One Day in May
Comments Off on One Day in MayWednesday — 05.01.13 — One Day in May
Contents:
1. May 1, 2013
2. Description of a Discussion (Toward a Cooperative Union)
3. May 1, 2012 (A Call to Strike)
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1. May 1, 2013
What: Discussion
When: Wednesday May 1st 12:00pm
Where: Cooper Square
Who: Free and open to all
Today, on May 1, 2013, one year after the much sought after (and contested) call for a General Strike was not generally heard, it is important to send an invite for a gathering this May 1st and to include a text that did not circulate on the list, but instead was posted as the only page on the 16 Beaver website last year in May.
The invite is to join a meeting this afternoon at 12:00, part of the a pop-up “Free University” that is being organized at Cooper Square on May Day. There will be many talks, meetings, discussions, marches and actions on this day, one among them is intended to discuss directly the fate of Cooper Union and the potentials for resisting its further privatization.
Of course, the fact that this pop-up “Free University” is happening in front of Cooper Union is not without its irony. As many on our lists will have heard by now, officers at the college announced last week their intention to begin to charge fees to students after over a 100 years of providing free education. That this decision is taking place precisely within a lager ideological war being waged to enclose upon or rid all kinds of commons or “concessions” of the past century under the pretext of financial pragmatism or realism is obvious to all except the self-perceived well meaning managers of today’s universities, museums, and institutions whose mandate it is to serve the public good.
It was not long ago that anthropologists like Pierre Clastres were attempting to flesh out the term ethnocide and distinguish it from genocide. As Pierre Clastres articulated, in his 1974 text ‘On Ethnocide’:
Ethnocide is therefore the systematic destruction of the modes of life and thought of people who are different from those who carry out this destructive enterprise. In short, genocide kills their bodies, while ethnocide kills their spirit.
Today, what we see and have seen, whether as “structural adjustments” imposed by the IMF and World Bank in countries of the global south or east, or as “austerity measures” in Europe or here in North America is a kind of ethnocide, a systematic attack on the possibilities to reproduce one’s life outside the dictates of capitalist life – a life which reproduces the same standards and decision-making calculus of a business-person.
The Cooper board of trustees (composed largely of executives of investment, real estate, or consulting firms) claims that the school’s costs have simply risen faster than their revenues. The reasons given on record for this, included a growing administration staff, bad fundraising efforts (this assertion has been disputed by alumni), and according to a new york times article “most significantly, $10 million a year in payments on a $175 million loan the school took out a few years ago, in part so that it could invest money in the stock market.” The same article fails to mention that the loan was also for a new building which the board asserted was to save long term costs, but the engineering faculty of the college flatly voted against (denying the long term cost savings argument).
Cooper Union is just one example of the kind of violence and foolishness which mars and marks our time. Corporate actors wearing the suit of philanthropists or governors pretending to understand what they are doing, but essentially only extending their prowess for speculation, gambling, plundering, squandering, enclosing and destroying: after which measures are forced into place which burden the most vulnerable with suffering the consequences of their losses.
That corporate governors cannot fathom for one moment that a school is not in a marketplace competing against other schools for ‘top talent’ or that education is not a product or that students are not consumers just looking for the best deal is evident.
Their every step and statement, including hiring a consulting firm last year to consider the effects of collecting tuition from undergraduates speaks to the basic logic which they are locked in. Of course, for them, in the bigger picture, if the goal is to compete with other schools for ‘top students’, it makes more sense to take out a $175 million loan for a new “state of the art” building, gamble for riches in the stock market and risk having to charge fees, than it does to stand on the principles of free education on which the entire school was erected.
Capitalist realism, Casino capitalism, Corporatization, Real-estate speculation, the Making of Indebted People, Self-Glorification, these are the dynamics which lie at the heart of many of the most respected cultural institutions today. And one of the questions which lingers in these times is whether these institutions can be salvaged or should be abandoned wholesale. And in either case, how will collectives go about doing this without succumbing to the same neoliberal tenets they are resisting?
At Cooper Square today, there will be a discussion about the prospects for a cooperatively run college in New York, potentially by reclaiming an institution of the commons such as Cooper Union. For those interested in learning more about this specific discussion, we have posted below the text some of the organizers have formulated.
For those who would like to learn more about the “New York Free University” initiative as a whole, please visit:
http://freeuniversitynyc.org/
Lastly, if politics exists whenever there is a disagreement about what is political, then this private decision, this police decision, by the officers of the college, will have to be contested as a political matter and exigency, not simply as a private or economic one.
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2. Description of a Discussion – Toward A Cooperative Union
May 1, 2013
12:00-2:00 pm
at the Free University NYC
in Cooper Square Park
JOIN US
On April 23rd, 2013, the Board of Trustees of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art announced the decision to begin charging tuition to undergraduate students, breaking with the historical precedent of a tuition free university.
We see this event as effecting not only the Cooper Union and its specific legacy, but more broadly speaking to the conditions of students and workers in this moment of capitalist crisis, under whose ruse resources are transferred into the hands of a few.
We ask you to join members of the Cooper community and friends from NYC and around the world in a radical imagining of the University in which students and workers at Cooper, with their shared values about the university‚s historic mission, take control of the institution which could not exist without them.
WHAT IS A WORKER’S COOPERATIVE?
Cooperative organizations are organized to meet the common needs of a particular group of people.
Often created in times of social and economic stress as a grass-roots response to market imperfections, cooperative structure is influenced by the particular situation, the law, and historical and cultural factors.
While there is no universal definition of a cooperative, two are commonly referred to in the United States:
1) The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines a cooperative as a user-owned, user-controlled business that distributes benefits on the basis of use.
2) A broader definition of a cooperative has been developed by the International Alliance of Cooperatives (ICA), which describes a co-op as “an autonomous, voluntary association meeting common economic, social, and cultural needs through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise.”
More particularly, „worker cooperatives are business entities that are owned and controlled by their members, the people who work in them. The two central characteristics of worker cooperatives are: (1) workers invest in and own the business and (2) decision-making is democratic, generally adhering to the principle of one worker-one vote.”
In a worker cooperative, workers own their jobs, and thus have not only a direct stake in the local environment but the power to decide to do business in a way that is sustainable for us all. The worker cooperative movement is increasingly recognized as part of the larger movement for sustainability. Worker cooperatives tend to create long-term stable jobs, sustainable business practices, and linkages among different parts of the social economy.
– University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives http://uwcc.wisc.edu/whatisacoop/
– US Federation of Worker Cooperatives http://www.usworker.coop/aboutworkercoops
ARE STUDENTS WORKERS?
„But schoolwork is work, not only because it involves a lot of hassles,
effort and long hours. More fundamentally, it is work because as students, we are actively engaged in producing a very important product ˜ ourselves ˜ as a specifically trained segment of the future labor force.
The work we do in school involves both acquiring knowledge and technical competence to perform certain jobs, as well as developing the self-discipline which will enable us to handle the daily routine of our future jobs.
While the work we do in schools appears to be for our own benefit, it is our future employers, who need our skills and self-discipline, who are the real beneficiaries of our work.
As we examine all the unrecognized and unpaid work we do at school, we should not forget that other workers are struggling to get paid for their labor as well.
http://zerowork.org/GrantWagesForHomework.html
CAN STUDENTS RUN COOPERATIVES?
Workers at Universities include faculty and staff who are capable of taking over administrative duties. Students can also take part in these tasks. There are hundreds of student-run cooperatives in the United States alone, among them food coops and housing coops. Students can be defined as workers, and join other workers in a workers cooperative.
berkeleystudentfoodcollective.org/…/Appendix_B_Co-op_Profiles.doc,
http://collegehouses.org/about/
CAN TEACHERS RUN THEIR OWN SCHOOLS? WHAT IS THE ROLE OF
STUDENTS IN TEACHER-RUN SCHOOLS?
As far as we know, there is no precedent for a worker-run degree granting university. There are teacher-run schools, however. Avalon school in St. Paul Minnesota is based on 3 principles:
1) project-based learning, grounded in student initiated projects
2) democratic organization in which students set rules, resolve conflicts, and enforce norms
3) the teacher-run school as inspired by the producer‚s cooperative
http://charlestkerchner.com/cr/uploadImages/Teacher_run_case.pdf
A cooperative university could learn from this model, but acknowledging and benefitting from the important difference that university students are adults. Project-based learning would include essential tasks in running the school and decision-making, alongside other workers. This experience would contribute not only to students‚ discipline-based learning, but to their civic capacity.
WHAT WOULD A WORKER TAKE-OVER OF THE UNIVERSITY LOOK LIKE?
Many workers‚ coops are established from the ground up. Others are the result of recuperations or take-overs. In the wake of the financial crisis I Argentina, workers took over their factories that were abandoned by owners. The year 2008 saw the beginning of a long process that began
with workers at Republic Windows in Chicago organizing to get their wages from the owners to their cooperativization in 2012.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9500-republic-windows-and-doors-serious-materials-workers-form-cooperative
http://www.american.coop/content/occupy-wall-street-opening-worker-occupation-factories-and-enterprises-us
Although we support the actions of workers engaged in takeovers, in our imaginings, the cooperativization of cooper would happen through reference to precedent. The majority of workers, students, and faculty at Cooper who see free undergraduate tuition as the core asset of the institution, therefore organized cooperation and solidarity is the logical next step. Various factions of this population have asked and demanded of the administration and board to seriously consider their suggestion son how to „keep Cooper small‰.
We see the cooperative dream as aligned with this majority‚s vision and in contrast to a vision that follows the trends in neoliberal capitalism to grow, redistribute funds to top administrators, and naturalize relationships with finance that have little to do with the health of institutions and their constituents. We think that we can uncover, with your help, a path of precedent for this manifestation of a Cooperative Union.
We know we are not alone in the vision of Free Cooper Union not as a remnant of a long forgotten past, but the wave of the future.
A “WAY FORWARD”
In April 2012, the Friends of Cooper Union issued „The Way Forward,‰ a thoughtful and creative attempt to hand to the administration an alternative plan to that of charging tuition.
http://friendsofcooperunion.org/thewayforward/
Among other suggestions, the document put forth a vision for cost cutting that includes deferral of a percentage of administrative compensation (also describing the steep increases in presidential and other top officers‚ compensation since 1999) and rotating deanships occupied by faculty (ridding Cooper the expense of nearly 1,5 million, based on 2010 compensation).
In winter 2013, the Faculty of the Whole invited all faculty to „reimagine Cooper Union within its means‰. In response, Friends of the Cooper Union produced the document „Within our Mission, Within our Means.‰
http://www.notnicemusic.com/Mission-Means-Union-Statement.pdf
On April 23rd, an appeal appeared on Friends of the Cooper Union‚s website urging alumna to vote for an alumnus who stands clearly against tuition to the Board of Trustees during the Cooper Union Alumni Association (CUAA) elections.
On April 26th, the leadership of the 3 unions at Cooper released a statement regretting the decision to change tuition and stating that „Peter Cooper‚s charitable purpose is to be reduced to platitudes about educational Œexcellence‚ and to the bottom line of administrative expense.‰
http://friendsofcooperunion.org/
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3. May 1, 2012
This text was posted on our website last year during the call for a General Strike. The untimeliness of this text at this moment in time when nothing of the sort is being called for, as well as the limitations we confronted in the generalization of the call, or the fact that a general strike ‘did not take place’ does not limit its future actualization or for some collectivities to hear this call, further down the paths of struggle. Of course, the text could use some editing, but we have opted to reproduce it ‘as is’ in this case, retaining some of the haste of that moment.
Pt.1
A Call To Strike
To friends who don’t live in the US, or others who have not yet been touched by the call for a General Strike on this day, we write this short note, as a kind of update.
Some of our earliest discussions in the space began with considerations of what could or could not be considered work; who is included and who is excluded when we talk about labor. And what constitutes labor today in this everywhere and nowhere paradigm of production.
Moreover, we have reflected together on what could potentially constitute a political activity today?
It is no surprise then that the most intensive global attempts at responses in recent memory come precisely when the living labor of humans is in its most deformed and devalued form, and political space everywhere appears the most foreclosed, by a logic that would prefer to reduce politics to a managerial task of order and administration.
A call for a national general strike in the United States has happened perhaps only once, for May 1st, 1886 [to be expanded by historians?].
In our January retreat/seminar, The Crisis of Everything Everywhere, we had a session, “On the General Strike”. We asked:
How it could be deployed? What are our historical and political conceptions of the strike, how do they relate to our present contexts, and what forms of communication and solidarity are necessary to see the strike we want to see? Who calls for the strike, who strikes, what do we do during the strike, and is there an AFTER the strike? What activities do we expect to precede this call, and what do we expect to follow? Can we have a general strike which is not instrumentalized, but is a political act, a step towards definitive refusal or revolt?
The efficacy of this meeting was to be found neither in its valor for organizing, nor the theories we developed together. Its efficacy came in its indiscernibility between intellectual work, cultural work, and political work. Today, it is precisely this space of thought, creativity, intellect, which has been corralled into a purely functional space for reproducing, legitimizing, and entertaining a world suited for and constructed in the interests of capital. Today, in the experiments with political speech and action, which have been restoring to common use private and public space, we find another vocation, another call.
That call, is a call to strike, not just on May Day, but on everday after, in every way possible. It is a call to find the capacity to translate thought into action, action which undermines systems of immiseration, dispossession, enclosure and destruction of our common(s) to those that engender, reclaim, and reproduce them, firstly in our social relations. An action that also returns us to the potential inactivity or undoing that a call to strike evokes.
These are no longer theoretical questions, meant only for discussion, but have been grounds for preparing for this general strike, a particular general strike, a wildcat general strike, on May 1st, 2012. This process of ‘preparing’ or ‘organizing’ has taken many shapes and forms, involved many different groups, with different interests, and analyses. And yet, despite differences, this process has yielded what will be another major experiment of 21st century political struggles, at least here in the US, where the tradition of a general strike has not been practiced very often and thus not normalized.
Adbusters putting out a call last July 13th to Occupy Wall Street seemed ridiculous. Inspired by what had been happening in Egypt, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere, they had an idea and a date. The rest was to be figured out by whoever wanted to. It now makes perfect sense. Some of us, commoners, took the call seriously, not because a magazine in Vancouver could be seen as the locus of a legitimate call. On the contrary, because we recognized that for the multitudes who are subjects of this financial dictatorship, there is no legitimate origin of a calling. We heard the call in the streets of Tunis. We heard it in Cairo, Alexandria, Manama, Sana’a, Madrid, Athens, London and every place else where the cracks in the edifice of this senseless regime of banking, finance, and warmaking, have exposed the hypocrisy and incompetence of every state.
In the months since the occupations began, we have seen general strikes called in Belgium, Egypt, Greece, India, Italy, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom.
Here in New York City 77% of residents are not members of any union. In the ‘private sector,’ this number is 85% (the national numbers are even lower: 88% not unionized, with the private sector at 93%). When one hears ‘We are the 99%’ it is these numbers: 93%, 85%, 77%, of people not part of any union, that this slogan refers. The majority of people living in the United States have no union to call a strike for them. We have to call it ourselves.
Recognizing that there are no legitimate representatives of our interests, there are no legitimate higher authorities to call for such actions. There is only ourselves. All of the radical networks, institutions, organizations, mailing lists we have been developing all of these years are the richest infrastructure we have. Every group, collective, space, website, publication, it is now up to us to make such calls, there is no one else to look to, or wait for.
As for the reigning order, everyone knows what it consists in: that a dying social system has no other justification to its arbitrary nature but its absurd determination – its senile determination – to simply linger on;
that the police, global or national, have got a free hand to get rid of those who do not toe the line; that civilisation, wounded in its heart, no longer encounters anything but its own limits in the endless wars it has begun …
Those limits are the constituent power of collectivities, bodies which assemble on the streets, together, however vulnerable, and assert a power to do, to determine for themselves, as opposed to accepting the determinisms and determinations of those with power over.
The multitudes need no longer to fear what we do not know. The politics of fear is finished.
There are no shortages or scarcity of potential responses to this call to strike.
This is a call to strike everywhere.
Pt.2
Notes for the Strikes to Come
*fragments written a fortnight before May 1st
This is a call to all who have felt solidarity with those who have risen up against dictatorships globally this year, to walk out..
Where to walk, from where to depart?
The answers are as multiple as they are common.
To walk out from indignity, from refusal, from anxiety, isolation, immiseration, servitude, fear, destruction of life.
According to a friend, every action has a meaning, in and of itself, within the context of a revolt.
And we should also assert, that every doubt has a counterpart of a response, in the midst of a general strike.
Class.
Solidarity.
What class?
If class is the split between the individual and her or his social figure. Then class must be understood, NOT AS an essential category to which each and every person indelibly belongs, BUT RATHER what incarnates this split, what lays open the contingency of each and every one of us, and our social condition. But class is also what is capable of abolishing the arbitrariness of this condition, this division. A class which does not demand or fight for any particular right, because no particular wrong but a general, a common wrong has been perpetrated against it. Class is the hollowing out of this arbitrary and contingent social condition assigned to or assumed by each and every individual. In this way too, solidarity, is not merely identification with those oppressed or less ‘well off’, less ‘indebted’ (or guilty), class solidarity is refusal of the assigned social figures we all inhabit as fixed, natural, or irrevocable.
Thus the strike is intrinsically connected to a revocation, an emptying out, from the center, every status, every state, every profession, every calling.
Thus a call to strike is a call to revoke every calling.
A walk out? From what?
The factories and work places have been converted into our living rooms, our desktops, its in our bags, our coat pockets, our finger tips.
We take the factory with us everywhere we go. The factories have mutated into our cities, creative?, vibrant?, dynamic?, convivial?, relational, semiotic, verbal. Calculated, cold, commodified, sold, rented, scripted down to the glance, square meter or foot by foot, and the duration of that glance, attention economy, subliminal economy, epidermic economy, nervous economy. The factory is grafted on our skin.
Can we feel without the factory nearby or upon us?
One big heap of energy, bounded by police and aisles leading from one wing of the factory to the next.
In this factory, eating and shitting are the same, soil and sewage are the same, production and consumption are the same, as long as they can be capitalized upon, they have value, what is residual or remaining is waste, toxic assets, our negative common(s), our collective debt.
In this factory, the only common is what gets left out of the charts and equations of profit-MAKING. In this way, nothing is really MADE, essentially. Things are produced, continually, but the only thing MADE is profit. Produced in X profited in Y should be the new label tags of the clothes on our backs or items we try to make use of.
The walking factory, the sitting in subway factory, the listening to radio or watching televison or film factory, the driving the suv factory, the posting an update to my blog or whatever factory, the unpaid internship factory, the get new skills after work class factory, the work all day for the next generation factory, the small job after the main job factory, the keep myself available factory, the working for myself factory, the looking for work factory, the easy money factory, the end up in prison factory, the search for x and find something else factory, the work to buy to work to borrow to work more to buy more factory. To pay in every way on every day factory.
And yet, in this factory, traditional divides between productive and unproductive lose their bearings. All is potentially productive, all potentially convertible into a new regime of signs, rules, axioms for profit-making. And no class or form of life is spared the calculation of their value in monetary terms, however low or high.
When does one strike, when the clock on the factory knows no overtime?
In fact, the clock functions in breaking up lived time into fractals of convertible energy, input, output, consumption, production, attention, engagement, participation, sometimes remunerated, mostly un-.
In this time, you are always on time, even if always running behind schedule.
The schedule is quarterly, largely, or some imposition based on the exigencies of institutions and conventions, unquestionable, of course.
Exponential growth and return on investment have largely replaced the hollow promises of a better brighter future through industrial or technological innovation, though positivist tendencies still grip the most stalwart believers, the level of belief often highly correlated with the amount of money the ‘believers’ have managed to bilk in earlier ventures.
In this way, the factory is timeless and ahistorical. Even those who manage the factory, don’t really understand what time they live in, and who they actually work for.
This is not the suspension of time associated with revolt, this is the imposition of time that knows no other time, a monoculture of time that forbids any contestation, any other duration, any other rhythm.
This is the time of money. When we are simply always out of time. It means that we are only in the time of the factory, in money-time. Clearly, there aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish the work of this factory, nor is there enough money.
So one sleeps less, willingly or unwillingly, one medicates, another slips in and out of addictions, another runs away to the hills, unable to withstand the tug slips into sad passions, overcome by feelings of impotence, lack, insufficiency, confusion, disorientation, fetish studies departments abound, always behind, one suffers, one falls ill, one is driven down internally and invasively or externally evasively, explosions, implosions, looking over one’s shoulder, the race is on, to death, the search is on, for the emptiness of not having a time to think, no less determine or act on a thought, one is reduced in the most desperate hours of disfunction, to searching for oneself.
One no longer has a choice to even identify with the slaves or the slave holders. A strange new kind of slavery takes hold in this factory, expanding operations less by constructing new facilities, more by expropriating existing spaces of relative autonomy or self-sufficiency, sustenance, subsistence. It spreads from board room to board room into institution after institution.
Even momentary or fleeting psychic spaces of autonomy, of waiting, boredom, are colonized, no longer enough to use the service of a company, or buy their products, to be an employee, you need to live with it, sleep with it, wake up to its alarm, take photos of your moments of flight, integrate back into its networks, report in, answer promptly, unplugging equals a form of asociality or insanity.
One works to pay to live and once the debt is paid, whether day to day month to month year to year, there is always a residual, an outstanding balance, and that balance is always tipped in favor of the house. But this house is no longer your or her house our their house. The bank didn’t even buy the house, doesn’t even own the house, the bank is the house. And this house, even when it is bankrupt will resurrect not just 40 days after, but on every day the bills are due.
A call to a General Strike must come from somewhere.
The irony today being that there is no privileged source for this call. Clearly, this call will not come from the center, at least not from the institutions in the center.
Discredited as most of these institutions are, who in the face of decades of relentless neoliberalization policies, have mitigated or fully capitulated to the reproduction of capitalist realism: such a call from the center will not be seen as legitimate.
The call will instead have to come from the peripheries, the peripheries which are also emerging inside the center, otherwise known as the cracks within this global governance. Those inside institutions, which at some point had as their mission to serve the public or common good, but have now internalized the ‘profit as sustainability’ logic that capital investment demands everywhere.
And so the call comes formulated something like this —
There is no legitimate locus of a call to a General Strike today.
There is no specific or privileged addressee of a call to a General Strike today.
There is only the faintest outline of a shared target, a militarized armed economic logic which governs the planet and trickles its ethos down into our micropolitical existence and the everyday preoccupations of individuals.
For this reason, the target is elusive, it has penetrated into our social relations as equally as it has our shared institutions.
All are equally addressed, or called, as equally as they are subjected to and by this regime.
Economize everything is the governing motto!
But this economy is not looking after the home or caring for the home. It is its unravelling, its foreclosure, its devaluation into a financial instrument.
And you ask yourself, what does life financialized look like?
Everything costs, but the costs are not reflected in these costs.
All can understand in their own particular knowledge of what work entails for them, what the withdrawal of that work and productivity could become. What the communization of that activity could become.
If one cannot withdraw, then one is forced to resort to sabotage.
Wikileaks and other phenomena like that are only a beginning for such a process of undoing, of evacuating an increasingly groundless center.
To take direct action.
Taking direct action is not solely protests from one city block to another, from one week to another. Direct action is intervening in the everyday reproduction of social relations. Taking direct action is the recognition that the systems which we reproduce are no longer ‘manned’, but instead observed, followed, obeyed.
Taking direct action also involves the awareness that a radical shift or even the smallest one will not be organized for anyone.
If the governing logic is on auto-pilot and those who operate by its rules claim, “but these people just don’t understand how the real world works!” Then it is reality, that reality constructed by 40 years of neoliberalist structural adjustments that is being resisted today. Because this posited reality begins and ends in pure abstraction, a sequence of numbers, equations, formulas, derivatives, systems of valuation, devaluation, grades, ecologies of belief after belief built upon one another, sometimes referred to as a house of cards, particularly in times of insolvency.
EITHER the ‘real world’ is insolvent OR racism, war, poverty, starvation, ecological ruin, unimaginable concentrations of wealth, enclosures of the common(s), property-fication of everything is not the real world, just the consequences of conventions which no longer can hold this regime together.
The inevitability of the demise of these regimes, which held the last few decades together, is certain.
It is a world of feigned consensus and choiceless choice that is being refused or said enough to. Set aside the epiphany that democracy is at best not a form of government but a relentless and direct process of bringing to the common and public, decisions which have been de facto privatized. What we have before us, are the perfect democracies that another friend described so lucidly after the experiences of the 70s in Italy and beyond.
‘Perfect’ democracies construct there own inconceivable foes. Terrorism has been one such foe. And their wish is to be judged by their enemies rather than by their abysmal results. We must never know everything about terrorism, but just enough to be convinced that compared to that everything else is acceptable, or more rational, more democratic.
This is what we have lived for the last decade and today unequivocally refuse, from Tunis and Cairo, Santiago to Athens, from Manama to Madrid, and London to New York.
So consider these fragmentary notes as an abbreviated version of a call or calling to come, a call we struggle to hear, listen to, formulate a language for or toward. These calls are just beginning.
These calls are not from any constituted group or any body of governance. These calls will come to and from the outside. The outside that rests however liminally or precariously (also) in the recesses or folds of each and every one who understands this way, ‘we’ are asked to live, simply is no way (to live).
What does suspending your doubts entail?
If this does not fit a historical progression of events that would result into a ‘real’ General Strike, then abandon the notion of historical progression. That ‘real’ General Strike belongs to the same ‘real’ world, that has made every understood kind of strike today unrealizable or impossible in its previous terms.
Does this mean that the existing organized labor is irrelevant? No, it just means that the organized can no longer represent or speak to, or call upon the rest, organless, precarious, undocumented, off-the-books, under the gun. They can only do their part, even if it means resisting the constituted forces within their own former structures of worker emancipation.
And while on the streets or in common space, the criminalization of this open experimentation with forms of commoning, of collective articulations of the disarticulation of lived experience is what must be resisted. The invitation to direct forms of confrontation with police appears in light of this analysis as an invitation to stop imagining and enter ‘the real’ of the make-believe world of capital.
But let’s return to the doubts.
Today, historical time has already been suspended, replaced by or supplanted by a post-historical ideology that posits that liberal-democracy resting on financial dictates of banking or industry or big capital is the unquestioned path and telos for all.
And within the existing regimes, even the revolutionary uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East can only be understood as efforts of aligning closer with the trajectory of this already existing global consensus tells end point a-historicity. That is why those struggles must be seen in conjunction with those in the peripheries of Europe and elsewhere globally including South and North America, against neoliberalism, against capitalism, against the enclosures and for/through/ toward a reclamation of our common(s).
And instead of falling back into asserting a linear notion of progressivist time, in resistance to the post-historical claims of capitalism’s greatest adherents, a task could be to resist historical time by asserting another temporality, assert the singular and multiple durations which cohabit this planet. Outside the regimented time, the consensual mediatic financial anthropocentric state monoculture of compositional mutable, just-in-time, always available fractal time. The struggle could be to revoke the notion of a linear march of time, progress, western march to future, patriarchal march to dominate ‘nature, the ‘great march of time’ time.
There is a disagreement here about what is real and what is primary, even secondary and tertiary.
We don’t even have to pull the emergency brake on this train, the train is broken down, grinding to a halt, and the technocrats of this forced consensus work relentlessly to keep the engine from stopping or having us notice that it has already grinded to a halt.
As the wakeless passengers of a train that went off the rails, is our task to get the train back on the rails, as the adherents to some evolutionary darwinism of socio-political-economic history may hold? Or should we rather look around, note where the train has stopped, and find a way to make use of its parts to reconfigure a different course entirely, no linear track, no privileged destination, just a vast horizon on common ground?
The question could be reformulated like this:
Do we disembark, jump ship, walk out? And upon ‘walking out’, what do we do, with whom, toward what, how?
And just as quickly as the lucidity and profound disorientation has arrived. Another question comes: Your wallet or the earth beneath your feet?
This is not simply a struggle to protect the common(s), the bases of our shared existence and reproduction, whether our water, air, soil, forests, seeds, cultures, labor, learning institutions, knowledge, production, cities, roads, transport…;
It is a fight which is (un)waged through a production of our communal interdependency, through practices of commoning.
For this reason, this call is not to simply take part in the General Strike planned to begin this May 1st.
It is a call to translate it, where the strike must be waged, in the everyday reproduction of our life, May 1st is a rehearsal space and experiment. A critical task today remains to open up the imaginary that is colonized by the timeless time of the keepers of time.
And this translation or invention cannot be done alone, bridges must be made and unmade, virtual or material, the struggle is through the common not for it.
with not for
and not or.
All power to do (not power over), to the multitudes, the whatever-singularities, those who re-invent the terms of a 21st century solidarity
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