The Occupy Movement in the US – Towards a Long-Term Critical Refusal? (Contd. from last week)
The Occupy Movement in the US – Towards a Long-Term Critical Refusal? (Contd. from last week)
(Contd from last week)
Pictures: Collected
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.
And I must say a few things about the bourgeois techno-utopian dream in relation to the situation in Bangladesh, where there is massive NGOization, and there are private organizations that are spearheaded by the bourgeois class, that want to take technology and computers to the villages, and suggest that this is how capitalism can help the poor. This is total nonsense.
I know from my own experience of looking at the life in the villages of Bangladesh, and working with various far leftist/radical study circles in the cities that the real revolutionary organizing and mobilizing come from the people. There is a very long history of peasant struggle in Bengal. And, there is a long history of student revolts in South Asia. There is no need to believe that the development-model and so-called “technological innovation” is going to help the people who are actually struggling. All this talk about development, rights and technology never asks the fundamental question about social relations, that is: How is society organized? It seems to assume that the present economic order is the natural order, and it is not. This kind of naturalization of capitalism is the foundation upon which the techno-utopian dream lies. We must reject this naturalization. Capitalism is historically specific, and even though it is elastic in many ways, it is not permanent.
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek in his speech at Occupy Wall Street said that we are witnessing the system destroying itself. Sure, capitalism cannot sustain itself. But we cannot be spectators either. We must act to accelerate this process, so we can open up a different future. But it is important to remember here what Joshua Clover says, that we do not proceed with “hope”, but we proceed regardless. Part of the reason this is so is because there is a certain kind of impossibility that goes with thinking about the future while we are still within the exploitative social relations of capitalism. Also, it is important as political actors to keep the focus on the task at hand. The task is to identify certain points in the crisis and intervene accordingly to dismantle capitalism.
FKT: How do you think about the relation between anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism? How do you think about creating solidarity between students and workers, students on campus and marginalized people off campus?
Geoffrey: This seems like two questions. First, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism; second, solidarity between town and gown.
To answer the second, the great thing about occupations is their potential for openness. That said, occupations in cities tend to be a lot more diverse (in terms of students and non-students) than ones on college campuses. In a number of university towns there have been two simultaneous encampments: one on campus and one off of campus. Regarding solidarity, the short period that occupations were tolerated created a lot of mutual aid between occupiers and homeless people. The camps briefly created a space where homeless people were not harassed by the police, and where everyone could cooperatively provide for everyone else. Though there were a number of times where college students from a more middle class background would have friction with homeless people. That issue would usually resolve itself by the more bourgeois students leaving.
Tanzeen: To answer the first question, I think it is fundamentally important to think about the relation between anticolonialism and anticapitalism. Within the occupy movement, there has been serious debate about the words “occupy” and “decolonize”. While I understand this debate, this tension, it is imperative that we think about objective conditions of history. It is imperative that we think about anticolonialism historically and concretely. It is simply not enough to think about the word “decolonization.” It is not a language-game! It is important to recall Ibrahim Fanon’s chapter on violence, where for him violence is not about epistemic shifts; it is objectively necessary and real for a shift in social relations. At University of California- Davis, when we took over the former Cross Cultural Center, this was precisely our intention. We wanted to ideologically challenge and shatter all forms of prior conceptualizations of violence that emerged from within a defensive mentality of politics, and encourage a much more creative and affirmative militancy.
Our aim is not to reform anything. Our aim is to destroy education or even pedagogy as such. It is not even about Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Our institutions of education did not begin through any kind of gift from settlers. Our public institutions became public through genocide, through the complete annihilation of native peoples. Also, beyond the physical genocide, education systems worked towards a cultural genocide of Native Americans. I think it is important that we understand what genocide means within colonial relations. It is not the same as mass murder. It literally means to ensure that a certain group of people do not reproduce themselves anymore -- culturally, socially, politically, and so on. This is continuing now with privatization. As we know, the UC (University of California), as a public university system, has become an impossible place for marginalized people of color, and the socio-economically challenged. The connection between anticolonialism and anticapitalism is in this juncture. So, anticolonialism today must mean thinking about decolonization in relation to anticapitalism.
FKT: What are some of the challenges you are facing as a movement? How are you dealing with State repression? And, what about the different tensions and contradictions within the movement?
Evan: Addressing the second question, (which calls forth the crucial challenge signaled by the previous one), within the last 12 months alone activists within the Bay Area have witnessed a dizzying cycle of repressive state and police tactics. Of course, none of these strategies and mechanisms are entirely new—from the repeated militarized police raids and mass arrests of the fall, to the targeted “stay-away” injunctions, preemptive arrests (“snatch squads”) and trapping of hundreds of comrades within the arbitrary legal continuum following the spring and summer.
The vulnerabilities and fractures that have been revealed throughout this time of struggle have in large part exposed the weaknesses of “Occupy” as a form of resistance (see: http://www.bayofrage.com/featured-articles/occupy-oakland-is-dead/). Whereas central aspects of the Occupy mode which began as novel often ended as either ineffectual or simply organizational fetters, (such as the General Assembly), other aspects became untenable in the shifting historical moment, particularly our inability to gather within--much less reclaim and continuously occupy-- a central, public space. Although Occupy Oakland always encouraged autonomous forms of action and self-organizing, the vacuum created by the lack of a camp site created many logistical obstacles in the early months of the new year.
These external limits from the state were supplemented by internal rifts concerning the organization and tactics of the movement, and exasperation regarding the decision making process, etc (e.g. the rift between “Occupy” and “Decolonize”). It soon became evident that the recent political developments necessitated fundamental changes and adaptations within our modes of organization, the most important being how to connect and help coordinate the now-dispersed committees, individuals, events, and actions in the absence of a spatial center.
To be clear, it’s not as if state force has succeeded in “defeating” our movements or freezing our actions, events, and organizing: we have achieved many victories over the past few months, from mass events such as the port shut down and general strike, to the smaller community-based events and marches. The summer, though less outwardly spectacular, is already auspicious, has already witnessed several radically new forms of anti-capitalist organizations emerge (surrounding “precarious” forms of labor and the unemployed), while a network of neighborhood groups have been forming to resist home foreclosures and evictions. However, within the early “post-Occupy” stages many new forms of resistance have yet to come into formation. Such adaptations have become patently necessary within our historical moment of increasingly open state antagonism, judicial precarity, and targeted police invasion.
(Concluded)
This article was first published in The Independent's Weekend Magazine July 13 Friday 2012 - http://www.theindependentdigital.com/index.php?opt=view&page=55&date=2012-07-13
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