Re: <nettime> A Movement Without Demands?

[Snafu <snafu@thething.it>]

On 1/6/12 4:49 PM, Keith Hart wrote:

> [...], but the paper that launched
> this thread reminded once more of my mentor, the West Indian revolutionary
> CLR James. He often drew attention to the intellectuals' impotence in the
> face of mass pressure for enhanced democracy. When the force of people on
> the move fails to conform to their own ideas, they make abstract calls for
> them to fall in line. Many of them end up serving established powers of the
> right and left, not that there are many of the latter these days.

I am not sure whom you are referring to here, Keith. But there is 
nothing abstract in the piece Jodi and I wrote. In fact, the three kinds 
of objections to demands we discuss in the article have been raised in 
several OWS meetings. The second part of the article argues that demands 
can be tactical weapons once you try to rebuild society around communal 
practices. Some of these practices already exist within OWS and tend to 
build autonomous institutions (Negri would call them self-valorization). 
Yet the notion that the General Assembly or the Spokes Council will 
scale up and one day will replace the functions of a national government 
is delusional. Increase the scale of democratic participation (something 
every Occupier desires) entails a radical transformations of the 
institutions that are supposed to articulate the decision-making process.

When I started attending GAs in August in Tompkins Square Park, we were 
about 50-80 people attending these meetings and the discussion was 
moderated but also quite informal. By October you had to compile a form 
in order to submit a proposal to the GA. The Spokes Council, which was 
created to overcome the paralysis of the GA is completely bureaucratized 
and yet still paralized by the ideology of consensus and 
participationism. De facto, anyone can create a working group and send a 
delegate to the Spokes Council with the sole purpose of disrupting it 
(something that is happening on a regular basis).

What we are saying in this article is that instead of pursuing consensus 
at all costs we should begin by acknowledging existing divisions. From 
there we can begin looking for commonalities. But if basically one or 
two individuals are endowed with the power to block any proposal, you 
end up with a dictatorship of the more vocal individuals--some of whom 
are aptly infiltrated so as to make self-government anything but an 
incredibly frustrating experience.

Finally, in the second part of the article we link the struggle for 
democracy to the struggle for social justice and environmental justice. 
We recognize that the commons is a training ground where democracy is 
exerted in relation to material resources. And we ask how do we go from 
local to large-scale commons when capital allows the commons to exist 
only insofar as they do not threaten private accumulation? This is a 
criticism of those who believe that you can simply expand alternative 
economies through incremental change. On the contrary, we believe that 
we need to mark a clear discontinuity with the current economic and 
legal framework of contemporary capitalism as this system does not have 
the resources within itself to overcome the crisis. We also think that 
this discontinuity has to go hand-in-hand with developing alternative 
economies from below.

Yet demands are critical for claiming back the space of thinking (and 
acting) big. To begin with, we propose a national campaign to reclaim 
the ground waters as commons. We also suggest that such campaign could 
be extended to other resources and sectors of the economy. If we do 
that, it is because we know that there are many activists that are 
already thinking and acting along these lines. For instance, OWS is 
working on an alternative bank called "The Commons." The direct action 
of December 17 was titled "Take Back the Commons." There are several 
working groups, forums, and other initiatives inspired to the notion of 
the commons. And even those who do not use this term, often assert 
communal practices around the production and reproduction of specific 
resources.

> From my point of view, this is exactly the opposite of "making abstract 
calls." It is an attempt to say, we do have a lot of little pieces of a 
giant puzzle, but we won't be able to see the larger picture if each of 
us remains focused on his/her own detail and if we assume that these 
pieces will recompose themselves as if by magic (i.e. by "consensus").

best, snafu

snafu


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