Occupy Wall Street - 2013 - The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
David Graeber
Spiegel & Grau
2013
326 pages

David Graeber is the former Yale assistant professor of anthropology who was let go from that institution, possibly for his anarchist political views. He currently teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. His anthropological work has been highly praised by others in the field, and as a far-left spokesman, he appears congenial and nonthreatening while expressing his thoughts in accessible language. He probably best known as an author for his excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which investigates the history of debt across time and cultures and provided part of the intellectual grounding for Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to Graeber's career as educator and author, he is also an activist and was a principle organizer for the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book, The Democracy Project, is Graeber's report on the initial stages of Occupy's formation, his own role in the movement, and his perspective on what occured in Liberty park during the fall of 2011. Much like he had in his earlier work, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber combines his two roles in in this book, scholar and activist, to describe what worked about Occupy.

The purpose of Graeber's book is to report on Occupy at a time when everyone believes the movement to have died out. He repeats through his book that social movements take years, decades even, to achieve the changes they seek, leaving the reader with the thought that perhaps the Occupy movement that appears moribund at the time of reading was a dramatic phase of a longer-lasting movement. Besides describing the Occupy movement, Graeber also describes in this book a set of institutions: media, police, financial organizations, government, and outlines how they constitute power in American society and how Occupy constituted a response to that power. At a deeper level of analysis, Graeber discusses how these institutions prevent the practice of real democracy in American society and how the Occupy movement pointed towards such a practice. One chapter, How Change happens, is almost entirely dedicated to a description of how the kind of real democracy envisioned by the Occupy movement was practiced in real life when all of the institutions that make up the existing power structure were doing whatever they could to destroy it.

ultras - 2010 - Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong

2010

A & C Black

256 pages

In Italy, Football fanatics are called Ultras and engage in many of the same soccer related activities as the Casuals in England. They fight with each other and they sing songs to their team while insulting the fans of their opponents.... and so forth. There are some differences too, though, unlike the English Casuals the UltraS wear their team colours and that’s about it for differences as far as I can tell from reading Football, Fascism, and Fandom. If there are other differences, they’re obscured by this book’s degree of focus on strictly neo-fascist UltraS firms, and their focus on uncharacteristically large firms.

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong make all the connections needed to satisfy the reader that the Irriducibili, supporter of SS Lazio, and the Boys, supporter firm of FC Roma, are great admirers of Mussolini, opponents of immigration, lovers of violence, etc. Just like everywhere, in England the English Defense League recruits from hooligans and in Germany, Football hooligans are thought to make up a significant component of the Islamophobic Pageda movement. It is interesting to read about the unique ways that these attitudes are given form among fans in Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, as the teams whose supporters are the object of study for this book both play in a stadium created by the Fascist regime in a city where some monuments to that period still stand.

While Testa’s and Armstrong’s book gets into all of the specific ways Fascism is given a new voice in Italian sports-fandom, particularly in these support clubs, there’s something disappointing about the tight focus this book places on Irriducibili and Boys when the book’s subtitle ‘The UltraS of Italian Football’ led me to believe that I would be reading an overview of the Italian UltraS scene with a focus on political attitudes. The two firms the book discusses, in that they support major clubs in Rome, are undoubtedly at the heart of Italian football, and they may be taken by the reader, at first, as representative of the larger UltraS scene. When reading through the book though, its suspect how typical they are. Irriducibili have built a brand of merchandise using the logos of their firm. How many other firms have a reputation that’s commercially viable? Additionally, they’re both neo-fascist groups, but its not surprising that there are connections between sports fandom and rightwing politics. Major league sports with city teams has, on a surface level, a lot to offer to adherents of the political right. There are moments in reading Testa and Armstrong’s account of these firms where they allude to other Italian teams having left-wing supporters, and I’d like to know more about them and how they come to be.

So essentially my issues with the book dont emerge from any problem with the book content but rather from a gap I perceive between the book and its content.

There was one statement in the book that I found especially troubling, when the authors noted that the method spectator’s used to express racism, that is, grunting like an animal when a black player took possession of the ball - the same method of expressing racism Bill Buford described witnessing on the English terraces in the 1980s in his 1991 hooligan ethnography, Among the Thugs - was practiced by the spectators at large, and not simply by the UltraS, and are therefore ‘beyond ideological explanation’. It is not at all clear to me how such a statement is true.

vagabondia - book - 1993 - The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
Jennifer Toth
Chicago Review Press
1993
267 pages


Hello out there in Interville!  I purchased The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, from Seekers Books, located on the corner of Bloor st. West and Borden st. in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto.

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City, is the best known work by journalist Jennifer Toth.  The text is intended as a journalistic account of the homeless people who live in makeshift communities in the underground infrastructure of New York City.  Toth creates an uneven view of the people who live there without clearly delineating them as a unique population within the larger group that is the city’s homeless.  The various chapters of her book are defined by encounters with particular individuals.  Chapter two, for example, is called “Seville’s Story”, wherein Toth discussed the situation of a particular man, while other chapters cover more broad aspects of the underground population.  Another example, chapter 22, “Women”, is broken up into short stories separated under headings of the first names of a number of women with whom Toth spoke.  

Aspects of the text are interesting, especially those parts where Toth describes the methods used by the underground dwellers for acquiring resources, or the living arrangements of particular individuals.  Much of the book appears as brief and superficial newspaper pieces about particular encounters with tunnel inhabitants.  This style of writing is especially emphasized when she introduces an individual a second time in the text, as she does with officer Bryan Henry, who appears early in the text and again towards its end.  Otherwise much of the book describes a number of encounters with the underground homeless without adding any new insights into the experience of being homeless, or of the unique nature of underground living.

Furthermore, a number of aspects of tunnel life that a reader may infer exist are merely alluded to, and never witnessed by Toth. There seems to be an issue with these kinds of texts where an author attempts to enter into a marginal social world.  The author appears to become a privileged outsider.  Toth is given access to components of the tunnel communities but is also shielded from their harsher aspects.  Violence, for example, is repeatedly referred to, by the discovery of a body, mentioned early in the book, and in conversation with a number of the tunnel dwellers.  Toth, however, never witnesses anything.  Something similar appears to be at play in Ted Conover’s Rolling Nowhere, however Conover dedicated himself to living the hobo lifestyle for a matter of months, and he witnessed violence, he just was never afflicted by it. (sidenote: Conover and Toth’s books both contain descriptions of violence by youths on the vulnerable poor).  Towards the end of the text, Toth is threatened by a tunnel dweller she thought she had befriended because he believed that she witnessed a murder he committed.  This situation, although quite serious for Toth at the time, approached an absurd horizon, as it created the implication that there’s a continuum of brutal behavior beneath these streets and her only encounter with it was a misunderstanding.

Toth’s book is an interesting introduction to this subject matter, however the potentially most interesting aspects seem to lie beyond its boundaries.  Many of the tunnel dwellers speak of having been aware of the underground communities before they actually entered it - that people were aware that beneath the surface there were hidden eyes - but she never speaks to members of the above ground population for thoughts on the people that lurk within their city infrastructure.  Furthermore, as a privileged outsider, Toth speaks with people who are, undoubtedly, the most extroverted members of a secretive population.  One individual named J.C. in the text says that a number of the people will only speak with social workers, however, Toth never speaks with social workers about the tunnel dwellers except to source statistics.   Nor does Toth ever discuss the tunnel dwellers as a part of an overall analysis of homelessness in the city.  

The effect created by these lacks is that the tunnel dwellers are almost formed into zoo animals by the text.  They are observed briefly as curiosities, but not entirely taken seriously as meaning anything to the larger social environment.  Perhaps a partial strategy for reporting on an underground population is that a reader may be lead to interpret the tunnel dwellers as mutually distinct from the aboveground population, and not place demands on the text to connect the two realms.  Many of the personal stories of Mole People, told to Toth, describe a desire to leave society.  While those individuals may be sincere in the desires they express, and their social status certainly must change when they move into the tunnels (even if they were socially marginal in the first place), they are still a part of society.

Despite these criticisms, The Mole People is still an interesting text that shines a light onto a marginal population that is beyond the beyond as far as the public’s ability to perceive it is concerned.  I’m aware that Joseph Brennan, a NYC subway enthusiast, has written a lengthy piece on how inaccurate Toth’s descriptions of the underground locations are.  I don’t really think that that is a particularly relevant aspect of her text.  Exact locations of tunnel spots are not important, and what is important about the text is that it describes a group of people’s will to repurpose the subterranean urban infrastructure for the sake of survival and even community.