Tag Archives: OWS

Tax Breaks and Tax Increases – Yawn

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A lot of people who know me and those who read this blog might think I am a “democrat” or that I am left leaning.

What the recent hullabalu over extending tax cuts for two months into the new year shows, however, is that very little separates the Republicans from the Democrats.  Sure, democrats defend abortion rights — but have Republicans ever done anything except give lip service to the right to life?  And Obama promised to close Git-mo and end wars, but it seems that the war machine continues to roll on.  The last democrat who truly distinguished himself was shot before he could even be nominated as the democratic nominee — back in 68 when the devil got his way.

My hope for the Occupy movement has always been that it would break the constant cycle of complaining about those in office and then re-electing the same old same incumbents who bicker and never change.  National politics is all ado about nothing.

Yet, we fall for it all the time.  I find it so hard to resist looking at the latest polls or reading about the latest “debate” over taxes or health care or what have you.

But all it does it is distract us

  • from the local community
  • from our commonality with each other
  • from true justice

Our task is to get past that and focus on the here and now of our local practices and local lives.  That is the locus of true freedom.

Thankful 2011

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I am thankful for many gifts in my life this year:

  • My spouse and family most of all
  • My friends
  • ISME and my friends and colleagues there
  • My mind, health, spirit
  • My work, my research, my writing, my teaching
  • The ability to travel to conferences
  • My trip home this past summer
  • Marching with Occupy Portland and Occupy Philadelphia
  • All the Occupiers everywhere
  • Books
  • Music
  • God
  • Good students
  • Stories of vampires, space travel, aliens, magic, love and sacrifice, growth and redemption
  • My comrades on this blog
  • You
  • The Native Peoples who first walked this land we call America
  • Cold water to drink, hot showers, tea, mochas – especially iced mochas
  • Life

God bless

Real barriers to democracy

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At a forum sponsored by The Nation on Thursday 10 November on Occupy Wall Street with Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, and others.  Naomi Klein addressed the issue of “What are the real barriers to democracy in the United States?”  She listed four such barriers:

  • Concentrated Media
  • Advertising
  • Corporate Personhood
  • Campaign Finance

When I mentioned these to some students, they were surprised.  The students told me that all they’ve heard Occupy Wall Street was about was relieving student loans – it was about “entitlement.”

I’ve already discussed the goals of OWS on this blog.  Yet, people still seem confused about the goals.  Yes, some people — and I have myself — have mentioned the relief of student loan debt.  To focus on those claims — as many major news media do — is to miss the overall aims of OWS — the end of corporate control of everyday human life.  In the political picture, this goal entails breaking up media conglomerates (and, of course, The Media know this and so resist reporting about the truth behind OWS), changing the way politicians advertise for offices, the rights corporations claim — especially in regards to “free speech” — and the ways campaigns are financed.

Most of these goals I have just listed are state, national, and international objectives.  Yet, to achieve any one of them can go to some extent in protecting the local communities which I discuss often. At the level of the local community we can break the control of corporations and bureaucracy on our every day lives.  This might mean, however, working on some of these larger goals when we can

The reason to resist, however, enunciating such goals is because they are too easily manipulated.  If we began a movement for campaign finance reform, it too easily distracts from what we can do at the local level and too easily is manipulated by the media conglomerates to serve larger interests.

Does that mean we do not try — no.  It means we try, but we always keep our eye focused on the end game.

And the end game is the complete fulfillment of each and every individual human being on earth, which is a political goal in the original sense of politics.  One most worthy of being human.

Herbert Marcuse Conference 2011 Day 1

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1:45 p.m. EST

ST here: I’ll be blogging live from the 4th International Herbert Marcuse conference today through Saturday.  I’ll try to say a little about Marcuse and also provide some feedback on the talks I go to at the conference.

I am now in a session where Alex Callinicos is speaking as part of a panel. The panel is titled Class-Based Social Movements in the 21st Century: Building a Critical Praxis.  This is the second of four panels on Class Based Social movements.

2:00 p.m. EST

As a side note while Alex makes his initial comments, I’ll make my own.  I’ve never been to a conference with such a high percentage of women participants.  Does this say something about the appeal of Marcuse’s philosophy, about the current state of academia or something else.

Alex is talking about unions and now about Tahrir Square in Egypt – it was tremendously important. Part of the strike was an independent worker’s movement, not an organized labor movement. The strike movement has resumed now on a larger, more radical scale according to Alex.  The ability of the revolution to maintain itself has dependent on the growth of the worker’s movement. Yet, the achievement of the squares has been symbolic in disrupting the workings of government. So we need to find some way to connect the squares with political action. In the EU, the worker’s movement, though weak, still has the ability to stop things from happening. The student union movement in the United Kingdom emboldened the trade labor movement. We need to understand how it works if we are to “mine” the more effective labor movement- critical develop an effective response to the crisis.

2:10 p.m. EST

Before moving on to the next speaker, I’ll say that Alex Callinicos’ comments were interesting, but he gave a much more moving response to the speakers this morning, challenging them to understand the power of the OWS.

Mark Dudzic, Labor Party National Organizer, Labor for Single-Payer

Mark appreciates Alex’s comments about UK, but laments the fact that we do not have even such a compromised class-based labor union that is effective in the US.  We are here to celebrate OWS. Most of Mark’s comments deal with the history of progressive movements in the US in the last 30 years.  One thing was getting his union to understand that “we had to fight to build a labor movement in the US while putting up with the occasional weak “democratic” president from time to time.” Built up to a founding convention in 1995. (Aside: Mark is a very clear spoken and gesticulating speaker.)  The party building model they had said they had to be rooted in the organized labor movement.

I wonder what Mark would say about a MacIntyrean approach to organizing and local communities.  He just said they understood that the workers had to own the movement. Which is clearly something MacIntyre would agree with.  He also agrees that elections were not the end-all of the movement.  The movement peaked around 1998. Labor and unions have been hit by a number of factors from government actions to international actions. Today’s labor movement has been compromised, which changes the dynamics about where they have to be and how to revive the movement.

I could see an interesting dissertation in political science or philosophy that begins with an interview of this guy and addresses the movement’s work from a MacIntyrean perspective.

Joe Burns, Reviving the Strike: argues must be a supplanting of the labor movement if we are to create positive forward motion.

The tragedy of this movement is that, we are in this moment of potential that has struck a chord in working peoples’ hearts, but we have no capacity to move that forward strategically.  The snows are coming, and if we fail to build a party based on class and values, we will never move beyond an episodic participation of explosions that happen every few years.

It strikes me that Mark is right on here!

2:25 p.m. EST

Sam Gindin is speaking, but it is hard to follow because he is sitting down and the mic is not close to him.  He’s from Canada.  He says we need to talk more about the crisis of labor.

There is a crisis of the left, because we have had forty years of the worker getting the shit kicked out of them, and the left remained powerless to do anything. But we have to understand what happened to the workers.  Neo-liberalism was not an attack on the workers, but a way to channel of the workers desires and needs that enforced neo-liberalism. They drove a divide between non-union and union-labors.

NB: I’ve said this over and over in the blog.  We have to move away from this divisive action.

Movements have focused on single issues and could not form coalitions. The different sides had instrumental outlooks and not a universal out look. NB: he is talking about the common good here without using that terminology.

Limits faced in his worker’s assembly: objective fact that there weren’t a lot of struggles going on that they could hook into; the people in the assembly was loose, so they avoided political discussions (NB: an issue of common good); lack of skills, from how to talk to people we disagree with without sounding patronizing, how to organize, how to penetrate labor, or what to do — what kind of activities should we engage in because we can’t just meet.

One idea: have labor unions bus people to the Occupy movements. Don’t just sit and witness.

99% is great, but most of the 99% are happy.  Workers aren’t radical.  People do not have structures through which to express their anger and struggle, and that is a problem of the left.

2:45 p.m. EST

I think that Sam has some good points: there is a need to have some model and some mode of organizing the protest.  Yet, I think this organization has to face the issues of the common good and of the issues about local communities that I have brought up.

Adolph Reed

More concern about the atrophy of structures of resistance and the co-option of the left by neo-liberalism.

Lots of criticism of Obama and Clinton and of the democrats as well as of the right. Right on!

3:00 p.m. EST

Janaina Stronzake, Brazilian Landless Peasant Movement

Janaina is Brazilian and does not speak English, and her translator is struggling with the translation and is not speaking into the mic, so I can’t understand anything that is being said.  This makes me sad.  We should have better organization here if we are really concerned about hearing from outside the margins.

Landless workers movement was founded in 1984 and its main strategy is to occupy unowned, unworked land. We are not thinking of ourselves as a group trying to improve welfare of the whole or redesign the whole system.  We are thinking about revolution

We need to subvert this type of culture that has been raised in us.  Relation with time, relation with work, and relation between people in the community.

NB: Janaina is a very vibrant speaker.  I wish I could understand her language and did not have to rely on the translator. (Where’s my babble fish?)

How many of us treat time as money?  We have to change/subvert that relation.  How many times have we had the the idea of our work as something fun, creative, different?  Even in the occupation everyone has to be represented as their own individual self. Our duty is to be subversive, to become a subversive class.  From this movement of the landless workers, we need to change our relationship to time, work, and community.

NB: We really need a MacIntyre practical study of this Landless Workers Movement

The intellectual must realize she is part of the people.  Class movement cannot be started from capitalism.

Slogan: Occupy, Resist, and Produce!

3:23

Occupy, Resist, and Grow.

7:30

Back to blogging from the conference.  I’m attending a session titled Capitalism in Crisis: Occupy!: Marx, Marcuse, Austerity, and Refusal Part 1. — Strategy and Tactics

The main speaker is Stanley Aronowitz, who, I was informed about 20 minutes ago, is familiar with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed tradition.

He’s opened his talk by stating that OWS has technique without strategy.  Not to have demands evokes puzzlement.  But in the case of OWS, not to have demands is a result of a decision — the reasons because there are too many unanswered questions.  One unanswered question is what is the organization that will propel this movement?  The OWS people have said that they have an organization with a decision-making process, but it’s about what they do tonight or what they do tomorrow.  They are asking themselves questions like what do they do when it gets cold and when it rains?

It is important to see this movement as part of a global movement.  We may say several possible reasons for the upsurge that has taken place in many countries.

The most common explanation is the failure of capitalism to resolve the economic crisis, according to Aronowitz, which may be traced back to 2000.One of the problems with the crisis is that this is a jobs crisis, because the many people who have jobs are satisfied because they have jobs.  But the truth is that they are unsatisfied because they’ve had to make concessions.

The second reason is the great refusal of capital to do anything on the principle of the great liberal-democratic apparatus to do anything to resolve the crisis.  And people elect liberal-democrats expecting them to change thing, but people are learning that the political system is broken.  Thus, OWS says they are a post-political movement — they are not interested in electoral politics.  Yet, the democrats are taking credit for what the OWS movement is doing. But people at OWS are very concerned about being used in this regard.

Aronowitz goes on to explain that the deeper question is, in the absence of a credible party system on the left of some substance that can be trusted to help them, what are the steps that would have to be taken for OWS to have some possibility for survival? They know they must rely on people that are trustworthy, but it’s not clear that anyone is trustworthy here.

7:35

Questions for the panelists:

So the question is what do we do to support them?

What do we learn from the experience from other countries and from our own?

People in other countries are not surprised when their protestors get tear-gassed or beaten by rubber bullets.  But Americans are!  One question as this grows: what will be the response of the police and the state — bi-partisan violence happened in Oakland, which has a democratic mayor.  Or will it be repressive tolerance? when a Mayor Bloomberg says, because this is private property, we will not bother them, but the moment they do something that is not legitimate, then we’re going to arrest them.

7:50

ST: I think what Aronowitz asks is vital to ask, but he needs to open the analysis up.  We need to think locally of how we are going to secure local communities that work outside the political system.  This is really a questioning of the liberal tradition– that is, the tradition of a neutral government that allows “freedom” for the pursuit of unlimited wealth, but not true freedom.

Leo Panitch is now speaking. He saw when the NY Times began to pay attention to the OWS movement that other media started to pay attention to.  They interviewed a woman who said she’s been trying to reform the system all of her life; now she is tired of reforming.  We need to do some careful analysis of this. We have to recognize that this is a form of political theater –there is opposition to the ruling class.

Panitch has brought up N+1 as an excellent source on the demands of OWS.

What they want is to show that there is a different kind of politics — the consensus meeting.

ST: Of course, I’ve mentioned this before in the discussion of Occupy Portland.  It’s very Thomistic, very MacIntyrean, to have this sort of movement.  But consensus based cannot work on the global or even the national level.

Panitch is saying that this kind of politics has a contradiction — the tolerate and extol the slowest kind of politics imaginable.  But I would ask, what are the other options?

The reason that the government giving for why no portapotties is that it is a possible place for a terrorist to put a bomb.

Despite his criticisms, Leo believes we need to be very supportive of the OWS movement.  He is recommending that students and others begin to occupy business schools as it gets cold.  And we should engage in socialist education wherever we can, which people are suspicious of.

8:05

Peter Marcuse is up to speak now.  “We will have succeeded when the woman says, I don’t want reforms but something else, call me a commie, and I’ll be proud of it.”

ST: Is communism a viable option here?  What is meant by communism? Or by being a commie?

The strength of the occupation is not in its numbers or actions, but in what it produces — I think Peter is right here, which is what I have focused on in a number of blogs — the question is what do we do, in Peter’s words, inspired by them.

Peter wisely warns us to be wary of co-optation by the media and by the current government.

8:20

Our first native Greek is speaking about the protests in Greece.  I missed her name because of her heavy accent.  She is listing some needs for the success of OWS

1. The need for democracy

2. To say that they are not only for denunciation of the state

3. Their demand not only to re-appropriate their every day but to re-appropriate the city — the public space.  A new construction of life from below – ST: Could MacIntyre have said it better himself?

Must form a strategy with these features of the social movement and not try to address them in a traditional way.  The crucial question that arises in Greece today, is the left that will not reproduce the same answers as before –  must escape that there is only two roads, either social democracy or collaboration with the powers to make some progress.  Must make a position of power that does not pass from the left, but an alliance of forces, that addresses the real questions.

8:40

Another person from Greece, but he did not introduce himself.  The Left needs to participate in these movements.  They need to question the economics that underlie this democracy.  If Greece remains in the EU, then there will not be concrete solutions.  The next step is to figure how to pose the problem: under which conditions can this anti-capitalism program be proposed?

The Arab Spring has given such an inspiration all over the world.  If, in Greece, there is a tactical defeat of the movement, then it will be an inspiration to the world too.

Very moving and brave words

9:00

ST:  So I asked the panel a question, we’ll see if they answer it.  My question was, where is the discussion of the common good in the occupy movements and where does MacIntyre fit into this discussion?

No answer, of course.

Rawls is NOT the Answer

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I could not disagree more with Steven Mazie’s take on OWS!  Steven Mazie is an associate professor of political science at Bard College.  In his contribution to the Opinionator, he contends that OWS should turn to Rawls to find a way to frame their positions and begin to lay out there view of change for the future.  His view faces many problems

One primary problem with recommending Rawls to OWS is that Rawls’ “justice as fairness” can be used to support the status quo as much as argue against it.  Justice as fairness names Rawls’ political theory which promotes two principles.  The first principle of justice is that everyone should have an equally extensive set of liberties consistent with everyone have the same liberties.  As a moral principle that guides a constitution, this principle remains abstract.  At the practical level, it seems to me that the first principle of justice says nothing about one of the main concerns for OWS — that people with money have greater access to and influence over politics and political leaders.  These are liberties that, Rawls says, are not impacted by the second principle of justice (on inequality) and thus would mean nothing, for example, about reversing the Citizens United decision.

The second principle of justice — what Rawls calls the difference principle — states that inequalities in society are justified only to the extent that they benefit the least well off.  This principle could easily be agreed to and promoted by the political leaders of the last 30 years in America who have bought into Reagan’s trickle-down economics.  The whole point of trickle down economics is exactly that given tax breaks to the super-rich will benefit the least well off more so than taxing the rich.  For the life of me, I cannot understand how good-hearted people like Rawls or Mazie can promote their idea of the difference principle as somehow best for those least well-off.  It’s defense relies on a counter-factual that is easily denied.  If we say, for instance, that tax breaks have not brought about a better life for the least well-off, the right only need say “prove that taxing us would be better.”  Further, nothing in Rawls’ justice as fairness says that we need to pick that level of inequality which is least when the choice is between levels of inequality in which the least well-off do better.

Finally, the current problem is that the middle-class is doing quite poorly right now, and that has nothing to do with the difference principle as stated.

Rawls’ justice as fairness faces many other problems, and the proposal to use it makes a mockery out of OWS.  Anyone who has attended a meeting with occupiers is familiar with their direct democracy.  This direct democracy recognizes difference as fundamental to the democratic process.  Rawls, however, denies that difference is important.  Surprisingly, Mazie does not mention this in his endorsement of Rawls: “They’ll find a trove of ideas to enrich their movement, from Rawls’s “original position” (a heuristic for developing a society’s principles of justice in a context of impartiality), to his view of “public reason” (a mode of debating divisive issues), to his “overlapping consensus” (a vision of groups with incompatible beliefs settling on basic terms of political justice) to his distinction between “the rational” and “the reasonable,” where the latter includes putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and not merely advocating for your narrow self-interest.”

In fact, each one of these principles violate the fundamental democratic spirit behind OWS.

I agree with Mazie that OWS needs to look for inspiration to formulate their vision of justice.  That inspiration should come from someone like Alasdair MacIntyre, however, who has fought practically and theoretically for direct democracy and the end of capitalistic oppression and bureaucratic oppression for decades.

Technology and Life

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Perhaps it is ironic, at best, and misguided, at worst, to write about the totalitarian nature of technology on a blog.  Yet, if we come to understand what Herbert Marcuse means when he calls technology totalitarian, I think we can see that, in fact, using a blog to write about social justice can be a meaningful use of technology that proves counter-cultural.

In 1964, Herbert Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man, as a critique of contemporary society and its use of technology.  One-Dimensional Man asks the questions, why, when we have the technology to end suffering and oppression, does humanity continue to suffer and experience oppression.  The answer to that question lies, for Marcuse, in the way we use technology, not to serve human needs, but to dominate and construct human needs and human life.  The domination of human life makes technology totalitarian.

“For totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.  It thus precludes the emergence of effective opposition against the whole” (Marcuse 1991, 3).

In other words, we allow our needs to be constructed and determined by the technology rather than using technology to answer needs we’ve determined ourselves.  Much more, of course, can be said about needs and their construction, but that will have to await another day.  As a simple example, however, consider the use of he technology of Facebook.

I don’t want anyone to get me wrong; I love Facebook.  I’ve connected with long lost friends, keep in contact with family members, meet new friend, and communicate and share about topics of interest to me (anything from Firefly to midwifery to philosophy).  Yet, I also tend to be drawn to FB, to feel lost when I am unable to connect.  And, of course, whenever I am trying to write a paper or another chapter in my book or prep a lecture, FB and the internet are always there, beckoning.  I cannot turn the net off or shut down Firefox because who knows when I’ll need to check an important date or the accuracy of a quote in a paper or lecture. And if I check that important date, well it’s only automatic to check back at FB, and before my time is up, I’ve chatted quite a bit about a number of things but have never finished that project I was working on.

This use of FB is only a simple example of how technology constructs our needs for us.  We can talk, and I hope we do some day, about its use in the Arab Spring and in the OWS movement, but how that use is countered by its sheet immensity.  And, more importantly, technology works at a much deeper level to construct our desires and wants from what might be better for us overall and what we feel is better right not.

All of which raises a number of contentious issues.  I will write more about technology and the example of midwifery next week. For now, I have to see what’s going on over on FB.

Zizek on Wall Street (Part II): What’s with this “Holy Spirit” stuff?

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Okay, I’ve warmed up to Slavoj Zizek’s speech to Occupy Wall Street. I criticized the first half.  But I like the second half, which is much more hopeful than the first.  Check it out here.

Zizek makes a lot of interesting points, but I’d like to focus on his discussion of the “Holy Spirit.”  He emerges as a prophetic voice, criticizing capitalist “idolatry”:

“What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the Holy Spirit is here now, and down there on Wall Street, there are vegans who are worshipping blasphemous idols.”

I’ve been curious before about what Zizek means when he refers to the Holy Spirit. There’s a passage at the end of his recent book Living in the End Times that I’ve been puzzling over. He recounts an old “Bolshevik joke”:

“…a talented Communist propagandist…after his death, finds himself sent to Hell. He quickly sets about convincing the guards to let him go to Heaven. When the Devil notices his absence, he pays a visit to God, to demand that the propagandist be returned to Hell. However, as soon as the Devil begins his address, starting with ‘My Lord…,’ God interrupts him, saying: ‘First, I am not your Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy for talking to fictions—I don’t even exist! And third, be quick, otherwise I’ll miss my Party meeting!’ “

Following this “joke,” Zizek concludes the book with these words: “This is the kind of God needed by the radical Left today: a God who has fully ‘become a man,’ a comrade amongst us, crucified together with two social outcasts, who not only ‘does not exist’ but also knows this himself, accepts his own erasure, passing over entirely into the love that binds all members of the ‘Holy Ghost,’ that is, of the Party or emancipatory collective.”

I don’t think anyone is sure how literally to take Zizek on this sort of thing. But just for fun, let’s take his narrative very literally—I would hypothesize, much too literally.  This is the doctrine one would end up with: A transcendent God decided to become a human being in order to side with suffering and oppressed humanity. After rising again and giving humanity tools for self-liberation, he willingly died in an act of love, freeing humanity to bring about its own freedom. (Note that the death that God willingly undertakes on this account is not the Crucifixion, but Pentecost.) God is a sort of non-simultaneous Trinity–first Father, then Son, then Spirit, and never more than one at a time.

Obviously, this doctrine is heretical. (Maybe it has a name?)  But like all heresies, it is captivating and contains a kernel of truth.

What is the appeal? Well, to put it in contemporary terms, Zizek gets to have Feuerbachian Marxist humanism AND liberation theology. He gets to say, “There’s no God, and thus all the responsibility to transform society falls to human beings. But we can do it! Because human beings are truly amazing–rational, free, makers of their own history. All we have to do is realize what we’re capable of and stop submitting to our own creations.” (That’s the Feuerbachian Marxist humanist part.)  He also gets to say, “God became our comrade, dwelt among us, chose the side of the oppressed, and is somehow still here in spirit.” (That’s what I mean by the liberation theology part.) He gets to completely empower human beings to make their own future while still hanging on to the “God of the oppressed.”

There’s another side to this, too. It’s appealing because it allows a human-made revolutionary moment to assume a cosmic, redemptive significance. One reason I’m interested in Zizek’s narrative about the Holy Spirit is that I’ve been trying to understand the influence of Jewish messianism on socialist revolutionary thought in Europe during approximately 1915-1925. Every now and then in the stuff I’m looking at, I run into unexpected references to the “Holy Spirit.”

Many young radicals of the time, such as Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs, were self-identified atheists but had a kind of faith that the world was approaching a grand and cosmic redemption. It is too simplistic a response to retroactively scold them, accusing them of being idolators of humanity, or of replacing God with a class, or leaders, or the state, or the Party. Revolutionary moments often awaken in people a hope and faith that they did not know that they were capable of, and yet revolutionary moments are human products—revolutions are not miracles but natural occurrences, which somehow shatter everything and reveal possibilities that had long been dormant.

So I sympathize very much with the narrative Zizek recounts. I don’t buy it in a literal sense, but then again, I don’t think he does either.