February 2012
1 post
INSURRECTION, COMMUNIZATION, AND THE PERMANENT...
[Excerpted from an ongoing conversation about communization and the #M1 general strike. Both texts are written by the same author, but the second presents a somewhat different argument than the first—slightly more hard-line.]
Point
I haven’t been following this thread until now, but I did want to respond to the question of subtraction and its relationship to communization—and...
January 2012
8 posts
OAKLAND CALLING—"THE GENERAL STRIKE IS BACK"
Reposting from occupyoakland.org:
Occupy Oakland Call for Participation in a May 1, 2012 Global General Strike
The general strike is back, retooled for an era of deep budget cuts, extreme anti-immigrant racism, and massive predatory financial speculation. In 2011, the number of unionized workers in the US stood at 11.8%, or approximately 14.8 million people.
What these figures leave out are...
FRAGMENTS—ON THE 0% AND THE REAL MOVEMENT OF...
Fragments excerpted from the comments section here (I’m quoting Red WithoutWhy):
The “99%”, the “1%” and the “0%” are all *in* the movement of history which traverses and determines their distinction. *This* is the movement which is radical, not that of the “0%” as a radical bloc–though it is a radical bloc within the occupation movement. That doesn’t mean it needs touting, and that the...
COMMUNIQUE FROM THE OCCUPIED CROSS-CULTURAL CENTER...
From UCDecolonized:
The spaces we live in are broken: occupation is our defense. As capital spirals further into crisis, we are constantly confronted with the watchword of austerity. We are meant to imagine a vast, empty vault where our sad but inevitable futures lie. But we are not so naïve. Just as Wall Street functions on perpetually revolving credit markets where cash is merely a blip, so...
ON ŽIŽEK AND EXTINCT FUNCTIONARIES
Slavoj Žižek’s recent article in the LRB, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie,” is a horrible piece of non-thinking, but still, I recommend reading it, if only as an exercise in holding one’s temper.
The problem with Zizek’s argument about the “proletarianization” of the salaried classes is that it gets both of its objects wrong, the salariat (as...
December 2011
4 posts
PROPOSAL FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A LARGE SOCIAL...
From Occupy Oakland:
Proposal for the establishment of a large social center for Occupy Oakland We propose to occupy and hold a large building that will serve the purpose of becoming a social center, convergence center and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement on Saturday, January 28th, 2012. The building will have sufficient office space for all of the Occupy Oakland committees and an...
"THE AUTUMN OF THE COMMUNES" REVISITED—FROM...
A revised version of my “Autumn of the Communes” piece was published in the third N+1 Occupy Gazette, downloadable here. For everyone’s convenience, I’m pasting the text here.
***
I first heard the slogan “Occupy Everything” in 2009 during the anti-privatization protests that shook the University of California, where I have been a graduate student since 2007. During the...
November 2011
17 posts
BEYOND VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE—A RESPONSE TO...
It is a sure sign that a movement has reached a limit when its defenders fall to bickering over failed ideas and imaginary threats—the better to obscure, or make forgettable, the real difficulty of the project at hand. A key example of this is the ongoing “violence” vs. “non-violence” paragone, which commentators on the liberal side of the Occupy movement can’t seem to get enough of....
TWO PROPOSALS—FOR A UNIVERSITY WITHOUT CHANCELLORS
One lesson to be drawn from the past week of struggle at the UC schools and in Cairo is this: that anarchy, long relegated to the micropolitical sphere of groupuscular organization, now looms large on the horizon of anti-authoritarian struggles. Following the brutal repression of occupations at Berkeley and Davis, numerous voices within and outside the UC system have called for the resignations...
ERIC LEE ON THE FUTURE OF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT
From Occupy Everything:
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...
TWO STATEMENTS FROM THE 90 5TH AVENUE OCCUPATION
From All-City Student Occupation (@New School)
Inaugural statement:
Two days ago the NYPD, under the orders of a billionaire mayor who does not represent us, raided Occupy Wall Street with riot gear and batons. Today we occupy. Everywhere. On this historic day of global action, the students of New York City public and private universities and colleges, in solidarity with the 99%, Occupy Wall...
FIRST TRAGEDY, THEN PATHOLOGY—ON THE COMING RAID
Mayor Quan’s second attempt at evicting Occupy Oakland now appears scheduled for sometime in the next few days (nights, I mean), a political shitstorm set to collide with a week of action/occupations at UC Berkeley following last week’s brutal repression of Occupy Cal. The Mayor’s office could not have picked a worse time to evict the Oakland occupiers. In an op-ed piece for the...
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ADMINISTRATION OF UC...
Dear Chancellor Birgeneau, Executive Vice Chancellor Breslauer, and Vice Chancellor LeGrande,
You should all resign—now.
On Tuesday, you sent a message to students informing us that we would not be allowed to set up encampments or occupy campus buildings. You quoted a passage from the student code of conduct that prohibits “[a]ny activities such as pulling fire alarms, occupying buildings,...
NEXT STEPS—DAVID LAU ON THE FUTURE OF OCCUPY...
From the Los Angeles Review of Books:
[…] The General Assembly Friday night, November 4th, revealed some splits and divisions among the participants. The right deviation at the camp remains a vocal but hostile and threatening minority, likely no more than 20% of regular participants. The proposal format requires a high level of consensus (80-90%) for any actionable results. In the...
READING MATERIAL: THÉORIE COMMUNISTE ON REVOLUTION...
From “The suspended step of communisation: communisation vs. socialisation” (2009), via libcom.
[…] Some fractions of the proletariat will be smashed, others will be “turned back”, rallying to conservative strategies of survival. Other insurrections will pick up where they leave off. Certain of those turned back or bogged down will resume direct expropriations, and the...
BEYOND THE GENERAL STRIKE—ONE OF MANY POSTSCRIPTS
Now seems like the right time to expand on something I wrote the other day—namely this: “We can say as well that the general strike will no longer be a lapse or break in the valorization process, but will instead take the form of a sudden intensification in the process of communization, shifting from the asynchronous and centripetal conditions of mass default (the result of staggered...
STATEMENT ON THE OCCUPATION OF THE FORMER...
From some friends of OO via IndyBay
Last night, after one of the most remarkable days of resistance in recent history, some of us within Occupy Oakland took an important next step: we extended the occupation to an unused building near Oscar Grant Plaza. We did this, first off, in order to secure the shelter and space from which to continue organizing during the coming winter months. But we also...
COMMUNIQUE FROM THE CRISIS CENTER
From Anti-Capital Projects
Tonight we open the Crisis Center. In this abandoned building that once provided services to those in need, we open the Occupation Crisis Center. Capitalism cannot avoid crisis. Capitalism cannot resist crisis. But capitalism is not the crisis. We are the crisis. Capitalism is not hungry, homeless, jobless, excluded, exploited. We are. And across the globe, across the...
LOUIS-GEORGE SCHWARTZ ON THE OAKLAND COMMUNE
From Occupy Everything
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...
October 2011
2 posts
PRELUDE TO WEDNESDAY—DEBTORS' STRIKE AND GENERAL...
“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 … 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...
WHY NOT THE AUTUMN OF THE COMMUNES?—A RESPONSE TO...
This piece responds to a couple Jacobin-related things pretty directly, so let’s put them out there straight away:
First, Malcolm Harris’ observation in “Baby, We’re All Anarchists Now” that “the left has finally broken into the national consciousness by adopting the tactics, strategy, and slogans of a group of left-communist insurrectionaries at the Universities of California.”
Second, the...