LENIN'S TOMB

Friday, April 13, 2012

Tahrir: "the revolution is not over" posted by Richard Seymour

Tahrir Square April 2012

Labels: dictatorship, egypt, imperialism, mubarak, occupation, revolution, socialism, tahrir square, US imperialism

Monday, November 21, 2011

Occupy Tahrir Square posted by Richard Seymour

Speaking of bungled acts of repression, the Egyptian military's assault on protesters after last Friday's mass protest has revived the country's revolutionary movement and (so I hear) put a general strike on the agenda. Tahrir Square has been retaken. This image (left) shows what the square looked like on Friday. Following the protest, which was against the military council's usurpation of dictatorial power, dozens of people decided to stay on in the square overnight. They were assaulted by troops using tear gas and rubber bullets in a bid to clear the square. The resulting uproar saw tens of thousands drawn back out onto the square. Repeated assaults seem only to have broadened the array of groups willing to stand against the military. Beyond Tahrir, there have been mass protests in Alexandria and Suez, among other places. The assembly of forces looks remarkably similar to that in February - trade unionists, liberals, socialists, Nasserists and Islamists, all out against the regime. There are now calls for international solidarity as the revolutionary movement, in tens of thousands not dozens, faces down rubber bullets and tear gas. The country's trade unions are calling for their 1.4m members to join protesters in the Tahrir Square sit-in. The struggle is still 'in the balance', as it were, but what a turnaround.

For a time, it seemed as if the armed forces would control the tempo of events. Elections would proceed in the manner prescribed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and most significant forces would participate. The army would incite sectarianism against coptic Christians, and murder them with impunity. The leadership of the Muslim Brothers - expecting to do well in any prospective elections under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party - would tend to side with the army in maintaining 'order' against those leftists, liberals and Islamists who antagonised the new ruling order. Indeed, at a crucial moment in July, a mass Islamist rally in Tahrir appeared to show that the alliance between the military and sections of the Islamists was being consolidated. Salafists, jihadis and Muslim Brothers chanted slogans in favour of national unity, while speakers defended the SCAF. The mobilisations of liberals and leftists against the regime, by contrast, looked small. Shortly after the rally, armed thugs were sent by the army to assault opposition supporters camped in Tahrir Square.

Some, in response to this situation, went so far as to declare the revolutionary process at an end. Others descended into indiscriminate rants about Islamists, and enjoined us to remember Iran, 1979. Here was a case of Islamist counter-revolution if ever there was one. Since many of the people I am referring to (I'm being deliberately vague, not to avoid giving offence, but to ensure that the offence is taken widely) are marxists, it is odd that their mistakes were so liberal. They began and ended their assessment of the forces assembled in Egypt on the basis of an ascribed ideology, with little or no reference to class or other political determinants. Whether or not ideology plays the dominant role in situating actors in a given struggle surely depends on the circumstances, but the imperative to be concrete was blithely evaded. Abstraction governed their responses. Relatedly, even while restricting the discussion to ideology, their discussion of that level of struggle was curiously flattened: Islamism was treated not as a complex, incoherent and frequently antagonistic combination of elements, but as a spiritual totality reducible to an incorrigible reactionary essence.

So, it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers. We needn't deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play. They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation. But, where they have supported progressive political struggles - for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship - they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations. The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation. In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists. The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.

Thirty three people have been killed by armed forces in Tahrir Square since Friday. The level of brutality is shocking. I understand that the military opened fire with live rounds on protesters as they attempted to storm the Interior Ministry. Yet, as you can see, the response from the revolutionaries continues to be defiant:

The military appears to be producing a situation from which there can be no return. Either they will consolidate their power as a new despotism with a slender democratic facade - and elections are now in doubt - or they will be decisively weakened, and a new alignment of democratic forces will have the initiative. As the revolutionaries of Egypt say, Glory to the martyrs, Victory to the revolution, Power and wealth to the people.

Labels: army, dictatorship, egypt, islamism, mubarak, muslim brothers, occupation, revolution, socialism, tahrir square, US imperialism

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Angela Davis at Occupy Philly posted by Richard Seymour

"We talked about the importance of building a movement that is inclusive, but recognising that the unity of the 99% must be a complex unity. Movements in the past have primarily appealed to specific communities. Whether workers, students, black communities, Latino communities, women, LGBT communities, indigenous people, or these movements have been organised around specific issues. Like the environment, food, water, war, the prison-industrial complex. Speaking of the prison-industrial complex. This is the movement I have been personally associated with. We have tried to call attention to the inoperable damage prison and the prison-industrial system has inflicted on our community. So we have called for a reduction of the prison population. Decarceration - decarcerate Pennsylvania. And we have called for the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. But we have also called for the revitalisation of all our communities. We have called for education, health care, housing, jobs, hope, justice, creativity, equality, freedom! We move from the particular to the general. We have come together as the 99%. There are major responsibilities linked to your decision to assemble here in communities. How can you be together? I evoke once more Audre Lorde. Differences must not be merely tolerated but seen as a fund of polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Finally, let me say a few words about my home town, Oakland, California. You have heard about the police assault. Scott Olsen remains in the hospital. Oakland General Assembly met in the renamed park Oscar Grant Park and responded by calling for a general strike on November 2nd. Many unions have already supported the call. I end by sharing the language of the poster: decolonise Oakland. We are the 99%. We stand united. November 2nd, 2011, general strike, no work, no school, occupy everywhere. Occupy everywhere."

Labels: anti-capitalism, capitalism, class struggle, left, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy philly, occupy wall street, protest, socialism, strikes

Friday, October 28, 2011

OWS vs. the Octopus: On Making a Demand posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by Ruth Jennison and Jordana Rosenberg

The biggest and broadest social movement we have seen in this country since the anti-Vietnam war protests has begun. The anti-capitalist revolts in Seattle, the movements to establish and defend the rights of the undocumented in Arizona, the defense of organizing rights in Wisconsin, the robust and indignant response to the murder of unarmed black men by the Oakland Police Department have prepared the way, nationally, for this moment. Internationally, the revolutions in the Middle East have raised the flag of full transformation. These are our waypoints, our history, our archive of how we got here.

The question we have asked ourselves, for so long now, has been: how far can they push us before something breaks?

Something has broken. And re-formed. And billowed – radiant and heterogeneous – into existence.

In the face of barrages of moralizing media campaigns that told us that overspending on our credit cards and living “outside our means” was the reason for the recession, we now have the blossoming of an entirely more accurate alternative narrative. Since at least the 1970s, the financialization of our economy has coincided with an unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the 1%. There has been a near absolute reversal of the gains won by working class militancy in the 1930s, as well as a gutting of the gains won for people of color in the long civil rights era. Such reversals at the level of finance and policy have been put in place through a steroidal injection of resources into the prison system, the police forces and wars: the repressive apparati of finance capital.

Even as veterans of the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements, nothing could have prepared us for the scope of what we have seen and participated in on the streets of New York. Everything you have read about the tremendous energy generated by Zuccotti Park is true. We have seen and love: transit workers shoulder to shoulder with tweens coming to social consciousness; street corner debates at the edges of Zuccotti that last so long the children fall asleep at the feet of their parents; when the food committee crosses the city to bring pizza to your working group, and your voice remembers it has a body that needs to eat; when the National Nurses United sets up voluntary shift rotations that make it feel just a little bit easier for the differently-abled to stick around, march, and wheel; when the human mic shouts “Free Mumia,” and it rings, in waves several times over, through One Police Plaza.

Zuccotti has given us a taste of what we want. Even the briefest breath of the air outside of full alienation feels like enough to strengthen us for the fight ahead. No-one wants this moment – so hard won – to end. But there is a temptation to say that the occupation itself is the revolutionary movement. Such a perspective partakes of some mixture of the long tradition of utopian communitarian social movements, a defanged lifestyle politics – whose injunction to “be” the change you want to see in the world has at times substituted for collective action – and the simple fact that the de-alienating atmosphere of this moment just feels really good.

And this same utopian whiff of de-alienation produces the sheer optimism that re-opens a historically healthy and crucial question for any social movement: the question of what we want. We have seen that there are diverse elements, in many working groups, that want to demand something in excess of the occupation itself.[1] These elements have not congealed, in any way, around a single set of demands. They are passionately interested in discussing the concerns of other groups, and constituencies, and communities. In the remainder of this piece, we argue not for a specific set of demands, but wish to address concerns about the raising of demands in general.

Those elements beginning discussions about demands do face some some steep questions from the rest of the movement. For the sake of clarity we have broken these questions down roughly into 3.

1) What is the Occupy movement?

Is it a clearinghouse – a hub? the center of a constellation? a member of the constellation? – by which other groups are inspired and to which other groups might bring their demands for solidarity? We have seen this structure functioning quite well in rallies with Verizon workers, the anti-police brutality and anti-Stop-and-Frisk demonstrations, the foreclosure auctions, and so on. There has been nothing – not even Zuccotti itself – that has been more inspiring than these actions.[2] But, after the raid on Occupy Oakland last night, the terms of both solidarity and of demands have intensified. Almost immediately, there was a call for the removal of mayor Quan from office. This demand resonated nationwide not as a divisive or premature silencing of debate, but as a cohering of the movement around necessary next steps. Today, the Oakland GA voted to call a General Strike for November 2^nd. What solidarity actions should we take in New York? Nationwide? How does Oakland’s sharpening of demands affect the Occupy movements around the country? It seems that, to even survive as a hub (much less to morph into an anti-capitalist movement that is able to truly challenge the State’s violent protection of the interests of the 1%) we may need to make some demands.

2) To whom do we make these demands?

Wall Street, or. . .the State? We cannot make demands of Wall Street. Wall Street, while it has taken on properly golemish proportions in the OWS movement, is not a coherent entity. It is tentacular. A blind and deaf octopus. Here, we might draw on the wisdom of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Panthers, the sit-down strikes and the unemployed workers’ movements of the 1930s. All of these movements had a double vision, an ability to produce syncretic understandings of the way that the State and capital work together to ensure the status quo. The Panthers provide us with a particularly strong model: holding community-building in a tense and mutually constitutive dialectic with demands for the full restoration of what has been stolen, denied, or hidden from view. The vitality of such a perspective finds an echo in the strength, within OWS, of the solidarity actions against police brutality. It is not coincidental or simply reactive that we have mobilized so strongly against police brutality. It is not only because we have been pepper sprayed, tear gassed, and targeted with rubber bullets, that our largest, loudest, and most passionate marches have cried out against the violence of the State. It is because we realize, in these moments of extreme violence, that when we speak out against capital, it is the State that answers. It is the State that protects the interests of the 1% – the State that arms itself and brings itself down upon us, in the form of arrests, pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

3)Another question that has been percolating in the movement is: what happens if you hazard a demand and lose it?

This is an understandable concern. For those of us too young to have participated in the fire last time, we have needed to read about vibrant cultures of resistance and victories in peoples’ history books, and in our archives. If many people are being radicalized now, or given a sense of political community and possibility for the first time, there is a hesitation to hazard a demand and lose it. Moreover, OWS is a loose constituency of many groups with many differing demands. Within it, there may be concerns about marginization by the movement itself. Many of our comrades of color might look with suspicion at a historical record scarred by the watering down and sidelining of crucial demands by white progressives and liberals. But, if we want to evolve from a sheerly populist movement to an anti-capitalist movement with teeth, we need to have these debates. We need to synthesize and motivate around the needs and wants of our constituents. In the understandably protective feelings that people have about the occupation, some are expressing fears that demands will divide us. But, if “divide” means that we lose the democratic opportunists and the Ron Paul supporters, maybe we should see it as less of a division, and more of a clarification of ourselves as principled anti-capitalists. Furthermore, demands have an inimitable power to further conversation and debate that ripples far beyond us. It is the fabric through which people discuss their relationship to OWS, and through which people who can’t occupy that particular space – for reasons of geography, health status, job, and so on – can take the debates to their communities.

And, if we don’t win a demand? Demands function in many ways. They exfoliate discussion, they clarify our objectives, they extend the optimism and vision of the occupation to real-life contexts. The forging of the demand is itself a laboratory for the revolutionary process. It necessarily entails and encourages a living dynamic between ourselves as the movement and those not yet in the movement.[3]

What, after all, is a demand? That we liberate New York, or Oakland, or Cleveland from the grips of financiers? That we must have returned what was stolen from us and given to the banks and to the 1%? That we deserve to live a life free of police repression and violence? That we want an end to imperialist projects and wars, and the restoration of social services and education? If any of our hesitation to demand comes from a fear of losing, let’s look around us and see how strong we are. For the first time in a lifetime.

[1] In terms of this question, we speak of our experience of New York alone.
[2] Erika Marquez, "The Zucotti/Liberty Park occupation seems to be, indeed, a symbolic (and, sure, material) interpellation to the monopolistic, speculative real state/space control in the city. Yet, this temporary space seizure must give place, as it is occurring right now, to decentralizing the occupation. To barrio GAs, to school occupations, to one-night occupations, to occupying airwaves." Notes from an Occupied New York City, After October 14," in Lana Turner Journal http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/general/occupywallstreetkaplanwinslowmarquez.html

[3] Vijay Prashad’s conception of a succession of demands/victories as a way to nourish the “radical imagination,” is particularly germane here. http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/06/zombie-capitalism-and-the-post-obama-left/

Labels: anticapitalism, antiwar movement, civil rights, class struggle, democracy, left, occupation, occupy wall street, socialism, us politics, working class

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Police terror in Oakland posted by Richard Seymour

The question was always going to be posed. How do you stop the police from physically dismantling your protest by sheer overwhelming force of arms? How can you uphold your right to protest when that right is gainsayed by tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds? When armed paramilitary police are running around like storm troopers - the cliche is appropriate - assaulting unarmed and non-violent protesters? When, having literally broken bones and smashed skulls, the chief of the police department can tell the press, "I think we allowed people to exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly"? And when the mayor - who was herself a target of Occupy Oakland's criticisms - can commend the police on a "a generally peaceful resolution to a situation that deteriorated"?

The debates on LBO Talk suggest two reasons not to be surprised by the police action. The first is that local Democratic Party machines are just as apt to resort to repression as the Republicans; and the second is the proliferation of Joint Terrorism Task Force franchises throughout the police during the Bush era - as is typical, a 'counter-terrorist' weapon has been largely refined and used in combat with workers and the Left. So what can one do? If you resort to tooling up and having running battles with the police, like the Black Bloc do, the police always win. At any rate, the problem isn't ultimately kinetic force, it's political force. Even at the moment when the police bring out their weapons, the chances of their being successfully faced down depend on political organisation not weapons. It is at the level of politics that the problem has to be countered. Yet, if you try to work around it by negotiating with local authorities, the mayor's office etc, you may end up having making your protest inoffensive and ineffective, at which point you may as well pack up and go home. The bourgeoisie fears "mob rule" more than anything at this point - by which they mean, they fear a surfeit of democracy. If you're doing anything remotely effective, the ruling class should be put out.

As far as I can see, the only possible solution is the one opted for by Occupy Wall Street - broaden the movement within the working class. The tactical alliance with unions was probably decisive in stopping NYPD's attempt to 'clean up' Liberty Plaza. Even that isn't necessarily sufficient. The Oakland occupation was, until last night, one of the largest in the US. It had already made links with major unions, as well as with several other occupations across the country. Labour organizers had come along to help out. They were doing everything they could do, and making a success of it. But this didn't stop the police waiting until the early hours of morning, and going on the rampage against children, women in wheelchairs, whoever - the cops weren't there to discriminate, they were there to break limbs. Even so, if Occupy Oakland has a chance of reviving and facing down this terror, it is because of the organisational alliances they formed, the political support they assembled, and the coalition of forces willing to continue to support them.

Labels: capitalist state, class struggle, democratic party, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy wall street, police, police brutality, ruling class, us politics

Monday, October 17, 2011

Visiting Occupy London posted by Richard Seymour

I went to visit the Occupy London site at St Paul's today. I went with the specific intention of getting people to talk to me about what their goals were, what the strategy was, and how they viewed the politics of the occupation. To this end, I went round nabbing people for interviews, and eventually ended up talking to someone at the media tent. Before delving into the politics of Occupy London, I want to describe what's involved in sustaining such an activity for those who aren't able to be there.

***

First of all, Paternoster Square, the original target of the occupation, is still sealed off by police. The cops, though, have relaxed their position since Saturday Apparently, they've been told to 'dress down', which means adopting a less confrontational approach. So, a conurbation of dozens of tents has gathered around St Paul's cathedral. Out front are tents and banners. Along the side are a free food stand, a small generator powering 'media tech', a media centre where you can usually find someone to answer questions, an information point, a first aid area, a 'surplus' tent where people can donate useful goods, a place where people wash dishes, a space where people make signs, and a regular garbage collection service. Since the police removed the toilet facilities on the pretext of 'cleaning' them, and did not replace them, the occupiers have had to send out teams to visit local businesses and work out arrangements with them. All of this infrastructure is run by the occupiers. It is actually a Herculean labour. Some of the people working on the occupation are donating an hour here or there after work or between shifts, while some are there full-time. There are constantly people milling around performing basic tasks, while others engage with the police or members of the public. It's not unknown for well-heeled City workers to stop and vent their displeasure, before being drawn into very public debates.

Despite the emphasis on avoiding 'leadership' in the traditional sense, there is an elaborate division of labour involving working groups on every area of the work that needs to be done to keep the thing going. These report back to the general assembly, which tends to be held at between 12-1pm and then again at 7pm each day. I won't labour the details of process. The principles of consensual ratification and decision-making are familiar enough by now. Essentially, when asked to vote on a proposal, you can vote 'yes', 'no', or 'block'. Only if someone 'blocks' a decision does a majority not result in a motion being passed. This means that if someone has serious objections, their ideas or interests have to be taken into account somehow. Of course, this is intended to frustrate the emergence of any kind of centralised leadership. "We don't need another Scargill, or another Swampy, I was told. We don't need another leader they can cut down." At the moment, the swarm is prevailing over the vanguard. Naturally, I'm sceptical of all this, but it's only fair to say that everyone I spoke to said it had worked quite well. At any rate, the occupation is digging itself in somewhat and it seems to be well enough organised for present purposes.

***

But where can Occupy London go? I wanted to dip my toe in the water of the politics of the occupation, so I asked about the heterogenous political elements present, and what people thought was the dominant tendency. There is an idea, which I heard a few times, that "this is not about left and right". One person I spoke to said explicitly that it was not just a left-wing event, and explained that there were many present who wouldn't call themselves left-wing. Strangely, this insistence sits alongside a set of classic left-wing ideological articulations. Catherine at the media centre said that "these old ideas of political divisions are not necessarily relevant," before going on to add, "because this is about the 99%, this is about the have-nots, versus the have-yachts."

This emphasis on popular unity versus the extremely rich was a recurring theme. Another person said that he didn't object to anyone earning £50,000 a year. It was the top 1% concentrating the wealth among themselves; and even within that 1%, increasingly steep wealth gradations. Worse than that, it's these people who "have an enormous amount of leverage over decision-making in government ... things are happening without consent, in democratic or so-called democratic countries." One example given was the secret loans by the Federal Reserve to banks amounting to $1.1 trillion in 2008 which - whether justified on economic grounds or not - was conducted in an extremely undemocratic and secretive manner. So it's the immense political power of centralised capital, especially financial capital, that is motivating this.

Catherine went on: "We're talking about the super-rich who meet in their little clubs and get to divvy up the world according to what suits them." The apparent rejection of left-right divisions is congruent with a rejection of traditional party politics, "where you just have clientelism and self-serving elites and people who are just trying to make sure they've got a bigger slice of the pie." This is perhaps one reason why you won't find left-wing stalls or newspaper sellers there - not necessarily because they've been banned, but because at the moment it's hard to know how they would be received: as welcome support, or as interlopers? Yet, it doesn't come with a suspicion of trade unionism, as is the case in some continental occupations. The outreach team is building up relations with trade unions and I understand that a delegation of the occupiers will visit a picket line at Blackfriars' station. Trade unionists visited to speak to the occupation, and deliver leaflets about the 30th November strike, and were extremely well received. The occupiers' first statement included support for the general strike and the students' action on 9th November. Moreover, the demands of Occupy London are of a sort that anyone on the Left could embrace; few on the Right could. There is, naturally, a section of the Right that will share the occupiers' hostility to the banks and monopoly capital, but they will agree on nothing else. My feeling is that the aspiration toward a popular bloc of the 99% against the uber rich is eventually going to prove chimerical. But people will find that out in due course.

***

The next thing I wanted to know about was strategy. I suppose this comes up partly because of the way the early demands juxtapose concrete proposals for meliorative reforms with declarative statements on the need to move beyond the present system - with no mediating steps between the two. Given that the entrenched power of the top 1% is considerable, and that the friction they can muster to prevent the passage even of moderate reforms is not negligible, I just wanted to know what thoughts people were having about how to navigate toward that systemic alternative. Generally, the answer is that it's too early to say what the long-term strategy will be: that's what we're here to find out. "We're on day three," Catherine reminded me. "The whole point of consensus decision-making is that we don't know what the answer is, and that we have to come to that answer through a process which is inclusive, which is democratic". The main goal at this point has been to "get the discussion started", another said. There is a tremendous amount of confidence that the answers will emerge organically in the situation. We're just getting step one finished; we'll work out steps two and three as we go.

This is related to the political indeterminacy of the movement thus far. "What we have agreed," I was told, "is that the current system is not working and that it needs changed. And we have some suggestions for that, which include that idea that we need regulators that are truly independent from the institutions which they regulate, that we need government that works for people not the corporations, and that we put people before profit." I would say that this combines the social democratic impulse, with an anti-capitalist impulse. Of course, the 'system' is not named: it could be capitalism, or it could be neoliberalism. And many of the demands are certainly compatible with capitalism continuing to exist. Objectively, though, the demand that the "world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich" is one that can only be realised outside of capitalist social relations. So, it's a reformism radicalising in the direction of an anti-systemic stance. The main thing for the occupiers is that whatever the precise manner in which that indeterminacy is resolved, they are creating a sort of working polis in which it can happen democratically.

***

If the occupiers are thus far not resolved on any particular strategy, they are much clearer about tactics. An essential component of their tactical repertoire is, as I've mentioned, the outreach team. This is where they look for groups of people with whom they have an affinity of interests and seek to build solidarity, and exchange support. In this respect, they're doing exactly what Occupy Wall Street protesters did, which had the result of bringing the union movement down on their side. This re-kindled an historic coalition also witnessed in Seattle, and it ensured that when the NYPD tried to clear out the occupiers from Liberty Plaza, union members helped organise their successful self-defence. In the Sixties, student, anti-war and anti-racist movements helped catalyse and radicalise class struggles. Today, the students movement and the occupations are playing a similar role, giving confidence to rank and file workers. I would bet that the 'Yes' vote in the union strike ballots for 30th November will be that bit higher because of the global #occupy movement. The alliance between the radical left and the labour movement is one that strengthens both sides.

Occupy London are also concerned to avoid unnecessary enmity or friction. This is particularly important as it would not be beyond the police in this country to use some ridiculous legislation to clear out the occupation. Getting the support of the canon for their presence on church grounds was thus crucial in terms of their negotiating position with police. "We are not black bloc," they say, and mean it. They aren't seeking a confrontation with police. Indeed, many seem to take the view that the cops are, as some Wall Street protesters put it, "one bounced pay cheque away from being on this side". I doubt this is actually true. I know that individual police officers have their own grievances with aspects of the system, and are unhappy with the cuts they're experiencing. But I also expect their institutional commitments to prevail over any such grievances. Historically, when state authority has decomposed under the pressure of popular movements, it has been the armed forces rather than the police that has split. Nonetheless, the occupiers seem to have it right: they have a struggle with the police that is currently conducted in terms of publicity, ideology and negotiations. Shifting it onto the terrain of conflict, where the police have the overwhelming advantage, would be foolish.

***

The sign on the wall says 'Tahrir Square, EC4M'. The sneering article on Huffington Post UK, observing this, quoted someone saying "it's not remotely like Egypt". Well, of course it's not like Egypt. This isn't a revolutionary situation, but merely a punctuating moment in the temporal flow of class struggle. But the purpose of slogans mentioning 'Tahrir Square' is to accentuate the internationalism of the movement, to point to its deep systemic roots, to express solidarity with the Arab Spring, to hope that this is the beginning of our own Spring, and to identify the commune as the political form of these aspirations. At the most prosaic level, it expresses the movement against austerity in its most 'political' moment, complementing the 'economic corporatist' moment of trade union struggle. It identifies the political class rule of the 1% as the key problem; the colonization of the representative state by big capital. And it proposes its own direct democratic answer. Of course, Occupy London is not yet a commune. But it is the germ of a commune. Perhaps its fruition will be when the germ takes seed in the heart of productive relations; when the commune is the workers' answer to the power of the 1%.

Labels: anti-capitalism, austerity, capitalism, militancy, occupation, occupy london, occupy wall street, protest, socialism

Saturday, October 15, 2011

#Occupy posted by Richard Seymour

Follow events at #Occupylsx for London updates.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, finance capital, occupation, occupy wall street, socialism, tories

Sunday, October 02, 2011

First we take Manhattan posted by Richard Seymour

Wall Street's famously chaste, humble bearing may not be the secret of its charm. When you ask what is, you begin to realise what the Right has accomplished. It has plausibly retailed something as banal as markets, and all the variations and derivatives thereof, as a libidinised field of popular (competitive) participation, the final source of all wealth/value (stock markets delivering oodles of the stuff like ducks farting out golden eggs), and, if this isn't a tautology, a genre of erotica. The insurance company as an aphrodisiac. Yet it had to occur to someone to give Goldman Sachs and allies something to worry about, a something from which they have thus far been protected. Under the Obama administration, which treats the quack orthodoxies of investment bankers as technocratic panaceas, the politically dominant fraction within the US ruling class has rarely seemed more powerful and at ease. In their home city, the banks and traders have colonised the political system to the extent that one of their own sons, Michael Bloomberg, can take office and actually run the city as a favour to them. (Bloomberg declines remuneration for his services.) This is 21st Century philanthropy.

On that very subject, it must be a felicitous coincidence that JP Morgan Chase donated $4.6m to the New York Police Department on the same day that the same department engaged in a mass arrest of hundreds of #OccupyWallStreet activists marooned on the Brooklyn Bridge.

"The whole world is watching," the protesters chant. No doubt. The question is whether any of those watching will take this as a cue to join the occupation in solidarity. Admittedly it is already an over-worked reference, but there are compelling, if distant, echoes of Tahrir Square in New York (and now, I understand, financial districts in Boston, Miami, Detroit, San Francisco, etc.), in the sense of a nascent attempt to find a new model commune. What the occupiers seek to create is both a rallying point for oppositional forces, and a model of participatory democracy that, if replicated, would give popular constituencies the ability and authority to solve their problems. We'll come back to the model of self-government being debated in Zuccotti Park, but as far as rallying opposition forces and pricking the mediasphere goes, the occupation has been having some success. The critical moment has been the participation of the organised labour movement, with the direct involvement of transport and steel workers, and the solidarity of Tahrir Square protesters. (A mass strike by transport workers in Egypt has just won a major victory, gaining a 200% pay rise, just months after the army outlawed strikes). The context of which it partakes is a germinal revival of class struggle in the United States. Doug Henwood, who initially expressed reservations about the (lack of) politics of the initiative, describes the situation as "inspiring". This is why the initiative has been greeted with the predictable sequence of tactful silence from officials, followed by open hostility, police brutality, threatening murmurs from Bloomberg and, finally, last night's mass arrest - which I would imagine follows orders from the mayor's office. Bloomberg, you'll be relieved to know, is not exercised on behalf of multi-billionaires like himself, but those Wall Street traders on a measly $40-50k, inconvenienced by anticapitalist wildlife.

As far I can tell, the occupation began with a deliberate strategy of having minimal concrete politics and no demands. The idea was that the politics and tactics of the occupation would be agreed in the context of a participatory, open-ended symposium. No doubt some of this is mired in what I would consider a destructive and caricatured anti-Leninism, but I can imagine it comes from real experiences and expresses legitimate desires. Some participants reportedly argued that what was important was the process, not a set of demands. The process itself, the decentralised, participatory system, should be the main 'demand' in this perspective. "Join us," would be the slogan. I can't imagine this approach being effective. There was an early fear that this could mean that right-wing elements would easily take over the movement and distort its agenda, and indeed some of the Tea Party websites have been vocal in their support for the occupation. Yet they aren't setting the agenda in New York. The political messages vary from the extremely abstract ("Care 4 Your Country") to the bluntly specific ("End Corporate Personhood"); from the maximalist ("Smash capitalism, liberate the planet") to the broadly populist ("I am the 99%"). The best slogan I've seen is, "How do we end the deficit? End the war, Tax the rich." This has the virtue of being a popular demand, a concise point, and right on the money.

On the issue of populism, I see that Doug Henwood has reported some misplaced sympathy for small businesses among some of the occupiers. Perhaps this would be a fitting moment to revive the old Stalinist/Eurocommunist idea of the "anti-monopoly alliance". I'm not being completely sarcastic. While the petty bourgeoisie is largely a bedrock of reaction, it can have its radical moments, especially when capitalism is wrecking the lives of small traders, shopkeepers, homeowners - as we've recently seen in Greece, where the lower middle class is overwhelmingly on the side of the working class and the left in this fight. I'm just saying that while one wants ultimately to win people to consistently anticapitalist politics, a sort of leftist, Naderite populism opposing the 99% to the 1% (the people against the ruling class in other words) is not a terrible place to start. The main thing is what the most organised and militant sections of the working class do - if they throw their weight behind the movement, they will probably lead politically.

But what I find most interesting is not the immediate politics, the tactics and the process - which I think tends to become an obsession - but what these say about the strategic orientations of the occupiers. In the broad outline, there have been two major strategies for those challenging capitalism. The reformist strategy has been the dominant one, and immense human capital and potential has been sunk into its promise. It posits society as, above all, a body of intelligent, rational citizens who can judge capitalism as wanting by reference to standards that transcend the system itself - ethical precepts that are universal, rational and humanistic. The influence of Kant on such thinking is well-known. The goal is therefore firstly to mobilise people behind a community interest favouring the gradual supercession of capitalism. This allows for a certain elitism, since it requires the dominance of those deemed most articulate, rational and intelligent in their advocacy of socialist values, as well as those most equipped to handle office. Secondly, those people are to put their trust in parliamentary means, using the power of the executive to impose abridgments of capitalist relations. Those advocating this strategy have differed immensely on the degree to which such an approach needs to be supplemented by industrial militancy and mass pressure. But it is ultimately the parliament which asserts the community's interests versus capitalist interests.

The revolutionary strategy rests on a different analysis. It judges capitalism by standards immanent to it, and raises socialism not as an abstract, supra-historical project, but as one situated within a specific historical moment - a technologically advanced, complex socialism has become possible because capitalism has created the material preconditions for it. Its universalism is not abstract, but class-anchored; rather than the sane, adult citizenry being the repository of universal values, it is the working class that is the 'universal' class, since it has a direct interest in the abolition of capitalism and an historically produced capacity to bring it about. Finally, it sees parliament not as an ideal democratic space in which socialist values can be elaborated and implemented with the authority of the executive at its back, but as a component of the capitalist state that is hostile to socialism. It follows that the aim is to create alternative, working class centres of sovereignty capable of implementing democratic decisions made at the level of the rank and file. Whether such a counter-power was to call itself a soviet, a commune or a Committee of Public Safety (as envisioned in News from Nowhere), its purpose would be to work as a rising alternative form of legitimate authority that would eventually be in a position to challenge the capitalist state. Through a period of dual power, the working class would learn to govern itself, acquiring the skills and self-confidence it would need, resisting attempts by the state to suppress it, until it was in a position to win a majority for taking power. This counter-power would logically centre on the process of production, but extend well beyond the workplace. It would have its own media, its own budget, its own leisure, and its own pedagogy. It would be the material infrastructure of the socialist order it sought to create. This doesn't preclude parliamentary strategies, as a means of helping legitimise and even attempting to legalise extra-parliamentary power.

Where does Occupy Wall Street fit into this? It is not my objective to pigeon-hole it as either a revolutionary or reformist strategy - it is neither, in fact. To put it in what will sound like uncharitable terms, it is baby-steps, the experimental form of a movement in its infancy, not yet sufficiently developed theoretically or politically to be anything else. There is a sort of loose autonomism informing its tactics, while its focus on participatory democracy is redolent of the SDS wing and the Sixties 'New Left', but it is not yet definite enough to be reducible to any dominant strategy or perspective. It is, however, potentially the nucleus of a mass movement, and how it relates to the problems addressed by both reformists and revolutionaries now will make all the difference in the future. At a certain point, the severity of the state's response to it will force a theoretical and political clarification on its (official or unofficial) leadership. Recall how the high watermark of Sixties radicalism in 1968 was also the moment at which the state got serious in its repression. This was the year in which the term "police riot" was invented to describe Chicago cops' response to protesters outside the Democratic convention, where police mercilessly assaulted protesters and bystanders alike, while students chanted "The whole world is watching". This was the year in which the FBI murdered several black leaders. It was in the years that followed that the movement was forced to crystalise politically, to become a much more grim undertaking - though with the unfortunate drawback that many of the leaders were drawn into the most ultra-Stalinist politics while others simply took their 'community organising' schtick into the Democratic fold. So, I would say that if a mass movement emerges from this, the early orientation of Wall Street occupiers to the major strategic questions will make a big difference.

The very attempt to mimic Tahrir Square implies a goal of creating an oppositional, popular sovereignty - a goal also hinted at in the rhetoric about "being the change you want to see in the world". It implies an aspiration, at this stage no more, to take and keep control of public spaces, conveniences, workplaces, government buildings, etc. This is a good, radical development. For the moment, it would be an improvement if they could march on a public highway without being arrested for it, and that is why it is so important that the movement spreads and enlarges. To that end, the evidence of class-anchored analysis and tactics by the occupiers is hopeful. For example, Pham Binh reports that Occupy Wall Street won the support of the Transit Workers' Union after engaging in a solidarity actions with workers at Sothebys and the post office. In this respect, the movement is already light years ahead of some of the early New Left trends, while the union movement is politically in a much better place than it was in, say, 1965. As in Wisconsin, the fate of this movement will partially depend on how much it defers to the Democratic leadership. I see no evidence of Obamamania or any other form of Democratic filiation among these occupiers. Indeed, the movement arrives just as Obama's support is crumbling among all sectors of his base (despite the efforts of apologists such as Melissa Harris-Perry to reduce this to the carping of white liberals), and could work as an alternative pole for its scattered elements, much as the left and various fragments of Clinton's disaffected base were fused together into a movement in Seattle in 1999. The achilles heels of the movement will inevitably be any tendency to exaggerate the suspicion toward centralism, which would tend to leave it vulnerable to repression, and also any tendency to over-state novelty as a virtue in contrast with the ideologies of the 'old left', which would leave it ideologically disarmed - as if any movement can do without the condensed learning and experiences of past generations facing similar problems.

At any rate, there is much to be said for the idea of an American Spring. And beginning the arduous process of experimenting in self-government is not a bad way to herald its advent.

Labels: barack obama, capitalism, democrats, occupation, occupy wall street, protest, ruling class, socialist strategy, strategy, wall street

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Let it bleed posted by Richard Seymour

I'll say it again. The disproportionate focus on the loss of jobs at News International misses the point. The loss of jobs is a story; it's not the story. To begin and end with jobs, to evaluate the closure of News of the World purely on that basis, as the Labour blogger Simon Hewitt does, is an extremely vulgar sort of reductionism. It does not rise to the level of political analysis and, in fact, is its own kind of moralism.

Let's briefly review what's at stake here. We have what is in many ways the vanguard of populist reaction, the Murdoch empire, implicated in a vast network of corruption and blackmail implicating policemen, editors, executives and so on. Front bench politicians are almost all compromised by the Murdoch clan, as they all rush to please the proprietor. The stable has played a prominent role in culture wars and class struggles, with the red-tops forming the sharp end of the wedge. For a number of years, an array of forces have worked to expose some of this, through the courts and parliamentary inquiries, and finally the cracks have coalesced and become a yawning quake at the heart of the Murdoch enterprise. Just when Murdoch thought his power in the British media was about to be further cemented with the BSKYB deal being rushed through by an administration that didn't even risk referring the case to the Competition Commission, a toxic scandal hit News of the World, the empire's flagship UK tabloid. The most profitable brand in UK newspaper market was irreparably tarnished, and advertisers began to flee. With the real risk that the police might be forced to take action, and the BSKYB deal might be permanently halted, Newscorp. acted in a drastic manner, sacrificing the tabloid limb to save the corporate patient. At the same time, it seems, they were busy destroying evidence - so they evidently expected to be hit hard.

That they had to do this certainly constitutes a defeat for Murdoch. And as such, unarguably, it is also a victory for all those forces who campaigned for a long time to bring about such a defeat. It's a victory enjoyed to some extent by the victims of the News of the World and the News International press. It's a victory for those against whom the Murdoch media's culture wars are directed. Perhaps you might argue that this is small beer and will make little difference. The Sun on Sunday will take its place, or Associated Newspapers will just get more readers, or something like that. Simon Hewitt argues, for example: "as long as we live in the kind of society we live in, we will have a pernicious press. Fostering the illusion that things could be otherwise is not worth livelihoods." This reminds one of Hegel's quip about the night in which all cows are black. There are degrees of perniciousness, and these degrees matter. It is not an illusion that things could be different and better even within the present capitalist production relations. More than that, it misses the deeper significance of this moment, which constitutes the beginnings of a comprehensive crisis in the class power of the capitalist media, with News of the World comprising the weak link in the chain.

The concentration of political, ideological and economic power in the Murdoch empire that has been in process has been part of the accumulation of class power by media corporations in the UK and beyond. Its disruption and modest reversal - and it could be much more than a modest reversal if the crisis spreads across the Atlantic - is in general a benefit for the working class, not least for media workers who lost massively from the rise of the Murdoch empire, especially after Wapping which enabled not just the destruction of the union, but also the spatial and technological re-organisation of newspaper work in such a way as to transfer ever more power to management's hands and subordinate labour. In the closure of News of the World is a specific political situation that condenses not just the prevalent antagonisms and crises in the media industry - which, faced with a crisis of profitability has resorted more and more to the sort of methods recently disclosed - but also a generalised crisis of authority for the state, from politicians to the police. All the newspapers who rely on such methods are now looking over their shoulders, however much they publicly crow about News of the World's downfall. The Star's offices have been raided, so both the Murdoch and Desmond group - the most vile, degraded end of the capitalist media - are implicated thus far. I doubt it can stop there. And the relationships between police, politicians and press executives - comprising a potent combination of state, capitalist and ideological power - are under scrutiny now. David Cameron looks in a very precarious position over this. In this light, I think any socialist who sees this purely or mainly as a jobs issue has seriously lost perspective. The situation is rich with materials for socialists to operate on, presenting a set of wide open opportunities. To reduce the political-ideological crisis to liberal hysteria and moral panic, as Hewitt does, is sub-Sp!ked contrarianism - Hewitt even adds the typical boring refrain that hatred for NotW (that uber-bourgeois institution) actually expresses class hatred toward workers, which prolier-than-thou rhetoric is familiar in defences of reactionary institutions of all kinds.

That said, how does one approach the loss of jobs in this circumstance? If what I've said above is true, I think it follows that any resistance on the part of those sacked should be supported. I must say, I think it's vanishingly unlikely that they will occupy or try to take over the means of production, though one may see some interesting graffiti in the last edition of the NotW. This is partly because I intuit that the workers are likely very divided - between the scum (I don't use this term lightly), the professionalised, well-paid journos, the lower paid staff, and the masses of temps who come and go. I would also guess that Newscorp headquarters are, like all major corporate headquarters, heavily securitised and surveilled, and that the police would be there in a flash to hammer any resistance. Still, if they do anything that calls for solidarity, they should get solidarity. This is not just because one should protect jobs at all costs, never cross a picket line, etc., but also centrally because the spread of any sort of militancy within the Murdoch media would accelerate the crisis in the mainstream media. You see, I think the truth is that a lot of newspapers that pose as sensible alternatives are actually surreptitious beneficiaries of what Murdoch has done. Not just because it makes them look half-sensible, not just because it normalised the grotesque, and allowed the broadsheets to latch on in an 'ironic' second-hand way to tittle tattle and eye candy, but because the transformation in the relations of class forces led by Murdoch shaped the whole industry and left all the owners more in control. Anything that looked like a strike or an occupation in the citadels of union-bashing would hit the whole media industry hard. Even if the demands were formally for the restoration of NotW, the process of actually making any gains would seriously abridge Murdoch's control, at a strategically opportune moment as well.

If there is no resistance, though, and if the workers do nothing to ask for solidarity or invite it - in short, if there turns out to be no practical way of expressing solidarity - then calls for solidarity operate purely at a moralistic level. And when Hewitt calls for solidarity (with the NUJ), it is clear that in practise this means little more than lamenting a situation that socialists and media workers should actually be taking advantage of. This could be the best thing that happened to the media in years.

Labels: capitalism, media, news of the world, occupation, propaganda, rupert murdoch, strike

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Statement from UEL occupation posted by Richard Seymour

Public service announcement:

Friends

On the afternoon of Wednesday December 8th 2010 an Emergency General Assembly will take place at the University of East London (details below)

On the same day an important seminar on the politics of 'pain' in an age of austerity will be held at the same site (details below)

The following morning, a public seminar and discussion on the crisis in higher education and the politics and practicalities of protest will be held at 10:00, allowing time for all participants to convene with the occupation afterwards and to travel to central London to join the major demonstration at 1:00pm (details below)

for any further information contact J.Gilbert@uel.ac.uk
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Occupying Students at the University of East London have called an Emergency General Assembly at 13:00 in the main lecture theatre (next to the library - Docklands Campus, Cyprus DLR) on Wednesday December 8th to address the crisis facing the university, as management threatens to roll out redundancies without consulting staff unions and continues to deny students democratic representation, as the voided elections to the students' union, declared illegitimate last Spring, have STILL not been re-run. UEL is in many ways a test case for the next wave of anti-democratic neoliberal managerialism across the public sector - so this issue affects all of us. All staff and students are asked to attend the meeting; sympathetic observers are unlikely to be turned away.

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UEL Centre for Cultural Studies Research
presents
A Public Symposium: The Politics of Pain

8 December 2010, 15:00 to 17:00

'Pain' has become central to the discourse of the coalition government as it embarks on its cuts programme. The cuts are inevitable, we are told, and the pain must be shared in the interests of fairness. But is the pain necessary, should it be shared, is it really being shared, how will the pain affect the social fabric, and what are the psychosocial consequences of the crisis? This is the second seminar in the Centre for Cultural Studies Research’s three-part “Debt, Pain, Work” series that interrogates the discourses and policies of the coalition government. (NB: A full audio recording of our last seminar, 'The Politics of Debt', is now available at http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/)

Speakers:
Kate Pickett, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
Mike Rustin, Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UEL and author of The Good Society and the Inner World
Jeremy Gilbert Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UEL and author of Anti-Capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics

For more Information and for a full audio recording of the last event in this series see http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/

UEL Docklands Campus
Transport: Cyprus DLR station is located right next to the campus (just follow signs out of the station)

Room EB.G.14
(Ground Floor, East Building, which is to the left on entering the main square from Cyprus station)

All Welcome - no booking required

AS SOON AS THIS SYMPOSIUM HAS FINISHED THE ORGANISERS WILL INVITE ALL PARTICIPANTS TO VISIT THE UEL OCCUPATION FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THE ISSUES FACING THOSE IN STRUGGLE AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT'S CURRENT WAVE OF CUTS, AT UEL AND FURTHER AFIELD
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Thursday December 9th 2010

10:00-11:00 (possibly carrying on a bit longer...)

The Crisis in the Universities and the Politics of Protest

Debra Benita Shaw (UEL), Jeremy Gilbert (UEL), Stephen Maddison (UEL) will lead an open seminar on the issues, and offer some practical guidelines on safe and legal protest
Room EB.3.19 (Third floor, main building, turn left on entering main square from Cyprus DLR)

Suggested Readings:

Raymond Williams
'Why Do I Demonstrate?'
http://www.culturalstudies.org.uk/WhydoIdemonstrate.PDF

Jeremy Gilbert
'Elitism, Philistinism and Populism: the sorry tale of British Higher Education Policy'
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/elitism-philistinism-and-populism-sorry-tale-of-british-higher-education-p

Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey
'New Labour’s neoliberal Gleichschaltung: the case of higher education'
http://www.commoner.org.uk/07robinson&tormey.pdf

Paul Bowman
'The ConDemned'
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/the_ConDemned/

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Advice for protestors:

Comprehensive 'bust card' - info to carry with you in case of unwelcome police attention - here:
https://london.indymedia.org/system/file_upload/2010/11/21/303/bust_card.pdf
Useful anti-'kettling' tactics discussed here:
http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/3208
How not to get kettled...:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0jKvgS7olo

Labels: austerity, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, occupation, protests, public sector workers, students, tories, trade unions, uel

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Sussex students in occupation posted by Richard Seymour

Students have just gone into occupation in the University of Sussex over the planned cuts and attacks on higher education. The occupiers, having taken over the Fulton building on the initiative of 170 students, are calling for other students across the country to join a national wave of occupations in resistance to the cuts. After last week's occupation of Tory HQ, it's important to keep up the momentum, and I hope they are joined by others.

Labels: education, neoliberalism, occupation, protest, students, sussex, tories, tuition fees, universities

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan posted by Richard Seymour

Research confirms the patently frigging obvious, namely that insurgent attacks in Afghanistan are motivated by NATO violence:

The authors of the report by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research say they analysed 15 months of data on military clashes and incidents totalling more than 4,000 civilian deaths in a number of Afghan regions in the period ending on 1 April.

They say that in areas where two civilians were killed or injured by Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), there were on average an extra six violent incidents between insurgents and US-led troops in the following six weeks.

The report concludes that civilian deaths frequently motivate villagers to join the ranks of insurgents.

"In Afghanistan, when Isaf units kill civilians, this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks."

"Local exposure to violence from Isaf appears to be the primary driver of this effect."

This is not an anti-occupation study. Rather, it supports McChrystal's counterinsurgency (COIN) policy of restraining military actions in order not to provoke resistance. (For background on this, see here.) This policy is intended to secure loyalty among the natives and enable the occupiers to build a client state structure, but its logic is to prepare the way for a plausible exit, one in which the US doesn't look like it just had its ass handed to it. The prevailing opinion in the military establishment seems to be that COIN didn't work. The strategy of outright high-octane aggression didn't pacify the insurgency either, however, and it's been guzzling revenue for few discernible rewards at a time when the Pentagon is under increasing pressure to reduce its expenditure - the empire is in no danger of going broke immediately, but its resources are seriously stretched. So Obama is sticking with COIN for the time being, while explicitly endorsing negotiations with segments of the Taliban. This is hitched to an ostensible initial withdrawal date of July 2011. There can, of course, be policy reversals. But the American economy is in a bad way, and the empire's global power is deteriorating. The more strategically-minded elements in the ruling class may consider it advisable to adapt to this situation rather than continue with the adventurist policies of Obama's predecessors.

Labels: afghanistan, counterinsurgency, insurgency, isaf, NATO, occupation, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Police attack Sussex students posted by Richard Seymour

Students at the University of Sussex have been organising against cuts in their university, lately beginning an occupation in protest against management lay-offs. It seems that a peaceful protest by students outside the university was attacked by riot police yesterday. Socialist Worker has footage:

Labels: cuts, neoliberalism, occupation, police, students, universities

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Citizen's arrest for Israeli ambassador in Nottingham University today posted by Richard Seymour

You might recall that Nottingham University students were among those who occupied in support of Gaza in January. In response to a visit by the Israeli ambassador, they have issued the following press release:

A planned visit to the University of Nottingham campus today by the Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, has caused widespread dismay and consternation within the university community, notably among the Palestinian and Islamic student body.

The visit, during which the ambassador is due to deliver a lecture entitled “Israel’s Search For Peace” is due to take part at 6pm on Wednesday 4^th November in the Great Hall of the Trent Building, on the University’s Main Campus.

The visit is set to be the focus of a massive demonstration by student protestors who are objecting to the University authorities’ apparent insensitivity and lack of judgment by inviting Mr Prosor less than 8 months after Israel’s internationally-condemned attack on the Gazan population in December 2008-January 2009. This attack left more than a thousand civilians dead and inflicted a huge human and material toll on the Gazan population.

The decision by the University authorities to invite Mr Prosor is even more surprising considering the campus was the stage of a substantial protest movement back in February. This protest was widely reported and involved the occupation of a lecture theatre by hundreds of students. The students were protesting against what many considered to be the tacit complicity of the University authorities in Israeli war crimes.

The occupation protest culminated in a large demonstration outside the Vice Chancellor’s office, under the banner of “Books Not Bombs”. Nottingham South MP Alan Simpson, who spoke at the protest, urged the University to stop dealing with arms manufacturers and to help supply educational materials and financial aids to Gaza’s students.

Many of those who took part in the protest action earlier this year have expressed their disappointment at what many deem to be a highly provocative decision by the University authorities. They feel that this seriously goes against promises that were made, in the wake of the student occupation, by senior management to seek better relations with the Palestinian and Islamic student body.

The protest being organised on Wednesday 4^th November is aimed at raising awareness about Israeli war crimes as highlighted in the recent UN “Goldstone” report of October 2009. Some of the protestors have been seeking legal advice regarding the possibility of affecting a citizen’s arrest on the Ambassador were he to enter the campus.

Many student and human rights campaigners have urged the University to rescind the invitation and have vouched to use all peaceful and legal avenues available to them to ensure the lecture does not take place.

PRESS CONTACT: 07786316571 – EMAIL: NottinghamForGaza@gmail.com

Labels: gaza, Israel, occupation, palestine, students, zionism

Friday, August 07, 2009

Britain in Afghanistan posted by Richard Seymour

Last month, you'll recall, opinion polls appeared to show increased support for the war in Afghanistan. I suggested, bleakly, that if this was a trend it would boost the Obama administration's chances of maintaining the alliance necessary to succeed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since then, we have had polls that show that any increased support detected was certainly a blip. This is telling, given the density of sanctimonious editorials advising fickle readers not to favour 'abandoning' Afghanistan just because of some combat deaths, which are a 'cost worth bearing'. Some stories have confirmed a rise in army recruitment due to a combination of soaring unemployment and glitzy Andy McNab-style propaganda, but - though a problem - this rise is from 27 to 99 new recruits for the whole of Scotland in a period of three months. The effort to make out that this represents a generation of youths enthusiastic for the adventure of the frontline is rather poor.

The escalation and the propaganda flurry that has accompanied it (Brown has already declared 'Operation Panther's Claw' a successful operation) was designed to give the impression that the occupiers were uniting behind a new strategy with confidence. There may be some small element of truth in this. A scathing report [pdf] has just been released by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, dominated by pro-war MPs, which is deeply critical of the way the occupation has been handled*. The report, trying to account for the failure to bring moxy n freem to Afghanistan, blames inapt tactics, poor strategising, and so on. The United States is scolded for, among other things, an excessively unilateral strategy, conflicts between the ISAF mission and that of 'Operation Enduring Freedom', cultural insensitivity toward the natives, and so on. Raimondo, with some justice, mocks this as British imperial resentment about American misappropriation of the white man's burden. Even so, this is largely criticism of Bush era policies, and the report's authors express much hope in the Obama strategy, and in the prospect of greater European cooperation on the war. It also broaches the topic of the war's unpopularity, blaming Iraq for having 'cast a shadow' over what is an altogether different kind of war. The problem, as ever, is not how governments might respond to popular will, but how the popular will might be sidelined and manipulated.

There is no doubting the British state's commitment to this venture. British officials expect the occupation to last for 'decades', long after military combat has (they hope) ceased. David Cameron is committed to further escalation, and is even proposing a 'minister' for Afghanistan, supposedly to overcome 'confusion' at the cabinet level. It is crucial to Britain's global strategy that the NATO alliance be maintained, continues to be viable for 'out of area' operations, and continues to unite the US with Europe, with Britain operating as the intercontinental bridge. There is no other explanation for ministers persisting with these clapped out chestnuts about 'terrorists', the laboured pretence that this is about 'Al Qaeda', this specious 'security' narrative of dark-skinned conspirators plotting to take over the world from whatever tiny plot of land they're permitted to inhabit in peace. Decades of commitment, troop increases, constant war, billions of dollars in expenditure (just as we're about to experience swingeing cuts in public spending), don't sell themselves for some reason. They have to keep hammering away at this 'Al Qaeda' conspiracy theory.

The next national demonstration against the war in Afghanistan takes place on 24 October.

*One arresting aspect of the report is how much it relies on journalists and writers for their advice on operational matters, on how well particular strategies have served the occupation, and so on. All of these are influential people, to the extent that they are senior reporters (Christina Lamb, James Fergusson, etc) or write regular opinion pieces. And all of them are not just tacitly backing the occupation, but actually using their experience and knowledge to assist the occupiers. Talk about embedded.

Labels: afghanistan, british troops, conspiracy theories, NATO, occupation, pakistan, US imperialism

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

SOAS deportations: what you can do posted by Richard Seymour

The campaign in defence of the SOAS cleaners has issued a statement asking people to help out. The following is a list of things you can personally do (see the update at the end of the post):

1. Sign the online petition: http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/28557.html

2. We have only hours to get the message to Alan Johnson & Phil Woolas, who have the power to intervene and stop the deportations. Please sign it, or write your own similar letter, and circulate to as many people who will do the same.

You can:
email: johnsona@parliament.uk
Subject: For the urgent attention of Alan Johnson

Email: woolasp@parliament.uk
Subject: For the urgent attention of Phil Woolas

Post the letter to:

Home Office
Direct Communications Unit
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF

Telephone:
020 7035 4848 (09:00-17:00 Mon-Fri). Fax: 020 7035 474

Address:
Date:

To Rt Honourable Minister of State, Phil Woolas
or
To Rt Honourable Home sectary, Alan Johnson

We are writing to ask you to grant leave to remain, with the right to work, to the SOAS cleaners, Marina Silva, who has claimed asylum and Rosa de Perez who are currently being held in Yarlswood detention centre. We are deeply concerned that five of their colleagues were deported within 48 hours of the raids, without any chance to put their case for being granted the right to stay and in come cases breaking up family relationships.

Marina and Rosa are two of the nine cleaners who were arrested in a raid by around 40 officers of the Border Agency on Friday 12th June 2009, on campus at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). They are charged with overstaying visas—but both women have had good reasons to have entered the UK and an urgent need to work to support themselves and their families. Both have worked hard for ISS, a company which is notorious for exploiting migrant labour, for low wages.

Marina is sixty three years old. She is from Bolovia and her husband was killed in an honour killing after which she was threatened and harassed until she was forced to leave her home. She has been living in the UK for several years and has made a life here. She is ill and was due a hospital appointment on the day of the raid. She has now made an application to stay to be safe and to live in dignity in the UK. These women are not criminals, they are hard working people on low pay who have worked to pay their bills and support their family in the dirty and undignified job as a cleaner. We believe that they should not be treated as criminals.

While Rosa has not sought to resist removal, she will be returned to extreme poverty in Nicaragua and will be unable to support her family—having four children who in the economic crisis of her home country have no other means of support. She will be unemployed when returned. She is in urgent need of the compassion to allow her, now she is here, the ability to stay and to work to support her children and we would ask for a work permit to allow her to continue to work, but in dignity.

While we recognize that their overstay was unlawful, the manner of their detainment at SOAS was shockingly aggressive, disproportionate, deceiving and unnecessary. The cleaning company which employs the cleaners, ISS, had collaborated with the UK Border Agency to arrest the workers through the pretence of an “emergency staff meeting” at 6.30am on Friday 12th June. Once 40 officers, dressed in riot gear, were hidden around the meeting and managers barred exit during the first part of the meeting before the immigration officers pounced on workers. The SOAS campus was sealed off while workers were locked in a room, and then questioned one by one in an adjacent room. Union representatives trying to bring water and aid to their members—including a woman more than six months pregnant—were denied access and not allowed to provide any legal aid for their members, who should have had the right to a solicitor.

We are very concerned about these workers who were employed by ISS, a company which had just been forced to grant union recognition and to pay the London Living Wage to its cleaners working in SOAS. We are especially concerned that the raid took place on the very morning on which cleaners were to rally in support of their sacked UNISON trade union branch chair, who was also an ISS employee. Rosa and Maria are just two of the thousands of migrant workers, refugee and asylum seekers who make a valuable contribution to our society. Like so many who work unsocial hours for low pay, they are making a valuable contribution to society, and they should not be punished and hunted like criminals for this.

We are deeply concerned at what appears to be BIA officials being used to discipline workers in the process of unionising and appeal for permission to stay and work to be granted to the SOAS workers. All of these people are working and supporting themselves as well as paying taxes and national insurance contributions. You will be aware of the research which shows the greater than average economic contribution of working migrants who are single and without dependents in the UK.

We therefore urge you to:

--Release Marina and Rosa on bail immediately and give consideration to our appeal for a grant of leave to remain to these workers.

-- In Marina’s case to grant humanitarian protection. In Rosa’s case to grant a work visa.

--to allow those SOAS cleaners who have already been deported to renter the country for reasons of family reunion and to work.

--to make clear that no person should be raided and held in such a way in the future, without water, medicine or the right to be seen by representatives wishing to provide legal assistance.

We would welcome an urgent response as these workers have only hours before removal directions. We look forward to hearing from you on the matters we have raised above.

Yours sincerely,

Etc.

3. Ring your MP and express your concern for these individuals and ask them to pass on the message to Phil Woolas. You can get your MPs details from www.theyworkforyou.com or ring 020 7219 3000 and ask for their office. Your Mp can ask a question about this or can lay down an early day motion.

4. Fax/email a copy to your own MP and ask that they pass this on urgently to Phil Woolas.

5. Ask your trade union branch/faith group/community association etc to also take action.

Update: as the students have declared victory, there is to be a rally tomorrow at 6pm in SOAS, to celebrate, take stock, and remind management that they are still under scrutiny. See their blog here.

Labels: immigration, migrant workers, occupation, soas, strike, students, trade unions