Re: <nettime> Portland Occupation's tactical innovation

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 01/04/2012 07:46 AM, Newmedia@aol.com wrote:

> OCCUPY your own *life*!!
>
> The ONE-PERCENT is a statistical account of wealth distribution -- NOT a
> useful description of *power* distribution.

I agree with Jodi, this is idiotic.

What's happening in the world right now is the perilous breakup of the 
extremely coherent elite reorganization that produced neoliberal 
globalization, cabled the planet and set up just-in-time production and 
distribution systems under the direction of computerized finance.

The last fifteen years of radical scholarship and political activism -- 
essentially since the passage of NAFTA and the formation of the WTO -- 
have fully analyzed the structure of neoliberalism and its historical 
missions: namely to regain elite ownership control over social 
institutions (starting with corporations themselves) and to recover 
profit margins after the long crisis of the 1970s. This is an aggregate 
class effort, not a conspiracy. It has given rise to a very distinct 
pattern of social relations, with a central role for the digital 
technologies (which Mark, bizarrely, thinks no one else on the nettime 
list knows anything about!).

The elite effort has been so successful as to largely eliminate 
organized resistance, not to speak of any attempt to impose an 
alternative form of social relations. Today as we enter the serious 
phase of a new major crisis, the neoliberal presuppositions of financial 
and corporate autonomy from any kind of collective mediation -- that is, 
any kind of social state -- have effectively created a chaotic and even 
suicidal relation between the banks and hedge funds, with each one 
staking everything on a bid to swallow the others and scale up for 
survival among the new global oligopolies. Yet  still they impose the 
agenda: witness the technocratic governments in Europe, or 
Bernanke-Geithner in the US. In the absence of any resurgent middle- and 
working-class resistance, what we will get is a deepening of 
ruling-class control and, without doubt, a new form of authoritarian 
police-state capitalism.

The initial questions of this thread were passionately interesting. They 
were about political action: the tactics of urban occupations and the 
relevance of disruptive actions and strikes at the point of production. 
One could go further and ask about the relation between these and 
emerging student activism, the repossession of foreclosed housing and 
debtors' revolts. One could expand from the strict (and obsolete) 
US-centric focus, to look at the really staggering wave of protest and 
open revolt that continues to unfurl across the earth since the 
beginning of the Arab Spring. The desire and will to change society is 
there on the streets, but a clear understanding of how to do it is not 
(although even Mark agrees the change will not come from Washington - he 
just can't imagine that it could come from anywhere else).

To my mind, all this points to a need for new and directly useful 
organizing ideas (which can build partially on those of the 1990s 
alterglobalization movements) and also, for a philosophical exploration 
of the chances for a better society in the early 21st century. Instead 
we get some retro-narcissist exclamations about occupy your own life, no 
one's in control, scatter and disperse, etc.

Let's lift the taboo that still hangs over anything collective, and talk 
about how to act *against* the domination of the ruling class -- or the 
one percent, or the state-capital nexus, or whatever you want to call it 
-- and *for* an egalitarian and sustainable society on planet earth.

best, BH


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