Layer 483 . . . An Architecture of Consciousness, A People's Forum and a Bay of Rage

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It looks like I underestimated (in yesterday's blog) the number of cities where there are anti-capitalist camps - according to this piece in the New York Times. The Observer's version of this article estimates the number of camps as 900, not 600.

                                                               Cairo

In Protest, the Power of Place
by Michael Kimmelman

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/wall-street-protest-shows-power-of-place.html?_r=1

THE ever expanding Occupy Wall Street movement, with encampments now not only in Lower Manhattan but also in Washington, London and other cities, proves among other things that no matter how instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days, nothing replaces people taking to the streets.

We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches, around the corner from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.

Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.

So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.

I thought of Aristotle, of all people, while I watched the Zuccotti Park demonstrators hold one of their “general assemblies” the other day. In his “Politics,” Aristotle argued that the size of an ideal polis extended to the limits of a herald’s cry. He believed that the human voice was directly linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry in a proper city required face-to-face conversation.

A peculiarity of zoning law has turned an unexpected spotlight on the bankruptcy of so much of what in the last couple of generations has passed for public space in America. Most of it is token gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger, taller buildings. Think of the atrium of the I.B.M. tower on Madison Avenue and countless other places like it: “public” spaces that are not really public at all but quasi-public, controlled by their landlords. Zuccotti in principle is subject to Brookfield’s rules prohibiting tarps, sleeping bags and the storage of personal property on the site. The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).

Living in Europe for the past few years, I often came across parks and squares, in Barcelona and Madrid, Athens and Milan, Paris and Rome, occupied by tent communities of protesters. Public protest and assembly are part of the European social compact. Maybe the difference in America has something to do with our longstanding obsessions with automobiles and autonomy, with our predilection for isolationism, or our preference just for watching, more than participating.

In Europe, the protests were about jobs, government rollbacks and debt. That the message of the Zuccotti Park occupiers is fuzzy somewhat misses the point. The encampment itself has become the point.

“We come to get a sense of being part of a larger community,” said Brian Pickett, a 33-year-old adjunct professor of theater and speech at City University of New York. I found him sitting last week among the neat, tarpaulin-covered stacks of sleeping bags in one corner of the park. “It’s important to see this in the context of alienation today. We do Facebook alone. But people are not alone here.”

And as a result, demonstrators also reveal themselves to each other. Egyptians described this phenomenon at Tahrir Square. Tea Partiers have talked about it, too. Protesters don’t just show the world a mass of people. They discover their own numbers — people with similar, if not identical, concerns. Imagine Zuccotti Park, one protester told me, as a Venn diagram of characters representing disparate political and economic disenchantments. The park is where their grievances overlap. It’s literally common ground.

And it was obvious to me watching the crowd coalesce over several days that consensus emerges urbanistically, meaning that the demonstrators, who have devised their own form of leaderless governance to keep the peace, find unity in community. The governing process they choose is itself a bedrock message of the protest.

It produces the outlines of a city, as I said. The protesters have set up a kitchen, for serving food, a legal desk and a sanitation department, a library of donated books, an area where the general assembly meets, a medical station, a media center where people can recharge their laptops using portable generators, and even a general store, called the comfort center, stocked with donated clothing, bedding, toothpaste and deodorant — like the food, all free for the taking.

That’s where I found Sophie Theriault the other morning, sorting through loads of newly arrived pants and shirts. A soft-spoken 21-year-old organic farmer from Vermont, she had already spent many days and nights working as a volunteer. “We may not have all come here with the exact same issues in mind,” she told me, “but sharing this park day in and day out, night after night, becomes an opportunity for us to discover our mutual interests.”

“We meet every night to talk about how to keep this place clean and sober, to keep it an emotionally, physically safe space for everyone. Consensus builds community.”

Patrick Metzger, a 23-year-old sound engineer and composer, echoed the thought: “From Web posts, you never get information about race, class, age — who people really are. Fox News talks about flakes and mobs. But you can see how complicated the mix really is: students and older people, parents with families, construction workers on their lunch break, unemployed Wall Street executives.”

O.K., a few flakes, too, as at any political rally. But Mr. Metzger got it right. The protesters’ diversity, at least during the day, is intrinsic to the protest’s resilience. Not since 9/11 have so many people been asking “Have you been there?” “Have you seen it?” about anyplace in Manhattan. The occupation of the virtual world along with Zuccotti Park is of course jointly propelling the Occupy Wall Street movement now, and neither would be so effective minus the other.

That said, on the ground is where the protesters are building an architecture of consciousness.

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What's happening in the USA is fascinating, given the total domination of USA politics by the neo-conservatives for past decades. But let's not forget that it was in America in the 1960s that the whole hippy/alternative society thing really took off. It's been puzzling that the Left in America has been so marginalised for so many years.

Check out The People's Forum:

http://www.the-peoples-forum.com/cgi-bin/latestarticles.cgi?cn=1

October 2011.org

http://october2011.org/pages/two-occupations-one-city-one-movement

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This polemic is interesting:

Bay of Rage

http://www.bayofrage.com/from-the-bay/greedunityviolenc/

Corporate Greed is the Wrong Target

Being “greedy” is what good corporations and businesses are supposed to do in capitalism. In this system, individuals can only get ahead by acting greedy, in their own self-interest. So while many recent city occupations in the USA have built themselves against  “corporate greed”, “big business,” and “financiers on Wall Street”, we cannot forget that the most greedy corporations also donate the most to charity, that small business is just as much part of the system as big business, that productive industry cannot exist without finance. We must challenge the entire system. If we are really against “corporate greed” then we are against capitalism itself.

The 99%?

Yes, the 1% have been screwing us, for a long ass time. The 99% are reduced to working, serving and maintaining a system that makes us miserable and prevents us from realizing our potential. A growing number of us have been completely expelled from ‘society’ altogether—through homelessness, joblessness, an inability to get adequate healthcare, lack of access to education and other miserable conditions.

But the idea that there is something called society that we should all work together to defend is an illusion. Society is rife with divisions, conflicts and wars. Some of these wars are manufactured and waged by the 1%. Other wars, such as the wars conducted by indigenous peoples and people of color against racist colonization and the war conducted by women and trans people against patriarchal gender violence, are hidden and suppressed in the false name of society. Every year for these last decades, the casualties of society have piled up as the revolutionaries have been killed or jailed.

In recent years, many of the 99% have appeared to follow the rules. Many of us have been caught in the cycle of working and borrowing in order to continue working and borrowing, we have been terrified of speaking out against daily injustices and humiliations for fear of losing the tiny foothold we hope to protect, or for fear of getting jailed or beaten by the cops, or getting ostracized and criminalized by the obeyers (even though they know the rules are unjust). Many people who have recently lost their social standing are figuring out that the promises capitalism holds out to them are hollow. What the 99% faces, at best, is a life of debt, chained to shitty jobs and to shitty commodities.

The Occupy Movement is awakening to the fact that if we continue to follow their rules, they, the 1%, will win. The Occupy movement is a wake-up call to disobey their rules and to create new ways of living together.

The square occupations in North Africa unleashed revolutions that toppled dictators and those in Europe brought global stock markets to the brink of collapse. The difference here is obviously in the numbers; 50,000+ in Tahrir Square, 20,000 in Syntagma. Yet there was also something more.The strength of these occupations lied in their refusal to be removed, their commitment to physically resist any attempts to evict them from their liberated spaces. Remember the barricades around Tahrir? Non-violence made no sense during those long nights of fighting to protect the revolution. Here in the usa, we will also need to resist, in our own ways. By limiting the scope of that resistance right from the start, we undermine our potential strength and we let the state decide when we will be removed, when this explosion of resistance has gone too far and needs to be extinguished.

We need tens of thousands to take to the streets and build this movement into something greater. But if the past weeks have taught us anything it is that clashes with the state do not scare people away. In fact it is the opposite. The numbers on Wall Street have clearly grown after each round of escalation and scuffles with police.

The potential of this movement. What do we really want?

We don’t want shitty jobs. We don’t want to vote for politicians who promise to change things. We don’t want to waste our energies trying to change the constitution. We don’t want a few new rules for Wall Street.  We don’t believe we can “affect the system” by just “being together.”

The 1% controls the wealth of the society. We need to take it back, and remake it in the process. But what comes after occupying the city squares? City Hall? Foreclosed homes? Supermarkets? And then—Liberating public transit? Free health clinics? Free education? Collective food production?

Everything is possible.

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Anti-capitalist protest camp sets up in Birmingham city centre

http://www.birminghampost.net/news/west-midlands-news/2011/10/21/anti-capitalist-protest-camp-sets-up-in-birmingham-city-centre-65233-29633212/


Wall Street protest camp builds its own world order

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20111023/NEWS/110230335


Occupy London protest to 'camp at St Paul's until at least Christmas'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/22/occupy-london-protest-st-pauls?newsfeed=true


Occupy London protest camp prepares to become permanent fixture
Anti-capitalist base in the City grows to 200 tents as activists set up kitchens, toilet blocks and media centre

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/17/occupy-london-protest-camp-grows


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Layer 482 . . . Freefall, Stiglitz, Anti-capitalist Occupations, Eagleton, Economics, Villanelles, Douzinas, Greece, Tunisia and Gaddafi

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From BBC TV last night I learned that 600 Canadian soldiers died in 1944 in an area near Caen on the day that British and American planes bombed the city into oblivion. Obviously the bombs were not meant to kill allied troops.

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"Francis Reginald Scott, commonly known as Frank Scott or F.R. Scott, (August 1, 1899 - January 30, 1985) was a Canadian poet, intellectual and constitutional expert. He helped found the first Canadian social democratic party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and its successor, the New Democratic Party."

 - Wikipedia

"Scott's father instilled in his son a commitment to serve mankind, a love for the regenerative balance of the Laurentian landscape and a firm respect for the social order. He witnessed the riots in the City during the Conscription Crisis of 1917."

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A villanelle is a poem with only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain.

"Dear Heather" is Leonard Cohen's eleventh studio album, released in 2004.

"Villanelle for Our Time", the album's 7th track, was recorded on the 6th May 1999, shortly after Cohen's return from the Mount Baldy Zen Center. It is an improvised jazz recitation of an F.R. Scott poem.

Villanelle For Our Time

From bitter searching of the heart,
Quickened with passion and with pain
We rise to play a greater part.
This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.
The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UzvVOy0Dq8

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It's been an eventful month. 600 anti-capitalist camps have sprung up in cities around the world. Libya's civil war has raged to its end. Gaddafi has been captured and shot. The citizens of Tunisia are voting today for a new post-revolutionary government . . .

Some say there's a ridiculous number of competing parties seeking election for their candidates in Tunisia. Maybe - however - this is how an anarcho-syndicalist democratic system should work: through there being a large number of parties, or syndicates, representing every possible point of view, that must genuinely communicate, discuss, persuade, negotiate and compromise. How can this be worse than a two-party system in which both the parties espouse basically the same conservative ideology?

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Joseph Stiglitz is one of the most intelligent men on our planet. In 2009 he published a book called "Freefall - Free Markets & the Sinking of the Global Economy". (Now a Penguin @ £9.99) Stiglitz was the Chief Economist at the World Bank and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.

Paul Mason said this in the New Statesman -

"If anyone is going to produce a bold new economic theory and vision to guide the centre left beyond the financial crisis, it's going to be Joe . . ."

David Smith said this in The Times -

"Freefall is a spirited attack on Wall Street, the free market and the Washington Concensus."

Chuck Leddy said this in the Boston Globe -

"Freefall is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the roots of the financial crisis."

So the question you have to ask yourself is - do you NOT want to understand the roots of the financial crisis, the reasons for the banking collapse, and what should be done now and in the future?

"Freefall - Free Markets & the Sinking of the Global Economy". Penguin  £9.99

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Here's an extract from the preface of Freefall:

"In the Great Recession that began in 2008 millions of people . . . lost their homes and jobs. Many more suffered the fear and anxiety of doing so . . . A crisis that began in America soon turned global, as tens of millions lost their jobs worldwide - 20 million in China alone - and tens of millions fell into poverty. This is not the way things were supposed to be.

The Great Recession . . . has shattered illusions. It is forcing [many of us] to rethink long-cherished views. For a quarter century, certain free market doctrines have prevailed. 

This book is about a battle of ideas, about the ideas that led to the failed policies that precipitated the crisis and about the lessons that we take away from it. The battle between capitalism and communism may be over, but market economies come in many variations and the contest among them rages on. 

Managing the crisis is only my first concern; I am also concerned about the world that will emerge after the crisis. We won't and can't go back to the world as it was before.

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Terry Eagleton's another very clever guy, and a Distinguished Professor of English Literature. Hot off the press is a new book of his called, "Why Marx Was Right".
Yale University Press  £16.99

"The crisis has at least meant that the word 'capitalism,' usually disguised under some such coy pseudonym as 'the modern age,' 'industrialism' or 'the West,' has become current once more. You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenom that it is . . . 

A form of social life can be perceived for what it is when it begins to break down. Marx was the first to identify the historical object known as capitalism  - to show how it arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end.

[As for] Marxism as a moral and cultural critique . . . Alienation, the 'commodification' of social life, a culture of greed, aggression, mindless hedonism and growing nihilism, the steady hemorrhage of meaning and value from human existence: it is hard to find an intelligent discussion of these questions that is not seriously indebted to the Marxist tradition . . .

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 This is from a major article in the Guardian G2 last Friday:

Occupy London: my nights with the St Paul's protesters
The Occupy London protesters have a kitchen, a tech-tent, a library – even a football team. But do they have any answers?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/20/occupy-london-st-pauls-protesters

by Patrick Kingsley

In the short term, I learn quickly, these guys want to stay here. I arrive on Tuesday, the fourth day of the occupation, and already the place seems staggeringly well organised – and growing fast. Estimates vary, but yesterday some say there were 100 tents lining the steps of the cathedral, and along its northern face. Today there are around 150. Tomorrow, maybe 200.

 People always impatiently ask what the occupiers' "demands" are, and why collectively they seem unwilling, or unable to provide quick-fix solutions. These questions miss the point. First, there are lots of occupiers, all from different social and political backgrounds, who understandably need time to thrash out what it is they want to achieve together. The camp gives them that time. Second, if there's one thing that does unite almost all of them, it's their rejection of capitalism – although they are wary of how they couch this. Nevertheless, a huge "capitalism is crisis" banner hangs over the entrance to the site; they're not interested in making petty demands on a system they see as irreconcilably flawed. If anything, the camp itself is their demand, and their solution: the stab at an alternative society that at least aims to operate without hierarchy, and with full, participatory democracy. And to be fair, in its small way, it kind of works.

Wail Qasim, an 18-year-old politics student: "You can go to the ballot box every five years, but politicians don't actually represent your view. So the importance of this kind of space is in the way it brings together people to open up a dialogue about building an alternative." 

Blogger Steve Maclean, 31, is slightly more pragmatic: "We're forming a space where people can come together and crystallise all of what we think. Out of this more concrete ideas can be formed."

Bear, who co-ordinates the kitchen, runs catering at festivals. He, incidentally, as he picked his way over a few crates of donated fruit, gave me the most nuanced view of what he hopes the camp will achieve: "We're not going to create the answer here, but we can effect a change by leading by example, by showing people that an autonomous, democratic community based on social rather than financial cooperation can work."

The tech team is one of 15 autonomous sub-groups at the camp, each with responsibility for a particular area. There is a group that deals with the camp's donations; there are the food, and "university" teams; the police negotiation group; legal, which has enlisted a friendly QC, in case of future trouble; recycling; outreach, which distributes flyers about the camp, and is planning a politics workshop for schools; music, art, and entertainment; a cathedral liaison team, which is tactfully dealing with its increasingly wary clergy; and a media team, for dealing with people like me.

Almost everyone's involved in something and, crucially, there's no hierarchy – or there's not supposed to be. The teams meet once a day and agree things by consensus, in a discussion "facilitated" (but not led) by a different member of the group each time. Their decisions are announced every lunchtime at a pan-camp logistics meeting – once again ideally facilitated by different people, to avoid anyone gaining too much influence. But the main meeting of the day is the general assembly. Held at 7pm, it's attended by 400-500 people and aimed at political discourse and camp strategy.

Most of the occupiers don't think this is a problem that can be solved by a few tweaks to [financial] regulation. They think it's a systemic problem not attributable to a single group. It's a problem with capitalism.

At the back of the crowd, the suit standing next to me leans in to say something. "So what answers have they got?" is what I expect him to say. After all, he's a former investment banker now studying for an MBA. But Nikita – "yes, just call me Nikita" – surprises me. "Even if they don't have a solution, people still have the right to say 'no'," he says, pausing between each word. "It's only once people start saying 'no' that we will start thinking about what the solution could be."

Sleepless at Occupy London Stock Exchange - video


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011/oct/20/occupy-london-stock-exchange-video

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Greece's lines now are clear
The Greek elite that tried to push through policies on the back of a deficit it fuelled stands alone and accused

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/greece-lines-clear-elite

by Costas Douzinas - Professor of Law at Birkbeck College

Greece is split in two. On one side are politicians, bankers, tax evaders and media barons supporting the most class-driven, violent social and cultural restructuring western Europe has seen. The "other" Greece includes the overwhelming majority of the population. It was in evidence yesterday when up to 500,000 people took to the streets; the largest demonstration in living memory. The attempt to divide civil servants (ritually presented as lazy and corrupt) from private sector employees (the "tax evading" plumbers) has misfired. The only success the Papandreou government can boast is the abolition of the old right-left division – replaced by a divide between the elites and the people.

It is as if the Greek elites desired the debt to orchestrate the wholesale destruction of the welfare state and transfer of public assets to private hands.

The Papandreou government will stand accused of incompetence and moral cynicism. Every authoritarian regime dreams of radically changing society. This government's mission was to replace care for others with indifference, hospitality with exploitation. They failed, and now only a thick blue line separates the elite from the outraged people.

Thursday's demonstration ended tragically with the death of a trade-unionist. The last vestiges of governmental legitimacy are gone and the government will follow soon. The democratic deficit from which political systems suffer everywhere is irreversible in Greece. The responsibility of the "other" Greece is to devise a constitution of social justice and democracy for the 21st century. This is what Greece can offer to the world.

Other articles by Costas Douzinas:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/27/greece-bailout-eu-neocolonialism


Greece is standing up to EU neocolonialism


The usurious conditions of the Greek bailout reveals Brussels' colonial mindset – but Athens is showing citizens can resist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/15/greece-europe-outraged-protests

In Greece, we see democracy in action


The public debates of the outraged in Athens are the closest we have come to democratic practice in recent European history

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/01/austerity-europe-left-alternative


Austerity? There is an alternative – a new project for Europe's left


Our initiative aims to show there is an alternative analysis of the present situation rather than the misery and injustice of austerity


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/28/hunger-strikers-greece-asylum-seekers


These hunger strikers are the martyrs of Greece


Asylum seekers willing to die in the face of expulsion after shame and exploitation bear witness to a higher truth than life

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/07/greece-protest-democracy-government


Greek protests show democracy in action


A minister described Greek civil disobedience as 'anomie' – but it is legitimately reclaiming our democracy from failed institutions

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/31/europe-depends-shared-humanity-culture


In London and Athens, protesters are rekindling the true European spirit


The idea of Europe must go back to a democracy that resists fake economic orthodoxy and false monoculturalism

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