UFPJ in NYC 4/29

against torture: 4/29 protest
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

Organizers estimate the turn out from Saturday's march at 350,000. This seems right to me. The best part was having a view of about 30-40 blocks of Bway and having it be covered by the march. Paul liked the way folks were hanging out on their fire-escapes, a guy with an electric guitar, a woman and a little girl with a rainbow flag blowing some kind of gourd horns. It also seemed an opportunity for folks who didn't march to talk about the war, the administration, folks in stores on just on the sidewalks. It was almost like little instances of something like a public sphere appearing like a grimace or glimmer within the commercially overrun everyday.

We got in with a group of antitorture folks with this guy in a cage. We bought their tshirts which added a couple of bodies to the orange cadre following the cage. I gotta admit, though, there are some chants I absolutely cannot say--I find them false: "the people united will never be defeated" and "this is what democracy looks like."

The end of the march seemed rather lame--but maybe folks there with groups found it a helpful opportunity for meeting and organizing. Basically, there were different tents set up from different groups with their information. The space seemed cramped, though, too small for several hundred thousand people. A woman in a shop told Paul that this ending is much better than the last one at a big protest: the protesters were rounded up into pens and arrested if they left. So, there has been improvement.

Comments

[Anthony Paul Smith]

""this is what democracy looks like.""

But isn't it? Not what democracy is (for that is still 'to-come'), but that assemblage of bodies in one space, marking a decision, points towards it. It looks like it to me anyway. Protests are so liturgical, aren't they?

[pebird]

I agree that "the people united will never be defeated" is a 'little' stale - it's one of those relics from the 60's that won't go away.

[Jodi]

If this is what democracy looks like, then one has conceded in advance that democracy is not a vehicle for governance and that the people have no responsibilities. In fact, it is difficult to see how democracy is different from authoritarianism insofar as people are in the streets complaining about something (which will remain vague, which was not something they initiated, and which they will not form the solution to). In a way, I was worried (and I guess remain) that protests actually legitimize Bush insofar 'well, we are still democratic.'

PEBird--the 60s stuff as well as something else, namely, the positing of a unity out of a plurality.

[McKenzie Wark]

Didn't see you there, but then it was quite a crowd, wasn't it? The chant around me was a rhyme that ended with "working people have no nation." Good thing Todd Gitlin was no where in sight!

[Anthony Paul Smith]

Jodi,

I fail to see how it looks anything like authoritarianism (more?), but that withstanding:
It looks like democracy because the people are participating in the governing itself. I'm thinking here of the documentary by the same name This Is What Democracy Looks Like where the people stopped the WTO from meeting. That is to say, as they chanted this slogan, they took a situation which was truly ungovernable and authoritarian and demanded that they govern it! It may not have been all that well organized and I guess people were complaining, but it looked more like democracy than a bunch of people lining up outside of city hall to vote for Brand A or B.

But I guess I'm talking about a protest that was direct action and you're talking a protest that is simply a way of being heard and, yes, those are two different things where that phrase would mean two very different things.

[Tim]

I think the "This is what democracy looks like" slogan made an awful lot more sense at Seattle and similar protests than it would on recent anti-war protests. Not only were the former attempts to directly have a political effect (rather than a moralistic expression of feelings - though I suppose they were that, too), they were collectively organized by the participants, rather than negotiated in advance between the state and movement leaders.

The most jaring use of the slogan I've heard was at the Make Poverty History march in Edinburgh, where people chanted it while walking between a line of steel fences set up by the police, on a demonstration enthusiastically endorsed by the government it was nominally protesting against. Still, I suppose they have a point - that is what bourgeois democracy looks like.

[Jodi]

Anthony--I say like authoritarianism because people can be in the streets under all sorts of different constitutional arrangements; differently, put, there is nothing about being in the streets particular to democracy. I'm familiar with the Seattle film you mention. But, I wonder: were the people really participating in governing? It doesn't seem so to me.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

"But, I wonder: were the people really participating in governing? It doesn't seem so to me."

What do you mean by governing? Does insurrection/autonomous governments under siege look like governing to you?

[Jodi]

The Bush regime doesn't govern either. I would say that goverance comes after insurrection, or after revolution, its the work of making things run, making decision, carrying out policies, all the boring stuff linked to law and policy. Much if not most of politics has little to do with governance--rather it's the struggle to get to govern.

[Jodi]

The Bush regime doesn't govern either. I would say that goverance comes after insurrection, or after revolution, its the work of making things run, making decision, carrying out policies, all the boring stuff linked to law and policy. Much if not most of politics has little to do with governance--rather it's the struggle to get to govern.

[Richard S. (Commie Curmudgeon)]

I must agree with Anthony Paul Smith that "This is What Democracy Looks Like" made a lot more sense during the peak of the "anti-globalization" demos, especially in the "direct action" red zones. (More sense, I should add, than at the usual UFPJ or anti-war demo that I know of...since I wasn't at the latest.)

I missed the demo in Seattle on November 30 of 2000 (though I did help to organize a sad little "solidarity" rally in New York City that day), but I was at the April 16-17, 2000 demos in Washington, DC and at the anti-FTAA/Summit of the Americas demos in Quebec City from about April 19 to April 22, 2001. In those demos, people (i.e., we) democratically took over the streets and took them, in some cases, at least, on our own terms. That is, created a space beyond that which had been pre-"allowed" by the state, and we attempted, at least (albeit with limited success) to democratically sabotage meetings that were definitely undemocratic. So, the people were having their say, up to a point.

The anti-WEF demos in New York City in February 2002 were a little different. Here, too, people were shouting "This is what democracy looks like!" But we were walking in a march penned in by an overwhelming force of police, and we were repeatedly attacked by the police even though there was little or no visible violation by demonstrators of the strictest limits set by the state in advance. (The only violation that I saw was that some people were wearing masks...and many didn't even know the details of our ridiculous "mask law.")

Once the big "anti-war" demos started happening a year later, that chant did seem like a joke to me. Anyone who could have stuck with that chant during those cramped, passive, penned-in "cattle strolls" must not have understood why the chant had come about in the first place.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
Those aren't my favorite chants ever either (not sure what is, maybe "globalize the intifada"). To devil's advocate, though, if one takes the chant and its context seriously as a concept then it might be just that you have a different concept of democracy. One could sort of stretch Ranciere a bit and say democracy is the act of the part of no part against the count/account that holds them as no part. That seems to me be a fair statement of the May Day events, and is precisely not a version of democracy as governance.
best,
Nate