Occupation: Call and Response
What follows is a response to the folks over at the Sacred Conspiracy, who were kind enough to respond to my “magnum opus” on the lessons from the recently ended 90 5th student occupation at the New School, and the issues I saw with a particular form of political expression manifest there.
Is there anything that can be said in response to a document that seeks to paint a broad coalition of political views with one brush in order to spread the fear of “insurrectionism” that to be honest is no less fear mongering than [Glenn Beck’s rant about The Coming Insurrection].
It is worth reminding readers that my critique was quite clear on this point. What began as a broad coalition of political views disintegrated throughout the week until the dominant voice was a small group advocating insurrectionary politics. The writing on the walls in the final “days of rage,” and some of the political statement manifested there, makes this quite clear. The same goes for copies of Call and other Invisible Committee related manifestos circulated in the occupation. So it’s disingenuous to suggest that I painted everyone in the occupation as calling for insurrection. My point was precisely the opposite–that this language marginalized the majority of the occupation and ultimately lost it wider support. And as far as fear mongering, my critique had nothing to do with being afraid of the insurrectionary politics on display there. Rather, I find it all a bit confusing and out of touch with reality. These major distinction are absent in the above comments.
Whether or not all of the hardlines pushing for confrontation are down with the insurrectionary politics ultimately is uninteresting to me. I’m more curious about its impact. And I’m not the only one who thinks that it largely plays at revolution in place of what others consider to be real political work. You can read this and this (quoted below in regards to The Coming Insurrection) to get a fuller sense of some of these objections:
Is “fucking it all up” (p 112) really a revolutionary strategy? No, it is just a cry of nihilistic alienation at a system which appears to be beyond influence, beyond change. Denouncing everything and postulating the most radical of spontaneous jolts based on pan-destruction and ruins may sound extremely revolutionary but it just shows that they have no real awareness of how to transform society or how a free world could function.
The point of my critique was that this kind of politics–insurrectionary whateverism as manifested in the 90 5th occupation–didn’t help transform or expand support for the occupation. It only brought it to an end faster. But perhaps if the whole point of the occupation was not to build a movement but simply to occupy for occupation’s sake, then my critique likely misses the original point.
It is not surprising that someone who has spent much of the last few years simultaneously espousing what he considers to be a “radical” politics and working from within the bourgeois and bureaucratic structures of the New School University Student Senate. In other words, working hand-in-hand with the administrative structures that seek only to frustrate any real radical politics.
Yes, I have spent the last 2.5 years working with the USS, the New School student government. I decided to get involved following the occupation of 2008 of a different New School building (65 5th Ave). Why? Precisely because it was clear that many of our demands agreed to by the administration during the occupation could not be achieved by simply occupying a space for a few days to a week. Securing those agreements and creating lasting political change from a campus occupation would take a much longer and more dedicated process. I decided to see if and how much I could push our demands by working within that political framework. The above critique rightly states that this often involves “working hand-in-hand with the administrative structure,” but it falsely claims that there is no potential for “any real radical politics”–whatever that supposedly means.
In the past 2.5 years the USS has helped fund a majority of the political conferences that take place within nearly every of the 7 divisions of the university. We have supported dozens of collaborative student projects and numerous political events reaching thousands of people. Along with the GFSS–the graduate student union, we fought for and got increased wages for grad student teachers and research assistants. We fought and pushed and help make sure we got a replacement space for 65 5th Ave when it shut down. The reason we even had a campus building at 90 5th Ave. to occupy on Nov. 17th is because some of us involved in the occupation kept pushing and working with the administration to make sure it happened. Folks might want to keep that in mind when they attack people for collaborating with the administration. These things don’t just magically happen because we’re a “progressive university.”
And we will continue to work with and push against the administration, as we have been doing, on everything from gender neutral bathrooms and autonomous student space to financial transparency and campus diversity. We’ll work with groups like the Social Justice Committee and the Green Fund. We’ll advocate for students as best we can within an institutional framework that we all know needs to change. But at least we have a vision for what we are trying to change, and a lot of us are talking about strategies for how to do that better. We’re talking about student debt and student unions. Building coalitions. Critical education and consciousness. In my book, this political work is real and radical. If that doesn’t pass other people’s radical litmus test, I really don’t care.
But this response is not meant to throw mud at one who is already so dirty and whose politics are so questionable – is it even worth criticizing one who claims spiritual knowledge, one who fetishizes “earth-based religions” and seems to think that a total ontological reset is necessary in order for humanity to save the earth – that it would simply be too easy. Instead, the point is to explain AGAIN that such tactics of smear are simply the backdraft of a politics of the status quo.
Not sure how to best engage this line of thought. Should I be offended by being called dirty? What about the earth is so awful that dirt, one of the foundations of this planet and all life, is understood as offensive? You wouldn’t be alive today if not for dirt. Come to think of it, this line of argumentation reminds me of a funny waddle and daub joke–it’s more of a saying really–that I’m sure a comedic friend in particular will enjoy:
“Throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick.”
Or maybe the writers of this post had more of a ritual filth concept in mind instead, which would be entirely in line with their sacrificial politics. If that’s the case, should I respond with Réne Girard or Georges Bataille, or perhaps Mary Douglas? Should we talk about the gift in the context of divine taboos? Should I dress in linens and offer a young bull and ram to cleanse my dirty politics and paganism? Would that help calm your rage?
As to your attack on my personal beliefs, perhaps I do fetishize earth-based religions. I am certainly interested in them, and I have lots of fetishes around the house. As an animist, it’s what is most important to me. It informs and shapes my entire world. Not by sheer coincidence, I was reading a discussion a few days ago precisely about some of these issues in Research is Ceremony by Shawn Wilson, who suggests the key to a decolonizing research methodology is relational accountability. For Wilson, this has to do with the way an Indigenous research paradigm rejects the separation of ontology (what exists?), epistemology (how do we know what we know?), axiology (ethics and aesthetics) and methodology (how to solve a problem) into discrete domains of thought, as is practiced in mainstream, or whitestream, academic and philosophical thought. In a similar vein, my belief in animism–a belief that all beings have some energy or force of their own that require us to respectfully engage with them (think of the Force from Star Wars)–informs every aspect of my worldview. It is not a “spiritual” belief in the narrow Abrahamic way you seem to understand spirituality, but rather it is a way of being in the world. What Jakob von Uexküll called the Umwelt, or the environment. It can’t be separated into spiritual and not-spiritual. It’s like trying to talk about a fish with no water.
So yes, I do think that for real change to happen in the world, it will require a fundamental spiritual shift in our consciousness, and I have no desire or need to hide that belief. Anti-capitalist politics are important, but this alone will never solve the problems we are faced with at this juncture in time. If we are serious about averting massive global instability brought about by ever-increasing global ecological collapses, we need something on the level of a global paradigm shift. For me, this is impossible without talking about spirituality. How this fits with your description as “simply the backdraft of a politics of the status quo” I have no idea. Last time I checked, massive global ecological collapse is precisely the politics of the status quo. Perhaps there is some part of your critique here that I am missing, so perhaps you could help by clarifying this part of your critique for me?
Let us begin with a distinction which in the above linked piece is treated as if it is without difference: Insurrectionism, or the politics of the writers of The Coming Insurrection are not only a specific trope of contemporary anarchist thought, but is by no means a comprehensive version of anarchism or other leftist thought. Violence (however one chooses to define it) as a necessary and inevitable part of any social movement, especially an anti-capitalist one, is not under the sole purview of an insurrectionist perspective. So why bother to paint all with one brush in this case? Of course, the opposite critique of “bureaucrat”, “collaborationist” and “bourgeois liberal” do the same, but these seem to the Sacred Conspiracy to have more of a rootedness in reality than the broad claim of “insurrectionist.”
I’ll fully admit that my analysis was far from nuanced or detailed on this point, and in my critique of what I see as an insurrectionist political tendency, perhaps I was too vague or broad–I have no problem conceding that. I have no illusions that the Invisible Committee, or Tiqqun or whoever we want to locate these ideas around originally, are but one of many strains of radical political thought on the left that valorized political violence. However, they are also distinct in particular ways, owing as much to their French origins as to their American and wider recent European re-articulations. I don’t feel this is really the proper place to go into an extended engagement with either The Coming Insurrection or the Call, or Introduction to Civil War or the other various documents circulated around New School occupations and New York radical circles. Suffice to say that this political expression was clearly visible at the New School occupation, both in the banners (99% is civil war), wall art (divine violence) and other similar messages. As already mentioned, I saw multiple copies of Call lying around the 90 5th space on several occasions. Those are just some basic observations about the influence of these ideas in that space. Many of the critiques made by the Invisible Committee–and by others sharing these ideas in the occupation–I share. Capitalism doesn’t work, and needs to be replaced. We live in a hyper-consumer world devoid of real meaning. We are all alienated from the world. But others claims just sound really silly to me, and seem totally devoid of any interest in building a broad-based movement for radical change.
As to the question of violence, this is much more complicated, and beyond the scope of this short reflection piece. To suggest that political change comes without struggle would be silly, and I would never defend such a claim. For me, the question was never about violence itself, but rather the specific ways in which it was manifested in the occupation. Kill all cops. Kill liberals. The Next Step… (with a guillotine), terror, divine violence, etc, etc. This is nothing more than hollow rhetoric posing as insurrectionary politics, regardless of whether it passes itself off as insurrectionary anarchism, insurrectionary communism, The Party or whatever.
No matter how much I think about it, I just can’t make sense of this line of thought. If we’re going to talk about violence, let’s talk about structural violence–patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, police brutality, the death penalty–basically, let’s talk about real daily violence, not just this play violent rhetoric of insurrection. I fully support direct action and militant politics. I don’t have time for empty slogans.
The occupation was planned and enacted by a coalition of those who identify as anarchists, nihilists, left-communists, communists, Kantian-Marxists, feminists, nihilist-communists, tranarchists, phenomenologists and others. It has been opposed by socialists, trotskyists, members of the International Socialist Organization, democrats, republicans, liberals, social-democrats, the New School Administration and a number of others. Both sides have alliances, tenuous and otherwise and if nothing else, this past week of occupation has allowed for those committed to radical action and radical organizing to unmask those opponents who were hiding in the clothing of allies.
Agreed. This initial political coalition was what made it powerful. Perhaps this clarifying of political positions was a good thing, as people now know what to expect from people they are dealing with. Does this mean we can’t work together? I don’t know, maybe, but not necessarily. But it does mean we need to be realistic when working on common projects that at some point we will diverge paths, and the more productive we are at this, the better. The most recent occupation has given us lots of examples of what, in my opinion, we should not do again, and what to avoid, as well as what some people will or will not be a part of. Although painful, it was probably also useful.
It is certainly clear to me that some people are not interested in anything having to do with campus politics, and in some cases seem to even reject a student identity. For anyone working as a campus organizer, this form of politics is obviously extremely hard to engage with. You can’t organize students to care about campus issues when they don’t even identity with the school–and here I don’t mean in any official way, but merely in their role as students. There’s lots of important work to be done that doesn’t need to be on campus, so that’s fine. The problem seems to be when off-campus and on-campus politics clash, as we saw in this most recent occupation. This may be a larger issues for our movement in general, as we struggle to understand how OWS interfaces with all of our daily lives and politics. Growing pains are always necessary, of that I am sure.
And so, you who claim to somehow speak for others, we reject the idea that you may either speak for us or to us. Your critique is invalid, your points negated by their sheer lack of material grounding. Move on (really, go work for moveon.org or something). We will continue to agitate and continue to act. History is behind us, we run towards the future while you stand pat and wait for it to catch up to you, hoping against all likelihood that you will be proven correct.
Ha ha. I can almost hear a certain someone saying this to me in an angry tone like last time. Sorry, but this straw man strategy doesn’t work. I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I listen and watch and then try to make sense of what is happening around me. I have no interest in speaking for others, and you will find no instance of me claiming to do that. If you fail to understand how I can make criticisms without speaking for others, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s like trying to explain to people how you can be white and still critique white privilege. I just don’t get how people don’t get it? But I do know this much. I can and will speak to anyone and everyone I please, and in that you have no control. Whether and how you choose to respond is up to you.
All I know is that I will continue to act and write and speak my truth as I have always done. History is my guide and will be both our judges when the future comes to pass. The material grounding from which my critique springs is wide open for all to see. I will let others be the judge of its merits.
In collaboration!
