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Occupied Real Estate

Occupied Real Estate from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

 

IMF report: Global economy looks grim for 2012 - The Washington Post

The world economy is slowing sharply, and the euro region headed for recession this year, the International Monetary Fund predicted Tuesday in a bleak update of global conditions.

Overall, the world economy is expected to expand 3.25 percent in 2012 -- down from the 4 percent projected by the IMF in the fall.

via www.washingtonpost.com

Doug Henwood in Southern California

Two talks in Southern California later this week (actually two versions of the same talk, “Reflections on the Current Disorder,” a title cribbed from William F. Buckley). Both are free and open to the public.

Wednesday, January 25, 3:30–5:00 PM
University of California–Riverside
CHASS INTS 1113

Thursday, January 26, 4:30–6:00 PM
University of California–Irvine
1030 Humanities Gateway

 

Much Ado About Nothing (Response to 0%)

Guest post by Paul Passavant: a critique of 0% by Louis-Georges Schwartz. 

First there was withdrawal from the state form.  The state represses us.  It alienates us by re-presenting innummerable singularities and differences as one (state).  It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us.  But it is not us.

Next there was withdrawal from the people form.  The people represses us.  It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (party).  It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us.  But it is not us.

Then there was withdrawal from the party form.  The party represses us.  It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (party).  It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us.  But it is not us.

Now there is withdrawal from the movement form.  The movement represses us.  It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (movement).  It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us.  But it is not us.

Now there is withdrawal from us form.  The us represses us.  It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (us).  It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us.  But it is not us.

There is even a withdrawal from the count form.  The count represses us.  It alienates us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one (us).  It re-presents that which is other to us back to us as if it were us.  But it is not us.  We don’t count.  We don’t want to count.  We should not count.

We should withdraw from words form, from forming words. Withdraw words.  Words repress us.  They alienate us by re-presenting innumerable singularities and differences as one word or another.  And you know where that could lead.  Back to us.  Words re-present that which is other to us back to us as if they were us.  But they are not us.  We don’t count.  We don’t want to count.  We should not count.

We should be zero.

We should be a sound truck.  Forceful waves that vibrate so excessively that they hurt indiscriminately.

Isn’t that bad, to hurt indiscriminately?

No.  Only indiscrimination withdraws from the movement form. 

Isn’t excessive sound the exact opposite of the infinity of absence denoted by zero?

Withdraw from logical relation.  Logical relation represses us.  It alienates us by, well, relation.  And you know where that could lead.  Back to the meaningful use of words, back to the possibility of us.  Away from indiscrimination.  Remember: we don’t count.  We don’t want to count.  We are torturous sound.  We are zero.  Without relation.  Nonsense.  To be sensible opens the way for capture. Withdraw from sense.  Be nonsense.  Zero sense.

Only zero eludes capture.

Sokal had it right.  

Celebrate homonymy.  No, withdraw from even homonymy. It uses words. Words repress. Us. And you know where words can lead.

Communicate communicativity.  Communicate nothing.  Communication that withdraws from communicating content. From truth.  From political position.

Communicate… whatever.

Communication sharing nothing other than the common denominator of communicability.

Withdraw from common denominators.

Do it loudly.

Like the sound truck that tortures.

Occupy zero.

Occupy represses us.

Be zero.

Being represses us.

Zero.

Except noise.

More noise.  Louder noise.  Indiscriminate noise.  Torturous noise.

Like a bad joke: Like Sokal.

Mayors report: US cities remain mired in slump

Less than 10 percent of US metropolitan areas have seen the job market recover to pre-recession levels, and nearly one quarter of these urban areas will not see such a recovery for at least five years, according to a report released Wednesday by the US Conference of Mayors.

Those areas facing the most protracted recovery (or, more likely, a renewed downward plunge) include most of the metropolitan areas in California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida, the centers of the housing market collapse, and the industrial states of Michigan and Ohio.

Among the biggest metropolitan areas, Atlanta showed the poorest recovery, regaining only 19.5 percent of the jobs lost since the 2008 financial crash, with Detroit second worst at 20.4 percent. This was followed by Los Angeles at 20.7 percent and the San Francisco Bay Area at 26.7 percent.

Phoenix recovered 29.1 percent of the jobs lost since 2008, Chicago 29.7 percent, Miami 30.7 percent, Philadelphia 40.8 percent, Seattle 49.3 percent, New York City and Minneapolis-St. Paul 54.2 percent each, and Boston 92.1 percent. Dallas, Houston and Washington DC were the only metropolitan areas among the 15 largest to report employment higher today than in 2008.

The report prepared by IHS Global Insight for the group, which includes the mayors of 363 US cities, found economic growth of only 1.3 percent in 2011 and barely 2 percent this year, figures too low to make any significant reduction in urban unemployment.

High unemployment is combined with falling real wages: the mayors’ report found that median real income for US households in 2010 was $49,455, a decline of 7.1 percent over the decade since 1999, when median household income was $53,252.

While conducted within the framework of official economic statistics that claim the recession was “over” in June 2009, the report to the mayors’ group underscored the dire conditions facing working people in metropolitan areas that together comprise the vast majority of the US population.

Local governments have themselves contributed to the depression conditions by eliminating 533,000 workers from their own payrolls since 2008, according to figures provided by the Department of Labor. Cities have cut workers, canceled public works projects and slashed wages in order to eliminate budget deficits, a process that intensified in 2011 after the expiration of the financial aid provided state and local government under the 2009 federal stimulus package.

via www.wsws.org

Seeing Red (part 3)

 

The wrong direction: OWS Now What? | Adbusters

Having reached this point, the obvious question becomes, “Now what?“ Of course we should continue to protest together, especially if we choose to do so intermittently and massively, favouring a general critique of the system over particular causes. And at the smaller scale, that those specific struggles continue to take the streets is also desirable. However, it is fundamentally important that these struggles are not overly disconnected from one another or the more general movement; that they unfold beyond their own spaces (hospitals, schools, factories, offices and so on) and into the broader metropolitan spaces of cleptocratic dominance. These processes serve to keep the questions that guide the movement alive and, therefore, adapting to the always changing situations in which they operate. Yet the question of what alternatives we can provide remains.

The conquest of political power, particularly in liberal democracies, is not the most important task of social change. Political change tends to occur once social changes have already taken place. Thus, if what we desire is to change existing social relations and inequalities, it makes little sense to prioritize a change of political power with the hope that social change will be installed from above. Instead, the first challenge, as John Holloway once put it, is to “change the world without taking power“, to build and strengthen the alternative institutions of the commons.

By institutions, of course, we are not referring to the institutions of a political regime such as parliaments, executives and the like. Nor are we referring to those which may lie between the regime and the movement, such as political parties, unions or other organizations. We are referring to institutions which provide a foundation for the movement and are defined by their own autonomy: social centres, activist collectives, alternative media, credit unions and co-operatives. Institutions like these constitute no more and no less than material spaces in which we can articulate the values, social practices and lifestyles underlying the social climate change taking place all over the world.

via www.adbusters.org

Bigger than any of us: occupy history

In the first week or so of OWS, Naomi Klein called it "the most important thing in the world." Since those initial weeks, many of us have noted that it has broken through the hopelessness on the left, that it's created a sense that the game has changed, that anything is possible.  Thousands of people in the US eat, drink, discuss, and live Occupy every day now. Some do this by living in tents; others do it as active supporters and working group members; others do it as organizers. A year ago, these same thousands would have said that they were too busy, studying or working, taking care of family members, looking for a job. When it's the most important thing in the world, though, we make time. Everything else matters a little less, moves further down the to-do list. 

The movement gives meaning to our lives. It explains what's wrong with the current system--capitalism. Why people are unemployed--capitalism. Why they are in debt--capitalism.  Why they have no future--capitalism.  And it tells us how we are strong--together. It tells us how to struggle--together. It tells us how we will win--together. Where contemporary capitalism has been separating us into demographic groups, pop cultural tribes, zip codes, and figures uniform in their cultivation of a sense of unique personal identity, Occupy reminds us that we are the ninety-nine percent: the rich really are different from you and me.

And so I wonder sometimes in our discussions and exchanges, especially ones that endure and require endurance, why is it that some feel the need to talk about personal feelings, individual feelings, and feelings in the abstract? Why do some find this talk of feelings disconnected from their settings in the affective networks of communicative capitalism helpful, interesting, necessary? It seems to me that this talk takes two forms.

On the one hand, it separates the emotional world from the political in order to prioritize the emotional. Rather than allowing political convictions to remain imbued with the intensity of their connection to the Real of antagonism, of class struggle and the tasks of building collectivity, the affective turn (in some of the exchanges I have in mind) valorizes affect for its own sake. The move, then, is highly abstract, even as those who make it seem to do so with an intent that is precisely the opposite (it's no wonder, then, that political scientists think they can measure affect in large populations). Are those who try to turn political discussions into discussions of emotions actually fearful of the intensity of politics and so wish to cut intensity off from the struggle that makes it matter? Is the effort, whether conscious or not, to diminish and redirect intensity so that the stakes are not quite so high, not quite so urgent?

On the other hand, turning discussions toward feeling separates individuals from groups. When feeling is introduced as a topic of discussion, particularly in the setting of a contentious debate, the introducer tends to take on either the role of therapist or the role of victim. A problem is perceived--a bad vibe--and either the therapist or the victim (or victim's defender) now wants to focus on the feelings around this problem. Therapeutization--the means to turn class conflict into personal conflict, or to hide class conflict underneath an ideology of individualism. It's like the opposite of consciousness-raising. Instead of connecting people to the world, the world is reduced to the interior life of one or two people.

The intensity is the politics, what informs commitment, solidarity, and courage: our coming together to build a movement and arguing over how to do it, where it's going, what it means. It's possible that a generation that has grown up under neoliberalism has no other political vocabulary--they think that the intensity of politics is the same as, identical to, how an individual feels. It's a generation educated with a diminished sense of Marxism, a stunted view of communism, and an overall loss of the vocabulary of collective struggle. For many, fortunately for us not all, politics is about having enough "information" to be "aware" and make a "choice."

What is best in Occupy is that it has reshaped the contemporary discussion away from the capitalist mindset that told everyone that her or his success or failure was strictly an individual matter, that everyone was on her or his own.  By focusing on Wall Street, the movement has created a new context, one that explains what had appeared as either failure or bad luck as actually the reality of capitalist domination and exploitation. The more we connect this capitalist reality to class struggle and the history of organized opposition, the more we can give to a generation of people who have lost a connection to the larger world a sense of meaning and purpose.

I just finished reading Vivian Gornick's, The Romance of American Communism (thank you, Jonathan Flanders). She describes the hunger for a life with meaning. Gornick writes:

The motive force is the dread fear that life is without meaning. This fear-hunger speaks to a need not of the flesh but of the spirit, a need having to do with the deepest definitions o what it is to be human . . . Once encountered, in the compelling persona of the Communist Party, the ideology set in motion the most intense longings buried in the unknowing self, longings that pierced to the mysterious, vulnerable heart at the center of that incoherent life within us, longings that had to do with the need to live a life of meaning. 

The book is filled with the testimonies of men and women who were members of the Party from the late twenties into the sixties:

Imagine being that poor with nothing to explain your poverty to you, nothing to give it some meaning, to help you get through the days and years because you could believe that it wouldn't always be this way. That's what our politics was to us. It literally negated our deprivation. It was rich, warm, energetic, and exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. It nourished us when nothing else nourished us. It not only kept us alive, it made us powerful inside ourselves.

It was as if I'd just found speech.

You see, I understood things. I knew what was happening. That saved me. Not only that, I was working for the revolution. I could take anything, knowing I was working for the revolution. Anything.

Some socialist critics of OWS see it as petite bourgeois entreprenuerial wanna-be's and disappointed bourgeois college graduates disconnected from the poor and working classes and acting out an affective politics suited best for social media. Cloaked in a rhetoric of autonomy and horizonality is the actuality of a self-indulgent individualism resistant to the kind of discipline real political struggle requires. I don't think this is a true--and I think that we insure that it does not become true by identifying and fighting against the effects of neoliberalism on our political subjectivity. What do neoliberalism and communicative capitalism encourage us to be? What do they thrive on and what are the practices and processes through which we can eliminate those tendencies and become people who can see clearly, who can understand?

This post is connected with the argument I make here.

Michigan Democrats Unveil Plan to Finance Free College Tuition by Eliminating Corporate Tax Credits | Truthout

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) spent his first year in office trading in the welfare of thousands of vulnerable Michiganders in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, the state’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Michigan currently pays out roughly $34 billion in tax credits. Under the Michigan 2020 Plan recently unveiled, $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes would be eliminated. Democrats put the tuition proposal’s cost at least at $1.8 billion. [...]

Under the plan, graduates who spent their entire K-12 years in Michigan schools would be eligible for the full award, which equates to the median tuition level of all public universities — currently $9,575 per year. Those who attended school for awhile outside the state would get a percentage of that amount.

College tuition has tripled in the last 30 years and is only trending upwards. Indeed, college price tags could get as high as $422,000 come 2034. And with student loans increasingly hard to find in a restricted credit market, families could certainly use the help in sending their children to a college close by.

What’s more, Michigan Senate Democrats note that the elimination of $3.5 billion in tax loopholes is only a 10 percent reduction in the tax credits the state already doles out. In fact, the program costs almost exactly as much as the $1.7 billion tax cut Snyder implemented for corporations.

The plan should appeal to Republicans as “it can be done without raising taxes one cent,”

via www.truth-out.org

Occupy protesters rally against Congress at Capitol | Reuters

n a sign of renewed vigor for the Occupy movement, which staged protests in many U.S. cities last fall, several hundred protesters gathered on the Capitol's West Front Lawn to greet members of Congress returning from a holiday break with a day of rallies and protests they said would include attempts to occupy lawmakers' offices.

Occupy protesters from around the country who gathered on the rain-soaked lawn carried signs saying, "Face it liberals, the Dems sold us out," "Congress for sale" and "Congress is not for sale."

"It's important to let people know we're not going to take it anymore. People are really mad about the way things are going and we want Congress to understand that," said protester James Cullen, a 30-year-old unemployed social worker from Greenbelt, Maryland.

The morning demonstration was peaceful. Police said one protester had been arrested for assaulting a police officer.

The protest against Congress comes as a record 84 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the way Washington lawmakers are doing their job, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Monday.

Democrats and Republicans fought all last year over the best way to control the U.S. debt and budget deficit as the parties tried to position themselves for the 2012 elections.

"Corporations and government have been so inextricably linked that it's not a true democracy anymore, and people have to realize that," said David, 16, a high school student from New Haven, Connecticut, who gave only his first name.

The leaderless Occupy movement burst onto the national scene in September at Wall Street in New York with its focus on income inequality and the perceived greed of the rich and powerful.

The movement succeeded in changing the national political conversation but it has weakened with winter weather and perhaps protest fatigue. Police have cleared Occupy encampments in New York, Los Angeles and other big cities.

The Washington Occupy movement has been among the most durable, in part because the National Park Service has allowed protesters to keep their encampments in two public squares near the White House.

District of Columbia officials are starting to show signs of impatience. Mayor Vincent Gray urged the National Park Service last week to remove protesters from one of the sites, McPherson Square, citing a rat infestation and other health concerns.

via www.reuters.com