Re: <nettime> A Movement Without Demands?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

This text is at once challenging and generous: it seeks the core of 
unfulfilled possibility in every limitation it critiques. Thanks for that.

You say the Occupy movement lacks strong core principles that could 
serve to define itself as a transformative force in society. I agree. 
That lack is betrayed in the rhetorical fiction of an overwhelming 
majority: the 99 percent, which in reality includes not only the cops 
but also vast armies of technocrats, financial managers, administrators, 
advertisers, marketers etc, as well as all the working and unemployed 
folks captured by racism and nationalism. It's clear that however it may 
define itself, the Occupy movement will have many opponents among those 
ranks. The initial appeal to everyone but the very top-level ruling 
class can only make sense in the context of a deliberate effort to forge 
a broadly appealing but also antagonistic collective will, or at the 
very least, a new terrain of constructive argumentation around what such 
a collective will could be. I think that's your strongest point, but it 
requires some steps you don't go into very much.

For instance, wouldn't it be better to start by identifying grievances 
-- that is, unbearable problems experienced and named by specific groups 
of people -- rather than by stating principles and emitting demands? 
That has been done to some extent (one example is the famous tumblr 
site) but doesn't the raw expression need some kind of objective 
analysis and categorization, so that people can see where their own 
grievances touch those of others? Of course the sociology of individual 
grievances does not equal a vision or a political project. But it would 
provide a reality check about everything the current system does not and 
cannot respond to, so that the more daring and inventive groups could 
make proposals, debate them and ultimately come to validate some new 
principles that would be acceptable to large populations.

You also point to two basic contradictions in what used to be called 
"the Left." One is that many are weary of utopian proposals based on 
full-fledged critiques of capitalism and tend to revert back to 
traditional Keynesian demands for taxation of the corporations and state 
investment in infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health 
care. The opposite contradiction is that relatively small but very 
active groups tend to refuse any social-state mediation whatsoever, with 
the idea that more or less insurrectional moments of general assembly 
and direct action are concrete prefigurations of a new way to live 
("communization").

I agree that in the absence of core principles, we will be condemned to 
a repeated sequence where the smaller direct-action groups spark 
transient mass mobilizations that subsequently dissolve -- not just 
because only a few can maintain permanent militancy and a permanent 
direct democracy, but also because the division of labor and the social 
complexity it entails are just too advantageous to be abandoned. Only 
trustworthy and verifiable principles can articulate a complex division 
of labor, even if we decide to shrink it from the global proportions it 
has attained today. The commons we need is also an organizational 
commons, a way of articulating production and sharing its surplus. But 
who is this "we"? So far, only the anarchists have been able to 
constitute a collectivity in which the remanents of the Left can 
momentarily recognize themselves. Kudos to the anarchists!

The great question, as fundamental as the one that inspired Marx long 
ago, is how to forge a new, trustworthy and verifiable logic of social 
organization that is both egalitarian and ecologically sustainable -- 
and how, at the same time, to create the agency that can gradually 
impose the new logic against forces that will bitterly oppose it? 
There's no way to answer through ordered stages. You have to leap into 
the midst of it, with the beginnings of a conceptual logic and the 
initial kernel of the social forces that could bring it into reality.

So where to begin? Many have observed that all around the world, the 
current protests are driven by debt-ridden students and graduates 
without a future. The precarious middle class, in short ("lost a job, 
found an occupation"). At the same time, the numbers tell us that the 
worst-hit are the working and marginalized classes, mostly across the 
color line. The next big movements could easily look quite different. In 
all likelihood we are headed toward an even more extensive social crisis.

I think in this context and at this moment there is a potential role for 
what you could call the intelligentsia (or Gramsci's organic 
intellectuals) to seize the cultural and technical resources of the 
university system, while bending both the rules of discourse and the 
order of bodies, actively looking for different participants and more 
practical-political ideas. The point is to find a cross-class, 
multiracial and multigender way of dealing with social complexity -- 
because that has been the great claim of neoliberalism so far, and 
there's no way around it, we have to do it better than them. In many 
respects Liberty Square and all the other occupations are already models 
for this, prefigurations if you like. What has been gained and defended 
and some times lost -- but not forgotten -- is a kind of open-air 
university, the diverse and embodied process of creating a collective 
will that could come to grips with a complex society. But I think we 
have to go further.

In 1967, at a moment just before the explosion -- which is maybe a 
moment quite similar to ours -- Marcuse had exactly that intuition. I 
just chanced upon his essay on "Liberation from the Affluent Society" 
where he says this:

"Education is our job, but education in a new sense. Being theory as 
well as practice, political practice, education today is more than 
discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing. Unless and 
until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the 
college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless. Education 
today must involve the mind and the body, reason and imagination, the 
intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has 
become the subject/object of politics, of social engineering... The 
educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize 
the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the 
established policy."

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/67dialecticlib/67LibFromAfflSociety.htm

What do you think? Aren't you planning some kind of initiative in that 
direction? What does anyone else think? What are the most interesting 
things going on in this sense?

In Chicago we just finished an autonomous seminar at Mess Hall, and I am 
now looking for collaborators and projects to work on. For those who 
will be in New York over the upcoming days, there are going to be a 
series of meetings at 16 Beaver starting on Saturday. We could also talk 
about it there.

best, Brian


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