candidate that was backed by Wall Street could still make “change”.

Barack Obama has delivered on exactly none of these promises. In fact, the ruling class could hardly ask for a better leader. Corporate profits have soared during his presidency, as unemployment remains stiflingly high with no signs that the economy will add jobs at a rate quick enough to keep up with population gain. It makes me furious that the candidate to whom I dedicated a year of my life has turned on me. I take it very personally. I am not the only 21-year-old who feels this way. I also served the President’s political party for a year following his election. I was an elected delegate to the California Democratic Party, and was a staffer for a statewide Democratic campaign. But the Democratic Party is leading the attack on working people across America.
Democratic Governor, Jerry Brown, for example, seems like he’s trying to out-do Scott Walker in imposing austerity on the indigent and the young. Democratic mayors across the country are ordering riot police on their own peaceful protesters. In the bay area, “progressive” Democrats like Jean Quan and Ed Lee have ordered riot police to evict occupiers on multiple occasions. These liberal champions ordered police to beat Iraq War Veterans Scott Olson and Kayvan Sabehgi.

Today, no solution to the social crisis can be found through either of the two big-business parties. This is why the burgeoning student movement in California represents a great hope for the anti-capitalist position. In light of this, demands for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation should be considered only as a show of our power. In reality, even if we are to succeed in ousting Katehi,
her replacement would be no different.

We students can re-shape the future of public education in California only by abolishing the UC Regents, CSU Board of Trustees, and their respective police forces. Democratic student, worker, and faculty control of the entire decision-making process is needed to reverse the trends towards privatization, debt, and austerity.

And we should also remember that the crisis in higher education is a symptom of the crisis of capitalism. The American student movement of the late 60s, for example, failed to prevent the attack on the working class that has been carried out by Democrats and Republicans throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s because it failed to self-consciously establish itself as a movement against capitalism.

This belies the issue of “no politics” that is such a popular refrain for liberals taking part in the Occupy movement today. “No politics” has been our strategy for 40 years, and look what it has gotten us! Back to UC Davis— I have read multiple accounts on the events of the past days that emphasize how UC Davis is a turning point for the Occupy movement. Images of the blatant police brutality and the powerful silence that met the Chancellor when she left her botched press conference have terrified and inspired millions. But this isn’t an unprecedented show of violence, and police brutality isn’t a new phenomenon. The events of the past days are a glimpse of reality, not a break from the past. Though it has taken a viral video to make this clear to many, it is an important fact to remember.

The images from Davis, Berkeley, Chapel Hill, New York, Oakland, Denver, and countless other cities and towns across the country have galvanized support for the movement and have even further embedded Occupy Wall Street as a facet of American political life. The images have also revealed democracy in America for just what it is: a façade.

In light of this, students at UC and across the country must prepare ourselves for the coming struggle. The police attacks will not abate—they will only grow in intensity. Our debt load will grow, unless we reject the concept of debt as required by capitalism. Fee hikes will continue until we reject the very idea of paying for school. We should fight for something radically different—a society where production is managed based on social need and human rights to housing, food, education, transportation, and physical security. One where our friends, brothers, sisters, and parents aren’t sent off to die in unnecessary wars. One where speculators and bankers are treated like the criminals they are.

The lines in the sand are being drawn on my campus and across the country. Students, ask yourselves: Which side are you on?

 [Point of clarification: I write this as an individual and in no way as a spokesperson for any group.]

Eric Lee is a 4th year undergraduate at the University of California, Davis.

A band of 0%ers within #OccupyOakland’s 99% allowed the encampment to distinguish itself nationally by declaring a commune. The import of this banner must not be underestimated. It signifies the passage from protest to resistance.

Obviously, “The Oakland Commune” refers to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Shanghai Commune of 1927 and not to the private, hippy communes of Marin County and points north.

The Oakland Commune does not exist as a population or a group. It exists as a series of actions. Cultivating powers and capacities as collective positivities makes the Oakland Commune exist.

The Oakland Commune doesn’t grow by seducing public opinion in order to enlarge its membership. It grows by showing what it can do. The Oakland Commune can make Oscar Grant Plaza habitable for a large number of people; it can run a library; it can resist assault by the police; it can fight other factions in the 99% for the right to actively defend itself against state violence; it can retake the territory from which it had been evicted by the brutal force of the police; it can spark direct action by 0%ers as far away as New York City; it can declare a general strike.

The General Strike and the actions that will issue from it bear the potential to spread communization to other parts of the city, to enact many communes — within a re-imagined Oakland and beyond.

[[Show as slideshow]]

Capacity means the power to care for a territory — to replace the organs of capital and the state with our own flows.  The creation of positivities means learning how to do things so as to move beyond the need for government or private institutions. The commune does not need to co-operate with the city and state government to feed itself — they have proven their ability to feed themselves and the homeless. The commune does not need city workers to come in and clean Oscar Grant plaza, they have learned to keep it sanitary together.  The commune does not need the Oakland police department for safety — together they have learned how to create a zone of safety in downtown Oakland, even at night. The commune doesn’t need permission to take back the plaza from the chastened mayor or from outsider activists supposedly committed to non-violence — they have learned to reclaim the territory together despite interference from Jean Quan and counter-revolutionary elements within the 99%. The commune doesn’t need external mediators for its various factions to make decisions — they have exercised their decision-making power so successfully that they have created the conditions for a general strike, with participating unions joining in; without the commune, organized labor would not dare to strike. These activities prove the power of the commune.

We must not neglect our capacity to defend ourselves, our comrades and our territories. The Oakland Commune has started to develop these capacities. An internal dialectic between non-violent white activists and young men of color who face violence daily resulted in the dismantling of the fence around Frank Ogawa Plaza and the return of Oscar Grant Plaza. The passage from protest to resistance means not submitting to arrest or eviction notices. The will to resistance cannot be distinguished from the willingness to fight with police and with those who wield peace signs and arrogate to themselves the right to forbid combat. If some within the 99% tell us that the cops are our friends, and the police announce that they too are part of the 99%, then we must separate ourselves. Resistance does not mean passively submitting to the violence of capital’s attack dogs or acquiescing to arrest. As the communards have shown, resistance means struggle on all fronts.

The current series of occupations can be traced to anti-austerity activism in California two years ago. It should come as no surprise that the occupation would be re-imagined there again — in the form of a commune — and with intensified positivities.

Author’s Note: This text with images was originally presented at the Historical Materialism New York conference in May of 2011. Given the context, the text does not go into the sort of detail the matter really requires. A longer version is likely destined for an anthology of writings on contemporary tactics, strategy, and logistics of insurrectionary struggle within a context of financialized global capital, and it is in those terms that I would frame the talk, gloss or two points further, and underscore certain elements that may tend to recede into the background — while at the same time opening up the questions that are left unanswered herein.

The tactic in question is organized debt default. The major categories of personal debt are student loans, home mortgages, and “consumer” or credit card debt. Each of these categories presents different problems regarding organization — what does it mean to organize unemployed homeowners in default, students who have temporary jobs and an uncertain market future, and consumers whose wages are not keeping up with cost of living? Can these disparate groups be organized together? These matters must be addressed.

The strategy within which nests this the tactic is that of interfering with capital’s self-valorization, through which surplus value arising in the sphere of production is realized as profit in the sphere of circulation. The extended opening presents this historical development in which the valorization chains are increasingly attenuated, and suggests that globalization and financialization are complementary forms of this attenuation — spatial and temporal respectively — which should be understood as a unitary process expressed along two distinct axes. From this I suggest that, without abandoning a consideration of capital interruption from the two positions of production and circulation (that is, workerist and consumptionist perspectives) we might alternately view attacks on valorization from spatial and temporal perspectives. It is the latter that argues for the tactic of collective debt default, as debt is a scheme for realizing a profit in the future when capital can no longer valorize itself sufficiently in the present. However, here I must underscore what has dropped out of the reception to this text — the insistence that the temporal interruptions such as collective debt default are complements to spatial interruptions (strikes, sabotage, occupation), which must themselves be understood as tactics against valorization, even if they appear chaotic, opportunistic, or spontaneous, like the riot or sabotage. I neither suggest nor believe that temporal strategies have much power isolated from their complements, or cut off from an adequate logistical framework.

The logistics within which nest this strategy and this tactic include, significantly, those gestured toward all too briefly at the very end of the talk: what I call “collectives of withdrawal, or subtraction,” which is to say, social arrangements in which collective support can be provided against the individual disciplines that attend debt default. At a minimum this means providing food and shelter for those who can no longer earn money in the formal economy. More capaciously, it suggests the development of informal economies which depend less and less on the superflux of capital’s formal economies, but are able to sustain themselves without that suplus. If this logistical frame comes to look like a “dual power” approach, there is a reason for this. The tactic of collective debt default and the larger strategy of valorization interruption cannot themselves strike a blow fatal to capital. They will have some effects; they will wound, infuriate, and confuse the beast. But they will also compel, if pursued seriously, the development and expansion of non-capitalist zones, able to increasingly provide collective material life outside the real subsumption of capitalism’s lifeworld. Collective debt default implies communities that first exist within the pores of global capital, but which mean eventually to replace its organs with an entirely different metabolic system, and thus a different relationship to the totality.

_______________________

I have a rather minor goal in this talk, or at least it is a talk in a minor key. The major tone is that of Giovanni Arrighi, and as this is my first visit to Historical Materialism, I wanted mostly to remember and honor his thought — both alone and with Beverly Silver — which has been so important for me and so many others. I want to offer a couple thoughts on its place and time in the present terrain of antagonisms, and that will be that.

Happily, Arrighi’s signal text, The Long 20th Century, will not need to much summarizing in this venue, and I trust you’ll fill in the blank spaces I am compelled to leave. It is itself a reflection and recasting of the work of Fernand Braudel (and to a lesser degree Ernest Mandel), extending and intensifying the double periodicity of capitalist cycles of accumulation: the long centuries of each world-system-organizing regime and its hegemon, and within those, the leadership of sequential modes of capital.

This latter, intra-epochal motion contains the two most trenchant (and well-remarked) features of the account. One is distinctly Braudelian: that each cycle can be divided into three phases led successively by the powers of merchant, industrial, and finance capital, with the first phase being prologue, the second the grand flowering of the hegemon, and the last being the decline, when actual accumulation starts to fail and the struggle for shares of the diminishing surplus intensifies. The second feature is Arrighi’s own novel insight: that world-system hegemons share a particularly capitalist logic of empire, wherein one seizes territory to make money, rather than vice versa. In his formulation, capital’s inversion of C-M-C to M-C-M’ has a spatial analog in which T-M-T (territory to make money to take more territory) is inverted to M-T-M, whence arises the hegemons and their long centuries. As an important and last addition to this, Arrighi notes that the rise and fall of each hegemon can be understood as the complementary motions M-C and C-M (or M-T and T-M), material expansion followed by financial expansion, ending in signal and then terminal crisis.

Before I add my own small inflection or reorientation, or maybe it’s really just a research question, I want to set forth a couple striking meta-notes about Arrighi’s analysis and its place in intellectual history, which is to say its place in the political history of intellectual institutions. These suggest, I think, why the analysis is more timely than ever.

One is something like the argument’s proper place, its territorial logic within the disciplines. It is almost entirely a piece of historical economics, from an author with a doctorate in economics working in the tradition of the Annales School. And yet Giovanni once told me that it was more frequently assigned in Comparative Literature courses than in economics or history or political science or sociology, the department he found himself in at Johns Hopkins. Now why should this have been the case? The positive answer is that the book provides an almost uniquely powerful periodizing framework for thinking about national literatures, or the motion of imperial culture in general. But there is also a negative case, concerning the extent to which, in the wake of the systematic demarxification of the academy that defined the sixties and after, Marxian thought was increasingly herded into the winter pasture of the humanities, and particularly to the culturalist confines identified with the Frankfurt School.

My second meta-note regards the extent to which the book’s schema has served as an occasion for reanimating three clichéd critiques which, braided together, have been familarly used to bind Marxian thought in general. (I feel like there should be a word for “clichéd critiques” — clichtiques sounds like a cosmetic product, so I’ll use crichés.)

These three crichés are,
• First, that Arrighi’s globe-spanning six-century tale universalizes what is a particular positional story, thusly falling inattentive to local difference and the granularity of daily life across the globe, imputing an ontological consistency to the radical heterogeneity which is history itself; finally it explains too little.
• Second, that it is a totalizing account, swiftly arrogating all experience to a schematic logic, which basically can’t be true because it works too neatly to be anything but an imposition — a grand narrative par excellance; finally, it explains too much.
• Third, that it proposes an iron determinism — a historical chemin-de-fer — that even if it not quite promising an eternal return of the same, nonetheless unspools along an immutable spiral track, against which the willful struggles of a few antinomian folks here and there can have little or no diversionary force — and so finally explains rather than challenges: a theodicy of imperial capital.

Arrighi responded thoughtfully to these, especially the third, in the Postscript to the second edition. For the moment I note only that these crichés have long been leveled against Marx’s critique of political economy in general, from multiple positions, like the attacks on various fortifications of the city during the time of the Commune — but as 140 years ago, in some sense the great counter-revolutionary coup was enabled from within. In place of the well-heeled citoyens of Passy who gave passage to the Versaillaise, it would be the post-structuralist citizens of the left who allowed for the most sustained and ambitious attack on the allegedly universalizing, totalizing and deterministic Marx.

Thus we can say that Arrighi’s placement in intellectual history is exemplary of the situation of Marxian thought and its dynamics in general, over the last four decades. But we presently find ourselves in a changed situation. The magnetism of a cultural Marxism, and the disciplining super-nuance of post-structuralism — both already on the wane as of the millennium — have been dealt rather decisive blows by global economic catastrophe, which has returned the problematics of political economy, of historical materialism in its strong form, and of the dialectic of value theory and crisis theory, to the main of thought — as signaled by the rediscovery of Marx as a significant or ominous figure in bourgeois circles, and the reanimation of debates of communism, the communist hypothesis, the insurrectionary ultraleft, and so on.

It is in some sense exactly the matter of time, of time and the present, or of time that is and isn’t present, that I want to revisit Arrighi’s periodizing hypotheses. That is, I want to think about them in terms of time. I have a local and a global reason for doing so, or maybe a kernel and a currency.

The former is that my reading of value theory proposes that the sphere of production, or value, is a regime oriented by time, while the sphere of circulation or price is a regime oriented by space. I actually mean something relatively simple by this: that value is congealed Socially Necessary Labor Time rather than labor or labor power itself — this is the critical distinction between Marx’s and Ricardo’s value theories — while circulation is a spatial exchange, as money and commodity swap places. This can be thought about in quite metaphysical ways and at great length, but this is neither time nor place. The great shorthand for this is the remark in the Grundrisse: “This locational movement—the bringing of the product to the market, which is a necessary condition of its circulation, except when the point of production is itself a market –could more precisely be regarded as the transformation of the product into a commodity.”

The transformation of value to price — that is, the process of exploitation, of surplus value extraction and realization as profit — can be understood as the compelled exchange of incommensurates, of the exchange of time for space. Here we must remark — if only it could be for the last time! — that the compelled exchangeability of the market is not the sign of some totalizing discourse, but the signature of capital itself, subjecting every single thing and process to the discipline of equivalence, a signature monogrammed across the globe as M-C-M.

I might add that this is not actually a contrary reading to that of the Temporal Single Solution Interpretation, I believe, but a different register in which to frame the same situation; it is exactly the restoration of adequate temporality that distinguishes Kliman et al’s subtle analysis. One further implication is that it is instructive but inadequate to declare a given era as dominated by time or by space, as various Marxian thinkers have proposed; the question is rightly about a given era’s orientation toward the two, its atunement of one to the other, and status of their transformation. And it is this that links value theory to crisis theory and to our present moment, since we can think of crisis as arising both when value production declines and when various operations to paper over that fact with fictitious capital cease functioning.

Thus it is toward time that I wish to reorient Arrighi’s account, not as a correction but simply as another way of thinking about things. It is fairly straightforward. One might conceive of the first phase of a cycle of accumulation as turned toward the past: this period, always overlapping with the preceding cycle, busies itself with seizing and reorganizing the markets, routes and relations of that departing age. Its predilection for dressing itself in the robes of previous epochs and empires, as a strategy to realize itself in a new present, is well-noticed by Marx and Benjamin among others.

Having reformulated and shrugged off the past, the second or high period of empire might be understood as turned toward the present, internalizing new markets and subjecting new territories to the necessary labor regime: a period of material expansion and relatively unproblematic value extraction in which thinkers and thoughts of transition fade into the background, and history’s sundial seems to pause at the permanent noon of power. And the third phase, that of decline and financial expansion, might properly be understood as turned toward the future.

This is true in the realm of thought and even of feeling: social life is increasingly dominated by anxieties regarding what might happen next, endless proclamations of “the end” of this and that, coupled with concerns regarding competing hegemons and increasingly hysterical disavowals of the same — what we might call the dialectic of China and the Project for a New American Century, or the competing delusions of renewed millenarism and climate-change-denial.

This futurizing turn also becomes fundamental at the stratum of political economy, defining the struggles for accumulation, profit, and class power. Here I pose my research question, which I will do little to answer today: per Arrighi’s territorializing of the double motion of M-C and C-M into the accumulation modes of Money-Territory and Territory-Money, might we consider a temporal logic and think of these motions as Money-Time and Time-Money? Is there something to be gained from that thought experiment? I am not entirely sure, though it does seem to me that it throws into clearer relief the fate of the value form in the era of finance-led capital.

Alongside that more structural question, I want to attend to the matter of attentuation. The time-space transformation of value necessarily present in exploitation/valorization becomes ever more attenuated via the hegemony of credit instruments, which should always be understood as the extension of the distance between value and price. Price is given in the present for value; socially necessary labor time — let us also call this immiseration, just for clarity’s sake — promised later. The term mortgage, being the most perfect example of this time-for-space swap, rises to the fore. Student and household loans follow close behind; as many of you will know, the former has just surpassed the latter and in the next couple of years we will reach the plateau of one trillion in outstanding student loans.

This happens at the level of the state as well, evidently enough. Globalization, so often described as a spatial regime — it’s in the name, after all — must in these terms be understood equally as a temporal regime, as the separation and alienation of the instants and elements of the value transformation in time as much as space, and in some moments even more so. Financialization may be a casino, but it is at least as accurate to say that it is a kind of time travel. Or at least a kind of fortune-telling, in which debt fixes the futures of its subjects, for certain small concessions in the present. The French phrase for fortune-telling, I cannot help but note, is “bonne-aventure” — as in the Bonaventure Hotel where Fredric Jameson realized the actuality of postmodernism, the cultural logic of late capital. It turns out to be the logic of bonne-aventure itself — and the problem of futurization, of credit and debt, has not waned but intensified.

I say this not because it is a revelation, but because it is a zone of conflict — literal class conflict — and I wish to end on the matter of strategy and tactics, by way of the autonomist hypothesis. I will admit I have considerable skepticism about the “becoming immaterial of labor” and all its predicates. Its great contribution, associated with Dalla Costa, Fortunati, and Federici, is surely the rethinking of the situation of domestic and reproductive labor of all kinds, and particularly so-called “woman’s work,” – as and in relation to exploitation –; this has offered vital insights into the historical and necessary relation between capitalist value production and brutal gender inequality.

At the same time, the autonomist proposals to rethink value production as arising from other sources than the productive economy, in light of the decreased distinction between intellectual and manual labor; the critique of an alleged Marxian ontology of presence levied by Antonio Negri (as well as Jacques Derrida); the forwarding of a new circuit of value production that, per Christian Marazzi, leaves behind any nostalgia for “a time before labor became linguistic” — these positions, it seems to me, have been rendered inoperative in the clear light of the current economic catatsrophe, which is irreducibly one of real, old-fashioned, nostalgia-dipped value asserting itself savagely.

But there is something unmistaken in this, let us say, Negrian mistake. I think that the phenomemon indexed by the autonomist view is precisely the space-time attentuation of the valorization process as it currently stands — so attenuated that it seems immaterial, like the troposphere, or fire.

If labor has been in some regard dematerialized in the US, in the OECD nations, it has been unequally rematerialized elsewhere: Haitian sneaker mills and Mexican maquiladoras and Foxconn factories in the midst of migrating from China to Brazil. These locations are the places, one might say, for a politics of place: the strike, most evidently, and sabotage and blockage. But if capital’s great defensive achievement of late modernity has been to remove itself from its home counties, as it were, to attenuate itself such that it is no longer clear where to attack — if there is no clear place of struggle — there is nonetheless a time of struggle, a politics of time, as this particular temporal regime of capital demands.

What does it mean, per the title of the X-Files movie, to fight the future? Not in some abstract sense, but as an actual arena of class struggle, an interruption of the circuits of value in time? This can only designate the arena of credit and debt itself. The circulation of credit and debt is, for all its dematerialized technologies, nonetheless a material process; it is not inoculated against interruptions of its flows. And it is here — here is the wrong word, of course, but it is hard to say now, for the reasons that have been enumerated — that class struggle must happen in the home counties. The class is not that of Multitude, of dematerialized labor, but is the class of debt — and the politics of time, I think this is an inevitable conclusion, is that of debt default. Debt default — and perhaps this is my only claim — is the temporal complement to the specific or general strike, and is the route of solidarity with material labor, with the place of exploitation.

But this does not make it an easy solution. The disciplining mechanisms of debt are in many ways both invisible and individualized: garnishing of wages, the increasing disciplines imposed by bad credit, and so forth. Any organizing effort must account for these reactions — which is to say, the politics of debt default as interruptive attack imply a correlated set of organizing practices based on the development of collectives of withdrawal, or subtraction, able to sustain what I would like to call not exactly the default lifestyle but perhaps the default milieu. And it is with this correlation of debt default as economic antagonism, and collectives of subtraction, that I think we can see a logic for solidarity between traditional Marxian analysis and those of certain anarchist and ultraleft tendencies — but this I must leave for the next conversation.

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 virtually nothing from the deal.

source: Norton and Ariely, pdf here

I would draw two conclusions from this psychological study. The first is that the United States is ripe (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 site — are not doing our job. We 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, “Eat the Rich!” 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, regular 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!

—Introduction by Milad Faraz and Jaleh Mansoor

_____________

To get here you’d witness the twisted distribution of wealth and signs of epidemic of addiction to opium which are some of the most visible marks of development of this metropolis. Young mothers with babies on their shoulder holding their hand out, old men selling washing clothes, and young boys selling flowers, their charm, innocence and haunting gaze are features of many intersections of this city. Those sober enough to walk navigate between traffic and knock on windows of imported luxury vehicles with market price of well over three times their equivalent in the US import market – “support of national auto industry”. Not principally opposed to such a policy, you might wonder about the threefold price of the domestically produced Nissan or alternatively you might wonder how this price has not deterred a long wait-list to acquire one, nor has it allowed the manufacturer to pay millions of dollars it owes to the national bank.

Incongruity here appears as the first principle. “Hichi to in mamlekat hesab ketab nadare,” literally: “nothing in this country is subject to any accounting or book-keeping” has been a familiar turn of phrase since at least the end of the war (Iran-Iraq war 1980-1988). Its constant repetition expresses the uneasy filiations symptomatic of this city’s topography. Not limited to the realm of the visible, it perhaps best expresses the everyday discontent symptomatic of my parents’ generation. Inheritor’s of the great Iranian modernization project under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944), this generation was to be thrown into and give rise to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In their constant and repetitive gestures of unease, the generation of the Revolution expresses its ambivalent relationship to this event and the historical discontents it “failed” to address. But this cliché continues to mark contemporary Iranian life and its historical conditions of possibility – or impossibility. Similar feelings – that it will pass – have certainly extended to my generation: those of us who grew up during the war and remember the sound of ajir-e ghermez (“Red Siren”) of air-raids, and are marked by loss, moves and separations – and perhaps some envy and guilt. Despite the Revolution, the end of the war, and even despite the emergence of facebook connections, historical ties are not easy to de-friend. They constitute the condition of possibility of different Iranian regimes and continue to produce an uneasy and impatient relation to the values celebrated during the Revolution and the war. Thanks to the post-war instrumentalization of these values by and for the State, the third generation of the revolution now in their teen and early twenties has an ambivalent relation to any value. Where moral values have their designated State organized security force and check points, all too often open to abuse and bribery, value as such has become a cliché.

As I am writing these lines and while my cell-phone text message inbox is filled with jokes whose butt is the Islamic State and probably qualify for “Conspiring Against the State”, a charge on an unparalleled rise over the last two years, I get an auto-generated text message from the national provider of phone service telling me who is leading tomorrow’s Friday Prayers in Tehran. All other Iranian cell subscribers have received a similar message. “Text-the-Imam” is new! It wasn’t around two years ago, when precisely a week after the June 2009 presidential election during Tehran’s Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian Supreme Leader, endorsed the hastily announced election results declaring Mahmood Ahmadinejad as the rightfully elected president. More importantly on that day, however, Khamenei’s grand stand rendered discontent and mistrust of millions of Iranian with the voting result and procedures unjustified and subject to violent suppression of State’s legal and extra-legal security apparatus. Exuberant, highly disciplined, and for the most part self-organized street mobilizations prior to the elections had promised a high turnout. According to the official results the voter turnout was at 85%. Thus, the supreme leader’s sermon for the faithful that Friday started with a celebratory and congratulatory note. The high turnout, surpassing all Iranian elections except the vote shortly after the Revolution marking the birth of the “Islamic Republic” (IR), was to be framed as the expression of the commitment of the third generations of the Revolution to the “nezam moghadase jomhoriye eslami” (“The holy system of Islamic Republic”).  “This is no small achievement”, Khamenei declared; while the commitment to the Revolution and the war by earlier generations was partially driven by emotions generated by these respective events, the new generation, according to Khamenei, demonstrated commitments, responsibility and enthusiasm without the influence of such spirits. Apparently it was time for Iranian politics to be secularized and for Khameni’s sovereign judgment to end the disruptive presence of the multitude.

Khamenei’s betrayal of the spirit of the Revolution and the war is telling. His framing was a direct counter to the concerns that Mir Housein Mossavi had offered for re-emerging in the political scene after 20 years of absence. An Islamic revolutionary with leftist commitments and sensibilities, Mousavi had led the Iranian government as the (last) prime minster during the eight long years of the war. Dubbed “Imam’s Prime Minster”, Mousavi was close to Ayatollah Khomeni, the founding leader of the Islamic Republic who publically and politically favored him over Khomeini, the president at the time. Mousavi had declared he has sensed danger with the direction of the Islamic Republic and took the incumbent president Ahmadinejad – his style, rhetoric and policies – as symptoms of a divergence from the ideals of the Revolution. According to Mousavi foreign intervention, disintegration along ethnic lines and reduction of religion to the State’s doctrine were among such rising threats. (These remain concerns of many observant Iranians today.) Mousavi offered his faithfulness to the Revolution and the “shahid” (martyrs and witnesses) of the war as the ethical and motivational grounds of his political intervention in order to address such threats. Various critics with liberal and “forward looking” sensibilities voiced concerns over such a “return” to the Revolution and its principles. Even Mohsen Rezaee, a socially conservative and economically liberal candidate close to the establishment challenged Mousavi on these grounds. Taking the liberal orientation of IR’s post war economic policy as an undisputed principle, Rezaee questioned Mousavi’s affinity for interventionist and State-centered economic policies which he had successfully pursued during the war in one of the telling – albeit neglected – televised debates. However, Mousavi’s success in generating wide support and revolutionary mobilization across generational and political divides quenched criticism of such a “return to principles.” The spirit, once again, overshadowed “the debate”.

The struggle over the framing of contemporary Iranian political struggles signals the necessity of presenting a more historical view of the relations of various forces and demonstrates the significance of the history and memory of the Revolution and the war in making sense of the current situation. The streets of Tehran, and other Iranian cities, are not only the grounds of uneven development, income disparities and epidemic of addictions; neither only a “place of business and commute, subject to infiltration of agitators and terrorist”, as Khamenei characterized them in that June Friday in order to justify the suppression of mass-mobilization against the elections. These streets – and its inhabitants – are marked by various images and ideals of the Revolution and the war which despite State’s best effort to appropriate them, retain an element beyond such an instrumentalization. They are animated by the ghosts of the Revolution and the ever-presence of the shahids; presences that are made manifest in moments of disruption and revolutionary mobilization similar to those after the June election. Nothing is more telling of such a presence than protester’s chant articulating the “real basijis” by invoking emblematic shahids of the war, Hemat and Bakeri, against the government’s extra-legal security force, also known as the basij which was mobilized extensively after Khamenei’s sermon in order to violently crush the peaceful protesters. Despite the success of government’s techniques in suppression of the mass-mobilization, which are now reportedly being exported to suppress Syrian protests, the ability of the protest movement and its domestic leaders to reclaim and mobilize this presence has been one of its most significant achievements and has served as a significant blow to the IR’s ruling elite’s claim to sovereignty. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic an alternative Islamic revolutionary account of the Revolution and the war that has not been appropriated to conserve and extend the ruling establishment has found popular expression in what has emerged as the “Green Movement”. Although the Green Movement cannot be reduced to an Islamic revolutionary movement, a significant danger to it is its short-sighted liberal and secularist renderings which forfeits the history of Revolution and the war to the ruling establishment and thus loses much ground for political intervention.

State’s designation and regulation of proper religiosity and instrumentalization of religion for the purpose of articulation of government and governance over the course of the Islamic Republic has put limits on public and political imagination of religion within contemporary Iranian society. Despite Shia Islam’s non-Statist and revolutionary characteristics, demonstrated in movement against British Imperial collusion with the Iranian monarchy late nineteenth century (Tobacco Protest, 1880) and then again mid twentieth century (nationalization of Oil), or in the 1979 Islamic Revolution itself, Iranian contemporary political movements critical of the State are particularly impatient in hearing religious critiques and claims against the State.  For example, the religious elements within The Green Movement appear on the defensive. In light of the exclusivist claim of the Islamic Republic on Islam, over the course of IR and increasingly after the war, religion has been valorized as an ideological construction and a divisive instrument of rule. A political figure of the Islamic Republic who is now part of the opposition camp expressed that Islam could provide the basis for articulation of values such autonomy, freedom, and Islamic-republicanism – values expressed in the most celebrated slogan of the 1979 Revolution – she nonetheless expressed doubts about the political possibility of Islamic claims upon the State today. [1]  Her concerns reflect the conditions of instrumentalization of religion. To the extent that such values, or articulation of rights, for example, are not based on traditionally liberal economic relations, religious articulation of such values have acquired significance in Iranian modern history. Furthermore, understanding political articulation of Shia Islam is significant because despite all the secular and secularizing features of the Islamic Republic, which are characteristic of the disciplinary regimes of modern nation-states, IR’s claim to sovereignty rests on a non-secular, theological basis. Dominant understanding of sovereignty and secularism, driven from history of Christian secularization that reconcile sovereignty of the modern State with doctrine of secularism by making religion a private affair, are inadequate to understand – and counter – sovereignty of the Iranian State. In the absence of economic basis for political rights, such as those articulated within liberal-democratic frameworks, it appears that secularist political claims upon the State in Iran rest on unstable grounds.

I just got another text. This time from Nike: a 30% Off Sale just started. I don’t think there is an Iranian do-not-text list –yet.

The end of the Iran-Iraq war (1988) brought about what is known as the “Reconstruction Era” under the presidency of the Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. By then, the left leaning Islamists, including Mousavi who had centrally planned the economic and military affairs of the State since the inception of the IR appeared stale. During this time, marked by collusion of Iran’s neighbors with the US and European powers on the one hand, and Khomeni and his allies on the other, the structures and direction of the emerging regime was solidified and alternative visions of the Revolution, including those of the independent and the secular left, were successfully and violently eliminated by the State. The monotony which was solidified by this political silence imposed by the
war still haunts and immobilizes Iranian politics. The Green Movement today, for example, suffers from the absence of analytical and political force of the left that was eliminated during this time. Moreover, the emerging articulation of the Revolution and narrative of the war, as well as what was to constitute “Islam”, were accounts only subservient to the Islamic Republic. Alternative narratives, which are necessary for cultural and political identification and mobilization, have been severely limited; it is as if masses of Iranians who do not identify with the regime are denied their history and a basis for social and political existence.

The limited project of liberalization, under the title of “privatization” which has been unfolding since the “Reconstruction Era” continues to be unchallenged and under-theorized. With the elimination of the left’s ability to articulate—and resist—the unfolding domestic privatization within a global framework of imperial capitalism, space for critical analysis of the State was also severely limited. The State reliance on oil revenues has been the basis for its political unaccountability and elimination of all critical political and economic institutions and organizations. Not surprisingly, and symptomatic to rentier States, this liberal economic trend, including privatization of government services, and a focus on short-term investment and heavy imports of manufactured goods, has been limited to particular political circles and is marked by a high degree of corruption. During Rafsanjani, privatization of government service started by encouraging government officials to become investors and business owners in the emerging private sector. Government officials’ control of government contracts has been a mark of the privatization trend ever since its inception.  Even though the ensuing corruption has been the basis of claims of the two later governments, including Ahmadinejad who successfully ran against the corrupt legacy of Rafsanjani’s period, based on the same economical foundation, the system continues to reproduce itself. Challenging the one group of political economic elite, Ahmadinejad has economically and politically mobilized the State security apparatus during his presidency. Today, the security apparatus is deeply involved in economic and political activity. High ranking members of the armed forces frequently assume otherwise civil positions within the regime. Despite political criticism of such militarization of economic and civil affairs, the absence of the intellectual and political force of the left, leaves this state of the affairs conceptually and structurally unchallenged. In the absence of resistance to this singular economic paradigm, control over capital accumulation and distribution passes hands among different powerful actors but remains fundamentally unchallenged.

It is true that the three post war government of Rafsanjani, Khatami and Ahmadinejad have had different allegiances and constituencies and significant differences. For example, despite the political suppression of the last two years, the “Reform Era’s” focuses on civil rights and political and social freedoms on the one hand and normalization of foreign relations on the other, has had significant and lasting impact on the Iranian political discourse. The demands and ideals of the Green Movement are unimaginable without the legacy of the “unsuccessful” reforms. Alternatively, the threat of foreign intervention during the first years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency and the mismanagement of the country’s rightful claim to nuclear energy are unimaginable within the two earlier governments. Furthermore, the current militarization of Iranian economy and politics might structurally alter the system. However, close attention to these changes as well as articulation of resistance to enduring historical and economic trends are severely limited in contemporary political landscape. Such a limitation is manifested in the absence of clear political-economical orientation of the Green Movement. To say this is not to oversee the achievement of the emergence of the 2009 mobilization that subsumed political and economical differences in its oppositional stance against the government. It is, however, to pay attention to the limitation of a movement that is articulated in purely reactive terms. If the Green Movement is to address the economic disparities which are the target of Ahmadinejad’s deceptive rhetoric, it needs to be able to address the plight of masses of poor Iranians and articulate a political-economical vision of its own.

The picture that emerges from this description of Iranian political landscape and the challenges of the Green Movement is a pessimistic one. History, it appears, continues to engender and crush aspirations and hopes of generations of Iranians. In the space of betrayal of the Revolution, revolution is easy to betray. Where loss, sacrifice and national mobilization become the instrument of State making and political domination, struggle too, is easy to betray. Contemporary Iranian political life, stuck within conserving and calculative cacophony of global capitalism, empire, and its reactionary and repressive local compliment, acquires a melancholic, still, quality. However, it is the confrontation with this political and existential suspension that constitutes the significance of June 2009 mass mobilization. With a simple claim to their vote, ordinary Iranians disrupted this suspension and claimed their social and political existence. In doing so, they have enabled the emergence of alternative accounts of their history and engendered a multi-faceted social movement that has been able to address long lasting divisions brought about by the divisive and traumatic history of the Islamic Republic.  Addressing the shortcomings that I have recounted earlier, particularly the plight of economically disenfranchised masses is only possible by inhabiting the lively space of such a movement.

It is not easy to remain faithful to the disruptive quality constitutive of the Green Movement – and beyond Iran, of the “Arab Spring” – when ordinary citizens begin to experience imprisonment, pain, torture, and death. In our rush to celebrate the achievements and prospects of such movements or to offer an analysis, we betray coming to terms with the singularity of the confrontation with pain and destruction as well as the practices and desires animated in such a confrontation. Shortsighted celebration of the self-serving individual, endemic to liberal and liberal-democratic articulations, is incapable of reckoning such queer feelings and desires constitutive of modern subjectivity. Secularist sensibilities prevent a coming to terms with imaginative and affective practices that are animated across the resistance movements in the Middle East today.  It is also not easy to accept that the Green Movement and alike themselves emerge and cohere by the way of instrumentalization of the actions of ordinary individuals toward destruction. In order to remain faithful to this constitutive quality and thus to the possibility of a movement, however, it is imperative to bear witness to these acts in their singularity. It is this singularity that expresses rejection of a suspended life that appears historical in the modern Middle East. In order to understand the emergence of this singularity, we need to reckon with the historical particularities of the Green Movement—their political and theological imaginary as well as their affective and bodily sensibilities.

Before singular actions of ordinary Iranians and citizens across the Middle East are instrumentalized in the name of “democracy” or “human rights”, they are a confrontation with a falsified life saturated and bored with cliché.  If such ideals, flags of imperial ventures and neocolonial wars, are to acquire any meaning beyond their instrumental renditions, it is in the singularity of actions that resist reduction to any calculus, even that of democratic, human rights, movements. Reckoning with this singularity requires those looking from the outside to come to terms with limits of their understanding and imagination – and thus engage in an act of imagining themselves. To bear witness to transformation expressed in the Green Movement and other movements in the Middle East requires a transformation of vision. To understand liberation as articulated in these movements we need to reckon with the prophetic gesture that unphased by death and destruction engenders an image of life and community beyond instrumentalization. Inhabiting the articulation of life and a community at the margins of death, although not easy, appears as the only space from which a new departure can emerge. However pessimistic of this departure, this is the call of many in Iran and across the Middle East who remind us of a life worthy of its name.

 An introduction to Cara Baldwin’s contribution, they are several. At the end of April, when Cara was compiling links related to a situation in which Facebook shut down the pages of dozens of anti cuts groups in the UK, I invited her to use the platform of CONTENTS (at that point more of an idea than a platform) as a tool to organize and make public this research. It seemed to be another instance (after Wikileaks and then the government imposed internet cutoff in Egypt during the revolution) of power swiftly and decisively intervening in the infrastructure that supported a certain type of horizontal organizing or dissemination. Although her contribution has evolved into a reflection on horizontality and more generally the metaphors with which we imagine our collective formations, I still think these questions among others are lurking within Cara’s text and selections – what happens when horizontality occupies a vertical landscape? or the reverse? how do we manage at the intersection of these ways of thinking and living, what new languages and subjectivities are to be articulated here? -SD

CONTENTS #2: they are several.

Cara Baldwin

Cara Baldwin is an artist, writer, researcher and theorist whose work focuses on art practice, public art, and intersections of cultural production and political organizing.