Thoughts on an Occupation

IN THE DESERT OF CITIES: NOTES ON THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT IN THE US

An important aspect of the Occupy movement is its rejection of representative politics for a body politics in earnest. You simply have to bodily be at the center of the circulation of cities to practice this politics. Its opposite, representative politics, is being rejected by millions of people. Let’s remember where representative politics comes from, i.e., re-presentation. Your re-presentative presents you in order for you to be absent from the political debates and decisions. So actually what appears to be a politics of presence is really one of absence.

Now for many of us busy, over-worked folk this appears to be a good deal. After all, sitting through long debates and getting trained to go over government accounts is time-consuming and tedious. But in periods of crisis when you no longer trust who is presenting you again in your absence and when you no longer trust the whole apparatus of representation, the need to make your presence felt physically returns, i.e., to go back to basics and originally present yourself as a body in motion at a historic juncture ready to swerve the relations of power in your favor. The occupying mass of bodies that we have seen from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Greece, Spain are made up of those who, for good reason, no longer trust any form of representation, whether electoral or not.

Why Now? What's Next? Naomi Klein and Yotam Marom in Conversation About Occupy Wall Street

From the Nation. 

YM: Yeah, I definitely think we’re in a unique moment in the development of a movement that’s not only a protest movement against something but also an attempt to build something in its place. It is potentially a very early version of what I would call a dual-power movement, which is a movement that’s—on the one hand—trying to form the values and institutions that we want to see in a free society, while at the same time creating the space for that world by resisting and dismantling the institutions that keep us from having it. Occupation in general, as a tactic, is a really brilliant form of a dual-power struggle because the occupation is both a home where we get to practice the alternative—by practicing a participatory democracy, by having our radical libraries, by having a medical tent where anybody can get treatment, that kind of thing on a small level—and it’s also a staging ground for struggle outwards. It’s where we generate our fight against the institutions that keep us from the things that we need, against the banks as a representative of finance capitalism, against the state that protects and propels those interests.

It’s surprising and it’s really encouraging because that’s something that has been missing in a lot of struggles in the past. You usually have one or the other. You have alternative institutions, like eco-villages and food coops and so on—and then you have protest movements and other counter-institutions, like anti-war groups or labor unions. But they very rarely merge or see their struggle as shared. And we very rarely have movements that want to do both of those things, that see them as inseparable—that understand that the alternatives have to be fighting, and that fighting has to be done in a way that represents the values of the world we want to create. So I do think there’s something really radical and fundamental in that, and an enormous amount of potential.

A Movement Without Demands?

From the InterActivist Info Exchange.

If this is true, then the first question that stems from a radical politics of the commons is “how can truly anti-capitalist commons be created, recreated, and expanded”? It goes without saying that such a question points directly to the centrality of private property to capitalist accumulation—an issue that looms so large that most activists prefer to avoid it altogether. Demanding the creation and expansion of commons that are not subject to the imperative of accumulation and profit would make the divisions that are latent in the 99 percent apparent. Weary of the historical failure of actually existing socialism—and lacking large-scale models of alternative development—most Occupiers seem to content themselves with a neo-Keynesian politics that begins and often ends with demands for fiscal reform and government investment in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health care. As we have noted above, however, these demands cannot be properly articulated as they meet the opposition of anarchists and autonomists who reject demands and focus instead on communal processes of self-valorization and self-organization. For the autonomists, the organizational forms of the movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. Such a perspective fails to recognize that the vast majority of the resources managed by the movement are produced and distributed according to capitalist logic.