Occupation and revolution

I
The coming occupations will have no end in sight, and no means to resolve them. When that happens, we will finally be ready to abandon them.

When we wrote that in December 2008 in New York City, after occupying the New School for Social Research, we were treated as youthful idealists, nihilist anarchists, even fascist thugs. What are your demands? they asked. But what are you for? they wondered. Occupy everything? they shrieked.

Alas. Our premonitions have come to pass.

It was only a matter of time. When the crisis first hit in the fall of 2008, its effects were diffuse, with individuals all over the country feeling it simultaneously but not collectively. Students, who have the time to both act and think free from the imperative to work, naturally reacted first. With an insurrection in Greece brewing, and a legitimation crisis of the American economy at hand, occupations without demands spread from New York to California, with thousands involved. Demands are irrelevant when no one can hear you, and so the only real demand was to occupy itself. Immature maybe, but not stupid. With foreclosures growing exponentially,
and unemployment skyrocketing as well, occupying your own space and means of living is the most obvious of actions. In the most unpolitical of Western democracies (the United States), we must first create a space for politics to emerge.

But students on their own are nothing. Especially left radical ones.

Always half way in and half way out of work, students can only express frustration over what is to come, not what has been. Hence, the theoretical advantage of the current wave of occupations, which takes its starting point as not the looted future, but rather the broken present. From here, we no longer needs to ‘convince’ others what ‘might’ happen; rather, the present itself is cracking underneath everyone’s feet. And only those living in skyscrapers can avoid the initial fractures.

Occupy Wall Street and its subsequent multiplications followed the trajectory of American social struggle which began in the labour riots after the Civil War and continued with punctuated equilibrium up unto the most recent flare-ups in the anti-globalization protests of the early second millennium. What is this trajectory? Simply put, at the beginning of the refounded republic of the United States, the working population demanded shorter hours and better pay, with independent representation and collective bargaining rights. These specific demands, which sometimes merged and sometimes conflicted with demands for women’s suffrage and civil rights, were backed up with massive waves of violence: strikes, sit-downs, street battles, riots, looting, arson. While demanding specific guarantees for life by words, people demanded nothing from the destroyed factories and trains by deeds. The normal American citizen, the 99 per cent, from Reconstruction to the Second World War, was baptized in blood and blessed with material gains. Citizen engagement in politics receded to the background of enjoying fresh commodities. With a relative peace gained for white working men, the sphere of political engagement opened to the other 99 per cent, the black population.

The slowly building postwar struggle for civil rights exploded in the 1960s, with not only demands for equal treatment and respect, but also demands for inclusion in the material gains that the white working population had temporarily secured. These political and social demands voiced in Washington and Selma were only the small foreground to the colossal mute rage in the background which, when heard, shattered the merchandise-filled windows of Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, and almost every other inner-city neighbourhood in the United States. The self-destruction of their own neighbourhoods was the sign of people having ‘nothing left to lose,’ a political position which cannot but win.

As the movement for equality and civil rights crested, the youth and anti-war movements of the mid-1960s and early 1970s gained in strength. Taking the physical message of the race riots to heart – that there is no victory without struggle – the young radicals mixed early labour tactics with civil rights strategies, which blended into an ideology that asserted their right to own the fruits of American society. Everything was up for grabs, and everything shall be ours. The specificity of political movements in this period was in the nature of its general demands: freedom, equality, peace, everything.

But the struggle for a total demand broke in the mid-1970s, when the crisis of the US economy led to a renewed class assault on those who make the country run. This assault is ongoing. No longer could anything be given to those who demanded, no longer must business and government be beholden to its employees and citizens. This new relation between governing and governed, between owners and labourers, was called austerity. From this point on, the gains of the last century slowly receded. Real wages stagnating while prices increased, income inequality exploding while unemployment rose, unimaginable wealth produced while unbelievably few own it – the American dream bought on bad credit, paid with a high interest rate, only softened by a coupon to the movie theatre. What can we demand when there is nothing left to give?

‘Not’ having a demand is not a lack of anything, but a contradictory assertion of our power and our weakness. We are too weak to even try to get something from those who dominate working life, and simultaneously strong enough to try to accomplish the direct appropriation of our soul, time, and activity apart from representation. A demandless struggle reveals the totality of the enemy we fight and the unity of those who fight it. Such a struggle ‘lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general’ (Marx, 1975, p. 256). This ‘general wrong’ is the impersonal structure of exploitation at the heart of our economic system – the forced selling of our time and life activity to someone else in return for a wage – which can never be overcome by any particular change, only by a total one.

Yet the demandless struggle is not ‘radical’ because it has no demands, just as the struggle for better wages is not ‘reformist’ because it does. More important than the demands waged against power are the demanding responsibilities that the situation itself calls forth. What is specific about the current moment is the explicit recognition by people themselves in public, together, out loud, indefinitely, of their own condition in the conditions of others. In other words, people are materially recognizing themselves while mutually recognizing each other. The forms of these encounters, while spectacular, are nothing compared with their contents. The questions of work, money, community, family, sex, colour, time, class, education, health, media, representation, punishment and faith are no longer individual questions. To think through any is to think through all, and to really think through all requires an occupation without end. Occupations without end are infinite and free, not because they are everywhere and last forever, but because there is nothing outside determining them but themselves. The overcoming of the occupations is the practical realization of such freedom, a task that can only be accomplished historically.

Take heed: there is a rationality at work here, a reason of social inferences which is made even more clear by the current lack of adequate concepts to understand it. The major premise of the 99 per cent perfectly synthesizes the universal emptiness of the modern American, expressing fully their entire being without reference to
one determinate quality. The truth of the occupations is not only in their substance, but in the subjects as well. The minor premise of occupation locates the subjects of the syllogism in a particular place and a particular time. Tied together through material relations of interdependency, we are compelled by logic to conclude that not even revolution is impossible.

The new era is profoundly revolutionary, and knows it. On every level of modern society, nobody can and nobody wants to continue as before. Nobody can peacefully manage the course of things from the top any longer, because it has been discovered that the first fruits of the crisis of the economy are not only ripe, but they have, in fact, begun to rot. At base, nobody wants to submit to what is going on, and the demand for life has now become a revolutionary programme. The secret of all the ‘wild’ and ‘incomprehensible’ negations that are mocking the old order is the determination to make our own history. Occupy Wall Street is the first major American response to the economic crisis of 2008. But the economic crisis of 2008 is the first major result to the failed response to the crisis of the 1970s. In effect, the delayed class war of the last three decades, in which Americans with good faith gave businesses and government a generation to fix the problem, has emerged with a vengeance. The time for waiting is over. The age of austerity has hit its limit. Occupying everything without demands is only the first baby step in the gigantic shoes of the new American proletariat.

II
In May 2011, arguing for an ‘anarchist turn’ in the United States was something of a scandal. A year later, it is already banal. This radical shift can be explained with reference to one verb: Occupy.

Inspired by the massive democratic protests in North Africa as well as the anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain, the Occupy movement unleashed the floodgates of rage, discontent and imagination that had been building in the United States since the economic crisis began in 2008. During the autumn of 2011, hundreds of Occupy camps across the United States and the world brought individuals together to practise forms of direct democracy through general assemblies, consensus and direct action.

Erupting faster than academics, the media or political parties could understand it, Occupy Wall Street proved once again that substantive social change only occurs when people take it upon themselves to act collectively without the sanction of official political channels. From the beginning, the movement was anarchist-inspired, not only explicitly by those particular anarchists who started to organize Occupy Wall Street in New York, but implicitly through the ethical relations and tactical choices that defined the movement overall. The emphasis on horizontal decision making, matched with the rejection of demands and the widespread occupation of public spaces, produced a powerful antidote to the feeling of political helplessness engendered by the two-party system. Powerless to counter the effects of an economic crisis that levelled the so-called ‘middle’ class, both parties were finally revealed for what they are: managers of an economic system that cannot be allowed to fail, no matter how devastating the social consequences. The Occupy movement materially announced the rejection of such politics, and it was the theory and practice of anarchism that filled the epistemic vacuum.

Finally, it seemed as though something had broken the spell of apathy and denial that dominated the US left since 9/11. Almost exactly a decade after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the mole of the alter-globalization movement reared its head again, but this time not as a movement of anarchists and leftists organizing on behalf of others at large summits once or twice a year. Rather, the injunction to occupy everything, everywhere, without demands was made by people on behalf of themselves and their own miserable conditions. Recognizing each other’s situation and articulating that in public through general assemblies without demanding anything was the most shocking aspect of it all. Every pundit on the left and right showered ridicule on this movement at one point, hoping to shame the occupiers into formulating just one demand they could understand. Only the fake newspaper, The Onion, seems to have understood the hesitation to make any demands, when its headline from October 12, 2011 stated: ‘Nation waiting for protesters to clearly articulate demands before ignoring them.’

The anarchist turn in political life is clear, but its meaning is still far from certain. Has there been a corresponding shift in political thinking? While there has been an overflow of sympathetic academics theorizing about the movement, the theory produced by the struggle itself has been disappointing. This is not because there are no good ideas being expressed, but because the ideas themselves remain abstract in the Hegelian sense: that is, separate from a dynamic view of the their own conditions of emergence. Hence, it still remains a political task to synthesize and render explicit the coherence of self-activity that emerged throughout the camps, squares, occupations and revolts of the period from 2008 onwards. We should refrain from offering only cheerleading narratives or participatory sociologies, but instead attempt a synoptic grasp of the whole. The plurality of the movements can at first seem to reject such big thoughts, but it is the very universality of the crisis that unifies the various occupations across all their local particularities, giving the struggle itself its global resonance.

Every struggle produces not only its own subjects, but also the theory in which those subjects articulate themselves to each other and the world. This theory is first of all material, expressing itself through the forms of action that occur at certain places and certain times. Every strike is a syllogism, and every occupation is also an argument. In 2011, more was done to rethink revolutionary politics than for a decade. But understanding the theory that was produced through the struggle does not occur immediately. The temporal lag between action and its understanding cannot be overcome through social media, academic surveys or more action. Such a gap is necessary in order to give time to let the limits and restraints of the movement come into view. It is such limits that I want to describe now, limits that are not based on bad strategy or tactics, but limits that come from the era in which we live and the kinds of movement that emerge within it.

Although new social conditions have produced new social struggles, the revolutionary horizons that people aspire towards in such struggles have stayed frozen. The general, unarticulated vision of revolution that remains in the background is usually some mix of postmodern liberalism and antiquated socialism. Revolution, on this account, happens through forming a positive unity out of all the classes of society – the oppressed and the exploited, the precarious and stable, the employed and the unemployed. Together, affirming their social identity in the face of political neglect, the hidden power of the people emerges through collectively taking over and self-managing their work, schools and cities in a strategy that is called ‘dual power’. The people will gradually grow big enough to delegitimize political authority, eventually being able to wrest power away from those managing and controlling their lives, so as to redistribute wealth and form a new society of self-managed, self-organized democracy.

What separates this account from the classic narrative of the working class uniting and affirming its revolutionary role in society by expropriating the expropriators? Nothing really, except that now instead of the working class, it is the ‘people’ or the 99 per cent, and instead of the bourgeoisie, it is a mix of greedy corporations and rich politicians, the 1 per cent. The ahistorical, revolutionary essence of the ‘people’ will grow through great acts of unity, and all that is left to discuss is how to best develop processes for collective decision making. What this account leaves out of the picture is the very core of why people are struggling today at all: it is not simply the forms of decision making that are wrong, it is the very content of their lives that is being destroyed.

None of the massive struggles of 2011 seemed at all close to gaining some power for a unified people; rather they were all unities of fragmented individuals who had nothing in common with each other except their objective submission to the force of the market and their subjective experience in the struggle itself. The participants of the struggles of the squares in Spain, Greece and the United States sought to maintain the experience of squares above any one demand, for it was only in the squares that some temporary common humanity was forged. This unity, however, was not enough to overthrow any of the logics of austerity being imposed everywhere. Even in Egypt, where the cross-class unity of the people overthrew the regime, they have not been able to change the economic conditions. Now that was not their main goal, but it was expressed by numerous segments of the movement, and it still resonates.

Such phenomena are the limits of this cycle of struggles, a limit which forces itself upon people in struggle, and demands either a revolutionary way forward, or not. The problem is that this revolutionary response is itself unknown in its particulars until it is accomplished. Every cycle of struggles is also part of the history of political economy, and from this history, revolutionary dreams are born and killed. The theorist’s task is to write the history of these dreams, mapping them onto the shifting grounds of capitalism. This also means pointing out what the current historical conjuncture makes possible. The current production of revolution as seen under the conditions in which we live is determined by a moment in the development of capitalism where the very success of accumulation is based on the complete evacuation of the power of any working class. This dynamic is completely different from the period preceding it, in which the growth of capital was tied to the strengthening cohesion and incorporation of the working class into both consumer society and the state.

There have been different horizons, ones in which offensive struggles of the working class predominated. From 1890s to 1970s, victory for these struggles meant strengthening the power of the proletariat, building unions, increasing wages and bettering working conditions. All these factors helped to build what is called a ‘workers’ identity,’ an empty signifier that effectively bound together competing sections of the working class and their various ideologies. The goals of this era of struggles were expressed in reformist and revolutionary ways; both of these ways, however, were united in thinking of victory as the domination of proletariat over bourgeoisie, through force, dictatorship, voting, self-organized councils or unions; all thought a non-communist transition was necessary, no matter whether it was organized or spontaneous. Losses and retreats did not deflect from this general aim.

We can say with certainty that the shape of class struggles today, at least since the 1970s, has a different horizon, one in which defensive struggles predominate. Victory today means softening the loss of a job, getting better layoff packages, improving working conditions so that you don’t die from overexhaustion. No victory strengthens the class of labour against capital, it merely fractures it individually. Individual victories, in other words, weaken general conditions. Today, the struggle to defend your condition tends to be identical to the struggle against your condition. For instance, in India, Algeria, Bangladesh, wage demands transform into the destructions of means of production; in the United States, anti-union struggles arise with no alternative to put in their place; in France, struggles emerge not for employment but for layoff payments; in the riots of Greece, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, struggles without any demands at all proliferate, at least without any demands that would have been recognizable to militants of another era; in California, England and Quebec, students struggle not for better education but against their role as students in a world which has no future for them.

Little by little, what emerges in these struggles is a calling into question, through the struggle, of the role assigned to subjects by capital. All the unified identities of struggle (the unemployed, the worker, the community, the militant, the student) hinder the development of the struggle itself; in other words, for the struggle to continue even in the most modest way, it must overcome the identities which are its very basis. Today’s struggles have different contents from previous ones: from 1968, 1977 or the antiglobalization movement. Social struggles today go face to face with global capital, and the demands do not even begin to challenge people’s situation. Rather, struggles themselves point to the limit of demanding anything at all, even while people cannot help but go on making demands. At this point, when the content of struggles exceeds and overflows its form of demands, ruptures inside of struggles themselves emerge. These internal tensions and conflicts over violence, police, democracy, assemblies, property, gender relations and nationality are the struggles within the struggles that should not be ignored, swept under the rug of some false ‘unity of the movement’ or class. These breaking points are the key to understanding what can develop from within an impossible situation.

For instance, there is a whole set of practices that previously emerged at the limits of struggle which we could call ‘direct action’. These were both the most radical and reformist expression of social struggle in the 1990s and early 2000s. They directly challenged the basis of some supposedly revolutionary proletarian identity outside of capital, by calling for and acting as the immediate negation of capitalism in the streets, anywhere and everywhere. This abstract call emerged from the abstract identity of militants, who could not identify with any of the previous mediations of workers’ identity, because that identity was emptied of all content except of capital. This militant role had a definite place and function within the antiglobalization movement, which paradoxically provided a home for this homeless figure, an identity for this identity-less actor. Acting individualistically based on moral conviction alone, the militant was a symptom of the overabundance of useless and precarious proletarians in the West, a phenomenon which created scores of revolutionaries without a revolution.

Yet today, when the crisis has generalized impoverishment and made explicit the fact that no proletarian identity can provide sanctuary from the blind domination of capital, all the direct action practices of the militant have been put to use. Pensioners blocking the economy in France, Greek families stealing electricity and refusing to pay taxes en masse, apathetic Americans occupying public spaces and fighting cops across the country – the only property of the militant, direct action, has been expropriated by the rest of the class, and hence, the militant role itself is called into question as a separate sphere of activity. What this shows is that no unified identity – whether worker, anarchist, immigrant or democrat – needs to be forged for a proliferation of such practices to weave themselves throughout struggles. These struggles are generalizing not ideologies, but practices. Class struggle has not disappeared at all; on the contrary, it takes place more and more, yet under different conditions from before. Class unity is not what binds these people or struggles together; ‘being part of the working class’ is the negative basis which all these struggles seek to get rid of.

What brought people together to occupy the squares in 2011 was the destruction of their lives by austerity and other attacks on their material well-being, but it has been expressed in a political language of ‘democracy’ which was able to unify fragmented individuals across classes. The democracy called for, however, has little to do with the democratic calls of the anti-globalization era, where ‘another world is possible’ was heard side by side with ‘democracy now’. Today, there is no alternative world possible within this one, and the word ‘democracy’ is simply the empty placeholder for the shared experience of powerlessness to determine one’s life. This shared feeling, also felt all across the Occupy camps in the United States, speaks to a real shift in what brings people together in struggles today. Brought together by the material content of their lives, people instead fight over the forms in which their lives are managed. This limit is pushed against when confrontations heat up within the squares themselves over how the struggle should proceed. At these limits, when democracy is critiqued democratically, when the 99 per cent do not include the homeless but do include the police, when vague ideas of citizenship and nonviolence are seen to be the values of groups of people who are brought together by neither, at these limits, the struggle within the struggle occurs, and the horizon against which these limits are pushed is brought into the foreground.

Occupations today are the first act of revolution, for they shatter the separation which capitalism enforces between individual lives and social conditions. But occupations themselves become the obstacle to overcome when they are taken as the one prefigurative form of the future society within the shell of the old. On the contrary, no one form is revolutionary outside of its context; not until is has proved itself capable of confronting the sources which have thrown people together in struggle will any tactic be deemed in hindsight to have been the ‘correct’ one. Revolution is not simply people coming together to self-manage their own exploitation, but people coming together to abolish their own conditions of exploitation. Occupations are the material announcement of this revolutionary horizon, but not yet its accomplishment.

May 2012

Reference
Marx, Karl (1975) ‘A contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’, in Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton, London: Penguin/New Left Review.