I was involved in the occupation of the New School student study centre at 90, FifthAvenue, just off Manhattan’s Union Square, and its regrettable degeneration is the basis for this reflection. This piece did not come naturally to me. The thinking I had to do for it was tricky, and took a little courage, as it was bound up with activities and individuals I stand behind. At Open Security’s request, I am offering some arguments on feeling secure in a New York City occupation, that is to say, on creating brave kinds of safety within heterotopic space, specifically, space collectively claimed in order to be transformed by direct action initiatives like Occupy.

The student rally on November 17^th (N17, widely experienced in New York as a day of glory) was on Union Square in the early afternoon. Then it got moving, in order to join the unions’ and “labor” activists’ rally downtown on Foley Square, by City Hall. Imagine you are a part of the throng snaking along East 16^th Street and south onto Fifth Avenue. Imagine nearing the TD bank on 14^th, and realising that something very exciting is happening above it, where the glossy glass-fronted student study centre is situated. A scuffle at the entrance. Marchers – not all of them necessarily students – thronging in and up the escalator. Police scrambling to prevent entry with plastic blockades. Building superintendents angrily ejecting insurgents from the freight elevator at the side-entrance. The main door threatening to split. A cluster of students visibly supporting those inside receiving baton blows. Banners already fluttering out of the first-floor windows: ‘Free Space’, ‘Zuccotti is dead: the virus has spread’; ‘All-City Student Occupation’; ‘All Welcome’; ‘This is not a New School Occupation’; ‘Students and Labor Unite’; ‘Labor & Students Take the City Back’. Do you attempt to go in? Then, or hours later (once President van Zandt had ‘allowed’ the occupiers to proceed), would you sleep there? If you surmounted your inhibitions, your nerves, and the adrenalin-fuelled, densely-packed chaos of that moment on the street, if you exited the heavily policed universe of the ‘public’ pavement that was being forcibly ‘cleared’ of human ‘obstructions’, if you plunged into the promised haven … what would you expect on the inside? What kind of society awaits you there, for your pains?

Occupations are – classically – houses of messy, over-determined contestation. The mainstream media often brand everyone inside them as unwashed, unemployed petty criminals with inscrutable and thus irrelevant politics. Yet it, significantly, also props up the view of space-claiming action as essentially ‘virile’ – and threateningly so – rather than ‘feminine’/’compassionate’. Thus, many actual participants, who are of course learning as they go, form their identity off the mirror of ‘public opinion’, and act accordingly in ways they deem uncompromised and uncompromising. I believe that insecurity within the space of occupation stems not from true radical vs. reformist distinctions: it stems from this (almost well-meaning) arrogance in those enjoying the dubious privilege of being stereotyped as frightening, i.e. from common or garden white/male privilege masquerading as professionalism. To give specifics: I did not feel safe within the space of occupation on the first night of its establishment, because my participation in the home-making process was squashed by undiscussed graffitiing, smoking, vomiting, and sexist jokes from young white men. I stayed anyway and regretted it: others would not. Everyone behaves badly a lot of the time. We are trained to. Most of us experience the bad behaviour of excited young white middle-class males as oppressive as well as ‘bad’, however. This is important, and Tools for White Guys help. Yet I am still identifying, primarily, a shoddy interpretation of the widely shareddesire to resist management-capital as comprehensively as possible as the source of behaviours of non-solidarity by these few towards those demanding a ‘safer space’ agreement. 

Security, after all, is their word. We, in flaunting them, should party hard and abolish rules. (So runs the reasoning.) Consequently, I was one of the only non-males who slept at 90 Fifth on day#1. And in the subsequent week, some attempts at mediation by perplexed and exhausted activists still failed to achieve the cohesive commune that might have succeeded in running and retaining the occupation. As the process disintegrated, we were forsaken not only by hoped-for allies but attacked by erstwhile supporters in positions of power. A letter with thirty signatories composed by Andrew Arato, faculty member published online on colleague Jeff Goldfarb’s blogDeliberately Considered, condemned “random violence” and argued that the liberal leadership of President David van Zant “had provided no conceivable excuse for this action”. MacKenzieWark, however, from Eugene Lang college within the same university, seems to me to make clear he deems the letter to constitute what Rancière calls the high treason of the Critical Left, opening his ‘Notes on the New School Occupation’ with the pithy sentiment “These are times when one must dispense contempt sparingly due to the unseemly number of things that deserve it.” The hebetudinous and offensive barricade-graffiti of the nihilist opportunists of ‘Occupy the New School’ is perhaps best condemned in this manner. Or, perhaps, one could invoke Slavoj Žižek’s double-edged epigram: “our violence is always legitimate and never necessary”. (One might even modify this slightly: “but never necessary”.)

Graffiti and barricades do not constitute violence. But sexism, racism, ablism, and certain forms of insurrectionary discourse rooted in class privilege sometimes do. There is good reason to expect, moreover, that environments characterised by these give rise to bodily attacks. And, based on the irony I outlined above, it is sometimes those who believe themselves to be ultra-radical who embody the domestic threat to other bodies already traditionally vulnerabilized by capital. Unpicking this often becomes a shouting match about the place of ‘identity politics’ within revolutionary struggle. Faced with this onerous task, people I would call real radicals can sometimes effect anti-sectarian magic. The role of mediation within Occupy Wall Street has been documented, for instance, in relation to the internal dispute concerning drum-circle revellers (see also Truth-Out). Sometimes documents and manifestos arise in networks in response to experiences of internally generated un-safety. The ablest mediators cannot, however, bridge gaps created by violent crimes. Recently, generalized public unconcern for the rights of the movement as a whole (following Zuccotti’s eviction) gave way to hysteria in the media in response to OWS reports of an incident of a rape on the park. This despite (or perhaps because of) its having been extremely thoughtfully handled by the ‘sexual assault survivors’ team’ (which also escorted the victim to a police station). In the New School study centre, no assault of that nature was – thankfully – reported. Yet a rhetoric of ‘divine violence’ (and outright rejection of Occupy Wall Street), emitted by some, amounted to small but meaningful assaults on others’ right to represent the occupation. It didn’t matter so much that a few blokes had drunkenly and unaesthetically graffiti-ed the walls. It mattered, however, that the enemy had been internalized. Trans, female, Black, Latin American, queer, disabled, working-class and older participants in the supposedly ‘all city student’ space were feeling indirectly targeted. And as one indignant African American New School student put it in a general assembly there she had decided to attend: “all I see here is white folks trying to tell me what radical activism consists of. Believe me, I know.”

I ought to mention, here, that what I have been calling an ‘occupation’ (here is a statement from its website) never substantively became one. President David van Zandt played a tricky game, killing us with kindness and enforcing an ‘academics-only’ door policy rather than anything stricter. To our dismay, moreover, very few non-academics arrived to make use of the student-ID-distribution system we ran to get around this. I should also add that I did not help plan the occupation, in fact, as an extremely new arrival in New York City, I was bedazzled enough by my new social environs to assume that the groundwork for a student occupation to mitigate the loss of Zuccotti had been more extensively carried out than it actually had. In fact, not much outreach had been undertaken among the ‘labor’ and longer-term Occupy Wall Street organising structures. The meetings I attended, i.e. the penultimate and ultimate meetings before the seizure of the space – distinct from the all-city OWS student general assemblies – nevertheless had representation from diverse New York universities: not just the New School, but Columbia, NYU, Pratt, CUNY, and even Juilliard. It initially seemed possible, therefore, that the occupation could be saved from becoming a ‘New School occupation’. Had that been the case, cliques might have had a harder time sinking the collective boat. It was urgent that no place really existed, at that time, for Occupy Wall Street to assemble. Ideally, to remedy this, occupiers would have wrested control of the escalator and entrance from the New School management and the bank. The catch-22 here became the fact that achieving that required serious support from the whole movement; gaining such support relied upon an open-door policy and a sense of trust which several union branches were reluctant to give to what appeared to be a bunch of drunken kids. And why should you – comrade, out there, whoever you are – enter a space that isn’t socially secure, when you are already preparing to take enormous political and material risks with your body in order to proliferate eu-topia? If existing neoliberal market logic is utopian (in the sense implied by ‘no-place’), and eu-topian aspirations raised in recent years across the world (in the sense of ‘good-place’) are still far from fruition, thenhetero-topias are the bridge between the two, laboratories in which another world becomes possible. So, when we begin the rehearsals for revolution in our encampments and occupations, ‘their’ phobic security has got to be replaced by an alternate ordering, an unbreakable promise to one another, a sense of security that is ours.

‘Security’ is not a word I use comfortably, though it was not previously clear to me why – beyond its hazy association with the word ‘homeland’ and with ‘anti-terror’ legislation. After all, to be on some level se-cure, without-care, must be a precondition for equality of participation and action in concert with others. It cannot, as a concept, be given over to reactionaries, police commissioners, border vigilantes, and surveillance-fetishists. Ways in which so-called ‘security’ issues play out in temporary autonomous zones are often polarising, pinning those raising concerns in a camp marked ‘self-involved’ and/or ‘identity politicians’, and those to whom they are addressed in another marked ‘long-suffering true-radical’. As I have argued, the false dichotomy stems from a misunderstanding of ‘revolutionariness’ and amounts to a failure in holding open heterotopia. The space fails to be different and cannot therefore give birth to eu-topia. The stress produced by putting ourselves ‘at risk’ differs wildly – and for good reason – from person to person. The tenor of ‘safer spaces agreements’ penetrates only unevenly into the common sense. For some, ‘freedom’ still spells individualistic defiance of traditional morality, even within the temporary autonomous zone. So, which is the way to struggle against asymmetries grown insuperably visible once the prevalent, however imperfect, “sense of security” has been challenged. How do we behave to promote care-free existence, where the liberal democratic state’s panoptic gaze is stymied?

In Kevin Hetherington’s book The Badlands of Modernity, heterotopias are alternate (not just ‘transgressive’) orderings, “uncertain zones that challenge our sense of security and perceptions of space as fixed”. But what must also be considered, then, is whose sense of security, whose perception of space, because the more “certain” zones we inhabit by default are rife with division, hierarchy and false consciousness. We know that privately owned squares, roads and buildings, with their insurance policies based on the logic of ‘risk society’, turn into supports for public action – and private life – when people pitch their tents there. These supports for action become, in theory, safe(r) spaces, because the collectivity frames alternate ‘commandments’ for its own society. It is frequently said (for instance in David Graeber’s Direct Action) that she who has engaged in the collective rush, and experienced political ‘take-off’ on the streets, when bodies in alliance suddenly take notice of their common sense, gains sudden understanding of the miraculous ability of mutual acting to re-make space. But the radical equality that seems to beproduced in mutual acting must be repeated, again and again, or else it falters. It arises, in part, negatively, out of opposition uniting all whose bodies provoke the common – baton-wielding – enemy. Even here, vulnerability differentials require attention: arrest is a more serious matter for Black people. The equality I’m talking about arises positively, however, when a home can be made, a meeting-place defended, a people’s library stocked, individual traumas soothed, bellies filled, a social welfare net autonomously woven around the bodies in alliance, in resistance. Security is nothing if not that equality. Yet the radical equality of the commons is threatened constantly by consciousness copied from capitalism. Bearing this in mind, then, shall we try again?

I’ve been silent and busy writing final papers. Here is the first of the three.

Civil disobedience as revolution: a critical appraisal

Preamble
The opening of the essay on civil disobedience reads, today, like a conservative, if sardonic, disquisition upon the state of a dysfunctional mid-twentieth century American judiciary and a guarded statement of approval of the “nice” type of ‘60s and ‘70s protestors. It is remarkable, perhaps, from the standpoint of 2011 and advanced biopower, to hear that Arendt considered herself forty years ago to be living where “disobedience and defiance of authority [were] a general mark of our time” (73). Her civic republicanism resonated with good faith: particularly in those lines where she shakes her head with shock at the authorities’ cynicism: “it is as though we are engaged in a nationwide experiment to find out how many potential criminals – that is, people who are prevented from committing crimes only by the deterrent force of the law – actually exist in a given society” (70). And her languid desire for more effective policing strikes a dud note within what is usually otherwise understood to be a vision of civic eutopia: she bewails that “neither potential lawbreakers … nor law-abiding citizens need elaborate studies to tell them that criminal acts will probably … have no legal consequences whatsoever” (71). We pause, too, in the face of her apparent regret over not being able to further fill overburdened prison cells: “What is so frightening in the present situation is not only the failure of police power per se, but also that to remedy this condition radically would spell disaster for these other [the courts and the prisons] equally important branches of the judicial system” (72). As distinct from ‘crime’, the acceptable kind of law-breaking, for Arendt, is explicitly that which is “tuned to necessary and desirable preservation or restoration of the status quo – the preservation of rights guaranteed under the First Amendment, or the restoration of the proper balance of power in the government” (75). She posits “organized minorities” striving towards this end “that are too important, nor merely in numbers, but in quality of opinion, to be safely disregarded” (76).

This essay was provoked by that word, “safely”.

* * *
Introduction
In Arendt, revolution and civil disobedience are posited as structurally analogous. In fact, this pairing is one of the few instances in which Arendt links, instead of distinguishing, concepts. It seemingly speaks to us as a concrete strategic insight, particularly at a moment of potential insurrectionary potency such as 2011’s nascent ‘Occupy’ movement of the ‘Ninety-Nine Per Cent’ – if civil disobedience is revolution in miniature, then surely it leads to revolution. In this essay, I do not attempt to refute Arendt’s proposition wholesale, so much as to problematize the definitions of civil disobedience and revolution she enshrines, and the characterization of civil disobedience she sees as necessarily revolutionary.

In what follows I consider the inescapably instrumental ends to which a dominant liberal ideology usually subordinates the concept of ‘civil disobedience, recalling that the idea of direct action was conceived by activists in answer to this very problem. Where the ‘civil disobedient’ conjures into being a partially modified world in which a particular law does not exist – a world for which the citizen is usually prepared to be incarcerated in this world – the practitioner of direct action brings into a being what Kevin Hetherington would call heterotopia: a different space of appearances. This practitioner does not aim above all to be apprehended or prosecuted, yet prefigures a veritable eutopia, an entirely re-made constitution. I aver, therefore, that there are contexts which render the spectacular, public, and ultimately rule-enshrining virtues of the civil disobedient at best irrelevant and at worst, quietist. But I claim that the collective, prefigurative, and often ‘impossibilist’ principles of direct action may in fact represent a more fitting testimony than ‘civil disobedience’ to the revolutionary aspects of Arendt’s the politics. In civil disobedience, as Judith Butler’s ‘Bodies in Alliance’ argues, one must already be in the space in order to bring the space of appearance into being. This means that a power operates prior to any performative power exercised by a plurality; whereas direct action arises when bodies appear together or, rather when through their action, they bring the space of appearances into being. Put another way, the local resistance to specific political situations, in civil disobedience, is premised upon the global validity of the socio-political conditions from which those situations arise; direct action rejects the premises of those conditions and is thus heterotopian. And in the terms of Rancière’s preface, civil disobedience is arguing over what ‘white’ means, whereas direct action is saying: ‘black’. If Arendt’s account of civil disobedience is accurate, then, contrary to being identical or essentially analogous to revolution, it in fact relies on a kind of global conservatism to constitute its action at all, and its meaning is only defined relative to the global norms of the system it locally resists.

I therefore wish to call Arendt to account for not penetrating the mechanisms by which liberal democracy itself generates favorable discourse around civil disobedience (within which civil disobedients risk inserting themselves to entirely anti-eutopian ends). I infer a role occupied by violence, anonymity, and non-citizenship within a direct form of action which sees itself not as civil disobedience but as the autonomous vehicle for acts of judgment without borders. I make the point that self-styled ‘disobedience’, Hannah Arendt’s “traditional” libertarian mold for revolution, with its pragmatic or realist negative legalism, renews the authority of its target – the governing institutions which may in fact be past redemption. Of course this line of delegitimizing reasoning can prove directionless, and Arendt had great faith in institutions (Deva Woodly has said of her theory of power that ‘she gives us all kinds of sexy radical theory … and then ends up with Locke’). Put another way, theBut the trouble with civil disobedience is that it’s, firstly, civil, and secondly, no true negation of obedience. To formulate a question we might ask of Arendt’s philosophy of revolution, under what conditions is self-conscious law-breaking insufficient?

Liberal democracy and its loyal opposition
On Revolution describes the American Revolution as constitution libertatis, the birth of freedom, established not merely negatively as a guarantee of rights, but positively, as a reality of citizenship federalized on the principle of self-government. Her wonderful insight (one which Albrecht Wellmer mistakenly sees as pitting her against both liberal democrats and Marxists, whom he takes to yearn in similar ways for the withering-away of the state or its reduction to mere administration) is of course that politics can have no end, certainly not the day after the revolution, even if, as in Arendt’s quip (CD 78), on that day, radicals were to turn conservative. For Arendt, perpetual participation is the only meaningful remembrance of that miraculous natality we know humanity to be capable of. Institutions will not maintain themselves. Thus politics is either world[-making] without end, or nothingness. Arendt’s pure and dazzling political philosophy gives us politics as a principle in itself – which is why it is at first utterly confounding to find her so conservative on the issue of civil disobedience, so protective of a defunct constitution, and so repelled by the idea of massed ‘bodies in alliance’ (to use Judith Butler’s phrase) – as we shall see. The reason is the apparently menacing idea of Butler’s “different social ontology [which starts] from the presumption that there is a shared condition of precarity that situates our political lives”; that we are “constituted in a sociality that exceeds us”.

Arendt may have excoriated capitalism (she was not, she said, the fan she deemed Karl Marx to be) but she essentially failed to understand how capitalism’s liberal-democratic American state would come to perfect the art of collaborating with, recuperating, and neutralizing those who rebelled against it for the sake of something new and better. It is not sufficient to speculate in hushed tones that someone who has pondered deeply the horrors of the Holocaust can be excused her excessive loyalty to the idea of the American constitution, or forgiven her squeamish fear with regard to those informal movements of the streets seeking to challenge it (and not to restore it). For Canovan, “it is only if we forget Arendt’s experience of Nazism that we can see her as the patron saint of direct action, welcoming every eruption of the population into the streets”. On the contrary, the eminently observable socio-historical fact that “precarity is unequally distributed and that lives are not considered equally grievable or equally valuable” is also a political (and not ‘just’ an ethical) alarum. No: while it is amply clear that forms of solidarity ‘erupt’ in fascist guises as well as revolutionary ones, and that liberal democracy all too happily metes out protest rights (thus shoring up its systemic marriage to the ideological hollow motive force that is capital), too much is at stake in civic life for a theory of politics to simply aid in the reproduction of normal social controls and the ontological stabilization of a system of disciplinary assumptions about our collective life. When ‘occupiers’ of symbolic physical shreds of ‘Wall Street’ paint “We the People” on their placards, as the Tea Party do, they copy Arendt in hoping against hope that civil disobedience can content itself with restorative rather than eutopian politics. This is why I call ‘disobedience’ of this kind ‘loyal opposition’.

Certainly, liberal democracy was not producing hegemonic ‘pro civil disobedience’ discourse in huge quantities in the years immediately succeeding 1968. Arendt is able to cite Vice-President Agnew in October 1973 urging the public to think of protestors as “rotten apples”. Yet in the context of the Nixon Administration, her basic policy recommendation (for that is what it is), that civil disobedience – ideologically de-fanged and considered as a scion of the oldest American tradition – be incorporated institutionally into government like a court jester, to keep us all honest, is all the more absurd. Further, for the purposes of this argument, it invalidates her idea that civil disobedience is revolution in miniature, suggesting simultaneously that her support for revolution, generally, denies forever the “part of no part”. For if the body is not primarily located in space, but, when moved by plural ‘actors’, brings about a new space, then those whose bodies are “unseen” have no acting part in politics. Canovan, already quoted above, skewered what is, in her Social Research essay, politely called “the paradox” of Arendt’s populism whereby “while she welcomed direct action by the people, she also feared and deplored almost all actual cases of grassroots mobilization”. Kateb, too, sounds a little wry when he notes how “Arendt added American civil disobedience in the 1960s to her list of authentic political occurrences”. Her interview on ‘Politics and Violence’ makes amply clear, after all, her fear of insurrectionary youth. Generally, the proliferation of loosely-defined undesirable political categories in her work such as ‘the mob’, ‘the mass’, ‘the tribe’, ‘or the hungry multitude’ appears to serve to conjure the specter of popular participation. Direct action enters to spoil the authentic politics achieved by those full-bellied few who, erstwhile, embodied “the people” and created a space for ‘freedom’ based on nothing other than mutual promises and agreements. I am probably not the first to think of this in relation to Virginia Woolf’s prescription for writers: ‘one needs a room of one’s own’. This theory of politics possesses a rarefied potential for excellence, yet one too easily marred by the incursions of bodily demands (“I’m hungry!”/“I’m homeless!”/“I’m invisible!” etc.). It is a politics for the counted, a politics of the demos. For everyone else, “we cannot act without supports, and yet we must struggle for the supports that allow us to act.”

Agnew’s ‘rotten apple’ simile suggests that everyone is inside the one constitutional barrel – a situation we know to be illusory. Whilst action is always supported (by other bodies acting in concert with us, by our being physically at least minimally sustained, and by our reciprocal constitution by the square, the street, the loud-hailer, etc), the life of the body itself sometimes becomes an issue of politics. For stressing these materialities, Arendt thought Marx anti-political. At the risk of returning tit for tat, the issues which she conceived of as mere “social” preconditions for action are on the contrary – for the majority of humanity – that which make up the political substance for which her promisory sphere is the precondition. Or, as Rancière puts it in refutation of what might as well be her “outrageous claim [that] the demos [be] the whole of the community”: “politics … causes the poor to exist as an entity” (italics mine). Marx’s objective, yet transcendent, understanding of revolution is salutary here, insofar as the need for constant self-criticism, constant self-interruption, constant “return to the apparently accomplished”, and even “recoil from the indefinite colossalness” of one’s goals, is needed in a genuine revolution before the ‘Hic Rhodus! Hic salta!’ moment arises. The exclusions of existing democracy cannot be seen as a ‘malfunction’ in a system conceived by true politics. Indeed, one side of Arendtian politics, lauded by Bonnie Honig and many others, agrees, locating (with Marx) the defects of representative government in the gap between modern formal/legal equality and de facto social inequality. The other side, however, enjoyed by Wellmer et al., rejects the pertinence of social inequality and ideology to the matter of politics altogether, and rejects on the grounds of realism new efforts to repeat, or proletarianize, the revolutions of the late 18th century. My response to this choice is Rancière’s: “We will not claim, as the “restorers” do, that politics has “simply” to find its own principle again to get back its vitality”.

The naturalness of equality
So, “the space of appearance does not belong to a sphere of politics separate from a sphere of survival and of need.” In Hannah Arendt’s work, the profound sense in which obedience is required in order to accept ‘politics’ under the banner of freedom, in abdication of the banner of equality, is uneasily glossed over as a question of pacta sunt servanda. Equality is the precondition for the mutual recognition involved in political “speech” (which as we know can be bodily, symbolic, vocal, or written). If equality is not a given, and direct democracy riddled with asymmetries, the most she is able to say (in ‘On Civil Disobedience’) is that “the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased” (CD 97). The “dangers of equality” are seen as a threat to the “contractual model of the associations” between people – the honorable politics that is based on the moral magic of the promisory bond. But the idea that the classes and the superfluous part of humanity are united to their rulers through a promisory compact of the kind Arendt canonizes is delusional at best. Indeed, some promises – like those uniting members of an ‘affinity group’ in direct action – belong quite uniquely to the genius of natality and not to its distortion, the beating ad nauseam of the constitutional drum.

For Arendt, the ‘naturalness’ of collective political engagement and the ‘artificiality’ of diverse intra-social mobilization – a forced re-working of ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ modes of human contracting – is a principle to be clung to. It hinges on the supposed ‘natural’/‘organic’ tendency towards compassion in reaction to social inequality, versus the (desirable, institutionalizable) ‘artificial’/‘mechanical’ impulse to set men ‘free’. Liberal democracy, as a space of the reduction of political discourse to questions of culture and sociality, makes this dichotomy untenable. If America was modelled on the Greek polis, consent (to our collective political ‘equalization’ and social ‘freedom’) would still be implied. Dissent implies consent, as Arendt says. Conversely, perhaps consent implies dissent as well. Today, the mantra ‘We are the Ninety-Nine Per Cent’ redounds with a new social politics. Forcefully, the question, posed by the Bar Symposium in 1970, of “the citizen’s moral relation to the law in a society of consent” (CD, 51) lives on – largely thanks to the philosophical work performed by Arendt and others on the (in)sufficiency of ‘consent’ as a linchpin of governance (see more recently George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent, and Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, both of which examine the hollowness of liberal-democratic consensus for legitimizing ecocide).
It appears at first blush to be for mere introduction’s sake that Hannah Arendt reminds us of the sharp rupture which occurred historically in our very understanding of the term ‘revolution’, which, before natality and ‘freedom’ were its raisons d’être, used to designate restorative regime changes via the motif of planetary cyclicality. In fact, her awareness of this etymology filters perceptibly through into her moments of populist conservatism. France’s year 1789, to her, contained a double revolution, both political and social. These were respectively ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ in their forms of solidarization – a distinction she makes almost as a modification of the Durkheimian ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ types of solidarity, categories usually applicable to societies based on homogeneous/pre-industrial, and complementary/industrial, divisions of labor. Furthermore, On Revolution reminds us that – contrary to the prevailing modern conception – the Ancients conceived men to be born unequal, and to be rendered equal through participatory praxis within political institutions (mechanical solidarity). What an extraordinary expression of pre-political violence, and what a perverse refusal frames it – a refusal to conceive of violence as persistent and endemic. The alternative to the world of Arendt’s French Revolution, which plagues her ‘reluctant modernism’, is of course a schema in which persons born politically equal (possessing only the right to have rights) semi-voluntarily render themselves violently socio-politically unequal through a system of economic cooperation within a prevailing mode of production based on organized interdependency (organic solidarity). The unnaturalness of both equality and inequality thereby comes home. This leaves some pressing questions of consent.

Consensus and violence
Precisely triggered by Arendt’s theoretical unease with the implied rights-based consensus which preserves Western liberal democracy, the final paragraphs of ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution’ amount to an eutopianist explanation of the ‘how to’ of the currently existing alterglobalization/anticapitalist “movement of movements” spawned circa the 2001 global trade conference at Seattle. (n.b. defender of her ‘realism’, Wellmer is quick to dismiss it as a ‘metaphor’.) “If only ten of us are sitting around a table [I presume she would also accept ‘cross-legged around a camp-fire’], each expressing his own opinion, each hearing the opinions of others, then a rational formation of opinion can take place through the exchange of opinions. …It will become clear which one of us is best suited to present our view before the next higher council, where in turn our view will be clarified through the influence of other views, revised, or proved wrong” (PR 233). This ideal of meaningful consensus permeating action, in the activist tradition whose mode d’emploi was shaped by the 1970s feminist organizing essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, is called the spokes-council system – and Arendt’s anarchist followers helped to shape it. Yet the most remarkable aspect of Arendt’s characterizations of civil disobedience is her somewhat anti-autonomist insistence that it be obedient to existing codes of civility. In the post-1968 context she hoped, contra Ernst Bloch, that “the principle of hope” should not spread from Europe to the United States, and believed, again contra Bloch’s “natural law’ of those who do not “truckle”, that “there is an element of running amok on the part of these bomb-throwing children” (PR207). “They have,” she pronounced, “no inkling of what power means”; adding somewhat cryptically that “revolutionaries do not make revolutions!”(PR 206). By this she meant, as she mused to Adelbert Reif, that not the oppressed, but those who object to their oppression on moral grounds, revolutionize the status quo. She deems students “free”, rather than enmeshed in the reproduction of capital. She holds that, for them, a project of revolution in the restorative sense is the only likely marshal of serious power (i.e. of collective participation). She implies that civility (and not antagonistic sentiments like the graffito “Ne gâchez pas votre pourriture”) is always connected with respect for the originary text. Arendt has already determined that a “theory of revolution can only deal with the justification of violence because this justification constitutes its political limitation” (italics mine) and stated that “if, instead, it arrives at a glorification or justification of violence as such, it is no longer political but antipolitical” (OR 10). She pushes anger wholly out of politics. But maintaining oneself as a body sometimes requires enragé action; moreover, con-sens-us without sensual unity, that is, without visceral contempt and deep consanguine love, is not consensus; and therefore Arendt contradicts herself.

Arendt’s argument would be, I venture, that forgiveness beats rage every time. When people of color sit at a lunch counter allocated by the state for whites, those people act anew, and they act unconditionally, because in effect, they forgive the racist state by their action; and forgiveness, as Arendt says, interrupts the ‘natural’ process of cyclical revenge (moreover, one can only forgive the unforgiveable). Yet using politics to achieve post-racism is not the point, for any instrumentalization of politics is unthinkable, and moreover “violent action is ruled by the means-ends category” (OV 106). Thus Black Power is not ‘power’ at all: this discourse makes it easier to understand why Tommie Smith wrote autobiographically that his ‘Silent Gesture’ was for human rights instead. The raised black fist and its existential threat to white bourgeois society might not enjoy political legitimacy, but, like it or not, it had power, because it issued from consensus (or, of course, ‘dissensus’) and it vindicated the right to have rights. The intrusion of the social does not under all conditions enjoy the option of being civil. And, fascinatingly, for one so phobic of the ‘social’, Arendt also thought the conviction that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” to be “entirely non-Marxian” (OV p113). The explanation, as I have so far been trying to express it, inheres in the fundamental obedience civic republicans expect from those who break the law together for political reasons. But it also relates to the definition of consensus as non-violent, a paradigmatic constraint for which Rancière found the counter-word, ‘dissensus’. Arendt did not understand the temptation towards violence rhetoric, but she did understand the temptation of the efficacy of violence itself. Property damage, undertaken in concert in order to “repeat the occupation” of the commons, should not logically fall foul of her seminal distinction between power and violence. Yet with her, civil disobedience and revolution occur within the political realm “strictly speaking” only as non-violent enterprises, but nowehere is her writing definitive about what constitutes “violence” in these spheres.

I want to give an example of institutional contempt towards the wrong aspect of a grassroots mobilization which broke its ‘dissensus’. Over thirty-five years after Arendt’s death, the November 2011 occupation of the 90 Fifth Avenue New School study center, which was pioneered by genuine experienced revolutionaries – whose hearts the whole sorry experience broke – but which was opportunistically dominated, both aurally and aesthetically, by inconsistently self-styled adolescent insurrectionist-nihilists, would doubtless have repelled Hannah Arendt too for these reasons. One can imagine her signature on the bottom of the letter composed by Andrew Arato, faculty member at her erstwhile alma mater the New School for Social Research’s faculty member Andrew Arato, published online on colleague Jeff Goldfarb’s web log Deliberately Considered, which condemned “random violence” and argued that the liberal leadership of President David Van Zant “had provided no conceivable excuse for this action”. MacKenzieWark, however, from Eugene Lang college within the same university, seems to me to make clear he deems the letter to constitute what Rancière calls the high treason of the Critical Left, opening his ‘Notes on the New School Occupation’ with the pithy sentiment “These are times when one must dispense contempt sparingly due to the unseemly number of things that deserve it.” The hebetudinous and offensive barricade-graffiti of the nihilist opportunists of ‘Occupy the New School’ is perhaps best condemned in this manner. Or, perhaps, one could invoke Slavoj Žižek’s double-edged epigram: “our violence is always legitimate and never necessary”. (One might even modify this slightly: “but never necessary”.) This, in the end, Arendt might well have understood.

Direct action: heterotopia prefiguring eu-topia
We have seen that theoretical support for civil disobedience frequently collapses into a reiterated demand for obedience. The location of the law at fault, within such ‘supporting’ views, is paradoxically over-determined, being both exceptional and extraneous to the contracted republic, and very much identified with the body politic. The problem of where to begin proves stark: in this section I pinpoint “the state of nature”. For Arendt, the “relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon of revolution” lies in the concept, lighted upon in the seventeenth century, of a violent “state of nature”. As Dana Villa explains, constitutio libertatis occurred for Arendt “after the violent struggle for liberation from oppression, the struggle usually (and wrongly, in Arendt’s view) identified with revolution”. The last two pages of her introduction to On Revolution, which both introduce and tie up this theme, contain a serious ambivalence, however. On the one hand, the “state of nature” is identified as “pre-political” and “implies the existence of a beginning”. It names the “recognition that a political realm does not automatically come into being wherever men live together”. It is characterised by the conviction that “in the beginning was a crime”. On the other hand, this “crime” is also what forms “brotherhood”; its violence is that from which “whatever political organization men may have achieved” originates.

My point is that the “state of nature” cannot be both pre-political and predicated upon a crime, if a crime of violence is also what gives birth to politics. Thus, although Arendt recognises that the “state of nature” was never “meant to be taken as a historical fact” she elides the question of its ahistorical narrative truth. Her implication that the formula “Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus” (OR 10) is no reason at all to suppose that “no beginning [can ever] be made without using violence” rests unexamined. This compounds her failure to clarify whether violence actually does inhere within, or on the contrary ruptures the “state of nature”, yanking the human subject (like Lacan’s mirror moment) into the realm of the Symbolic/political, i.e. over an “unbridgeable chasm” (OR 10-11). The distinction has crucial consequences for the theory of power and violence, and therefore permeates the issue of revolution’s structural resemblance to civil disobedience. For if, in order to ‘begin’, we must first forge from the peaceful tabula rasa a space for politics through violence, we might indeed see the two as similarly extraneous to – yet enabling of – politics. But if ‘beginning’ entails fighting fire with ice, and mastering the violent un-political energies of the “state of nature” with the force of new and organised political energies, then surely revolution and civil disobedience cannot be considered in the same light. Political space can never be ‘pure’, but always involves some kind of reliance on pre-political violence. Whilst revolution acknowledges this, negates and transforms the state of un-freedom; disobedience, as a political act, is not the same as negation, on the contrary, it affirms pre-political non-violence in the law, and, by ‘opting in’ to it with conspicuously qualified enthusiasm, illuminates the place where its authority pretends to be.

Arendt notes that Socrates and Thoreau as the sole ‘set pieces’ of civil disobedience theory, interpreted as reinforcements of the requirement that one accept punishment, elicit “the joy of jurists” because they are not political. She clearly views the American reconciliation between the law of the land with civil disobedience – via the patriotic imperative of ‘testing the law’s constitutionality’ – with bemusement, and is swift in her dismissal of the idea that the good citizen should “welcome his punishment”, or be theorized as a conscientious objector. The view of civil disobedience as a matter of individual conscience, articulated by Thoreau, requires not that one “tremble for one’s country” but that one act only if the situation one has been born into forces one to commit injustice upon another. Arendt’s theory – needless to say – is political and cannot stop at that. Direct action, the concept of group acting upon the world without representation or mediation, whether through occupation, general strike, is the pure and risky alternative. The distinction I have proposed between civil disobedience and revolution, which Arendt fails to make, has much to do with what Robert Fine calls her ‘critique of her critique of representation’. As Deva Woodly’s comment implies, Arendt makes the journey towards today’s prevalent – and ideologically relatively evacuated – theories of radical democracy, and back again towards the need for a political élite. Direct action is the name that has been given to those practitioners of civil disobedience who perceived the need to transcend. It is certainly extraordinary that someone who hopes for a ‘civil disobedience niche’ within the state can pronounce the somewhat ‘bomb-throwing’ sentence: “what we today call democracy is a form of government where the few rule, at least supposedly, in the interest of the many … [and where] public freedom and public happiness … become the privilege of the few” (OR 269).

Kevin Hetherington, in a Foucauldian vein, has written on the need for heterotopias to prefigure and pre-date eutopic re-worldings. The space of public appearances can – indeed, must – according to this view, undergo complete rebirth. Paradigms internal to this space are apposite, unrelated to the norm. They need not be comprehensively imagined, but only negatively apprehended, in advance (one might think of John Holloway’s idea that radically speaking our political motivation “begins with a scream”). Arendt does not approve of the “the anarchic nature of divinely inspired consciences” (CD 66) any more than she approves of the “self-sacrificial element” of the fanatical (67). Yet, as Honig notices, the American revolutionaries put two rather fanatical “appeals to transcendent source of authority” – “self-evident truths” – in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and Arendt is forced to admit that they therefore did not “consistently maintain the performative posture she admires”. And in this light, the all-important non-violence of the American Revolution falls somewhat flat; that is to say when its motivation risks corruption by a promise, not to one’s brothers and sisters, but to God and a kind of Eden worthy of being restored for a chosen people. “The state of nature”, by definition, cannot consist of heterotopia; and it cannot therefore enter into the horizon of eutopia. Arendt makes her ambivalent relationship to the bridging of worlds clear. Her insistence, for instance, that both those who say “better red than dead” and those who say “better dead than red” “are not serious” (OR 4) implies a commitment more radical than either of these postures, namely, a commitment to the Kantian imperative which Eichmann so grossly bastardized, whereby the content of the individual will (better dead or better red) must be fit to double as a general rule: a premonition of another world. The resultant tension in Arendt’s writing on the question of direct action is extraordinary. But only as a direct activist, and not as a civil disobedient, can one give birth to a heterotopia in which politics can find a foothold for the annihilation of the old world. That is to say, civil disobedience alone will never size up to the idealist proposition fiat justicia et pereat mundus.

Conclusion: on the structural analogy between C.D. and revolution
What a significant portion of the public found to be scandalous about Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was not in fact her returning of individual responsibility to Adolf Eichmann for precise acts (as opposed to responsibility for ‘The Holocaust’) but her simultaneous re-location of responsibility to those whose “conscience [had] apparently got lost” and who did not disobey the Nazis. Indeed, the ‘present absence’ of organised resistance by the Judenräte and by anti-Nazi leagues grows incomprehensible to the dumbfounded reader of Eichmann, who begins to suspect non-Nazis of harboring greater reverence for official Nazi ideology than Nazis did themselves. Indeed, her much misunderstood banalization of evil has a flip-side, namely, her insistence on the potential banality of good, which she documents relentlessly in her case-studies of resistance and civil (or national) disobedience that proved astonishingly possible – one hesitates of course to say ‘easy’ – in Denmark, and at times in France, but certainly very powerful when pitted against Nazi strength. Those isolated instances of non-collective resistance like Anthon Schmidt’s concrete aid to Jews, or Christoph Probst, Sophie Scholl, and Hans Scholl’s attempt at leafletting against Hitler, were of course murderously put down. And, as this is the case, Arendt’s mournful wish that it should have been possible – for honour’s sake – to tell far, far more stories of such disobedient heroes, is also the prompt for the fundamental question raised in my introduction. In the totalitarian context, is such (individual) civil disobedience simply insufficient, or is it – on the contrary – sufficient? Is nothing but concerted revolutionary negation of Nazism worthy of the name of ethics, or is it also deeply honourable to amplify ‘ambiguities of domination’ (Wedeen, 1999) on the symbolic level? Does one risk compromising one’s judgment by engaging in oblique or ‘termite resistance’ (as David Harvey terms John Holloway’s theory of ‘cracks’) as opposed to public efforts of obstruction, strike, boycott, and blockade? Primo Levi’s damning thought ‘if this is a man…’ suggested the most melancholy of all abdications, of all existential defeats. It demanded that we devise ways to come to respect ourselves, in the world after Auschwitz, yet, if truth be told, victorious action against hidden holocausts still eludes us. Policies of ‘making live and letting die’, as Tania Li writes in relation to rural dispossession, today take the form of climate change, ‘slum-ification’ policies, neoliberal pharmaceuticals, and modern-day Majority World wage slavery.

Judith Butler has provocatively suggested Arendt’s thought on Adolf Eichmann to be telling us that “only philosophy could have saved those millions of lives”. Canovan emphatically demurs, ascribing to Arendt a firm “suspicion … of the incursions of philosophers into politics” (we must assume this includes politics in dark times). Civil disobedience is ultimately passed off as a “traditional instrument”, as Arendt tries to conclude: “Ever since the Mayflower Compact was drafted … voluntary associations have been the specifically American remedy for the failure of institutions, the unreliability of men, and the uncertain nature of the future” (102). Of course, still today, there exist people who believe – for instance – the viscerally charged protest chant “The system is racist: they killed Troy Davis!” to be effecting remedial care, rather than dissent as profound as Nora’s at the close of A Doll’s House. They are wrong. If natality does indeed characterise both revolution and civil disobedience as it is here defined, then the former displays this miraculous quality radically; the latter, only insofar as someone desires to be ‘born again’ and believes their soul to have undergone remedial (and possibly ‘revolutionary’) restoration. This second sense is Camus’s when he underlines the desirability of acting on conscience for reasons of personal health. Yet philosophy still has a way of erupting from the collective experience of ‘moments of excess’. When Arendt said that “nothing deprives people more effectively of the light of public happiness than poverty” (222) she was wrong: what she should have said was ‘inequality’. This is what Rancière saw when he asserted the motive force of politics to be the concept of equality. Well, she who wishes to philosophize equality had better be willing to put her body on the line.

Renaissance dreamer Girolamo Cardano said in his Somniorum Synesiorum Libri II (On Interpreting Dreams), “to dream of living in a new and unknown city means imminent death. The dead, in fact, live elsewhere, nor is it known where”. In Cardano’s vision, the moment we look past our existing constitution, yearningly, towards another “new and unknown” one, means the moment in which the existing constitution’s death knell rings. When we dream of living “elsewhere, nor is it known where”, we begin to prepare eutopia in the dark. We make a blind and lovingly murderous gesture, allowing the present polis (that which we inhabit) to slip away into nothingness to join that nowhere or u-topos inhabited by the dead. But what Cardano can also be interpreted as saying is rather different: a dreaming detachment from the material reality of one’s situation can represent the killing of politics, the a-political meditativeness, perhaps, in our times, of the ‘enlightened’ New Age reluctant earth-dweller who aims to emulate the water-lily, up to her neck in the mud of the world, consenting to its rule, yet spreading the petals of her face to an anarchic heaven above the surface. This dual possibility – of revolutionary rupture and dreamy ‘consciousness-raising’ spectacle – mirrors the distinction I have tried to draw. If we dissent from the murky polis in which we find ourselves buried, the point is not to stand in judgment according to “self-evident” truths, but to change it precisely with the power of truths that are not self-evident – truths that are chosen, performed, messy, contingent, embodied, mutable, and collectively hit upon. A group of civil disobedients is still a water-lily, even if the shaming power of its pristine (Gandhian) petals, shining above the surface of the scum of politicking, can churn up the water. A revolution, however, is full of dirty hands, perplexing rather than shaming the inner logic of the system, turning the pond upside-down, and doing so within everyday life. Raoul Vaneigem has a famous line which spells, I fear, Hannah Arendt’s final indictment: “People who talk about revolution … without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouths.” But even an achieved eu-topia becomes a corpse-like u­-topia again, relentlessly, so much is certain. It is imperative to act outrageously upon dreams, therefore, or else we follow our dying city into the grave.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah, Crises of the Republic, Harvest, Harcourt, 1972.
_____________, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harvest.
_____________, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press.
_____________, On Revolution, Viking Press

Butler, Judith (2011) ‘Hannah Arendt’s Challenge to Adolf Eichmann’, The Guardian ¦ The Big Ideas, 08/29 accessed 12/02/2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-banality-of-evil?INTCMP=SRCH.

__________ ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’, website of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies ¦ section entitled “#occupy and assemble”, accessed 11/20/2011 http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en.

Canovan, Margaret (1996) ‘Hannah Arendt as Conservative Thinker,’ in Kohn and May, eds., Hannah Arendt – Twenty Years Later (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

________________(2002) Margaret Canovan, ‘The People, the Masses, and the Mobilization of Power: The Paradox of Arendt’s Populism,’ Social Research 69 (2).

Eco, Umberto(2007) Foucault’s Pendulum, ed. Weaver, Harvest Books.

Fine, Robert (2001) Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Routledge, London and New York.

Hetherington, Kevin (1997)The Badlands of Modernity, Routledge.

Honig, Bonnie (1995) Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Penn State Press.

_________ (1991) “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85/1.

_________ (1993) “Arendt’s Accounts of Action and Authority,” in Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Kateb, George, ‘Political action: its nature and advantages’, Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa, Cambridge University Press.

Keen, David (2007) ‘Action-as-Propaganda’, Counterpunch, 09/24.http://www.counter-punch.org/2007/09/24/action-as-propaganda/.

Marx, Karl (1964) The 18thBrumaire of Louis Napoléon, New York International.

Rancière, Jacques (1995) Disagreement (La Mésentente) University of Minnesota Press.

Vaneigem, Raoul (2001) The Revolution of Everyday Life, Rebel Press.

Villa, Dana (2000) ‘The development of Arendt’s political thought’, Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa, Cambridge University Press.

Wellmer, Albrecht (2000) ‘Arendt on Revolution’, Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa, Cambridge University Press.

Regardless of our personal beliefs, it became clear that the 90 5^th Ave occupation had not galvanized enough support from the wider community of students and stakeholders. Despite the many positive teach-ins, workshops, and discussions the space had fostered in such a short time, the occupation unfortunately was becoming self-referential and trapped in a futile logistical effort to preserve a space soon to be lost, and lack of regard for outreach caused the occupation to risk driving away more people than it brought together. The focus on just maintaining the space itself as an occupation for occupation’s sake was the opposite of its founding intention. With our original political goals in mind, we supported the decision to accept the administration’s offer to move to the Kellen Gallery, which was approved by the GA on Tuesday, November 22^nd. For us the occupation should have ended that day. Although the limits of the space were apparent, we thought that the move to the gallery could give us the opportunity to explore and experiment with more inclusive and experimental forms of action and debate, build a stronger connection with the occupy movement, and contribute to the advancement of a developing student movement.

Following the Thanksgiving break we are here again, and eager for a new start. We would like to invite all students interested to take part in a meeting in the Lang Courtyard to decide how to move forward. This is our proposed agenda for discussion:

1)    We want to contribute to the development of a larger and more inclusive student movement, which focuses on concrete actions and political discussion rather than merely reinforcing ideological divisions. For this reason we would like to be part of a movement committed to both direct participation and real democracy.

2)    A student movement is necessary because the system of higher education in the United States is a tool for the reproduction of race, gender and class inequalities and hierarchically organized power relations. We are therefore interested in connecting a critique of the education system to a critique of capitalist social relations. We also think that the theoretical and practical critique of sexism and racism are and should be a fundamental part of the critique of capital.

3)    We would like to work in strong coordination with the NYC All-Student Assembly. Our immediate goals are: to support the student struggle against tuition hikes at CUNY; join the campaign against rising student debt; participate in protests against police brutality; support workers’ strikes in NYC; organize teach-ins and debates; and experiment with new and more inclusive forms of political action and discussion. For these reasons we support the student strike on November 28 called by the students at UC Davis; the day of action against foreclosures organized by OWS on December 6^th; the day of the Port Blockade organized by Occupy Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tacoma and Portland on December 12^th.

4)    Finally, and this is our greatest hope: a nation-wide student movement and free education for all people.

This is our proposal for a discussion and a new start. We would like to invite all students who are interested in discussing these points and working with us to take part in a meeting Wednesday at 1pm in the Lang Courtyard, 66 W12th Street. From there we will decide to move forward or not at the Kellen Gallery, pending its fate as a political space.

Signed,

Dan Boscov-Ellen   Hannes Charen   Aaron Jaffe

Sophie Lewis    Erin Schell   Kyle Stone    Brad Young

At 7am today, we massed outside the stripped and barricaded waste-land that had been the cornucopian ‘Liberty Plaza’ only a few days prior. Mayor Bloomberg, I presume, was at least indirectly responsible for the spectacle of the wet power-hose, inefficiently blasting away yellow Autumn leaves from Zuccotti’s surface as we mustered. The goal was to shut down the Stock Exchange. We were a radical bunch, I think, compared to previous ‘Occupy’ solidarity marches. I hesitate to mention the woman with the ‘Jump, fuckers’ sign (an allusion, I presume, to 9/11′s traders under assault) and the man who forcefully yelled ‘end the war and kill the rich’. The majority, I thought, were determined, enraged people on the defensive following the brutal eviction of the movement ‘HQ’. Never mind that some commentators had speculated that the Bloomberg raid may have constituted a blessing in disguise, never mind that the symbolic capital retained (or gained) in having your base tyrannically removed probably does beat that of having your movement peter out in the December snow and the rain. You don’t take the public space away from these bodies in alliance. We charged at the stock exchange in  colour-coded groups, we identified the road junctions that needed blockading, and we blockaded them. A lot of bankers had difficulty getting to work today. Perhaps the majority did get there, and perhaps the bell did indeed ring on time rather than late, as Twitter claimed unto the insurgents on the street. I will never forget the stand-offs we created at the mouth of high finance: the professionals appealing to the police, ‘How will I get to work?!’ and the Occupiers chanting at the N.Y.P.D., ‘You have a choice! You have a choice!’ and ‘Who do you protect? Who do you serve?’

A retired police captain, after all, did kneel down in the streets this morning on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, requesting to be arrested. In other news, in my personal constellation of experience, I saw one friend who formed part of the Book Bloc  brutally arrested and dragged away from the financial district and into a bus or van, and another friend accost me in a state of advanced trauma over what he had seen happen to a female friend of his, including (in a recurrent theme) breast molestation and hair-pulling. I digress – and this is only intended to be a rapid offering – typed relatively late at night from the strip-lighted first-floor cavern of the Occupied New School Study Centre at 90 5th Avenue – the Stock Exchange action segued effortlessly before noon into a *triumphal reclamation of Zuccotti Park*. Mobile libraries, sound systems, sacks of food and the usual plethora of signage could not replace the cosy infrastructure that had accrued to the space over its first two months’ existence. But the pride of the people in having taken this lousy bit of private paving *back* was entirely palpable, and it was expressed as sheer bliss. The NYPD ran hither and thither in an attempt to pick ring-leaders off and re-establish control of human traffic. They could not prevent Zuccotti from re-emerging, if only temporarily. Marches then departed (towards Union Square, or the subways, towards the Boroughs or Students/Labor initiatives, for instance) and I don’t know for sure what happened at the Plaza over the course of the rest of the day. We now have a banner, 6 foot long, that proclaims ‘THE ZUCCOTTI DISEASE HAS SPREAD!’ here at 90 5th Avenue, the all-city ‘Occupied New School’.

At Union Square, at 3pm, about a thousand people converged and people’s-mic-ed. It was rainy and shitty, or just imagine: three thousand people might have crammed into the square and obliterated the kitschy seasonal market on the south side. The New School General Assembly – and allies – were part of a coordinated rallying push of students (inside faculty buildings) and passers-by. A large number of posters were passed to almost everyone, or so it seemed, bearing at least eight different slogans, including ‘Students and Labor together shall win’ and ‘Political justice and education: that’s why we need this occupation’. When the discoursing had come to a lull, around 4pm, leaflets went viral around the crowd, preparing those who read them for an occupation. As we rounded 16th street onto 5th avenue, the target became apparent. Perhaps thirty people had already made it inside and up to the first floor, but to my dismay, a double line of riot cops were making sure that would be the last of it. The throng was of monumental proportions, and the occupiers had already festooned the windows above the bank withe signs of their achievement, plus the injunction ‘DO NOT LEAVE’. A Wacky Races style series of altercations and negotiations took place, with much circling of the block and skirmishes at the side-entrance to #80. I did not succeed in entering, and repaired to Foley Square via the 2 subway, with some faculty members and New School students, where – as we now know – approximately 32,000 people had congregated in advance of seizing the Brooklyn Bridge.

A good time to remember, as my friend J.Butler/Pierce Penniless reminded me with a tweet, that “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Indeed, the chants of today were not the insufferable ‘this is what democracy looks like’ nor ‘we–are–the–ninety-nine-percent’ but instead the purely political ‘We are unstoppable; another world is possible!’ and the immortal ‘Whose streets? Our streets’. With sore feet and an aching back, I returned to the East Village and found my way into the barricaded study centre, whose preliminary statement of occupation can be perused here: http://www.nsfreepress.com/. As I walked in, the collective was (alas!) voting to opt for an organising system of two-thirds voting (or so-called ‘modified consensus’) and devolving into seemingly unresolvable arguments about smoking and drinking. Later, the decision was reached amidst a flurry of charisma and unfinished meeting process that protective barricades would come *down* at once in compliance with Fire Department stipulations. We are proceeding to build a space of free education, free thought, safe space, and organisational magic. This may not all appear overnight. But the occupation is here, and it is an occupation of a Wells Fargo owned New School building — a clear stand against the neoliberal doyens of the higher education business. (Even if they are tricky bastards like Van Zandt, who will go to great lengths to be ‘on our side’). A stand, also, in the name of the Occupy! movement in its opposition to capital. And listen! Above all! This is an occupation for the people: if we do anything, we will make sure that it becomes an occupation beyond students. 

There are now four cops in the lobby of this building. I will sign off for now. Solidarity!

Sophielle — 12.20 AM Thursday night / Friday morning, occupied 80 5th Avenue.

I had the full, nightmarish Naomi Wolf experience in Oxford just over a year ago, and wrote breathlessly about it here. I found her to be a hectoring, monomaniacal, contradictory, thoughtless, gender-essentialist, pro-capitalist bully who thought it was absolutely OK to speak for women in the Majority World (“an Indian woman in a bordello” for instance) because of the “power of our” (white bourgeois) imaginations. A kind of Miss Havisham, bitter, incoherent and fetishistic about personal misogynistic damage incurred in the past, but one very much not in hiding. A preacher of amoral self-advancement within the logic of the existing system: Make money! Take down the master’s house, but only with master’s tools! Speak for anybody you like, anybody you think needs emancipating! Don’t let those ‘failed social movements’, those ‘social movements that don’t work’ teach you anything! Yes, I remember thinking that this was someone who desired nothing more than a cult of the personality (her own). This is why I shudder when I read her on the subject of Occupy Wall Street, a year later:

The movement has been shy of identifying leaders, but I believe this is a mistake. A leader does not have to be a top-down hierarchist: a leader can be a simple representative.

My friends, I hear the ‘inside’ voice of Naomi Wolf, which flashes through the cracks of her self-composure. And it translates: A leader does not have to be a top-down hierarchist: a leader can be me!

But let me attempt one or two elements of a more substantive critique. Wolf anchors her support for Occupy in the contention that a ‘corporatocracy’ is “claiming the lion’s share of the planet’s resources and capital“. This unfairness is launching us definitively into a world beyond “left and right”, she says, reproducing the by-now utterly familiar tale about the end of history and the defeat of those great emancipatory dreams that another (not just a ‘better’) world is possible. The conflict is now located not between the producers of wealth and the owners of the means of production, but between “the rest of us” and an arbitrarily defined constituency: the top 1% of global earners (who are not the traditional élite of amassed or landed wealth, either). The really odd phrase “global family” keeps coming up, loaded with romantic non-violent imagery that obscures the historical production, by power, of the family as a lived concept. The modern family is a unit of capital (re)production instrumental to the state. There is a reason why opponents of this system have come to group themselves in ‘intentional communities’, communes, or queer parodies of the ‘family’.

This single global family, transcending national boundaries, just wants a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy.

Oh, right! The Ninety-Nine Per Cent “just want” peace, love, ecology, fairness, and “basic democracy”, whatever that means. Well, what am I being so cantankerous about? Naomi is right! Doesn’t everyone (except the evil bankers) want that? So why don’t we, the international #occupy human swarm, listen to this scholar of “successful protest movements” and immediately adopt her policy? What Wolf recommends is this:

(a) sitting down peacefully for months if not years, taking care not to allow “provocateurs” into our midst because that would mess up our (i.e. the right kind of “disruptive”) democracy,

(b) raising lots of money in order to get our collective hands on the mechanism of the (existing) law,

(c) making our own media, as long as it is still mainstream media-friendly media, and as long as no one covers their faces to protect themselves from the panoptic gaze of the cameras Wolf suggests we use “religiously”,

(d) syncing a nation-wide email list for the purposes of leveraging Occupy as a brand for electoral barter. We apparently “need to email [our] representatives the list of Occupy-registered voters in each district and commit to getting out the vote in congressional or parliamentary elections for Occupy-supporting candidates – while working to defeat Occupy-bashing candidates.“

(e) adopting leaders,

(f) keeping things looking like “civil society”, “joyful and positive”, and, finally

(g) building “new institutions, new relationships and new organisations” as part of a transformative grassroots re-engagement with the “habits of freedom”, face to face.

OK. I have no problem with (g) at all, and the last paragraph of Wolf’s article is actually really good:

And, I hope, pass laws sooner rather than later to demilitarise the police; ban Tasers and rubber bullets; criminalise police and politician violence against free speech activities; demand prosecutions for financial fraud; compel the corporate books that unaccountably swallow billions in tax revenue to be audited; investigate torturers; bring home soldiers from corporate wars of choice – and rebuild society, this time from the grassroots up, accountably, lawfully and democratically.

This is Wolf at her best and sanest. I say sanest, because it is totally utopian to imagine that liberal democracy would actually sign away the right of the capitalist class to wage war abroad and at home. Still, the issue priorities she condenses here make a lot of sense. Somehow, however, I cannot bring myself to ignore the enormous flaws in her suggestions (a), (b), (c), (d), (e) and (f). Firstly, fund-raising for legal self-defence is already happening everywhere, and has been for decades, in the form of Black Crosses, lawyers’ guilds, and activist legal teams (b). The idea that our movement oppositional to the stranglehold of wealth upon justice can win simply by ‘outmoneying money’ is absurd. Secondly, independent, autonomous and crowd-sourced media are also already happening (c). Duh! Witness the Occupy Wall Street Journal! Witness the proliferation of activist voices and spokespersons hosted by both independent news-hubs, and progressive/bourgeois-liberal media vehicles. Witness the vast cloud of critique and reflection and instigation on Occupy on the blogosphere and in informal print. I am myself setting up a journal ‘of Occupied Studies‘ to host student- and faculty perspectives on theory and praxis. Does Wolf not think very much of http://occupywallst.org? No, I think we must conclude that her objection is with the lack of a tight, streamlined, centralised ‘party’ news-desk issuing press releases and vetting comment-pieces to ensure messaging stays ‘the right kind’ of messaging. “Basic” democracy, indeed.

(a) and (d) are more difficult, and more important, to deconstruct. “Protesters ideally should read Gandhi and King and dedicate themselves to disciplined, long-term, non-violent disruption of business as usual“, Wolf notes. Do I really have the audacity to have anything to quibble with, here? After all, she’s name-dropped the dual saints of progressive politics, just like, er, well, literally every other speech-giver addressing our Changing Times in the neoliberal era. Gandhi! MLK! Non-violence! Email lists! [sic] Shamed the system into treating us better! ‘Nuff said! Indeed, the author of The Beauty Myth was missing, only, the third reference that is usually affixed to these apotropaic gestures: the invocation of the suffragettes. But they are a bit riskier, a bit more connotative of bombs and smashed windows. Best stick to the Black son-of-a-preacher-man and the Indian ascetic. As Arundhati Roy remarked fairly recently, non-violence is fine – as a spectacle with a pre-existing audience – and it had its moment. The accomplishments of satyagraha and the civil rights movement are unquestionably triumphs. I’m not insane: I’m not questioning that, and I fully acknowledge the important (though not total) role that non-violent tactics played in them. It makes no sense, however, to ignore historical context. In India, a revolutionary anti-colonial movement existed, alongside Gandhiji’s, dating  from at least the late nineteenth century; it included the armed Gadar and Jugantar parties, and the Berlin committee for the liberation of India. To parse the trajectory leading to independence as an unadulterated victory for the “moral high-ground” is to ignore the toothier antagonistic factors, or factions, whose part in the initial victory cannot be quantified after the history-books have been written.

The agency of the Indian revolutionaries (or “marginal destructive elements” as Wolf would probably call them) reached far beyond the moment of formal and legal severance from empire and looked ahead to ongoing, recuperative hegemony that emerges in the form of capital’s new Empire, globalisation.  The same, needless to say, goes for Black Power. To connect this analogically to OWS, the two-dimensional flash-cards of MLK and Gandhi serve to keep ‘disruption’ acceptable, un-ideological, photogenic, and relatively unambitious: to ensure it seeks symbolic and legal redress of the kind no-one reasonable could argue with (the re-instatement of Glass-Steagall, perhaps, or the visually impressive mirage of a sea of ‘Occupy-friendly’ smiling politicians who have been mobilised by email). The function of recommending we remain “sitting down” where we are (i.e. quite far from Wall Street itself, in a private, publicly available park we have no physical control over) is anti-political, myopic, and hopelessly naive. Capital has shown itself again and again to suffer fools gladly: it has more than enough techniques to assuage, whilst essentially ignoring, those who sit upon “the moral and political high ground” composing stream-lined press releases to the 1%, signed, the “global family who just wants peace”. Oh, and by the way, Naomi, with regards to your opening about the greedy corporatocracy, I forgot to mention my main complaint: ‘capital’ means a system of social relations. It is not a synonym of ‘money’. You say frequently that you “trained as a Marxist”. In that case, you must be familiar with Marx’s clear insistence in volume I of Capital that the violence of exploitations is nothing to with the individual will of the capitalists. Not that smashing capital is something all those social movements you dismiss have figured out comprehensively how to do, of course. (Although I for one see every reason to keep trying.) This ‘economic justice’ that you say the ‘global family’ yearns for. Do you think it will be handed to us, like Indian national sovereignty or Black enfranchisement, by a sheepish bunch of corporate fat cats, puppeteers of the political system, belonging to this spurious One Per Centers club that represents your intellectually empty substitute for class?

I liked Marianna LeNabat’s call-out so much. She has agreed for me to re-post it. (re)Occupy the New School!

__________________________

So, why did we call this meeting?

We called this meeting because we all belong to this school, we all study here, we socialize here, most of us work here, some of us live in the student housing… and yet we all feel like have surprisingly little say in this institution in which we spend so much of our lives. We feel, in other words, like we just study here, like we just work here – as though we are cogs in the machine or consumers passing through. We feel like this isn’t a place where we have any real input as to how things are run, especially the things that affect us the most.

And things only seem to be getting worse. So, for example, we are told to just walk ten extra blocks to get that book out of the library, because the only copy is at Bobst or Cooper Union. Just live four to a dorm room this year instead of 3. Just share that study space with 800 more students than last year. Just pay $1150 more tuition this year than last year. Just accept $1000 less in work-study. Just take out an extra couple grand in student loans. Just tighten your belt. Find a way to make it work. You have no choice.

The same kinds of things are happening everywhere – at other universities, in workplaces, in communities, all over this country, and the world. People are being told to tighten their belts, to make sacrifices. But that’s the thing. We’re also hearing that profits are right back up. That Wall Street is fine. That the wealthy are making massive gains in income. The tough love and the sacrifices are just for the rest of us.

And what is happening? People are starting to revolt. They are starting to say, “Enough. Things do not have to be this way. We cannot be dictated to in this way anymore.” They are trying to get some momentum going in the opposite direction. To have more say in the political and economic institutions that run their lives.

Well, we called this meeting because we likewise want to raise the radical possibility that we can have more say at this institution. And the first thing we have got to do, is to stop carrying these ridiculous burdens in silence and in isolation. We have to stop thinking that it is our own problem to bear individually. We have to get together and talk to each other about how bad it is. About how it’s not working for any of us.

And we have to stop allowing them to tell us that there is no alternative. People asking for change like this (people asking for a 40-hour work week, or for free public education through high school) are ALWAYS told that what they ask is impossible. That it can’t be done, there is nowhere to go. We’ve certainly heard this from our administration, from President Van Zandt in the last two town halls, just like from President Kerrey before him, for those of you who remember. Van Zandt may be the nicest guy in the world, but he insists that his hands are tied, and that nothing can be done for us financially. Sure, he and the rest of the administration will listen to our demands, and even be “sympathetic” to them, and maybe they’ll make some changes around the edges and let us talk more, but overall – as far as the library, and the living conditions, and the fees, and the resources go – these are just “tough times” or “transitional times” and we just have to bear with them.

And it’s funny, because that same administration encourages us to pride ourselves on the fact that this institution was founded in active political engagement. It was founded, first, as a protest against the firing of a professor at Columbia, who had spoken out against the draft, during the First World War. And it was founded again as a University in Exile for scholars fleeing political repression.

We are told that we are part of a tradition of dissent, and that The New School wants to train us to be the free-thinkers, the leaders, the social critics of tomorrow. And yet, they want us to be completely passive about the administration of things in our own backyard. They want us to quietly leave the decision-making, and the future planning, and the economic steering to them. And when we object – the moment we make a demand, like putting an end to these incessant tuition hikes – they condescend to us, like we are uninformed, with our pie-in-the-sky demands, like we don’t get the big picture. We GET the big picture. This year, Eugene Lang College was awarded the dubious honour of being the fifth most expensive school in the country. So, yeah. They endorse our right to challenge everything, to be engaged, inquiring citizens, but in words only. Well, the last time they patted us on the head and told us not to worry, that they were handling things, a small group of students occupied the building that used to be on 14th and 5th, and the next thing you knew teaching assistants and teaching fellows saw their first raise in twelve years.

I can tell you, as someone who studies political history and political movements, that right now, this is a moment. No one saw the Arab Spring coming. And all of a sudden, three thirty-year dictatorships were wiped off the face of the earth. No one saw the European Summer coming. And in an instant, tens of thousands of people were amassed in city squares. No one saw Occupy Wall Street coming. And suddenly, it has spread to over 1,000 cities across North America. It has become the lead-off item in the news. It has become the thing to talk about in the media, and in the White House, and over New School email circulars from our President. It has become a magnet for labour unions, and community groups, and the working poor, and students! Why? Because when people are told to butt out of decision-making, and to butt out of an institution that is running their life, they realize that the appropriate response is to take it over.

Well, we need some of that over here. We need to ignite that spark at The New School. We need to form our own community, and establish some solidarity with one other, and find our own voice. And the instant we do, we will have people standing alongside us. SUNY is ready. CUNY is ready. Columbia is ready. NYU is ready. Occupy Wall Street is ready. Let’s get ready.

WHOSE SCHOOL?

As last night’s themes really pushed a lot of buttons in my head, I think it would be advisable for me to think about an essay topic I might develop out of them. At the beginning of the semester I was interested in Arendt and anarchism and also in the sense of stasis, or apprehension in the face of the imperative to action, that I thought I could discern in Origins. With HC I feel compelled to work out whether this idea of the polis remains elitist. I could interrogate the reproductive futurism of the ‘doing it for the children’ conception of politics that has been so fascinatingly critiqued in queer theorist Lee Edelman’s No Future, which defies the homophobic censure that ‘gays have no investment in the future’ by saying ‘absolutely right: I demand the better world right here, right now, and I’m fine with that signifying some kind of death-drive in me’. Then, as you gathered in class, I am also squeamish about simply advocating a proliferation of doxa because, well, some doxa just aren’t valid (who’s the elitist now, I guess). Surely there are hegemonic conditions shaping what counts as ‘reasonable’ doxa, and, to use the controversial Marxist term, ‘false consciousness’ ensues. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity” and so on. And further, words count, to me, but a lot of words don’t count for very much anymore. ‘Fairness’ is one of them. Ayn Rand thinks, and so do her followers, that the worldview she purveys is ‘fair’. If we are saying that agon is necessary, then why produce the example of OWS as an oppositional demand for fairness? No one can be against fairness! No one can be against the 99%, either. Why not have the courage of one’s convictions and say ‘class’? And say ‘anticapitalism’?

Now, over a year later, the Dems seem keen to approve Keystone XL. Hillary Clinton allegedly “sees no reason to believe” that the State Department is biased toward TransCanada Corp.’s plan to build a $7 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline to bring Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. The fact that a key Keystone lobbyist was once a Clinton campaign aide is ENTIRELY irrelevant. America’s Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica believes that approving, or not approving, this pipeline is “the most important environmental decision President Obama will make before the election. If he sides with greedy oil companies instead of people and the climate, he will essentially be urging a huge part of his base to sit out the election.’’ OK, you heard him. We’ll get some even crazier capitalist, a Republican, as the head of state next May. But it will hardly matter by that point, because our biosphere will be industrially locked in to self-frying, past the point of no return. I mean: greedy oil companies, non-greedy oil companies. Some day soon a portion of my brain that can only stand so many iterations of the Facebook sentiment “look, I’m not against capitalism, I’m against corporate greed“ will burst explosively through the top of my skull. All right, tiresome as this emphasis on ‘greed’ is, I suppose I feel horrified enough about the possibility of Keystone XL actually passing to support pretty much any formulation of the case against it. And there are hundreds. Will Obama side with cancer-giving Albertan tailing-ponds, or with First Nations activists? Will he side with a project visible from Space, or with communities only audible on the Internet? Will he side with the single most carbon-intensive enterprise ever devised, or with the advocates of wind, wave and solar? Seriously, people. I mean, seriously, Mr Pica. Leaving this toss-up between capital (omg I said it) and commons up to the ethical adjudication of a government that has essentially acted just like a bought and paid for bourgeois party for decades, in the hope that the ethical leverage of mass nonviolent rallies and jeremiads will sway President Obusha, inspires me with despair. I’m not personally D-locked to a British/American piece of tar sands extracting machinery right this minute. I’m increasingly wondering why the fuck that actually is. Maybe it’s time to seriously think about it. You can read about Ruckus here.

]]> http://lasophielle.com/2011/10/12/if-a-climate-changes-in-the-wood-and-no-one-sees-it-a-wednesday-morning-freak-out-largely-about-keystone-xl/feed/ 0 lasophielle http://lasophielle.com/2011/10/11/politics-away-from-home/ http://lasophielle.com/2011/10/11/politics-away-from-home/#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:10:00 +0000 lasophielle http://lasophielle.com/?p=876 ]]> I attended a politics seminar this week that was solely about Occupy Wall Street (hurrah! etc) but which ostensibly addressed communicative power, and which I think threw up questions about the so-called public/private spheres. Deva Woodly, the seminar convenor, circulated a working paper by herself that outlined striking differences between the political fates of the living wage struggle and the struggle for marriage equality. One dominates headlines and discourse, the other does not: despite the many and significant legislative advances under the belt of the latter. So, one of these is an identity-politics issue specifically pertaining to the assimilationist ‘gay rights’ campaign, as opposed to queer rage (the Black Panthers / civil rights distinction springs to mind). The other one pertains to class. We are supposed to marvel at how the communicative power that was (and continues to be) marshalled in defence of the right to a living wage has somehow proven less effective than the communicative power of the ongoing (and nowhere near ‘achieved’) marriage equality campaign; yet the living wage is also not achieved, without being a particularly potent or sexy issue. Rather than explain that one on its own terms, I want to turn to the distinction between the home and the public sphere, the oikos and the polis, partly because it has a history (it is not a ‘natural’ distinction) and partly because the topic of Occupy Wall Street triggered a particular thought for me.

As Malcolm Harris and the Self-Negation Blogger argue in separate article son Lib Com, there are several ways in which Occupy Wall Street could and should push beyond its current mold. They remark on the understanding that an occupation is usually for disrupting and seizing control of a space or infrastructure, and instating the joie de vivre of the temporary autonomous zone for strategic, organisational purposes. The Plaza, by contrast, is nowhere near interfering with the day-to-day of investors and traders. The square resembles a police “pen” – it’s true – and is no one’s sane idea of an action planning venue. Moreover, whilst the lack of clear demands is absolutely not a failing in OWS, its reluctance to fight for the enemies of capital, as a class, is. “We are the 99%” is only a good point if it comes with the understanding that even if bankers and billionaires were evil, that would not be the point; and that non-bankers are not all good. Marx asserts somewhere in vol.1 of Capital that the will of the individual capitalist is irrelevant within the horrific system he props up, entirely legally. Key quotes, then, from Lib Com’s perspective are firstly “We must begin to think and fight for ourselves as a class without “demanding” anything” – because demands already recuperate our actions for the current system’s logic – and secondly “If corporations are people, what would it mean to wrap our hands around one’s neck and choke it to death?“

Of course, it won’t be nice to choke a corporation to death. It might be achieved through a mass strike combined with the mass occupation and barricade of a bank’s headquarters. I mean thousands of people, not hundreds. It would throw things into crisis and open possibilities for all kinds of other action. It would draw the real violence of the state. For now, Wall Street occupiers fear guns and imprisonment. So do I! I can only imagine not fearing them in a context of mass rebellion. And like everyone else, I want someone else to create that atmosphere for me. That said, Occupy Wall Street does seem quite concerned to stay – even discursively – ‘nice’. Concerned, why? Fox News and all the more mainstream news media have already issued HUAC style verdicts on the demonstrators: unwashed! un-American! simultaneously pot-smoking ne’er-do-wells and threatening 21st-century shades of the Nazi brown-shirts (hat-tip to Jon Stewart for hilariously souping up this classic contradiction of the Right). The Tea Party has – thank goodness – disavowed any similarities between its brand of populism and Occupy Wall Street’s. (Ann Coulter says ‘This is what  a mob looks like’.) The unions are with us. Bloomberg and the millionaires are against us. The lines of political enmity are clearly drawn. Whom exactly is OWS afraid to scare away?

Is it liberals? Well, yes. The Daily Show’s and MSNBC’s support is important. But for the time being, I think the protesters are frightened of themselves. The exuberant and slightly hysterical word ‘revolution’ is bandied about as though to whip up, through repetition, the merest wisp of confidence in such a thing being possible. Will it come from somewhere? I hope so. People certainly aren’t going away. They sleep and work on Zucotti, for the plaza is a library, a home, a free university, a social/online media hub, a kitchen, a gallery, and a non-bureaucratic administration. The Occupy Wall Street journal is a success. Immense power resides, in a dormant kind of way, within the tens of thousands gathering around this cause, and immense power could even reside in the Plaza, properly defended from interference by the police. ‘Revolution’, ‘revolution’, ‘revolution’ is on everybody’s lips. Many of them, probably, mean significant reform of corporate law. Many mean a state-imposed cull of the wealth of the top 1% of U.S. citizens, for egalitarian redistribution. Some mean that ‘Obama must resign now’ (in favour of Ron Paul?!). Many feel that the ‘middle class’ has been destroyed: and if Occupy Wall Street turns out to be a bourgeois revolution, then I shall hold my peace. Many think they mean a return to the principles of the Founding Fathers and to “the constitution” (a real holy book, across the political spectrum, it seems). Many even mean some kind of right-libertarian destruction of the state. Many, however, speak of ‘class war’ and social justice. You can hear more kinds of soap-box offerings at http://livestre.am/PlNN.

Yet even on the terms of these sundry agendas and ideological camps, almost all the working-groups that I saw presenting at the general assembly on the Plaza yesterday stressed a non-confrontational or hyperbolically non-violent agenda. Art. Rallies. Camp maintenance. Outreach. Teach-ins. Yes. All good, very good things. But under the mandate ‘occupy Wall Street’, we can claim, crush, and rebuild a symbolic nexus of power. We won’t even begin to change the system of capitalist labour relations by simply meditating together, making bigger placards, and chanting – yes, it is finally beginning to get on my nerves – “WE. – ARE. – THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT!”

Because we aren’t. We must acknowledge our enemies, and we must attack the free-market logic they cleave to. 99%-ism ultimately substitutes bankster scapegoatism for systemic critique.