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.

occupy wall street - 2012 - We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation

We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation
Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds)
AK Press
2012

The Occupy Wall Street Movement was, to an outsider, at some times exhilarating to watch, and at other times, very strange and occasionally disappointing. The police are part of the 99%? An anti-capitalist moment of silence for Steve Jobs? Why? Because he was a vegetarian in addition to being a brutal industrialist? Still it was a real uprising in America, in lower Manhattan, that largely adhered to anarcho-socialist ideals of building a new world in the shell of the old.

Occupy Wall Street generated a lot of literature within twelve months of the movement's start date of September 17, 2011. There were many books about Occupy published even before January 2012, when the movement still seemed like it may continue in its original form. We Are Many, from the venerable AK Press, is a collection of reflective pieces on the movement that came later in 2012, with a number of its authors referring to writing their entries during the summer of that year. Almost all of the authors are almost politically radical and while there is a great deal of variety to the entries, many of the pieces are critical of the more liberal side of the movement. This was the side of the movement who suggested that police were part of their class and, presumably, felt that Steve Jobs was an honorable exception to the plutocratic class the movement claimed to opposed.

The book includes dozens of short entries, including pieces on the handmade signs, spirituality, race and gender issues, connections to other uprisings, movement strategies and constitutive documents, and many personal reflections. The entry that struck me more than any other when I was reading the book was titled, The Tourist Brochures in People's Hearts: A Snapshot from Occupy Santa Fe. This was a piece in which the author, artist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore paints a picture of a local occupy movement directed by people who may be members of the %99 but they wouldn't be members of the %95, if that was the term adopted by the movement.  Bernstein Sycamore's piece expresses a passionate love for the ideals of the movement to be realized, and a bitter critique of a local encampment which was turned into a public relations forum for a thriving local arts market by wealthy art dealers, gallery owners, and artists. The piece reads like an address to a general assembly, and perhaps that's what it was written as, but more importantly it sketches out a situation where all of the radical energy of the movement was siphoned away by liberals and their wish-washy views on society. The idea that the arts community just plain belongs to Occupy is a liberal one. Bernstein Sycamore laments the tears of someone crying in anguish over the closing of twenty galleries, which, sure, sounds bad, until our author goes on to note how many many  galleries there actually are in Santa Fe and how much money and competition there is in their market. You might cry for the art galleries and you probably wouldn't shed a tear for luxury car dealerships but both types of commercial institutions cater to upper-middle class consumers and play a role in economic disparities.

The book covered many aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but not all of them. The role of social media was actually downplayed in this book. I don't remember reading a mention of the 'We are the 99%' tumblr page that featured those iconic and mimetic images of individuals holding up their handwritten stories of woe in selfie shots and affirming their support for the movement. I don't think Anonymous' role in the movement was given much attention here, and I would have loved to have read something about the library at Liberty Plaza. Oh well... it's still probably the best book I've seen on the movement to date.

popular uprising - 2012 - Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions

Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
Paul Mason
Verso
2012
237 pages

Back in the years of 1994, 1995, and 1996, when the Internet was just emerging as a mainstream media service, a large number of books with titles like 'Cyberia' were published about the new frontier of digital freedoms to be found in cyberspace. These books made grandiose predictions about the utopia that lay beyond the horizon now that the internet's mass availability had just come into view. The predictions about increased democracy and global intelligence and everything else now seems incredibly naive to the critical observer, but now the gushing cheerleaders of 1990s internet freedoms and consciousness, like Timothy Leary, Douglas Rushkoff, Bruce Sterling, Mark Dery are replaced by critics such as Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Jodi Dean, and Robert McChesney; critics who discuss the adverse effects digital and networked technologies have on society, literacy, politics, commerce, etc.

One of the early adopters of these networked technologies as they appeared in the 90s, were the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN, popularly known as the Zapatistas, a group of indigenous revolutionaries struggling for greater autonomy in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Beginning their revolution on January 1, 1994, the EZLN disseminated their communiques via the internet, in Spanish and English, to the world, marking the very beginnings of what was popularly known as the anti-globalization movement and what is referred to by anarchist anthropologist (a title he refuses on his twitter page) David Graeber as the global justice movement (a name for the movement which I haven't seen in print in any source other than his work). The Zapatistas use of the internet to get their message out was notable for two reasons, first was the novelty of the internet at the time, and the novelty of its use by political radicals, and the second was that it was being used by revolutionaries in a remote and impoverished section of Mexico by indigenous people. That radicals of the fourth world were using the latest in communications technologies garnered the EZLN the label of the first post-modern revolutionaries. In the year 2000, with the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, the anti-globalization movement became a global phenomenon with the full attention of the mainstream media, and one of the aspects of this movement the mainstream media fixated on was the protesters use of technology. At the time, it was of interest to observers that activists were using things like laptops and websites to any extent.

The interesting thing about Paul Mason's book, Why its Kicking Off Everywhere, is not that it has anything interesting to say about the uprisings seen around the globe in 2011. Mason's is far from the only book to examine those events, and what it has to say about them is typical of sympathetic journalists. Of course, Mason gets that the human element of these movements, but personal testimonies of movement participation have been a major feature of these uprisings, and there are entire books from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement written by the people. Its that it's a book-length emanation of this continued amazement over that activists are using digital technologies that makes it interesting. History is filled with examples of radicals using their contemporary communication technologies to disseminate their ideas at the same time that they engage in direct action. Consider the mass of writings produced by radical groups, such as the Diggers during 17th century England because of their access to printing presses, or the Yippies studies of television formats and media theories so they could appear effectively on the medium. That activists use current communication technologies in their struggle is to be expected, but because so much hope has been invested in the internet's potential to direct change, it is still possible, in 2012, for an individual to write a book with nothing more profound to say about activists than that they're using blackberries and facebook to communicate with one another. That's what Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere is, a lengthy assertion that technologies are at the forefront of political change rather than people and their ideas. A return to the hope felt in the mid-90s that the internet has produced new kinds of spaces where all our hopes for mankind will be realized. That recent communication technologies permit activists with rapid-fire abilities to evade systems of control and authority, a point of view that's obviously incorrect. When Paul Mason writes that new activists using smartphones and social media are "pioneering a major expansion in the power of the individual human being", he's echoing the never-realized transhumanist pronouncements of 80s and early/mid-90s tech gurus like Timothy Leary. When Paul Mason makes analogies between the current situation and the French Revolution and says "A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop." He's repeating the same amazement shown in 2000-2001 over activists using computers. I think it is possible that a reader could dive into the literature of the anti-globalization movement and come up with similar statements, and the major difference between then and now, is that now the brandnames for each communication format are noted.

Taken at a broader level, there is an intense delirium for digital technologies in all fields and social areas, and similar books are being written discussing how incredibly epoch making tablet computers and social media are in everything, including political activism. While its undeniable that these technologies are having major effects across society, I don't see how people can look at the internet and its related technologies, and also look at how they're actually used by people on a daily basis, and see their effects only as positive steps taken towards a more perfect world. One of the effects of the internet as a communications technology is that it occupies our fields of vision and sets limits on what we can see in ways that always refers back to itself. In this way, of course, digital and networked technologies appear to us as problem solving in an of themselves if they're all we can see in the world. In Mason's book, he quotes an activist who refuses to read radical texts of the past, instead favoring new ideas, especially if they're spread on twitter. While Mason offers these statements as examples of new kinds of activists who are resistant to ideologies, a ludicrous position as ideology is always at play, this activist actually reveals herself to be vulnerable to manipulation due to her preference in consumer communication products. These new consumer technologies commodify communication, friendship, emotion, and possibly even revolution. What's being described here is designer communication, and it is inserting itself into the revolutionary spirit in ways that are actually insidious. Mason is writing in 2012, now in 2014 it might be interesting to think about how an obsessive fetishizing of these communication tools contributed to the dissolution of the movements they apparently pushed forward a couple of years ago. They are, fundamentally, consumer products and provide consumer experiences, and a book can just as easily be written about these media companies like facebook doing things like deleting the Anarchist Memes page. Activists can hold discussions on facebook, activists can also lose their job for revealing their political attitudes on their facebook page. As communication tools, social media networks should not be taken as inherently revolutionary or the primary means through which revolution is won.

occupy movement - television - 2012 - The Julian Assange Show: Occupy Movement

Occupy Movement
The Julian Assange Show
RT
May 29, 2012
27 minutes


Julian Assange hosts a half-hour discussion with organizers from Occupy New York (Wall Street) and Occupy London, including anthropologist and anarchist, David Graeber.  They discuss some of the tactics and strategies deployed by Occupy groups, the development of some of their symbols, the preconditions for their movement, and they contest the commonly held notion that Occupy and other recent uprisings thrive on social media.

anarchism - book - 1995 - Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
Murray Bookchin
1995
AK Press
86 Pages

Heya out there, surfers, I bought my copy of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism from Willow Books near the corner of Bloor st w. and St. George st. in Toronto.

This is the second book by Murray Bookchin that I have profiled for this blog.  In my post about Remaking Society, I noted how I had come to read (and to appreciate) Bookchin after an adolescent interest in the writings of Bob Black, including Black’s elaborate anti-Bookchin essay, Anarchy after Leftism.  Well, Black’s text (and his more recent anti-Bookchin eBook, Nightmares of Reason) were inspired by Bookchin’s brief attack on the anarchist ideas put forth by Black and a number of the other prominent anarchist voices of the 1980s and 1990s, including Hakim Bey, David Watson (who himself wrote his own Bookchin critique titled Beyond Bookchin) and John Zerzan (whose book Elements of Refusal has been profiled here).  Bookchin terms these thinkers (minus Black, Bookchin actually never mentions his most vocal opponent) the lifestyle anarchists, who he argues bring anarchist praxis into concert with consumer culture via Max Stirner’s egoistic-anarchism.

This book comes in two parts: the first is the admonition of this emerging trend in anarchist thought in that period.  Bookchin was primarily concerned that the quasi-mysticism of Hakim Bey or the return-to-the-primitive calls of John Zerzan sidestepped the need for critique of actual social conditions that have concerned multiple generations of earlier anarchist philosophers.  Bookchin assess these philosophies as taking the view that society is something to be dropped out of, or obliterated completely, rather than reformed according to specific critiques that address specific, material social problems.

The second part of Bookchin’s short book is a brief essay titled “The Left that Was”.  This essay is a look back at what may be considered the “old left” of the pre-1960s, when the first signs of the ideas expressed by the lifestyle anarchists began to creep into leftist thought.  In this essay, Bookchin laments the past activity of organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Anarchists of the Spanish Civil War (and early subject in Bookchin’s writing).  While recent writers such as Terrence Kissack note that this is a past that is gone, current trends in activism such as the now global Occupy movement suggest that the social aspect remains a vital part of activism.

The Lifestyle anarchists are charged, by Bookchin, with basing their theories on faulty science and anthropology.  I’ve wondered, when reading the primitivist texts of Zerzan and others, whether or not the anthropological texts he cites were themselves rooted in an ideology partially formed by the era it came out of, and according to Bookchin, they were.  Many of the Primitivist understandings of early man come from the published papers of a specific symposium called 'Man the Hunter' held in 1966 at the University of Chicago, where its participants portrayed man as living in paradise before civilization.  Bookchin disagreed and, more recently, Theodore Kaczynski (The Unabomber) also disagreed based on his own experience of living the lifestyle Zerzan advocates. While the anarcho-primitivists describe pre-civilization life as easy-going, Kaczynski, in his essay 'The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarcho-Primitivism' describes the demands such a lifestyle places on labour needs as quite high.   Kaczynski was speaking from personal experience, having lived a mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyle for over twenty years of his life.

Bookchin critiques the 'lifestyle' anarchist theories as not simply being ungrounded but also as operating in accordance with contemporary consumer culture.  The realization of the unique individual, the unlocking of the personality, these are things that the lifestyle anarchists seek, and things that consumer culture offers.  Thomas Frank’s edited anthology Commodify Your Dissent addresses this same issue but from the end of critiquing the advetising that advocates rebellion, and the subcultures they feature.  By now we have had at least thirty years of commercials saying things like “Toothpaste as unique as you are”, and there’s little reason to believe that these sentiments are not mutually exclusive from the ideas of the Lifestyle Anarchists, even if those writers would inevitably deny any commonality with advertising slogans.

This consumer/activist-anarchist dichotomy, however, is not particularly helpful, coming from Bookchin, as it currently provides an incredibly shallow argument to pundit types to discredit activists of many stripes.  That is not to suggest that pundits now discredit activists for using consumer items because they read Bookchin’s attack on Hakim Bey and David Watson, but I am suggesting that just as Bookchin’s found a tense consonance between consumerism and certain strains of anarchist theory, that very line of thought has found its own consoance with current right-wing attitudes towards leftist action.  In particular, the idea that activists are not truly committed to any cause unless they can prove themselves free of all consumer objects.  For example when Occupy Wall Street began, photographs circulated across Internet channels that highlit all of the commercially available objects that appear....

....as though there’s some possibility for an Occupy protester to be using an indie digital camera.  Furthermore, this critique assumes that anyone who owns a piece of consumer electronics is implicitly dedicated to capitalism, acquired all of their possessions at retail, and in fact presumes one of what Bookchin implies as a potential byproducts of lifestyle anarchism, that activism can be merely a series of consumer choices.  That activists are also consumers is almost inevitable in contemporary society, but that activists accept consumerism as a necessary social condition is not inevitable.  That activism can be practiced through ethical consumerism is essentially new, however, and has produced interesting byproducts, such as the phenomena of the hipster whose persona is built upon consuming products that have acquired a subcultural cache.  

Bookchin refers to the difference between these two forms of anarchism as radically divided, so that an individual cannot commit to both.  This argument appears extreme, and it is not explicitly clear why concepts from “lifestyle anarchist” writers cannot be integrated into forms of social anarchism.  This text, however, is relevant for opening up an ongoing debate between two generations of anarchist philosophers.