Far from being tamed, parliamentary legitimacy appears only to have emboldened the extremists. In recent weeks racially-motivated attacks have proliferated. Immigrants have spoken of their fear of roaming the streets at night following a spate of attacks by black-clad men on motorbikes. Street vendors from Africa and Asia have also been targeted.
Greek police send crime victims to neo-Nazi ‘protectors’
by Helena Smith
Greece‘s far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.
In return, a growing number of Greek crime victims have come to see the party, whose symbol bears an uncanny resemblance to the swastika, as a “protector”.
One victim of crime, an eloquent US-trained civil servant, told the Guardian of her family’s shock at being referred to the party when her mother recently called the police following an incident involving Albanian immigrants in their downtown apartment block.
“They immediately said if it’s an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn,” said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. “We don’t condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre,” she said. “If the police and official mechanism can’t deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions.”
How Occupy Wall Street is re-centering the economy is an open, fluid, changing, and intensely debated question. It’s not a traditional movement of the working class organized in trade unions or targeting work places, although it is a movement of class struggle (especially when we recognize with Marx and Engels that the working class is not a fixed, empirical class but a fluid, changing class of those who have to sell their labor power in order to survive). Occupy’s use of strikes and occupations targets the capitalist system more broadly, from interrupting moves to privatize public schools to shutting down ports and stock exchanges (I think of the initial shut downs in Oakland and on Wall Street as proof of concepts, proof that it can be done). People aren’t being mobilized as workers; they are being mobilized as people, as everybody else, as the rest of us, as the majority—99%–who are being thoroughly screwed by the top one percent in education, health, food, the environment, housing, and work.
Occupation as Political Form
by Jodi Dean
Editor’s Note: Jodi Dean presented the following text as a keynote lecture for the 2012 iteration of Transmediale, an annual new media festival in Berlin. The theme of the 2012 festival was “In/compatibility…the condition that arises when things do not work together.” The section of the festival at which the author presented was titled “Incompatible Publics.” 1 The discussion that followed Dean’s lecture was moderated by Krystian Woznicki2 —the text of the discussion is included below. –MW
I’m going to talk today about Occupy Wall Street in light of our theme of incompatible publics. I claim that the occupation is best understood as a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people. To call it a political form is to say that it is configured within a particular social-historical setting. To call it a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people is to say that it has a fundamental content and that this content consists in the failure of capitalism to provide an economic system adequate to the capacities, needs, demands, and general will of the people. More bluntly put, to think about the Occupy movement in light of the idea of incompatible publics is to locate the truth of the movement in class struggle (and thus reject interpretations of the movement that highlight multiplicity, democracy, and anarchism—autonomism). So that’s what I hope to convince you of today.
Locking arms and dancing together at the Resistance Festival 2012. photo credit: Eric Ribellarsi
This summer, I spoke with a young Albanian communist who is a member of the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE). The interview starts with her own story, then moves to the notoriously anti-immigrant group Golden Dawn and her thoughts on revolutionary strategy in the 21st century.
“How do we meet the basic needs of the people in a way that leads to our final goal of communism.”
“The people must come to administer the society themselves, rather than having a group of people administer it for them.
“KOE has a view of emancipation through participation. The people must know that their participation in the movements is a part of them coming to administer the society.…
“I want to say that my views on Golden Dawn have been mainly shaped by my orientation as a communist in KOE. I don’t fight them in the struggle as Eva the immigrant, but as Eva, the member of KOE.
“Golden Dawn is a social problem. Golden Dawn came to prominence through the absence of the Left. The Left has offered no reasonable answer or program to the people in relationship to immigration. At this point, there is an immigration question related to huge numbers of migrants who have come, but cannot be assimilated by the Greek society.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Eric Ribellarsi: Can you tell me about how it was that you came to Greece?
Eva Z.: I was born in Albania in 1989. I came to Greece when I was ten years old. We came here by accident. My father’s friend made us a visa to come to Greece, and found a job that paid more than we could make in Albania.
The problem that cuts through all the objections to demands is the movement’s inability to deal with antagonism. So the very question of demands brings to the fore the fact of division within the movement, a division that many—but not all—have wanted to deny.
Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality.
A Movement Without Demands?
by Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean
The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.
Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.
On the first anniversary of Occupy, Kasama is revisiting some questions, which remain unsettled and controversial. In the hopes of sparking off discussion, we are posting some analyses from Jodi Dean (and co-authors) that came recommended by J. Ramsey, who also wrote this intro:
Jodi Dean has produced some of the most cogent and rigorous critical analyses of Occupy over the past year, as this movement was playing out before our eyes, and beneath our feet. She writes from a position of both enthusiastic support for this outbreak as well as of of clear communist politics. Her perspective keeps fidelity to prior communist experiences, while also attending to what is new in the present conjuncture, one that gives close attention to questions of political form, expression, and representation as issues of great significance.
In re-reading these essays, I often find myself wishing that they’d been much more widely spread and read by occupiers, while we were still in the camps.
That said, it is important though to grasp the essays below as critical interventions in a unfolding political sequence, not as theoretical generalizations addressing a timeless or monolithic thing called “the Occupy Movement.” Readers are encouraged to keep in mind the specificities of the moment in which Dean is/was writing, from Sept. 2011, when OWS is first established, to Nov. 2011 when the camps are mostly destroyed, through the Spring and Summer of 2012.
Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Representation
By Jodi Dean and Jason Jones
September 2011 shattered the ideology of an invincible Wall Street much as September 2001 shattered the illusion of an invulnerable United States. All of a sudden and seemingly out of the blue, people outraged by the fact that “banks got bailed out” and “we got sold out” installed themselves in the financial heart of New York City. Occupying the symbol of capitalist class power, they ruptured it. The ostensible controllers of the global capitalist system, still reeling from the crash of 2008, appeared to have lost control over their own cement neighborhood. Hippies with tents and cops with barricades had turned lower Manhattan into a chaotic mess. Those seeking to combine the people’s work, debts, hopes, and futures into speculative instruments for private profit confronted a visible and actual collective counterforce. There in the power of the people where investment banks and hedge funds had already identified an enormous social surplus, a cadre of the newly active located an inexhaustible political potential. It was like a giant hole had been opened up in the steel and glass citadel of the financial class. Through it, traders, brokers, and market-makers—as well as everybody else, even the whole world—could see the possibility of something new, something more, a world without capitalism, a world where people dance, talk, live, and create in common. Wall Street was occupied—and this occupation was producing a new form of political representation.
Kasama received the following invitation from Taki, a reporter who travelled to Greece as a reporter with Winter Has Its End. The event is hosted by Solidarity.
Sunday, September 23
Clifton Cultural Arts Center
3711 Clifton Ave. , Cincinnati, Ohio 45220
4:00 PM
Greece is the epicenter of the on-going political and economic crisis in the Eurozone. Faced with increasingly brutal austerity measures, the Greek people have mounted a level of resistance not seen in decades. This escalating struggle has lessons not just for Europe, but for those fighting for social justice in the U.S. as well. Read the rest of this entry »
I was with a group of teachers this evening as I got the text message. We were fifteen teachers in a graduate class listening to a lecture, but all of us distractedly thinking about our fellow teachers who were debating and deliberating whether to continue or suspend the strike.
My phone vibrates.
I get the text and announce to the class the results of the vote. Teachers vote to suspend the strike. The teachers that I was with had a collective sigh of relief. Everyone was very happy to be going back to their students.
The immediate mood was the strike is over, but the struggle isn’t.
The teachers I was with were from mainly Spanish-speaking schools on the Southwest side, African American schools on the South and West sides and some gentrifying schools in the Logan Square area of Chicago.
The following essay was sent to Kasama by A World to Win, a communist news service.
The protests against the anti-Islam video and what could still blossom in the Arab Spring
By Samuel Albert
17 September 2012 — The protests against a reactionary anti-Islam video have brought out, more sharply than ever, two aspects of what has been called the “Arab Spring” – the dangers it is facing, and the fact that its outcome has not yet been determined.
Like many people, my first reaction after the killing of the American ambassador to Libya and three other embassy personnel was one of dread. As we’ve seen before, when the U.S.’s position as the arbiter and enforcer of the world order is challenged, it often reacts by demonstrating that no one can match its lethal power.
We all remember the U.S.’s response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. They were an excuse for the invasion first of Afghanistan and then Iraq, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the toppling of the World Trade Center. Now, after the embassy attacks and the accompanying political chaos throughout the Middle East and North Africa, some reactionary experts who help hash out American foreign policy are already arguing that these events show the need for direct foreign military intervention in Syria, so that the U.S. can have “allies on the ground” to fight for advantage in a situation that is still basically out of anyone’s control. (The New York Times, 16 September 2012)
These changes have been driven by two chief things: capitalist accumulation and the desire to expand into the public education sector, but also white supremacy and the restructuring of state power to manage poor Black and Brown people in the city in a manner that most benefits the political and economic power structure of “global Chicago.” This is a fundamental dimension of the larger structural crisis of capitalism: how do you deal with a kind of surplus humanity? It’s not just keeping wages down anymore but it is actually something that is a real political problem for the ruling class. So I think the destruction of public housing, and public schools even more so, has been key to that.
What’s behind the attack on teachers and public education?
by Peter Brogan
Editor’s Introduction: On September 9, 2012, a day before the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike, Peter Brogan gave a talk in Chicago on the political and economic reasons underlying the attacks on public education and teachers in the United States. The following is an edited transcription of his talk.
Some of the question I want to address today include: Why is Rahm Emanuel attacking the Chicago Teachers Union? Why is it so important for Emanuel and his supporters to break the CTU at this moment? Why are attacks on teachers and their unions at the center of both the Democratic and Republican Party’s political agenda? Why are both parties in such staunch agreement on the “education reform” agenda, which is fundamentally about dismantling the institution of public education, replacing it with a hybrid, largely privatized and corporate form? Why is the attack on public education so fundamental, not just for the right wing, but actually for the broader ruling class, in this country and globally?Hence the fieldwork that I’ve been doing in Chicago is part of a comparative study of Chicago and New York that looks at transformations in urban space and capitalism, and is really trying to understand the problem of why the dismantling of public education and the creation of a privatized, corporatized education is really central to the larger transformations in the global political economy.
Rita Stephanie — an inspiring teacher, and a dedicated revolutionary organizer– has been giving Kasama day by day reports — on the actions and mood among the teachers. Now the authorities are trying to press through a compromise agreement, and have manufactured outrage that the teachers chose not to immediately grab the deal and rush back to work. Instead they want to study it, consult with each others, think it over, and weigh their options — all while the Democratic City Hall of Rahm Emmanual threatens to criminalize their strike itself.
by Rita Stephanie
Here we go: Week two.
I was anxious to get to the picket at 7:30 this morning. I know that many of my fellow teachers will be disappointed that we are not back in school today. Many of us are both teachers and parents.
Last night when the news became clear that we were going to be out on strike until at least Wednesday I witnessed first-hand the disappointment and frustration of my own child—a CPS student.
“I support the strike, but why can’t you go back while they finish the contract so that we can get back to school.”
Downtown Manhattan, September 17, Occupy anniversary. Photo: ish
by ISH
It was clear that Occupy movement organizers had big plans for today’s first anniversary of OWS, but it was also clear that the day’s events would be determined in large part by who showed up.
It really surprises me when Occupy is criticized for being disorganized, because everything about this weekend’s celebration and today’s direct actions felt like it had been dreamed of for months, with many possibilities painstakingly thought through. I’d been busy with my local neighborhood Occupy assembly, Occupy Sunset Park, so I hadn’t been able to tap into any of the advance organizing.
I was told that if I wanted to stay safe as a participant on Monday, the best thing to do was attend the Spokes Council Sunday evening after the big anniversary celebration concert, and find out the final plans there.
Planning: The Evening Before
I met up with another Kasama comrade and we went to the Spokes Council at Foley Square and listened as organizers laid everything out. Hundreds of people were in attendance, sitting in a big circle. Downtown Manhattan would be divided up into quadrants, and clusters would be created to take responsibility for actions in each area.
There would be a 99% zone, an Education zone, the Debt zone, and the Eco zone. Each cluster would divide up into affinity groups. Some were self-selecting groups of people with shared interests, some random collections of people.
On the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street — Kasama is revisiting some of its own earlier writings and debates. This first appeared on October 14 — as it started to become clear that something unusual, special and quite radical was happening. Discussion of this essay was worth checking out.
by Mike Ely
It is no longer five minutes to midnight. After Arab Spring leaps to Spain, and Greece, and on to New York’s Wall Street, it suddenly feels like five minutes to dawn.
We no longer need assume that there is no time to stop the world going to shit. There is an opening and we are flooding into it.
We are suddenly in a moment that is not marked by exhausted routine protests that speak for no one and speak to no one.
For the one year anniversary of Occupy, Kasama will be sharing summations and thoughts on occupation movements here in the United States and around the world. The following piece was originally written for the Occupy Gazette, and also appeared in the Occupied Wall Street Journal, Tidal: Occupy Theory, and the Boston Occupier.
by Eric Ribellarsi
I recently traveled with a team of radical reporters from the “Winter Has Its End” project to Greece. There, longstanding illusions of Europe as a “progressive and democratic” force in the world are being dashed as the neo-liberal and imperialist projects that are European Union and the International Monetary Fund bare their fangs.
Thousands upon thousands of public sector jobs have disappeared. Half of Greece’s hospitals are slated to close. We met doctors who had not received their pay in over 6 months. Free access to healthcare is being replaced by free market chaos in which people must rely on bribes and brokers in order to even secure basic services. The old social contract of the European welfare state has come to an end.
#OccupyWallStreet was born Sept. 17, 2011, when we occupied the heart of Manhattan’s Financial District to declare: “We are the 99%! We will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%!”
Our message resonated across the globe as countless sister occupations rose up in solidarity. With the whole world watching, a terrified 1% threw everything they could at us, but in so doing, they exposed not only the violence and deceit necessary to maintain systemic inequality, but also the tragic truth that our so-called democratic governments were in fact tools of the very 1% we had organized to resist. In city after city, we were demonized, brutalized, and evicted – but the 1% made one crucial error: in their arrogance, they assumed they’d won.
The 1% can never win; they are (by their own design) hopelessly outnumbered. Another world is not only possible, it is unstoppable. We, the 99%, are on the right side of history.
One year, and over 7,000 arrests later, we are still fighting. We are not afraid, and we will never, ever, quit.
Join us September 15-17, 2012 for three days of education, celebration, and resistance!
For more information and schedule of most events in NYC, visit S17NYC.org. See below for an evolving list of Occupy one-year-anniversary related events, actions, and additional resources in NYC and other cities.
News flash: The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) House of Delegates has voted to continue the teachers strike. At 3:00 p.m. today a meeting was called for union delegates to review the contract wording that has been put forward by the Chicago board and the union negotiators. The 800 members of the House of Delegates have decided that they have not had enough time to review the contract language and voted with an overwhelming majority (according to CTU president Karen Lewis) to continue the strike and open up the discussion to union members.
In a televised news conference at 6:05 p.m. Lewis said that the House of Delegates wanted to exercise their right to review the contract. She said that the union is a democratic organization and that she supported the right of members to review the language of the contract. Schools will not open Monday and members have overwhelmingly decided to continue the strike. When questioned by reporters she said that a key issue was TRUST. Union members do not trust the school board or the mayor to have their interests at heart. This would be an understatement! Union delegates say that their strength lies in the strike.
I am not a member of the House of Delegates, but was very proud of the way that Karen Lewis and the union conducted the negotiations this weekend.
As a communist I understand that the process of “little d democracy” can be messy and take longer. The fact that Karen Lewis and the other members of the union negotiations did not try to “sell” the contract is commendable. In her press conference Lewis made the point that she is here to serve the union members, not to “market the contract.”
Obviously, as a union member I am extremely interested in the wording of the contract. As a communist I am excited to understand the process of allowing a large group of people (approximately 25,000) to engage in a democratic discussion and come to a collective decision. I can’t wait to see how this is going to play out over the next two days. (The union will not hold a vote on Monday in respect of the Jewish high holy days.)
People in the city are watching what happens in this strike.
I’ve taped up an on-strike sign outside my apartment on the gate. Walking to the grocery store this weekend, neighbors kept asking:
“Are you going back to school?”
“What do you think will happen?”
The strike has inspired working class people. One example is an older woman a few houses down. Each time she sees me she tells me that she is thinking and praying for me—she wants us to win! Read the rest of this entry »
This letter comes from Matt Duran who was just sent to prison for refusing to provide information to the Grand Jury.
Friends and comrades,
My name is Matt Duran and I will do everything I can to resist this Grand Jury.
I’m releasing this as it’s come to my attention that the strategy my lawyer and I have been working under will more than likely not work; the prosecution wants to grant me immunity before I even have a chance to testify.
I want to make it clear that I am in no way ever cooperating with the state now or ever.
Anyone who knows me well enough to be a close friend knows that I will fight with my political allies and for them with every fiber of my being.
If I ever did cooperate, it would bring an immeasurable amount of shame upon myself, my community, and my family as they have risked more in resistance than I have in my life so far.
Kasama is publishing reports from a striking teacher in Chicago. Rita’s first impressions appeared here.
by Rita Stephanie
A full week on strike!
It is Friday and we are back on the picket lines at 8:00 a.m. We are all exhausted and running out of red clothes. The weather is a bit chilly and we stand close together as we talk about yesterday’s march.
The main discussion is about how lively the march was, and I have to say that I agree. The march was orderly, and stayed within all the allowed boundaries. Yet, this march had an enthusiasm and vitality that was contagious.
Maybe it was the high school marching band that joined us. Maybe it was that we were all wearing these goofy red rain ponchos that were donated to the union. Or, maybe it was the high school students that were laughing and being silly behind me. I’m not sure what it was, but the mood was happy and you could feel the possibility of something different in the air. How can we hang onto this feeling of comradery?
Kasama 