DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

dagNotes: On Occupy Wall St [Concise]

I know picking on Occupy is wildly popular, but I do get people who get mad at me when I post anything critical. And it’s always from people who participated. Because I respect your participation, here’s an explanation, my position.

I think at the beginning there was an honest push to do something. I think the GAs were flawed and catered to a kind of intellectual, liberal elite that tended to be white and male and over-educated as opposed to knowledgeable about how to work in the street and organize campaigns. At the beginning there were people who had long histories of activist organizing who were rather publicly booted, literally pushed out by the intellectuals. Idealism won out right from the start, which is always a bad sign. This isn’t speculation as most of this behavior was documented and argued about on blogs while Occupy was getting going. We all read about this and argued about it together while watching live feeds. This has caused problems that cannot be ignored, especially in communities of color all across the US who feel Occupy abandoned them. I agree and do believe Occupy abandoned them.

I’m not opposed to the movement. I’m opposed to branding it as a generalized movement. Movements to be effective must be focused. I’ve always been opposed to its name, which I find highly offensive. Occupy is a horrible brand name because it just reminds people of color what’s really at stake in many progressive and white social movements: taking other people’s shit and making it work for them. Know what I mean? For example, an effective Occupy would not have been at Capitol buildings and Wall St; it would have been in urban neighborhoods and rural locations all over the US with leaders for the movement who look like the people in the neighborhoods. And the Occupy leadership would have been recruits from the thousands of already operating radicalized community orgs that know how to get shit done. The GAs were a way around active, well-organized and useful community activist projects and a way in for wannabe organizers and academics.

Quite frankly, mind you I only followed the first three months via feeds and email and blogging as I live in Korea, it was very clear that the movement was doomed to stoners and anarchists in name only from the start. It was not focused. It was not in the right places. And it ignored the experienced members in communities of color all over the US. When I crap on Occupy, this is what I mean. I don’t deny that there were Occupy groups that we can all be proud of; don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny that people are still working hard. I don’t deny that it changed some participants’ lives. My critique is not a denial.

Modernity! Consumerism! Identity!

When the next group of composed youth wake up to ideology by further composing themselves within modes of acceptable social order though they see it as a challenge to everyday norms.

Fuck You, Adbusters. “We here in North America gave birth to something weird and wonderful…”

Adbusters has always been full of shit, in my opinion; it’s radicalism for the privileged classes. But this “tactical briefing” entitled “What is Occupy morphing into?” takes the cake:

As our first anniversary passes we can see that our indignation, the nascent revolution, the calls for new ways of being, are just one part of the global insurrectionary jam. Tunisia, Tahrir, Indignados, Casseroles, Pussy Rioters, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Russia, Chile, China, Spain, Greece, Quebec, Indonesia and beyond … the world political compass hasn’t wobbled like this since 1968. The ecstatic confusion points to global seismic shift … a new point of collective reference is appearing on the horizon.

So what can we make of all this? Yes, we here in North America gave birth to something weird and wonderful that swept the world last year, but now as the global heartbeat thumps ever louder, the fire in our bellies is smoldering and we are just one of a myriad of revolutionary forces pulsing through the world. We must get over our obsession with ourselves, our neurotic micromanaging of our GAs and encampments and learn to rumble anew.

This is a delicious moment … the world is morphing into something new … don’t miss it! Get in there and do what you’ve always wanted to do.

Who are they kidding? —Themselves. I know. We know. But, really, look at the photo they stuck to this self-congratulatory crap:

It’s exactly how white liberals and progressives see themselves. All the brown people everywhere are waiting for us to give them a signal. This is as stupidly jingoist as say the scene in Independence Day where all the armies of the world are in a desert waiting for the POTUS and his army to start a true rebellion against the alien hordes. It’s just horrible meat.

How can you read something like this and not be incredibly offended? I’m not being precious. I want to know who reads this briefing and thinks, “Wow, we did this! Hooray!” It’s racist, sexist, and colonialist, in my opinion. It caters to how “North Americans” like to kid themselves about leadership. It’s horrible propaganda: the photo has nothing to do with the text. And it’s incorrect.

Moreover, where is the world morphing into something different? Culture Jammer Headquarters must be a mess of narcissism and satisfaction.

You want proof that North Americans forget they’re relatively isolated from the rest of the world? Here it is:

Hey all you redeemers, reckless dreamers and radicals out there,

Look!… look! … look! Regimes are being toppled, leaders thrashed, embassies stormed, movements and masses are rising. One by one all the old paradigms, power structures and civilizational norms are biting the dust … Capitalism, infinite growth based economics, the sacred morality of Western leadership, the invincibility of totalitarian and corporate driven regimes, the cult of individualism — all the sacred touchstones of our civilization are reeling under attack like never before.

Our civilization? Come on!

I give it you, Adbusters. You are, in fact, reckless dreamers. Too bad you are anything but radical.

OWS cops a plea for an excuse to snitch

You’re not going to impress anyone, Occupy Wall Street media team, when you say, in interviews, that you know that most OWS participants would turn-in to the police any participants who were “making molotov cocktails.” It’s not that we support people making molotov cocktails. Hell, who’s been making molotov cocktails anyway? It’s fucking ludicrous. It’s that you’d consider snitching something worth bragging about that’s the problem.

I don’t know who you’re attempting to distinguish yourselves from, but the problem isn’t violent protesters, is it. The problem is that OWS has been infiltrated, time and again, by agent provocateurs from the government attempting to make occupiers appear violent to the easily persuaded masses.

Moreover, you’ve implicitly aligned yourselves with the corrupt government and its militarized police force to illustrate your intent to be nonviolent. That’s right. The OWS media team has illustrated how its desire to practice nonviolent civil disobedience is also the desire to practice civil disobedience within the limits of the law the government is actively revising to marginalize the Occupy movement’s organized protests.

I have listened to Jeff Smith report on OWS from the beginnings of the movement. I respect him and his dedication, but this sentiment is completely unacceptable. Movement discipline must come from within.

I’d like to note that I enjoy Sam Seder’s Majority Report and support the show. Independent political programs are hard to come by in the US. Sam gets much respect from me.

dagWeek in Review: Memes

dagseoul:

I get annoyed when bloggers reblog crappy memes about POTUS, Democrats, Republicans, white people (although I love teasing white people, so carry on,) war and peace. A complaint about Obama, for example, that includes a meme about war and the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t really communicate anything more than what we know about traditional politics and politicians. It implements contradictory trajectories: we often go to war to promote peace, for example.

When I read a blogger I follow reblog a meme or common complaint, I wonder who she’s talking to? Where is her message directed? With whom is she engaged? It can’t be me. After all, I agree: I’m aware of the irony that Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize. Crappy memes are little more than a charm on a bracelet to quickly indicate to others something about personality or affiliation. I see a lot of people with Chrome bags and beards in my neighborhood. I can list their favorite music, literature, politics, food, fashion, et al., without knowing anything else about them. I can likely list the brands of their material existence. The answer to the questions above—to whom are they talking, to whom are they engaged—is always going to be with people who agree with me.

Many folks who claim leftist affiliation (which means what exactly?) are much more interested in creating an exclusive and well-disciplined discourse community much like the libertarian capitalists long ago accomplished. (For an example, see Mises.org.) That is, they wish to organize or to create a community of pissing, sanctimonious dissent that intends to do nothing much more than to disagree with the status quo and occupy a permanent position of predictable and conditional correctness. They say, “We know we’re correct about these things and here’s how to discuss them with others.”

Nothing approaching real work in public space can occur when all efforts are directed at disciplining rhetorical space.

As with the crass libertarian right over the years, I’m struck that The Occupy Movement now resorts to blaming traditional media organizations for not fairly representing their ideas and actions. Their complaints are similar and basically, “You did not correctly cover it.” Blaming traditional and corporatized discourse for a failure of representation suggests Occupy may be an acquiescing liberal struggle seeking popular acceptance in traditional discourse to express a desire to change paradigms about how we represent people who are not visible in our movement. Isn’t that what Obama’s problematic Hope was all about?

Language is important. Let’s examine pronoun use for a moment. When a movement leader suggests We are trying to find ways to talk about what Occupy means and what direction it should take, who is the we he refers to? Is it the General Assemblies? Is it a small group of intellectual activists? Is it an idealized Every One Of Us? Is he talking about The Leaders of the Movement? It’s not clear. (I know this might appear to be a bit of a straw man, but I’ve heard this sentiment expressed in interviews and read it online, and here’s David Graeber expressing it in this discussion with David Harvey.)

I don’t think saying something about an idea illustrates how the idea might work. This is my problem with crass economic libertarianism. The conditional for libertarians is always “Things will improve if and only if we adopt our method” as if the method has already been illustrated to work and that it’s natural. Let’s make an important distinction. For libertarians, the “we” is often “all the others” because libertarians implement a traditional us and them strategy in their discourse. They are the knowledgable outsiders looking for inclusion. Liberals assume inclusion. For liberalism, the “we” is an abstract universal we. It’s meant to be a statement for everyone in a manner everyone should find agreeable. It’s a problematic cornerstone in liberal tolerance. I may get annoyed at liberal reach, but I can’t help but giggle at libertarians who complain about coercive state apparatuses when they refuse to recognize their own goals.

I feel the same way about liberalism I do about crass libertarianism: both practices are expert only at expressing a wish to illustrate how the status quo can actually work well for every one of us. Well, it cannot. Capitalism cannot offer freedom from state coercion as libertarians will argue, and our democracy isn’t going to find a way to promote justice and equality as liberals will insist it can. And that young people resort to memes to recognize a wish for change in others, I wonder if anyone will bother to do more than talk about desire.

dagNotes: We. The Problematic Traditional. The struggle to become popular offers cover for the desire to be correct.

I get annoyed when bloggers reblog crappy memes about POTUS, Democrats, Republicans, white people (although I love teasing white people, so carry on,) war and peace. A complaint about Obama, for example, that includes a meme about war and the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t really communicate anything more than what we know about traditional politics and politicians. It implements contradictory trajectories: we often go to war to promote peace, for example.

When I read a blogger I follow reblog a meme or common complaint, I wonder who she’s talking to? Where is her message directed? With whom is she engaged? It can’t be me. After all, I agree: I’m aware of the irony that Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize. Crappy memes are little more than a charm on a bracelet to quickly indicate to others something about personality or affiliation. I see a lot of people with Chrome bags and beards in my neighborhood. I can list their favorite music, literature, politics, food, fashion, et al., without knowing anything else about them. I can likely list the brands of their material existence. The answer to the questions above—to whom are they talking, to whom are they engaged—is always going to be with people who agree with me.

Many folks who claim leftist affiliation (which means what exactly?) are much more interested in creating an exclusive and well-disciplined discourse community much like the libertarian capitalists long ago accomplished. (For an example, see Mises.org.) That is, they wish to organize or to create a community of pissing, sanctimonious dissent that intends to do nothing much more than to disagree with the status quo and occupy a permanent position of predictable and conditional correctness. They say, “We know we’re correct about these things and here’s how to discuss them with others.”

Nothing approaching real work in public space can occur when all efforts are directed at disciplining rhetorical space.

As with the crass libertarian right over the years, I’m struck that The Occupy Movement now resorts to blaming traditional media organizations for not fairly representing their ideas and actions. Their complaints are similar and basically, “You did not correctly cover it.” Blaming traditional and corporatized discourse for a failure of representation suggests Occupy may be an acquiescing liberal struggle seeking popular acceptance in traditional discourse to express a desire to change paradigms about how we represent people who are not visible in our movement. Isn’t that what Obama’s problematic Hope was all about?

Language is important. Let’s examine pronoun use for a moment. When a movement leader suggests We are trying to find ways to talk about what Occupy means and what direction it should take, who is the we he refers to? Is it the General Assemblies? Is it a small group of intellectual activists? Is it an idealized Every One Of Us? Is he talking about The Leaders of the Movement? It’s not clear. (I know this might appear to be a bit of a straw man, but I’ve heard this sentiment expressed in interviews and read it online, and here’s David Graeber expressing it in this discussion with David Harvey.)

I don’t think saying something about an idea illustrates how the idea might work. This is my problem with crass economic libertarianism. The conditional for libertarians is always “Things will improve if and only if we adopt our method” as if the method has already been illustrated to work and that it’s natural. Let’s make an important distinction. For libertarians, the “we” is often “all the others” because libertarians implement a traditional us and them strategy in their discourse. They are the knowledgable outsiders looking for inclusion. Liberals assume inclusion. For liberalism, the “we” is an abstract universal we. It’s meant to be a statement for everyone in a manner everyone should find agreeable. It’s a problematic cornerstone in liberal tolerance. I may get annoyed at liberal reach, but I can’t help but giggle at libertarians who complain about coercive state apparatuses when they refuse to recognize their own goals.

I feel the same way about liberalism I do about crass libertarianism: both practices are expert only at expressing a wish to illustrate how the status quo can actually work well for every one of us. Well, it cannot. Capitalism cannot offer freedom from state coercion as libertarians will argue, and our democracy isn’t going to find a way to promote justice and equality as liberals will insist it can. And that young people resort to memes to recognize a wish for change in others, I wonder if anyone will bother to do more than talk about desire.

BURN DOWN THE OCCUPY WALL STREET SHOP

occupywallstreetshop:

Occupy Fist Dark T-Shirt

Wear this Occupy Fist apparel to show your support for the Occupy Movements message.

(via Occupy Wall Street Shop)

scum.

what the fuck is an occupy fist?

dagNotes: on the production of space; occupy publishing; histories

(@1300: just edited and added to my note in the third paragraph.)

We should ask, What are the stories we should be telling each other about THIS space?

So often, we’re encouraged to think only of the space we are producing now, willfully ignoring that we’re working within a tradition that insists we do not consider the spaces that have already been produced. Innovation is the favored term over renovation, which is actually much more accurate a description. Cultural Gentrification, in other words.

Saying the Occupy Wall St movement is a “new movement” is a way to ignore the old movements, like say, the slave trade in New York City. I don’t think this white aspect of OWS gets much examination. And for a very good reason. The Occupiers like to claim they have a right to occupy, a right to protest. This Right is a claim that mirrors, implements in fact, the white power that eradicates minority histories in the United States. It’s a little complicated, but I’m convinced it’s part of the same social mechanism.

In the case of Occupy Wall Street, the old movement produced a space for cultivating an American, if not global, plutocracy that redistributes profit to the wealthiest minority and caters to the mostly white and male aristocracy. And that space, as my last story insists, has a history. A slave history. A labor history. An African history. A black history. A white power and white supremacist history. We should talk about it, shouldn’t we?

Most importantly, it’s not a new movement. It is, on the other hand, a renovation of all cultural and social movements. I think we should resist producing a space that is ignorant of what came before it. What made it possible. What exists in the well worn grime of the history of Wall St, for example. All that we can’t see and so ignore.

Occupy Your Cultural History: New York’s Slave Market

Did you know that Wall St was the site of a slave market? Looks like someone is beginning to think about the stories we should be talking about, learning about, publishing and distributing. We’ll see what this Occupy Publishing becomes. For now, the guy behind it seems to have his mind and actions in the right places. (He needs a content editor, though. Dude, if you read this, drop me a line. Someone give him a hand.)

From Columbia’s MAAP site:

Slave Market

In 1711, New York was growing quickly, and the growing needs of the city were often supplied by slave labor. Nearly 1,000 out of about 6,400 New Yorkers were black, and at least 40 percent of the white households included a slave. In these homes, enslaved workers cooked, washed, sewed, hauled water, emptied the chamber pots, swept out the fireplaces and the chimneys, and cared for the children. Along the East River they built, loaded, and unloaded, the ships. They cleared the land uptown, and then planted and harvested the crops.  And up and down the narrow streets they pedaled their master’s goods and even supplied the city’s first fast foods—fresh oysters and steaming hot corn on the cob.

As the number of slaves imported into the city soared, barrel makers, butchers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and tin workers began to purchase young enslaved men in order to teach them their trades. Typically, when a slave owner ran out of work, they hired their slaves out at half the rate of free labor.

Often the slaves themselves were sent out to find work. In a time when fear of a slave uprising was ever-present, the sight of so many enslaved men walking the streets looking to be hired caused alarm. Fearful white citizens began to complain. They demanded a market where slaves could be hired, bought, and sold. Finally, on December 13, 1711, the City Council passed a law “that all Negro and Indian slaves that are let out to hire…be hired at the Market house at the Wall Street Slip…” This market, known as the Meal Market (because grains were sold there), was located at the foot of Wall Street on the East River. It was the city’s first slave market.

LINKS: MAAP, Occupy Publishing

forty-minute interview. very good stuff.

Today in I TOLD YOU SO

First the t-shirts, then the books and movies. It’s a matter of time.

OWS should publicly reject this.

(via ghost-of-algren)

She’s got “high morale”, just not introspection

Check it out kids. To talk about white power is now sectarian. Fuck off.

Who’s this WE you’re talking about?

I’m not opposed to Occupy. I’m incredibly supportive. You haven’t read my blog. But I’m not going to reward Occupy. It hasn’t even begun to address the problems with the mainstream discourse community and its technology that it un-critcally implements on a daily basis. And until it does, Occupy will be a semi-successful yet mainstream movement.

I stick with my claim, it’s a colonialism that insists we participate in it. In other words, it appropriates other voices in order to always already speak for them.

If you can’t admit that. Then you’re part of the problem, not the solution. I can be a supporter and participant and offer my critique of whiteness and its role in Occupy.

shesgothighmorale:

The whole point is to converge in a place that has done innumerable amounts of damage against and is the root cause of these damaged communities and the problems of these minority groups… Our power is in numbers, and this kind of sectarianism over details isn’t going to help anything. I myself have put aside some of my personal views in order to lend a hand towards a movement growing in power. It’s time we all stop practicing our personal politics and fight for rights as a whole, which we’re in severe need of. I know many people who come to our Occupy camp with specific topics they want to highlight, and the rest of us are fine with that. We acknowledge the legitimacy of their issue, and all the issues come together into one voice. And that’s why Occupy is quite special, it’s succeeded in bringing together people of all backgrounds in order to achieve prioritized goals.

We’re already getting enough smack from the media and people who aren’t on board with us for our lack of extreme organization and the couple of prioritized points that we have, but expecting everyone to bow to each of your concerns is only going to turn us into a mad beehive of people with no unity. Your views would inevitably break us all up.

Why can’t we all just put aside this racism and ‘whiteness’ business and learn to accept everyone with open arms who is willing to make our society a truly better place and is more than willing to hold your hand?

“How many times exactly are they supposed to have these same experiences with movements full of people who were content with institutional oppression as long as it didn’t effect them?” … Correct me if I’m wrong, but are you saying that those who are not affected can not join our cause? The rich can not realize what they are doing and abandon their ways? Do you always need someone to fight against, or can we all slowly grow together and abandon this mentality?

I don’t know what you’re fighting for, but I’m fighting for equality. A lack of class-ism would solve many of the issues within poor communities, this can not be denied. Once this is complete, we can continue on in our hopes of addressing other contributing factors. This is what a community is.

(Source: karnythia)

This is the problem, isn’t it. It’s built into the movement. They took to occupy spaces in the capitalist hood. Outside of banks. Industrial parks. Civic centers. The seats of symbolic oppression. Very academic. And comfortable. And masculine. And white.

I like the idea that many activists who know better have been floating: come to the neighborhoods hit hardest by poverty. Don’t ask us to come to you. Come to us.

The notion that the mainstream discourse and movement seems to have is that we are all in this together. But that’s not true, is it?

I think the movement leaders—don’t pretend there are no leaders—are insisting people come to them. It’s very white power. It’s colonialism that insists YOU participate in IT.

karnythia:

The fact that OWS supporters are still insisting marginalized people should show up to Occupy sites & fight to have their concerns recognized as valid is ridiculous. If we have fight oppression within a movement that claims to be anti-oppression then how can we trust those people to actually stand in solidarity with us? What kind of definition of solidarity are these activists using that hinges on them not having to do any of the work to build a relationship?

That’s before we get into the fact that many of the people criticizing Occupy have been to their local sites, have engaged with people from various Occupy sites online, and are speaking from direct experience of the problems in the movement.  Many of the people offering critiques have been actively fighting for the health & safety of their communities for years. The fight for economic justice, for stable safe communities, for access to food, healthcare, & education, for freedom, has been going on in communities of color for generations. Activists in these communities know that their energy is finite, and that they must use it wisely if they wish to be effective.

How many times exactly are they supposed to have these same experiences with movements full of people who were content with institutional oppression as long as it didn’t effect them? How much time must be wasted before we are allowed to decide to focus on things that better serve us & our communities? Why is the only acceptable activism suddenly defined as the kind that puts the marginalized at the most risk? This just highlights that many of the people participating in Occupy are fighting to retain privilege & not fighting for equality. They don’t seem to understand that marginalized people are not going to show up just to be cannon fodder in a class war that doesn’t ultimately benefit us or our communities.

(via peaceshannon)

dagNotes: Occupy, White guys, Production of Space

Occupy anywhere is going to be a micro social space that will concentrate, not simply reflect, the problems we face everyday in the cities in which Occupy occurs. We have more interaction with, for example, the homeless, the mentally ill, loiterers, the employed, the unemployed, the illiterate, the educated, the privileged, the underprivileged, people of color, white people. There isn’t a new kind of people occupying parks and campus plazas across the US, there are the same people occupying. And for most Americans, these occupiers are strangers, The Others, if you will, that we basically mill about with all the time without being asked to recongize. In the space Occupy produces, participants face specific social demands. We know many of them, but one that’s being ignored is the demand to recognize others.

Some of us are cool with navigating the liminal boundaries of insider/outisder cultures, but most people are scared of such a grey area that the space of Occupy produces—it is a liminal space cultivated in the midst of contiguous and diverse cultures and social spaces where everyone is permitted. That’s not typical. It’s not typical for people and it’s not typical for social space. Thus, I don’t blame women at all for being frightened. I don’t blame people of color for being critical about the movement. I don’t blame the bourgeoisie (traditional or not) for being flippant about the whole thing. People simply aren’t sure what to make of it. And we need to work with those people to insure their concerns are met. That is, if Occupy is going to be a truly representative movement. We don’t like to consider it a possibility, but maybe it’s not going to become representative? (Consider what happens as it continues to migrate to campuses.)

I think Occupiers need to get on with the business of addressing what they are producing and how it will be engineered in the future. I’m not calling for leaders or ideology. I’m calling for something more along the lines of social cartography. Simple yet detailed observation.

One thing I’ve been pissed about, quite frankly, is what’s coming through the white guy left regarding the production of space within occupy: the lack of concern for the well-being of others, the lack of recognition of inherited privilege, the lack of desire to actually rather than symbolically give up inherited leadership whenever possible. In addition, I read and hear a lot of left colorblindness in the movement.

I’ll give you an example of the sort of critical work I think we need to insist Occupy burden and actively engage. You know, the GAs are one way to engage more members and more often of the Occupy community, certainly, but offer a unique strategy for resisting confronting privilege as well. Social progress, actual movement through social space, has a habitual stride to it that if unexamined will permit the movement to insist that certain organizational structures within its everyday micro-society are organic or natural. Using sexism and white supremacy as an example, it’s not enough that GA members discuss these problems. The GAs must inject into their discourse an active principle to resist sexist behavior and to resist left colorblindness. I don’t see that happening. I see talking about prejudice. I see idealizing radical communal living.

I don’t see any change to the white masculine rhetoric that is the central element of American social discourse.

What does it mean to produce a social space that can cultivate Occupy while rejecting sexism, classism, white supremacy, et al.? I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about it…