The Occupy Movement in the US – Towards a Long-term Critical Refusal?

The Occupy Movement – Towards a Long-term Critical Refusal?

Faizul Khan Tanim interviews several activists of the ongoing Occupy Movement in the West Coast of the United States to understand its crucial factors, its achievements and the legacy it may leave behind

What will the Occupy Movement ignite? Will it refine democracy and challenge the given social and political order? Fight the struggle to find economic alternatives in the face of the failure of market fundamentalism? Or bring an end to the dominance of the global elite who maintain their hierarchical power-structure at any cost?

Today, people and especially the youth around the world are re-evaluating and re-assessing the kind of world they want to live in, the kind of visions they want to dream. Are Occupy Movements the real elements which can bring such ‘changes’? Will they be able to bring down, what they believe as the dysfunctional and exploitative global economic order?

Thousands of questions assail my conscience and hence this report delves in to being educated with answers straight from the political actors on the ground. Few extraordinary and defining characteristics of the Occupy Movement include - its refusal to define itself through conventional binaries like Left-Right, Capitalist-Communist, Young-Old.

I want to know if it is possible to think about the global and the local via the occupy movement? Since, capitalism itself is international in nature how are we to think about its effects on our local social, economic and political system? There are concerns in Bangladesh about fundamentalist market economics, and the recent violent protests in the garment sector is one such example. There are concerns about our political culture that consistently stagnates the democratic process.

Then, there is the question of systematic political repression on activists. The disappearance of hundreds of political actors remain an unresolved human rights question. How can we think about a social movement that can address these concerns? And, how can we have peace in a post-colonial State where violence has become the norm?

In the following interview I asked larger systemic questions, and perhaps through this conversation we can arrive at a proper understanding of globalization, capitalism and resistance.

Let us see what activists in the occupy movement want to tell us. The participants are:

Joshua Clover, a poet, critic and author. He is a professor at University of California at Davis.

Geoffrey Wildanger, a graduate student in art history at University of California at Davis.

Mohamed Shehk, a student in philosophy at University of California at Davis.

Evan Loker, a graduate student in comparative literature. He works on Latin America and is interested in critical theory and political economy.

Tanzeen Doha, a graduate student in social anthropology and critical theory at University of California at Davis. He writes political articles in local newspapers and journals in Bangladesh. Most recently, he wrote for the journal ‘Chintaa’ (www.chintaa.com).

Faizul Khan Tanim (FKT): What are you trying to achieve through the Occupy Movement?

Joshua: We hope to achieve nothing. We have learned that politics in this era means proceeding without hope, but proceeding nonetheless. We ourselves are oriented by anti-capitalism. By this we do not mean an identification of capitalism as the source of the global immiseration. Instead it is the certainty that the end of capitalism, rather than its reform, is a necessary and shared political project. But this project is itself not separable from articulating the intolerable social relations that are at this historical moment entirely entangled with capitalism: colonialism and patriarchy are two central matters for us, though not the only ones. In this sense, the annihilation of capitalism is a name for the abolition of the present state of things in a more variegated sense.

FKT: The last time we saw these types of protests in US campuses was way back in the early 70’s during the height of Vietnam War. What are the crucial factors that prompted the current generation of students to get engaged in a social movement? How do you think about the continuity of struggle?

Joshua: There are many differences between that moment and this, but one stands out. The sixties and seventies were the last years of the greatest economic boom of our age, and the zenith of United States global power. Today we are facing a vast economic disaster and the unraveling of US hegemony. Because of this, that earlier moment was more easily diverted into a “cultural” revolution — not in Mao’s sense, but in the sense of personal freedoms, the sexual revolution, and the like.
This had some real appeal for students, who were not part of the job market anyway. There was a brief, beautiful coalition of students and labor. And then the attempt at mass worker mobilization was bribed out of existence, the unions betrayed labor, labor betrayed students, the underlying thin-ness of the student insurgency was revealed. The demands for economic rearrangement faded both from actuality and then from memory, so that people now don’t even remember, for example, over 10 million on strike in France, maybe 20 million. They remember the students putting flowers in the gun barrels of soldiers, and “sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” as a kind of demand.
We strongly support sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. We feel we will enjoy them more in the smoldering wreckage of capital. Now there is no money to buy off anyone, except in very temporary ways. We could think of the various sovereign debt bailouts as a paradigm. There is a massive hollowing of the economic foundation. Everything is teetering. But there is not enough money, now or expected to come in over the next many years, to really rescue Greece, or Spain.
In the same way, there is no way to bail out those who must survive by working. There is not enough money and not enough jobs to alleviate their immiseration and make them feel like they should keep participating, keep collaborating. There will be no payoff to the working classes, or the excluded classes. Similarly, there is no way to bail out the universities and reverse their race toward being a very minor appendage of the research and development sector of business. That doesn’t mean that the structure will burn tomorrow, or next year, or this decade. But the solution that was available in the Sixties and Seventies simply isn’t available now. This will never be a cultural crisis. Already we see that there is no meaningful response on the cultural plane. There are no great protest songs here, no Woodstock. Occupy is Woodstock, for better and worse. And there will be much bigger festivals of refusal coming soon.

FKT: What is the relation between the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa? And, how do you think about these movements in relation to the War which has a strong focus on South and Central Asia?

Geoffrey: While the Arab Spring is a clear inspiration for the form of the Occupy Movement—as is the European “movement of the squares” and the Californian and New York University occupations—Occupy Wall St. has distinctively lacked anti-colonial politics. In fact, the New York based Occupy Wall St. attempted to send election observers to Cairo, desiring, I guess, to teach Egyptians how to do politics! One must note here the diversity of the various Occupies. Occupy Oakland has struck a much more anti-colonial, anti-war tone through actions directed explicitly against, for instance, military recruiters. It is for this reason, among others, that Oakland quickly took center stage in the U.S. Occupy movement.

Mohamed: The war in the Middle East, Central Asia and now South Asia is nothing more than the West’s attempt to dictate how countries, in these regions should operate. The ongoing global financial crisis of 2008, which was the primary catalyst for the Occupy Movement, has led to a considerable decline in U.S. political and economic global hegemony. Although the War started in 2002, it is only now, after the crisis, that everyone realizes what an utter failure it was to begin with; this failure is ultimately a sign that the U.S. is unable to secure its global power as it used to. As it progressively loses its grasp on foreign “diplomatic” relations, the U.S. must now turn to brute physical and military force to try and maintain its slipping control. This is exactly what the War is -- the turn away from ineffective “diplomatic” coercion (e.g. free-trade agreements) to military intervention. In this sense, the crumbling political and economic conditions are inextricably tied to the global War and any committed resistance movement must confront anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism with equal seriousness, as two happenings of the same process.

FKT: What is the role of Social Media in the occupy movement?

Tanzeen: Since the beginning of the revolts in North Africa and Middle East, particularly with the movement in Egypt, there’s been a move by a certain class to think of it as a movement that was made possible by the social media. I think that is a false understanding. I think we have to understand that the history of technology (media-technologies included) is the history of capitalism. We should understand technologies as instruments of exploitation. There is no need to think that if we can organize on the internet, this will result in street protests. This is the sort of the bourgeois-activist dream that we need to reject. Street protests happen because of crisis, and organizing happens through various channels. There is no need to highlight the social media in my view. Yes, of course, we communicate through whatever means are available to us, but let’s not get too carried away with all these false techno-utopian conceptualizations. Social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook are useful, but they do not “make” movements; people on the streets make movements.

(To be continued)....

This article was first published in The Independent’s Weekend Magazine, Saturday July 07 2012 - http://www.theindependentdigital.com/index.php?opt=view&page=49&date=2012-07-07