I cite

Three economies

Lately I've been thinking that there are three "ideal types" of production, that is, three basic models of producing the material condition of social life.

1.  Command

2.  Market

3. Democratic (whether in workplaces or communities)

In history, these are always mixed. For example, market societies rely on command relations in the domestic sphere to reproduce the labor force. Some command economies have tolerated small local markets and even democratic forms of decision making in workplace councils or communes. Sustenance economies can be thought of as a combined form, where units domestic command (patriarchy) link up with other similar units for exchanges (which may be organized as gifts or markets). All three can also be combined with distribution on command (seizure, expropriation, tribute, taxation). 

Further, in history and in principle each of these arrangements can be and has been built on a set of suppositions, a kind of dictatorship (ala DeBois in Black Reconstruction in America) that establishes the limits and values of the system (for example, animal rights advocates reject the speciesist suppositions of US capitalism; we could call that a dictatorship of the human). Command economies have been built on the dictatorship of the proletariat. They've also been built on the dictatorship of military-industrial elites. Likewise, markets have been structured for the sake of competition as well as for the sake of imperialism. Democratic arrangements of production (whether directly within workplaces, mediated through laws, or part of local or tribal customs) can be and have been limited by hierarchies within the demos that establish the parameters of what can be done, not to mention modes of inclusion and exclusion.

These three types cut across the binaries of top-down v. bottom-up, especially by resisting the normative value given to bottom-up. Markets can be thought about in both ways (especially when one thinks about US free market fetishism as it rests on suppositions of states' rights and their legacy of slavery and patriarchy). A more benign example would be the romance of the entreprenuer, the small businessman, the do-it-yourselfer. The point here is that even in these bottom-up versions, markets exert a force 'behind the backs' of sellers and buyers. Another way to make the same claim is to say that there is no innocent or free market. Even if a market without a state were possible, the market is not a realm of freedom. Or, "bottom-up" cannot describe an ideal arrangement of a system of production.

Somewhere Zizek notes how bourgeois society represses the relations of domination and servitude that are expressed directly in feudalism. These social relations, then, are expressed as relations between things. We enjoy capitalism, then, in part because we prefer the fantasy of freedom it allows. We fetishize commodities not because of the things (any old thing can be a commodity)  but because of the way they enable us to disavow social relations, disavow hierarchy and exploitation.

How many leftists do you know with iproducts? I confess to owning an iphone (and old one) and to buying them for my kids (new ones). I confess to having purchased more than one ipod. I confess to falling in love with idesigns and the aesthetic features of these objects. And, all this knowing the conditions under which they are made. Most of those in my circles who have ithings know that they are made in FoxConn factories where the workers try to and sometimes succeed in commiting suicide.

But this isn't a piece about the horrors of Apple (maybe this is now the moment of disavowal). It's about what non-market economies for us can mean. Can there be economies that produce food, housing, medical care, energy, and transportation, that provide roads and railways, airplanes and flights, that have reliable sewage systems, clean water, and trash collection, that enable and distribute fast and reliable communication, that care for the very young and the very old, that enable a quality of life for people of differing abilities and capacities and that do this directly rather than without the mediation of commodities (not to mention wages or similar such modes of accounting for work input)?

I tend to think that the answer is yes and that a basic structure would involve some kind of complex set of collectives for organizing commons. These collectives would combine in various layers and networks that would enable connections based on locale as well as industry/sector. But even this schematic and idealized first step opens up problems. For example, every locale needs clear water and a good sewage system. So, every locale would need engineers who could evaluate, run, and repair the systems. They would also need pipes and different kinds of hardware, most likely that they would not be able to make themselves but would get from another locale. But what if that locale didn't want to make pipes anymore? What if all the young people moved someplace else to develop software or dance? It's hard for me to imagine what it would mean to handle this democratically: how would it scale? It's less hard to imagine how to deal with it via command.

Extreme capitalism deals with this in two ways. People either move to where the jobs are or they are too poor (or have too many other obligations) to move and so do the work others don't want to do. 

Another way I try to think about this is in terms of Detroit: if communists took over the city, dissolved private property and debt, what would the next step be? How would we get through the winter?

At any rate, humanists imply that we can answer these questions with respect: if pay and regard don't result from a higher regard for mental labor, then physical labor won't be onerous. And then what? What decides the distribution of work or tasks? It's one thing to disconnect work from food, housing, health (which is what I take the axiom "from each according to ability, to each according to need" to entail). It's another altogether to proceed as if this disconnection at the same time entailed a kind of freedom from work (that is, from compulsion whether commanded, normative, or by necessity).

I think that the elements of command and chance are unavoidable. Liberalism combines the two in meritocracy/equality of opportunity. But this simply displaces the question of command and contingency onto education and its hierarchies, luck of birth and parentage, the contingencies of life. And communism? At a minimum it has to make command and contingency collective matters. This doesn't eliminate or resolve them. But it means that they are not forces the individual encounters alone or for which the individual is deemed responsible (in terms of award or punishment).

Split consciousness

The present left is becoming more self-conscious as a left.

Occupy changed the terrain of struggle, making opposition appear in class terms in a way that had been repressed in the US for decades. Multiple lefts came together in occupation, not only sharing a project but also struggling over its meaning. In Europe, the deadly impact of austerity measures and growing opposition to them (not to mention the ongoing effects of the financial crisis of 2008), has made capitalism visible as a problem again (most explicit indication: polls reporting that the majority of Americans think the division between rich and poor is the most fundamental division in the country). For over thirty years, the preoccupation of a left that has been practically and theoretically active in a variety of specific movements and causes, as well as in multiple groups and locations, opposition to capitalism is growing, covered now in the mainstream media and a matter of governmental concern. That concern is generally exhibited via quick repression and aggressive policing (surveillance, intimidation, arrests, out-numbering, tasers, teargas, etc). 

The growing self-consciousness is at the same time, and necessarily, a time of division. As we emerge, we fight over who we are, over our name and names, over our principles and tactics, over whether we can even be said to exist. At the very least, our infighting lets us know we are here.

There are fights and there are fights. Some we shouldn't have to fight. We shouldn't have to fight over whether rape is wrong, over whether rape should be covered up. We shouldn't have to fight over whether the genocide of Native Americans was wrong, over whether Palestinians should be able to live and work and flourish. Fighting those fights, even though it remains necessary, doesn't strengthen us. We are already know what the answers are. Having to fight for them again and again doesn't let us advance theoretically or practically. It mires us in defensive maneuvers.

There are also useful fights, the kinds that sharpen thinking, clarify stakes. In the thick of things, it can be hard to know which kind of fight one is in. Which ideas are innovations? Which tactical repetitions further the struggle and which are but tributaries into circuits of drive (whether as media stunt, fetishized process, or perpetual self-criticism)?

This is a particularly tough challenge for communists insofar as the very opportunity presented by the collapse of socialism (the dissolution of the USSR and the Chinese capitalist turn) ushers in a generative chaos such that previously clear and distinct tendencies engage one another once again. An advantage is that ideas suppressed by the too tight link between communism and Stalinism, intransigence of Trotskyist parties, and reduction of debates into pointless repetitions of Marx and Bakunin have room to breathe. A disadvantage is the absence of learning or advancement (old lessons in a new time, one step forward and two steps back), lack of clarity about the stakes of debate insofar as the repetition of old themes in a new context can displace attention from present issues, and the undeniable fact of increasing inequality and immiseration in the wake of 1989.

Contemporary communist theoretical engagements draw on differing textual traditions and histories of struggle. They also unfold in the context of ongoing movement and protest. Absent a common language or common commitments, discerning what is at stake in any disagreement, beyond, say, the performance of a revolutionary identity insistent on the purity of its difference, at times seems impossible. Which views are anarchist, libertarian communist, autonomist, communist, or socialist? What is the difference between the ultra left and the anti-left? Where are the points of alliance that are useful and to what end?

Labels distort. But the critique of labels, the rejection of 'isms', leads to the cultivation of specificities that hinder debate and prevent thinking. Rather than building a common analysis and movement, we are pushed into esoteric analyses of multiple, specific, texts. Rather than debating what to do, we argue over what did so-and-so mean, which texts matter and why. Do these arguments derail the very possibilities that the current chaos opens up? Do they lead it to dead ends when they could insight new questions and approaches?

There's an irony, though, in these questions insofar as all they do is reiterate the split. Those who oppose organizing in common would likely take this reiteration as affirmation of their point that the Party is impossible now. I take it as an indication that it's necessary because disconnected and multiple loci of opposition is the form of our current defeat.

There are, though, points of convergence, ideas irreducible to generic anti-capitalism.

1.  Today the working class is not revolutionary.

2.  Our modes of opposition strengthen and reproduce what they attempt to destroy or overthow.

There are various explanations for the first point, including the insight into the role of unions in facilitating compromise with and acquiescence to capitalist demands, the decline of unions, the limit of proletarian identity as an identity within capitalism, the fragmentation of the working class in the wake of the rise of identity politics, the technological changes associated with digitalization, the outsourcing and off-shoring of industrial production from the US, EU, and UK to China, South Korea, and the Philippines, and the decline of confidence in metanarratives assigning historical purpose to specific agents (no big Other of history). How the fact of the absence of a revolutionary working class is explained and interpreted affects the conclusions that are drawn. Should efforts be made to raise class consciousness? strengthen unions? Or, alternatively, find another revolutionary agent, whether that is a different social group or capitalism's own crisis tendencies?

The explanation one find most convincing has repercussions. My approach is to emphasize the people as the rest of us and the process of proletarianization as fundamental to capitalism. An effect of this emphasis is that politics matters -- the people are divided, differentiated, dissagreeable. Even as capitalism involves never ending crisis (whether structural or local), creating another world requires work and organization. Communism doesn't just flow out of capitalism's self-destruction -- there are more potentials here (pick your favorite post-apocalyptic scenario: climate disaster, nuclear disaster, global pandemic, peak oil, enclaved super rich funding aggressive police state to oppress the increasingly immiserated ... oh, wait, we have that one already).

The second point also admits of variation. The critique of reformism points out that parliamentary efforts to build socialism prevent it, strengthening instead bourgeois capitalism institutions. The ultra left critique of bolshevism, premised on viewing the USSR as a capitalist state (which I find a point too crude to be useful, basically a variant of the notion of totalitarianism), argues that it strengthened the proletariat instead of dissolving it. A psychoanalytically inflected critique of some forms of direct action (particularly those that emphasize getting arrested) observes that demonstrations (like terrorism) call out and enhance state power. And, my own account of communicative capitalism criticizes media oriented activism --particularly but not exclusively in networked social emdia-- for intensifying communicative capitalism, providing media content to be circulated, adding to noise and hindering action, displacing focus from creating organizations with duration and commitment, and affirming liberal democracy's claims to legitimacy.

In my view, the only way to address to address the problem is via an analysis of the present (which is what I've tried to do in my communicative capitalism research). When we look at the present in terms of what is missing--and in terms of what everyone acknowledges is missing--it's an organized left, a Party, an alliance to which we have a degree of commitment. 

We have riots, insurrections, demonstrations, gardens, chickens, blogs, NGOs, networks, newspapers, lectures, fora, conventions, meetings, assemblies. But we do not have them in common. We do not associate them under a common idea. This was part of the event of Occupy -- that for a time, at least, the left was visible to itself as a common struggle. And, we knew it even as we knew that we disagreed, that some of us wanted to spend our time talking about how to arrange our everyday life, others wanted to  draft banking legislation, others wanted to block the ports, and others wanted to bring down the stock exchange. What was remarkable with Occupy is that these different actions, in different places, happened under the same name. They were consciously part of one struggle.

Notice as well: in this struggle, the 99% were not acting as a class. But they were acting like a class insofar as they were opposed to another class. Their affirmation of themselves declared the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, entirely circumventing the problem addressed in some ultra left theory in terms of the dilemma of proletarian affirmation (for example: 'The central theoretical question thus becomes: how can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class of this mode of production, in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production, abolish classes, and therefore itself, that is to say: produce communism?') Of course, this in no way means that Occupy produced or prefigured communism. It's contribution was more modest: breaking a hole in our setting, making the gap between capitalism and the people (in other words, class struggle) apparent as a gap. And more: Occupy made real and new the challenges of mobilizing, organizing, and enduring. Against the fantasy of an immediate communism (as compelling as it might be for a quick fix generation), it posed the ongoing and unavoidable questions of infrastructure, self-governance, problem-solving, provisioning, and mutual care that are themselves inseparable from communism as a self conscious mode of emancipatory egalitarian production and reproduction.

Keep Calm and Carry On

I ventured from my small declining city in farmland to the cheerless suburbs for some Christmas shopping. I wasn't immune to the consumerist spirit of Barnes and Noble. Items that I would typically ignore or mock were oddly appealing. They were potential gifts. As gifts they promised  a momentary escape from profit and loss, supply and demand. Even though they lied, I couldn't help but believe them. The day after Christmas, they will have lost their potential as gifts. Sinking back down into the swamp of over-production, they will have become bargains. So much extra and unwanted stuff, they will slide into overstock and only a week or two after the New Year turn into trash.

One series of such items features the motto from WWII Britain, "Keep calm and carry on." There is a "keep calm" calendar. There are mugs, tshirts, shopping bags, refrigerator magnents, and mobile phone cases repeating the injunction. Why are we so enjoined?

To say that the slogan traveled from the UK where it was an ironic and affectionate nod to the Queen and British resolve mistakes geneaology for explanation. Lots of things travel through communicative capitalism's meme flows. Not all of them get their own mugs and calendars.

I think the call to "keep calm" is everywhere because we are in a crisis, over the edge, living the end and one step from total panic and chaos (for a slightly different demographic the analogous meme is YOLO). It repeats a British slogan because the British handled their decline much better than we are. They offered a kind of social welfare--national health, housing, education--that eased the pain a bit. 

I started thinking about the demand for calm down during my yoga class today. The instructor mentioned the Connecticutt shootings and then told people to focus on the positive. She advised the class not to turn on the news and to be mindful of our breathing.

I don't think the instructor is an idiot, bless her heart. She's just repeating what she's heard over and over and over again for a decade, since the world ended and instead of joining the rest of the world as one of many facing common problems the US suffered a psychotic break.

For some, this psychosis manifests itself via an intransigent attachment to the power the country no longer has, except for its nuclear arsenal which gives it its remaining power, the power to destroy. For others it manifests itself via the delusion that we can go back, become Keynesians again, return to the social democratic road we didn't take. For still others it's in the desperate hope that they can seize enough--money, weapons, things--to keep the rest of us so far away that we can't do any damage (I talk more systematically about US psychosis in the last chapter of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies). 

The mistake of zombie movies and Mayan calender fans is that they think of the apocalypse as happening relatively quickly -- although it's worth noting that a zombie apocalypse takes longer than an asteroid, so maybe there is some cultural learning here. The apocalypse isn't fast --it's slow, perpetually and momentarily displaced like so many chemo treatments or anti-aging creams, Snow Crash not Omega Man, Feed not Dr. Strangeglove, Super Sad Really True Love Story not 2012.

Do we really expect the areas of New York demolished by hurricane Sandy to be rebuilt in a way that can provide something like a quality of life for poor and working class people, for people who were living in public housing or other low income areas? Or is it more likely that the city will use the disaster as an opportunity to continue its steady banishment of low net worth individuals in the name of development? If we keep calm, they will keep on, keep on expropriating and exploiting because nothing is stopping them.

Do we accept that the families of those slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school will recover, will come back stronger and better than ever? I don't and I think that suggestions of healing and recovery and celebration and moving on and requiring a waiting period for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons perpetuate the fantasy that everything is basically okay, that the system is sound, that if we remain calm and soldier on we will get through this thing together. That's the biggest lie of all because we are not together and we have not been together. We persist in a lie that violence is freedom and inequality is freedom and the unrestrained exercise of financial power is freedom. We even have a motto for this persistence.

Keep calm and carry on.

Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Consensus

I have been critical of the consensus-based, horizontal practices associated with contemporary anarchism. My criticism has been based on what I've viewed as an underlying individualism--no one has the right to speak for any other, each person must speak for themselves, etc. Graeber sometimes describes the virtues of anarchism in terms of an underlying individualism (no one can change another person's mind). When I was at a GA in Washington Square Park last month, I was taken by the fact that people echoed the speaker regarding each person's autonomous choice on whether or not to occupy the park that night (a deliberation of a few thousand people).

But lately I've experienced another side of consensus that is making me start to think differently about it. The fact that it takes so long to come to a decision is the benefit. It's what let's people get to know one another in a way that is neither commercial nor familial. The inefficiency is crucial--it's not capitalism; it's not subject to capitalism's dynamics, values, and imperatives. Maybe there is something here that is appealing to a residual Habermasianism that I have yet to shake--discursive will-formation. But I don't think so insofar as that argument relies more on reason than the affective ties, the truth, the solidarity that builds after hours and hours of deliberating with a common purpose in mind. 

Seeing the unions come together in struggle as they've done in Ohio and Oakland has also made me think again about solidarity (the subject of my first book). It's what is missing in our neoliberalized society, the society that makes each treat the other as a competitor or a tool, that remakes all relations into efficiencies, means, something to capitalize. There is nothing efficient about hours and hours of conversation. But it is the way, perhaps the only way, to build solidarity. You need to know if someone will stand by you on the front line, that people are behind you when you tear down the barricades or break down the doors. You can't know this from a donor list or list of friends or followers. Who will be there? Who will show up? Likely the people who have spent hours and hours already because of a shared commitment.

This isn't a communist thing (or if it is, it is because there is an underlying communism in many kinds of politics and sociality). Tonight there are local elections in Geneva. The people who are active in the parties are trying to get the vote out; they've been going door to door, meeting about what to say in ads, discussing editorials in the papers. Now they are calling, making sure the people on their lists get out and vote. In a small town, elections can be one or lost in under 10 votes. They demonstrate and experience solidarity--the people with the big ideas who are in and out like a flash, they aren't reliable. They think of politics as "someone else" carrying out their ideas, but they aren't in there for the interminable, frequent, meetings, the discussions and conversations crucial for building solidarity.

The difference may be voting--voting lets you stop discussion and build resentment. It also lets you get much more accomplished. Since the time of politics is always pressing, necessary, too early, and uncertain, it generally seems like the best way to deal with disagreement. But maybe the cost is too high. It probably makes sense in settings where there are no common ends, where conflict is the presupposition.

But for a party, cause, or movement (rather than a state), it may be that consensus is a better process. 

Which would also mean that consensus requires prior exclusion.

End of #OccupyWallStreet: conflict over drummers

this just in (from folks working with community relations):

OWS is over after Tuesday:

Friends, mediation with the drummers has been called off. It has gone on for more than 2 weeks and it has reached a dead end. The drummers formed a working group called Pulse and agreed to 2 hrs/day at times during the mediation, and more recently that changed to 4 hrs/day. It's my feeling that we may have a fighting chance with the community board if we could indeed limit drumming and loud instrumentation to 12-2pm and 4-6pm, however that isn't what's happening.

Last night the drumming was near continuous until 10:30pm at night. Today it began again at 11am. The drummers are fighting amongst themselves, there is no cohesive group. There is one assemblage called Pulse that organized most of the drummers into a group and went to GA for formal recognition and with a proposal.

Unfortunately there is one individual who is NOT a drummer but who claims to speak for the drummers who has been a deeply disruptive force, attacking the drumming rep during the GA and derailing his proposal, disrupting the community board meeting, as well as the OWS community relations meeting. She has also created strife and divisions within the POC caucus, calling many members who are not 'on her side' "Uncle Tom", "the 1%", "Barbie" "not Palestinian enough" "Wall Street politicians" "not black enough" "sell-outs", etc. People have been documenting her disruptions, and her campaign of misinformation, and instigations. She also has a documented history online of defamatory, divisive and disruptive behavior within the LGBT (esp. transgender) communities. Her disruptions have made it hard to have constructive conversations and productive resolutions to conflicts in a variety of forums in the past several days.

At this point we have lost the support of allies in the Community Board, and the State Senator and city electeds who have been fighting the city to stave off our eviction, get us toilets, etc. On Tuesday is a Community Board vote, which will be packed with media cameras and community members with real grievances. We have sadly demonstrated to them that we are unable to collectively 1) keep our space and surrounding areas clean and sanitary, 2) keep the park safe, 3) deal with internal conflict and enforce the Good Neighbor Policy that was passed by the General Assembly.

Whether or not you personally feel that the support of the community board and local residents and their reps is needed to maintain our occupation, many of us believe that maintaining Liberty Square (aka Zuccotti Park) as a flagship and nerve center for our movement right now is in fact critical to our efforts that are much bigger picture, longer term, more revolutionary than the internal conflicts that are consuming too much energy right now.

We need to take this seriously, and be clear that if we can't deal with conflict and self-organizing then we are facing eviction very soon (this week), and the allies that helped turn out mass numbers at the last one will not be around this time, nor will the press be supportive. Additionally, Bloomberg released a statement a few days ago that said that he / the City plans to crack down on any violations as of this week. Once we lose community and ally support at Tuesday's vote, the door is wide open for an eviction.

What to do? We need an all hands-on-deck clean-up and everyone sharing responsibility for the Good Neighbor Policy, including enforcement of 12-2pm and 4-6pm drumming hours. (While recognizing that the community board has been firm that they can only support 2 hrs/day of drumming). We should also start serious conversations internally about what this movement might I look like without Zuccotti Park / Liberty Square. How can we set ourselves up for continued organizing and momentum without an active occupation? I don't write this to be dramatic, it's a serious question. If so much of our organizing time currently (for many of us, 20 hrs a day) is going to putting out fires and maintaining the space, what does it look like if we lose the space?

For more on the drumming issue check this link.

On the demands: #occupywallstreet

So the discussion of demands is underway, stimulated by a serious, specific proposal from the demands working group. It's a good position to think about, to frame discussion. I have a number of concerns about it, though. The most general is: does this demand change our current discussion of the economy? Does it rupture the discussion of the economy in the same way the occupations themselves have ruptured our sense of the possible? I think the ultimate answer is no. And because I think these demands too easily fit into business as usual, I think we need to engage, criticize, and rethink them.

First, the jobs for all plan too easily reiterates Obama's rhetoric and proposals: infrastructure, clean energy, education, health. In fact, the Obama administration could say that it actually began some of these efforts (although it would of course concede that 'we can do more') with its (pathetically weak) stimulus program last year.

Second, and accordingly, the Obama program failed in part because the money was never distributed, the programs were implemented in a half-assed way, and they got trapped within other deals and regulations. As described by the demands committee, the jobs program can be inserted directly into such a slot. One can imagine an implementation that gives money to states for road construction (existing program) and mass transit (which some states moronically refused to accept earlier this year).

Third, the program too easily resembles Clinton's moves from welfare to workfare. One way the demands as currently formulated seek  to avoid that is by inserting 'union wages.' That's good--but why not just say unionized jobs? Or quality, creative, and flexible unionized jobs? I add creative and flexible because we don't want the sort of jobs Perry created in Texas (sub-minimum wage) nor do we want people forced into meaningless drudgery. If the jobs suck, then the plan is no better than the forcible creation of a class of workers completely alienated from their work.

Fourth, the plan omits from consideration the lives of people outside the paid workforce--retirees on fixed income, those with disabilities, children, people responsible for caring for everybody else. Once these folks are brought into the picture, we have to deal with transportation and childcare/eldercare issues.

What might be preferable? To begin with the recognition that creative production is a common. From this follows the idea of a guaranteed minimum income separate from work. A guaranteed minimum income or social wage acknowledges that each, albeit differently, contributes to the social whole. It also recognizes that there are technological conditions that make many kinds of labor redundant and unnecessary--but people still gotta it. 

A further implication of the idea of common creative production is that it makes us recognize different sorts of work and have to determine which ones are good places for our energies and which ones are not--I don't think it makes sense for social energies to be expended in financial speculation, in the creation of bizarre financial instruments, in secondary and tertiary forms of insurance. I do think it makes sense to to expend social energies in teaching and learning, in mending and caring for our common world, in proper stewardship over our environment.  

But maybe the jobs for all ultimately does this. That is, maybe the concerns I raise are ill-founded because the very idea of universal healthcare, housing, education, and transportation ruptures the market logic of insurance, subprime mortgages, privatization, and car culture in which we are drowning. Maybe jobs for all is a radical break with what we have and not a prescription for a mandatory works program that forces people to spend their time in uncreative and unrewarding ways. Maybe it has just enough impossibility (to those who think in the old way) to break the constraints of the possible.

Communist desire (trying again, failing again)

It could be that communist gaze goes in the wrong direction, trying to imagine a place from which we see ourselves, a place that judges or authorizes. Under the conditions of the decline of symbolic efficiency, this is missing, lacking, fragmented; rather than covered over in fantasy, misrecognized, it is recognized. 

But we don't know what to do with this knowledge, recognition. It should be liberating, but it feels like capture, immobility. This immobility is the other side of drive, of compulsive, acephalic repetition. We look out and for and become transfixed by ourselves looking. 

But why do we look, why do we ask, why do we want to know? These questions point to the other logic of enjoyment: desire.

My thesis: communist describes desire, not its object. So it is a determination of the subject, a subjectivization that organizes and mobilizes desire (I've been reading Badiou's Theory of the Subject, which is cryptic, to say the least). Communism, then, is the movement of communist subjects. It should not, then, be conflated with the particular historical description of parties and states, parties and states being instruments for arranging and producing subjects.  

How, then, to describe or understand or communist desire or communism as specific arrangement of desire? Tonight I've been looking again at Living in the End Times to think about this.

1.  Zizek employs a parallel between Lacanian theory the theory of relativity. For Lacan, 

no matter whether the desiring subject approaches or runs from his or her object of desire, this object seems to remain at the same distance from the subject. . . This paradox can be neatly solved by introducing the difference between the object and the cause of desire: no matter how close I get to the object of desire, its cause remains at a distance, totally elusive.

The object of communist desire would seem to be a world without exploitation, one characterized by equality, freedom, justice, the absence of oppression, where production was common, distribution was based on need, and decisions realized the general will. Yet even describing this perfect world always comes up lacking, something is always missing--what about an end to sexism, racism, and egoism? what about an end to social hierarchies? what about ending meanness and bullying? It's no surprise that communism's critics (as early as Aristotle) criticize it as utopian and impossible. Communism seems another word for perfect.

But the impossible object of communist desire is not the same as its cause. I want to suggest that the object cause of communist desire is the people (the people not as a name for the social whole but as a name for the exploited, producing majority).  For any government, any system, any political organization, the people remain elusive, incompatible or in tension with government. Where government is, the people are not (I use Ranciere to talk about this in my chapter in the new collection on Ranciere; I think his idea of an original wrong gets at the same idea of the torsion or missing conjunction between people and government).  Authoritarianism, oligarchy, aristocracy, representative democracy, parliamentary democracy--none of these forms worries too much about the disconnect between government and the people. But it matters for communism (and for fascism, incidentally, which fascism solves via blood, soil, and Leader), particularly because communism is not only a form of government, but also an organization of production. 

The people are elusive. They exceed their symbolic instantiation as well as the imaginaries that try to fill the gaps.

2.  Zizek's parallel extends to the curvature of space:

In a homologous way, the Freudian solution to the antinomy of the subject's approaching or running away from his object of desire, and the 'constant speed' (and distance from him) of the object-cause of desire, resides in the curved space of desire: sometimes the shortest way to realize a desire is to by-pass its object-goal, to postpone the encounter with it. What Lacan calls the objet petit a is the agent of this curvature: the unfathomable X on account of which, when we confront the object of our desire, most satisfaction is provided by dancing around it than by directly going for it.

To realize desire is to cede it, to end it. The only way to maintain desire is not to go for it directly, by any means necessary, which, will end up destroying the desire itself. There are different versions of this: getting burned by the sun, too close, so that the subject destroys itself in the process, that is, destroys itself as a subject capable of desiring as it had desired. Another version: once reached, the subject says 'that's not it.' And, perhaps the realization that 'going for it directly' is itself impossible, an attempt that will always necessarily be short-circuited. One can't avoid the long road because the short cut takes you someplace else and makes you someone else.

3.  Zizek's discussion here is in the context of an engagement with Malabou's discussion of cerebral traumas of the sort that make the person into "an impassive disengaged subject deprived even of the capacity to dream." Zizek asks:

 And is what happens in the case of a post-traumatic subject not the destruction 0f the objet a? This is why such a subject is deprived of an engaged existence and reduced to indifferent vegetation.

He continues, connecting this subject with the death drive:

the disengaged indifferent de-libidinized subject is indeed the pure subject of the death drive: in this subject, only the empty frame of the death drive as the formal-transcendental condition of libidinal investments survives, deprived of all content.

Another word for this subject of the drive is 'whatever being' (I argue this in Blog Theory). Zizek uses the term 'libidinal proletariat.' This is the subject relieved of content, place, desire, the subject of communicative capitalism. And might we also see this as the subject of left politics? The problem of the contemporary left is it capture in drive, in the sublimation of the desire into small issue politics and little victories. This sublimation is the form that the loss of the people as the object cause of desire takes. No people, just issues, or for some identities or localities or singularities (even as they are a multitude). 

4.  But how to return to desire? Perhaps dialectics can help. Zizek writes:

true, after negation/alienation/loss, the subject 'returns to itself,' but this subject is not the same as the substance that underwent the alienation--it is constituted in the very movement of returning-to-itself. In a properly Hegelian-Freudian-Lacanian way, one should thus draw a radical conclusion: the subject is as such the survivor of its own death, a shell which remains after it is deprived of its substance; this is why Lacan's matheme for the subject is $--the barred subject.

He continues to emphasize the subject as the effect of separation, the subject as gap, along with various familiar gestures to cogito. 

Can this make sense for me, for us, for thinking of communist desire? I am faltering at here, my thinking at best falls into the old story of the move from tradition to modernity, from substance to abstraction. Zizek argues that the key point is that separation, the gap, is subjectivity (so the trauma of birth is the same as cerebral brain trauma, both are radical separations, erasures).  Zizek:  "what is repeated here is not some ancient content, but the very gesture of erasing all substantial content."  Because the form remains, the form must have already been there.

But maybe: the content is erased, but the form remains, the empty form of subjectivity. We look for something, expect something, but there is just a void, gap. Argh. This doesn't work: gaps don't desire, although there is no desire without a gap. 

So, what's left: empty form, gap, abstraction. Drive/capitalism is one arrangement of these. Perhaps communism is the other. If capitalism is the way of the drive, perhaps communism is the name of desire, another arrangement, without short-circuit, without satisfaction. Perhaps the very struggle is against capitalist drive's provision of tidbits and nuggets of enjoyment, against its arrangement of the loss of the people. 

Still not there. 

And probably not any closer. But I might get a little closer if I reconnect these ideas with a discussion of capitalism.  It could also be that Zizek's notion of the subject as a gap in the structure results in this deadlock and that as long as I stick with that I will keep going round in circles. So Badiou? or is it an error/delusion/attempt to fill what can't be filled, an attempt to avoid the gap in the Other.

One last possibility: the difference between the Neighbor as Thing in its gap of desire and that of flat whatever being. These are not the same, but I don't know how to get from one to the other.  

Is there a communist gaze?

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek describes "the Stalinist elevation of the dignity of the socialist 'ordinary working people':

this idealized image of the working class is staged for the gaze of the ruling Party bureaucracy--it serves to legitimze their rule. That is why Milos Forman's Czech films were so subversive in mocking small, ordinary people: in showing their undignified ways, the futility of their dreams . . . this gesture was far more dangerous than making fun of the ruling bureaucracy. Forman did not want to destroy the bureaucrat's imaginary identification; he wisely preferred to subvert his symbolic identification by unmasking the spectacle enacted for his gaze.

One of the challenges for reinvigorating communism as a political signifier, as a name for a political movement and desire, is the gaze of the other. Whose is the gaze? 

Since 1968, the people have been replaced by interests, identities, publics, tribes, networks, and singularities. Another word for this fragmentation/fractalization is the decline of symbolic efficiency such that there is other with which symbolically to identify; the other is already split. The image of the multitude is staged for the gaze of the Left, the condition of possibility for its political failure and inadequacy (there are multiple versions of this same basic frame:  the everyday people against the academic or intellectual, local foodies against those who rely on fast food, do-it-yourself-ers against those hire contractors or mechanics etc). 

Since 2000 (at least--there are also good arguments for 1980, 1989, or 1994), a people has been constellated around the attractors of conservativism, Christian religious fundamentalism, Fox News, and now the Tea Party. The name is more fluid than the gaze here, but one can say that in the US, the mainstream media as well as the Democratic Party and everyone to the left of each sees themselves, their politics and possibilities, from the perspective of such a "Right." The image of the Right is staged for the gaze of the center and the left, the condition of possibility for compromise, capitulation, and failure.

And so now it is not surprising that speaking of communism results in questions like: who do you have in mind? Is there an image you can stage before which we might imagine ourselves?

The USSR as a state tends to displaces the image of the revolutionary people and the active soviets. The same tends to hold for other regimes--the state displaces the image of the active people. But this does not mean that such a state itself takes the place of symbolic identification. Rather, that place continues to oscillate between fragmented multitude and united Right, both of whom are imagined as hostile to communism, socialism, and the large, idealist and bureaucratized projects of the twentieth century. The state that displaces the image of the revolutionary people cannot be imagined as either the multitude's or the Right's object of desire.

The problem of symbolic identification, of the gaze, for whom, thus has a double form: that of the image of the other and that of the desire of the other. So long as the other is imagined as a multitude or a Right and communism is imagined as an oppressive state, communism cannot be conceived as an object of desire. The multitude is incapable of desire; or, put in the terms of Hardt and Negri, if the multitude is already "desiring productivity," it lacks for nothing and so there is no way to designate communism as both missing and desired. Similarly, the Right obviously hates communism, so it can't be figured as an object of the Right's desire.

But perhaps this is too superficial a rendering of desire. For, it's clear that the Right relies on rhetorics of anti-socialism and anti-communism. As Michelle Balkin's bizarre reference to US decline and the power of the USSR suggests, the Right continues to desire communism, that is, an enemy that can justify military power, a strong state, and a free market, a godless enemy before whom it can appear spiritual and righteous. The Right might desire a communism that lets it persist as the Right. 

Yet this, too, seems superficial, false, an error in that it mistakes the Right's fantasy of the enemy for communism. The error is in treating communism as the object rather than as the desire or the desiring. The challenge, then, is how to get to the communist point of view or desire: it would seem that this requires the image of such desiring, an account of the view point (point of symbolic identification, point from which we judge ourselves).

Perhaps a way to get at this is to return to film, or television. A month or so ago we spoke on this blog about the absence of working class people on television when compared to the 70s. Is it possible that now there are more working class people and that they are the people who are watching television? that the fantasies of wealth and privilege and toddlers in tiaras and vacation houses and really detailed healthcare--as on House--are staged for working people? Workers are gazing on the lives of people with careers, privilege, disposable income, futures, with more to do than remain stuck in boring, underpaid jobs rendered somehow valuable in their precarity (and, if this is the case, then the Office is subversive for rendering 'white collar' jobs as unbearable; at the same time, it's restorationist in the ways that it undermines workplace solidarity by making most of the people with whom one works barely tolerable). 

Yet this won't work because the gaze isn't as workers at all--or, as soon as we try to fill in the perspective the images of the multitude and the Right rush in. Either there are many views (the audience is irreducibly plural) or the viewers are conservative. 

Perhaps the split between these views, though, is the place of desire. Multitude and conservative are incompatible. The conservative either erases the multitude (intolerance, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, etc), oppresses the multitude (slaves, servants, workers), or excludes the multitude (gates, walls, anti-immigration). The multitude likewise denies or forecloses the conservative (antagonism is denied or effaced; the conservative is absorbed into just another singularity). The very incompatibility between the two omitted in the questioning or thinking that jumps from one to the other.

The communist gaze might then be understood as the gap or space between the two that names their irreconciliability, the antagonism between them insofar as only from this perspective does it appear as such. 

If so, then communist functions less a master signifier than as an impossible object, a gap. It's partial, even as it is an object of desire rather than drive. I am going to need to work this out.

Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden | MichaelMoore.com

(excerpts from a post at Michaelmoore.com)

Meanwhile, we – me, included – get lost in the weeds of how this one madman was killed. The official story from the Pentagon changed four times in the first four days! It went from OBL firing on the troops with one hand and using his wife as a human shield with the other, to, by the fourth day, not single person in the main house, including bin Laden, being armed when killed. Instantly, this created a lot of suspicion about what really happened, which itself was a distraction.

Here's my take: I know a number of Navy SEALs. In fact (and this is something I don't like to talk about publicly, for all the obvious reasons), I hire only ex-SEALs and ex-Special Forces guys to handle my own security (I'll let you pause a moment to appreciate that irony). These SEALs are trained to follow orders. I don't know what their orders were that night in Abbottabad, but it certainly looks like a job (and this is backed up in a piece in the Atlantic) where they were told to not bring bin Laden back alive. The SEALs are pros at what they do and they instantly took out every adult male (every potential threat) within a few minutes – but they also took care to not harm a single one of the nine children who were present. Pretty amazing. This wasn't some Rambo-style operation where they just went in guns blazing, spraying bullets. They acted swiftly and with expert precision. I'm telling you, these guys are so smart and so lethal, they could take you out with a piece of dental floss. (And in fact, one of my ex-SEAL guys showed me how to do that one night. Whoa.)

In a perfect world (yes, I would like to reside there someday, or at least next door to it, in Slightly Imperfect World), I would like the evildoers to be forced to stand trial in front of that world. I know a lot of people see no need for a trial for these bad guys (just hang 'em from the nearest tree!), and think trials are for sissies. "They're guilty, off with their heads!" Well, you see, that is the exact description of the Taliban/al Qaeda/Nazi justice system. I don't like their system. I like ours. And I don't want to be like them. In fact, the reason I like a good trial is that I like to show these bastards this is how it's done in a free country that believes in civilized justice. It's good for the rest of the world to see that, too. Sets a good example.

The other thing a trial does is, it establishes a very public and permanent historic record of the crimes against humanity. This is why we put the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg. We didn't do it for them. We did it for ourselves and for our grandchildren so that they would never forget these horrors and how they were committed. And we did it for the German people so they could see the evidence of what their elected leaders had done. Very helpful. Very necessary. Very powerful.

And for those who wanted blood back then – well, the majority of the Nazis all hanged in the end. So, it doesn't mean the bad guys get away – they still swing from the highest tree.

...

Yet, we began to fear Muslims and round them up. We profiled people from Muslim nations at airports. We didn't profile multi-millionaires (in fact, they now have their own fast-track line to easily get through security, an oddity considering every murderer on 9/11 flew in first class). We didn't run headlines that said "Multi-Millionaire Behind the Mass Murder of 3,000" (although every word in that headline is true). You can say his wealth had nothing to do with 9/11, but the truth is, there is no way he could have kept Al Qaeda in business without having the millions he had.

Some believe that this was a "war" we were in with al Qaeda – and you don't do trials during war. It's thinking like this that makes me fear that, while bin Laden may be dead, he may have "won" the bigger battle. Let's be clear: There is no "war with al Qaeda." Wars are between nations. Al Qaeda was an organization of fanatics who committed crimes. That we elevated them to nation status – they loved it! It was great for their recruiting drive.

We did exactly what bin Laden said he wanted us to do: Give up our freedoms (like the freedom to be assumed innocent until proven guilty), engage our military in Muslim countries so that we will be hated by Muslims, and wipe ourselves out financially in doing so. Done, done and done, Osama. You had our number. You somehow knew we would eagerly give up our constitutional rights and become more like the authoritarian state you dreamed of. You knew we would exhaust our military and willingly go into more debt in eight years than we had accumulated in the previous 200 years combined.

Maybe you knew us so well because you were once one of our mercenaries, funded and armed by us via our friends in Pakistan to fight the other Evil Empire in the last battle of the Cold War. Only, when the killing stopped, the trained killer, our "Frankenstein," couldn't. The monster, you, would soon turn on us.

If we really want to send bin Laden not just to his death, but also to his defeat, may I suggest that we reverse all of that right now. End the wars, bring the troops home, make the rich pay for this mess, and restore our privacy and due process rights that used to distinguish us from any other country. Right now, our democracy looks like Singapore and our economy has gone desperately Greek.

I know it will be hard to turn the clock back to before 9/11 when all we had to worry about were candidates stealing elections. A multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around "homeland security" and the terror wars. These war profiteers will not want to give up their booty so easily. They will want to keep us in fear so they can keep raking it in. We will have to stop them. But first we must stop believing them.

Hideki Tojo killed my uncle and millions of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and a hundred thousand other Americans. He was the head of Japan, the Emperor's henchman, the man who was the architect of Pearl Harbor. When the American soldiers went to arrest him, he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The soldiers immediately worked on stopping his bleeding and rushed him to an army hospital where he was saved by our army doctors. He then had his day in court. It was a powerful exercise for the world to see. And on December 23, 1948, after he was found guilty, we hanged him. A killer of millions was forced to stand trial. A killer of 4,000 (counting the African embassies and USS Cole bombings) got double-tapped in his pajamas. Assuming it was possible to take him alive, I think his victims, the future, and the restoration of the American Way deserved better. That's all I'm saying.

via www.michaelmoore.com