“After the Apocalypse” – by Alex Knight

As I write, it’s March 1, 2013. I never expected to see this date arrive.

When I was 10 or 11, my father and I watched a TV special, probably on FOX, called “Prophecies Revealed,” which rounded up an assortment of fables from Nostradomus on down, to scare the crap out of the audience and get ratings by making people believe the end of the world was right around the corner. One segment talked about the Mayan calendar, and over a background of creepy and violent images, posed the question, “what’s going to happen on December 21, 2012? Will our technologies revolt against us? Will there be some kind of cataclysmic event, like an enormous meteor impact? Will nuclear war finally consume the Earth?”

I feel silly to admit it, but these ideas of imminent doom really stuck with me. Maybe I was just an impressionable kid who had seen too many Terminator movies. Or maybe there is something really appealing, even liberating, about apocalypse – at least for those of us living in a repressive, alienating, hierarchal social system such as zombie-capitalism. The specter of apocalypse seems to substitute in negative form for the positive vision of “social revolution” that radicals a century ago believed in – namely, a way out, an escape. Say what you will about the Rapture – at least it’s a rupture. Meaning, even if the fires of armageddon were a nightmare in the short run, at least the horror of the world we live in would come to an end, and then maybe something better would sprout from the ashes.

Almost immediately after I left home for college, these apocalyptic prophecies were resurrected from the nether-regions of my mind. On September 11th, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by hijacked airplanes. As I watched in my Freshman dormroom, I felt shock, sadness, but also a forbidden and shameful giddiness. The attack was a horrible, evil thing, and I feel awful for those who lost loved ones. But for me at age 18, the dramatic realness of that event was a sharp, sudden puncture to the bubbly propaganda image of 1990′s peaceful hegemonic America. It was the first time I ever realized that the world is not static – it is changing all the time. I had just never looked outside my plastic suburban cage to see the real world, in its full ugliness and beauty. September 11th, as hellish as it was, was for me that rupture – it jarred me into the awareness that there is an exit from the prison of mainstream America, if you’re willing to do a little digging.

I started to listen a bit more to my communist English teacher, be less defensive in response to voices critical of capitalism, and I set off down the rabbit hole. As Bush put the country on the warpath, I transformed myself from a video game junkie into a committed activist devoting every bit of energy I could to making revolution happen in this country, starting by organizing a national student movement against the war, I hoped.

2012 wasn’t something most social change organizers discussed seriously. I certainly didn’t. But I held onto a secret hope that the date would prove to be significant, and that it would coincide with the inevitable collapse of capitalism and at least the possibility of world-wide democratic upheaval.

My role in this quasi-religious quest was to serve the cause as a martyr. I wanted to give everything I had for the revolution, and probably die trying, like my hero Che Guevara. For my young activist self, 2012 was an end date which gave my efforts and sacrifices context. I made no time for strolling in the park, or even socializing, because I was on a mission of supreme importance. As far as I knew, Che had given up everything to fight for other countries’ liberations from oppression – how could I allow myself any unnecessary luxuries? Time was limited. I didn’t expect to live to see 30, so I had about ten years to pour all my energy into organizing, writing, and anything else I could do to make this global transformation a bit more likely. I took no shortcuts and I didn’t even know how to ask for help. I tried to take the weight of the world onto my shoulders.

As I grew older, my self-sacrificing philosophy turned increasingly self-destructive. I got into abusive relationships and justified my partners treating me badly as sacrifices I needed to make for their sake. I drove myself to exhaustion doing activist work that often didn’t bring me closer to the people I was trying to work with. There were nights when my friends had to almost physically drag me away from my computer to get me to a party or social event. I was so focused on my work that I totally neglected friends who came from out of town to visit! Only later did I learn the lessons of bell hooks, that the revolution is about relationship building, and that you must take care of yourself to sustain being a changemaker over the long haul.

Even though the revolution seemed further and further away, December 21, 2012 still stuck out as a significant reference point on the timeline of my life. How would we mark the occasion? Around 2007, some primitivists suggested going down to the Mayan pyramids for “the party of a lifetime.” That never happened. In the end, I spent the night of the apocalypse bowling in the suburbs with some high school friends. Talk about anti-climactic. By then, no one even talked about it anymore, except in the same way we had talked about Y2K, as the stupid, media scare-tactic spectacle that it was – just another way to get people to buy shit they didn’t need.

The Power of Myth

Photo by Scott Harrison.

Was 2012 ever anything more? Speaking for myself, the passing of the calendar into 2013 feels disorienting. I no longer have an end-point in mind, giving structure to my life’s path. The movements I devoted my energy to, from SDS to Occupy, have now faded into history. Clearly, we have not overthrown the systems of oppression and we are not living in a liberated future. Movements today feel so powerless that’s it’s almost impossible to even imagine that liberation is possible, let alone that it’s right around the corner. Maybe the biggest problem is our inability to imagine. Maybe the stories and myths we tell ourselves actually confine us within certain parameters that we can’t seem to get out of – sunglasses that bring into focus the world we expect to see, while filtering out the rest.

After reading Starhawk’s book Dreaming the Dark and talking to my friend Hugh, I’m starting to think the story of the apocalypse is really a male-driven way of ascribing meaning to our lives, fitting into a patriarchal grand narrative of the universe.

It’s a pretty compelling story. There’s a beginning, in creation, and a clear end of Judgment Day, where the good will be rewarded and the evil punished. There’s also a pretty interesting protagonist, the savior, or martyr, who sacrifices himself to allow the masses to find salvation. What’s in it for him? (Of course it’s a him.) Well, for one thing he achieves the greatest ego boost you could possibly gain, you know the one for being the hero who saved the world. He gets to be recognized, validated, appreciated, in a way that he could never get from normal, worldly endeavors. They don’t tell you in the story that this desire to be a martyr is really a reaction against severe insecurity and the feeling of being invisible and insignificant. My therapist pointed out to me the irony that even if I won the Superbowl and released a multi-platinum album on the same day, this wouldn’t be enough for me. Within the expectations I’d set for myself, nothing short of saving the world would cause me to feel like anything but a failure.

The other interesting thing about this mythology is that the apocalypse is a necessary component to justify the martyr’s self-sacrifice. If there were no final judgment or ultimate revolutionary orgasm, and the world were just going to continue, more or less as it had before the martyr’s plunge into self-destruction, could he still go through with it? Doesn’t the suicide bomber expect forty virgins to meet him on the other side, as reward for serving the cause? What reward did I expect for countless hours of slaving over Google Docs and conference calls, looking down on my friends who cared about fashion or pop culture, scorning joy itself as counter-revolutionary? Is self-righteousness reward enough for torturing yourself?

It occurs to me that the beneficiaries of suicide bombers’ attacks, or American soldiers “serving their country,” are not the martyrs themselves, or their families or friends, or anyone they cared about, or even necessarily their cause. The beneficiaries are the ones who propagate these myths, and who recruit people to believe in them. They’re the patriarchs. The old men who sit back and collect the rewards while sending the young men and women into harm’s way, armed with righteousness and a desire to serve. It doesn’t really even matter if the Pentagon dickheads and Islamic fundamentalists even believe their own mythologies. The narrative of apocalyptic struggle between good and evil facilitates the creation of a world where other people throw their lives away in order to serve them.

All this gives me deep pause. I have to wonder, who was I serving by pursuing a path of self-sacrifice towards the goal of revolution, even a revolution that seeks the overthrow of all oppressive systems? Who benefits from the myth, apparently dominant in many young activists’ minds, that they have to throw away comfort and convenience, and orient every fiber of their being, from their diet to the number of exasperating meetings they attend, towards “the cause”? I’m not sure, perhaps it’s the male-dominated activist culture itself which ultimately benefits.

Certainly the most successful messianic figure on the Left over the last few centuries has been Karl Marx. He spent most of his adult life squirreled away in London libraries, huddled over economic textbooks, trying to conjure a formula which would explain the evils of capitalism and its inevitable downfall. This effort earned him the boils on his ass and a burial in dire poverty and relative anonymity. Yet, Marx’s narrative of the meaning of the world has attracted so many followers since his death (who’ve gone on to found their own sects, with competing interpretations of his holy word) in part because his story very closely mirrors the patriarchal Judeo-Christian prophecy with which he was raised and educated. He has the linear storyline, with the brilliant beginning, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,” moving through different stages of class society, and climaxing in communist utopia. He has the world-savior protagonist, represented by the enigmatic proletariat, who for Marx has been given its ordained mission precisely because it has been stripped of all land and power. “The meek shall inherit the Earth” anybody?

At the risk of being labelled a blasphemer, let me point out a few contradictions in Marx’s prophecy. First, Marx’s critique of capitalism did not extend to a critique of patriarchy or a critique of power structures as such. He didn’t even see capitalism as a bad thing in the end, since it was creating the technologies and social arrangements he believed were necessary for future communism. Without railroads or telegraphs, he reasoned, human freedom is impossible. Only in his early unpublished manuscript on “Alienated Labor,” or in the very brief “Primitive Accumulation” section of his massive text Capital, and maybe a few other places, does Marx focus on the terrible violence that the system has levelled against humanity.

Of course, this should be the very center of anti-capitalist analysis – what does the system do to us? how does it dehumanize us? how does it subjugate women? how does it appropriate and destroy nature? how does it brutalize and humiliate the non-European world? how does it invade our minds and turn us against ourselves? and more? It’s these enclosures, where the capitalist system interacts with the non-colonized, or not-yet colonized universe, which should be the setting for the story, because this is the terrain where we have agency and can fight back. (Or, where we’re already fighting back.)

Marx bypasses these front-lines of struggle and sets his focal point inside the system itself, trying to find the flaw in its logic as if he’s taking down a debate opponent from his collegiate Hegelian philosophy club. This causes Marx to position the incredible violence that capitalism does to human and non-human life as something in the past, as “primitive accumulation,” rather than as the ongoing assault on life-systems which forms the basis of capitalism’s profit and productivity. The result of this blindspot is that Marx’s mythology rests on the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself by being insufficiently productive and the “law of the falling rate of profit.” And so it falls to the working class to seize control of the existing economic apparatus and manage it even more efficiently, producing even larger surpluses, and thereby heaven on Earth.

Lenin’s messianic mission picks up where this prophecy leaves off, with the one revision that the workers aren’t ready or politically advanced enough to manage the economic machinery, so we revolutionaries will appoint ourselves their representatives and manage the machine for them. They’ll still have to work, in fact they’ll work even harder to produce our coveted surpluses, but we’ll convince them that those who work the hardest will be great communist heroes. And if they resist? We’ll shoot them. Stalin, Mao, and the rest are simply the beneficiaries of successful variations on the same overarching Judeo-Christian-Marxist narrative.

Prospects for Hope

Photo by Christopher Martin.

Some mythologies, such as these patriarchal Leftist ones, are oppressive. But myth, narrative, and prophecy are still incredibly powerful, perhaps necessary, tools for communicating hope that the future might be better than the present. So what does a feminist narrative of changing the world look like? To be honest, I don’t know.

Maybe the story has no defined beginning or end, but instead is a continuous resistance against oppression. We’ll probably never be able to pinpoint the exact day when patriarchy first entered into the world, and we may never get to see the precise moment when it is overthrown. But perhaps it’s more important to keep the flame alive, to simply survive the system and its attacks, to endure it, to outlast it, and to give the next generations a better chance of creating a world worth living in. This doesn’t diminish at all the importance of knowing history, because it’s not the presence of a timeline itself that makes narratives or mythologies oppressive.

In fact, I think there may still be a place for 2012 in a new, feminist and anti-capitalist narrative. I would actually like to believe that in the future, our descendants will look back on this era and say to themselves, “Wow, our ancestors in the early 21st Century really had it rough. I don’t know how they survived. Thank the Goddess that we don’t have to live like them anymore.” I know fretting about the horrors of the future is en vogue right now, especially on the Left, which is partially why the idea of apocalypse was, or is, so popular to begin with. But I actually think it makes more sense to invert the story of the apocalypse so that 2012 simply becomes the low-point in human history, the rock bottom, from which things can only ultimately improve in two key indices of goodness: ecological well-being, and the well-being of human community. Maybe that’s what the Mayans meant after all, that 2012 was the end of the dark ages, and the beginning of a new era.

At this moment it’s really hard to believe that things from this point forward will actually improve, but this is because the lenses through which we see the world are tinted by our experience of the world as-it-has-existed. There’s no way to dispute that things have been getting worse and worse for the vast majority of humanity, and certainly for the planet, at least over the last forty years since the movements of the Sixties were defeated. Our hopes have simply been dashed at every turn. Every movement we’ve put our faith into has faced steeper and steeper climbs, harsher and harsher odds. This is not to say that our efforts have been wasted – quite the contrary, they’ve been all the more important given the obstacles they’ve had to overcome. And they’ve laid the groundwork for us in the present to be able to carry on the tradition and pass the torch of collective resistance down to the next generations.

In ecology, there’s this idea of ecological succession, which I think is a really helpful concept for understanding social change. The story begins with catastrophe – maybe a volcanic eruption or flood, which totally destroys whatever ecosystems had previously occupied that terrain. This recalls the crisis our society has experienced under neoliberalism since the 1970′s – the spread of repression and austerity, the breaking of the New Deal, the defeat of the liberation movements. On this devastated terrain, usually the first lifeforms to arrive are simple organisms which rapidly spread across the land, seemingly out of nowhere, only to die off and fade away just as quickly. However, in dying, these organisms which arose in crisis leave behind a more fertile soil for more complex organisms and systems to replace them. Grasses will be replaced by shrubs, which will then be replaced by strong trees, which will house birds and bugs, and ultimately a fully interdependent and sustainable ecosystem known as a “climax community” will form.

For me, Occupy was exactly this kind of first-wave crisis organism. It started from a Facebook event, and before anyone knew it or could explain it, it had taken over city squares across the country, and become a mass political phenomenon the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, only to disappear just as rapidly and mysteriously. And as spectacular a disaster as Occupy was in many ways, speaking as someone whose late 2011 was totally absorbed by Occupy Philly’s craziness, it was also incredibly inspiring and it has definitely left behind a more fertilized landscape for current and future movements to sprout and grow in new directions. So I see Occupy as a new beginning – out of the catastrophe of neoliberalism, we are once again thinking about building mass movements and thinking through the challenges of organizing millions of Americans. We can learn a lot of lessons from Occupy’s failures, and use that experience to invent, new forms of struggle which will be more sustainable, with deeper roots, and able to support more people. The hope is that our movements and communities will get stronger and more stable, until they overgrow the systems of oppression entirely, and an ecological equilibrium re-emerges.

Finally, our feminist story of change has to address the question of leadership. I think it’s obvious we should discard the idea of an individual savior or messiah emerging and leading us to salvation. As that great American socialist Eugene V. Debs so eloquently put it, “I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out.”

The more difficult question seems to be how do we act as leaders and how do we develop more leaders? This is certainly the question I personally struggle with most. How can I best contribute? How do I inspire others? How do I avoid burnout over the long haul? It’s difficult for me, coming from my background of self-sacrifice, to balance self-care with staying motivated and active in organizing. I fluctuate between throwing too much of my energy into projects and getting burned out and retreating into depression.

I don’t have the answers yet, but I’m inspired by feminist writers like Silvia Federici, who says that there is no room for sacrifice in the movement, because we need to build communities of care, in which our collective reproduction and the survival of ourselves is our priority. I think some Marxists and hardcore revolutionaries have a hard time with this theory, because they see it as a retreat if we’re not on the barricades, pouring every once of our energy into struggle at the highest level. But the reality is that there’s a tremendous amount of support that needs to go on behind the lines in order for people to be able to even be on the barricades. Things like raising kids, taking care of elders, taking care of the sick, making dinner, washing clothes, cleaning up, which are traditionally delegated to women and seen as somehow less important than what the male revolutionaries are occupying their time with. So to avoid inequality or hierarchy from entering our movements, it’s imperative that we find a way to share these loads, through communal housing, and other collective ways of organizing our survival.

So here we are, in our winter of discontent, without even an apocalypse to look forward to anymore. How do we stay motivated to keep trying to change the world? What is our vision for creating a future worth living in? Is a feminist story of change less compelling or less sexy than the patriarchal mythologies with their superhuman hero and simplified plot-line? Or is it even easier to succumb to despair and cynicism, and believe that there really is no hope at all, and any vision of a better future is pie-in-the-sky, so we should all become ironic hipsters who care only about mocking everyone who cares about things?

The only answer I have, which I’m trying to keep in mind as I move through a life in search of a path, is that I’m called towards change. I’m not sure where the calling comes from exactly, but I can either accept it or reject it. If I reject it, I know where that path leads. Isolation, addiction, irrelevance. Do I really believe in the depths of my soul that the other path, accepting the calling towards change, will lead to something better for myself and the world, or is it just a myth I’m telling myself to feel less hopeless, a leap of faith which will leave me even more scarred and heartbroken in the end?

I don’t know, but it’s bound to be more interesting than where things are now, so I might as well take another step.

“Alienation and Intimacy”

Apparently a single by the band “Monster Truck.” Thought it was humorously appropriate.

by Corina Dross

Originally posted on Revolt, She Said.

Intimacy is often considered outside the realm of political discourse; politics is what we do out there, not what happens in our homes, our friendships, and our romances. We know this is false, but that knowledge itself doesn’t transform our lives.

We still carry shame and fear about our private needs and desires–and we look to our communities for clues about the appropriate ways to get these needs met. So when we mirror for each other the same policing and oppression we’ve learned from the larger culture, we’re failing to demand a better world for ourselves and the people we love.

The enterprise of radical relationships is to create a language that we haven’t yet learned, that can subvert the language we’ve been given, as we struggle to analyze how the alienation that permeates our world specifically functions in the details of our intimate lives. It’s important that this enterprise be public and collective, to avoid the trap of buying into the self-help book mentality–which advises us to analyze our own deepest fears and worst habits alone or with a therapist, or with a partner or best friend–but as an individual project, without agitating for the world to better meet our collective needs.

And our own worst habits are not merely ours; most likely, they arise in response to larger systems of oppression, which we all face, and which we internalize. There are multiple intersections of oppression in our lives, but let’s focus here on capitalist processes of alienation. If we look at some specific ways capitalism creates suffering–and makes this suffering appear normal and invisible–we may see parallels in our intimate lives and begin to formulate forms of resistance.

There are many cultural side-effects of the capitalist project, worth discussing in future conversations, but for now let’s start with the idea of artificial scarcity.

If we agree that capitalism shapes our world through processes that consolidate wealth, power, and resources amongst very few–creating scarcity and need for the rest of us, robbing us of time to pursue our own deepest desires and interests, time with friends and loved ones, access to healthy food and housing, access to medical care, and a thousand other necessary things, we can imagine how much pressure there is on our intimate relationships, which are supposedly outside of the public sphere, to be sites of abundance. It’s somewhat fantastical that we could expect one person (or several, depending on how we arrange our love lives) to make up for all that lack. But popular narratives reinforce this: that love will fix all our problems; that a long-lasting romantic partnership should fill all that is empty in us; that we must give to our lovers all that the world can’t.

I’m sure most of us have come face-to-face with our own inability to give our lovers what they need, despite our best efforts–or have felt how inadequate our partners have been in caring for us and meeting our needs. To some degree, our material scarcity prevents us from having the time to devote to our loved ones. But deeper than that, internalized oppression from capitalism (and other systems of violence) renders us not only damaged but damaging; in this way true expressions of care and intimacy can feel scarce. Because intimacy under capitalism not only promises a private space for transcendent, abundant freedom in which we can access our best selves (in opposition to the drudgery and anonymity of the marketplace), it also serves as a necessary release valve for our worst selves (where the consequences of our terrible behavior won’t be as public).

I’d also argue that we can’t fully divorce our sense of identity from the economic conditions of capitalism; even the language we use for relationships is conditioned by the marketplace. We speak of “investing” in a relationship, we try to measure love as though it can be numbered, or exchanged like money, with a tally of debts owed and paid. With this fear of scarcity, we become competitive and insecure. We see love as limited, conditional, and rare–something to be earned, and like any other commodity, something that can be lost or stolen.

So how do we begin to resist the effects of the marketplace on our intimate lives, especially as we recognize that even in the privacy of our homes and beds and minds, we aren’t free of capitalist conditioning?

There isn’t one simple solution. But there are ways to begin. In “Twelve Theses on Changing the World without Taking Power,” John Holloway writes, “If separation, alienation (etc) is understood as a process, then this implies that its course is not pre-determined, that the transformation of power…is always open, always at issue.” Which is to say that transformation exists as a germ in our unvoiced experiences, in the moments we stray from the script.

I began by saying that radical intimacy needs to create a language that we haven’t yet learned, to subvert the language we’ve been given. This process has already begun, to an extent, in feminist and queer communities. We owe a huge debt to the language of identity politics even as we need to push past its reductive habits. Oppression functions by making itself seem normal and invisible–we partake in it everyday, until the day we stop and begin taking it apart. This requires vigilance toward normalizing forces even within our radical communities.

Because even in these communities that strive to offer prefigurative or alternate sites of intimacy, outside the model of the couple as a site mythical abundance, we rarely succeed in uprooting these myths. Rather, we pride ourselves on being self-sufficient, on practicing self-care, keeping our needs in check, and being productive activists who can keep fighting the good fight and require little from the world. We submit to the public discourse that legitimizes economic, rational models and disparages emotional experiences.

Very few of us expect our friends, our casual sex partners, our political comrades, or our coworkers to actively care for us—that is, to provide us with sufficient emotional or material support—unless we’re facing some unusual crisis (if we can even swallow our pride and ask for help in those circumstances). If we have a romantic partner, we may or may not expect such care from that person. But care itself generally feels precarious, scarce, vaguely understood, and somewhat shameful to need. Think how much harder it is to describe what’s missing from your emotional life than from your material world.

Invisible and unspeakable, without a meaningful lexicon, is the world of care. No human could survive or thrive without touch, affection, nurturing, attention, compassion, validation, or empathy–yet the need for these acts of care (which are often gendered as feminine, no matter who provides them) has been subsumed into necessary invisibility by a system that depends on depriving us of the means to tend to our own lives.

I highly recommend a text on this topic by a militant feminist research group from Spain, called Precarias a la Deriva (the text is translated as “A Caring Strike”). They describe how capitalism has found ways to isolate and commodify certain acts of care; customer service workers, sex workers, teachers and childcare providers, even cooks and waiters, all provide fragmented aspects of the care we all need to survive. Yet even in the marketplace, we rarely recognize that what we’re purchasing is care.

When I worked as a phone sex operator, few of my callers recognized that they called to receive reassurance, compassion, and attention as well as (or sometimes more than) sexual release. By providing these forms of care under the table, as it were, hidden within the product they were buying, I met these men’s emotional needs while allowing those needs to remain invisible to them. Precarias a la Deriva ask us to consider what “a caring strike” might look like–acts that could make public and visible such invisible and unspoken acts of care; ways to foreground a continuum of care as the basis of human life, outside of any market value, and outside of any transaction in which we “earn” care by being worthy of it, beyond our merely being human.

So let’s begin by finding words for what’s still unspoken between us. Because acts of care, when they can’t be commodified, often entirely disappear from consciousness and language. Gender often dictates who does the emotional support work in an intimate relationship–or any relationship. Yet because the act of caring is itself gendered, no matter who performs it, it is almost always rendered invisible or unimportant.

What stories do we tell ourselves and each other that overwrite the care we are trying to give and receive? How does gender determine these narratives? What violence have we swallowed that becomes fixated on our lovers? What shame do we carry about needing support, and through what subterrenean fissures does this seep into our friendships? It’s curious, too, that our basic human need for care has become an insult—when we call someone “too needy,” for example–when by definition a human need can never be excessive; the lack is not in us, but in the artificial scarcity of the world that should nourish us.

“A specter is haunting Europe; the specter of zombie-ism.” – Zombie Karl Marx

Art by guitarbri. Still from the film “They Live.”

Why has the archetype of the zombie been so ever-present in pop culture over the last five years or so? Is it just a passing fad, like Justin Bieber’s latest hairstyle or the eye-rolling annoyance of YOLO? Is it simply because it’s so much fun to dress up in tattered rags, skin covered with fake blood and oozing sores? Or could this zombie fixation reflect something buried in our subconscious about the society we live in today? Something about our ideas about ourselves, minds turned off and eyes glued to flickering screens, fatalistically attempting to forge human relationships through virtual social networks, working meaningless jobs to pay inescapable debts, groaning towards a future that promises no better than what already exists, and at worse may offer apocalyptic disaster, a remix of Fukushima and Hurricane Sandy set on repeat?

But beyond detachment and doom, could our obsession with the undead reflect the reality of the state of institutional decay, political futility, and economic stagnation the world as a whole is struggling to wade through, like some pungent swamp that won’t release its brambles from our ankles?

I submit that the answer is all that and more. I believe we are, in fact, living through a historic period tied to the image of the zombie because the system which dictates and dominates our globe, from the world-markets to the workplace to the propaganda machines, and I do not hesitate to name it – capitalism, has in fact zombified right before our eyes, transforming into a monster that threatens to tear all of our lives apart, unless we can find some way to annihilate the sucker, or at the very least evade it until its virus extinguishes itself in an orgy of self-destruction.

And yes, this is a hopeful theory, more hopeful than almost anything else a left-wing radical like myself is likely to propose to you in this day and age. In this age of grimness and despair, scheduled to climax in about a month, any hope for a better future may sound like the naïve ramblings of a starry-eyed child who’s watched too many Disney movies. Nevertheless, hear me out, I have a point.

Definitions

Zombies

In 2009, the radical UK magazine Turbulence published an excellent editorial called “Life in Limbo?”, which courageously declared that neoliberalism, the dominant ideological and political project of the capitalist elites over the last forty years, had failed and been replaced by what they called “Zombie-Liberalism”:

Neoliberalism is dead but it doesn’t seem to realise it. Although the project no longer ‘makes sense’, its logic keeps stumbling on, like a zombie in a 1970s splatter movie: ugly, persistent and dangerous. If no new middle ground is able to cohere sufficiently to replace it, this situation could last a while… all the major crises – economic, climate, food, energy – will remain unresolved; stagnation and long-term drift will set in. Such is the ‘unlife’ of a zombie, a body stripped of its goals, unable to adjust itself to the future, unable to make plans. A zombie can only act habitually, continuing to operate even as it decomposes. Isn’t this where we find ourselves today, in the world of zombie-liberalism? The body of neoliberalism staggers on, but without direction or teleology.

Any project that wants to slay this zombie will have to operate on many different levels, just as neoliberalism did, which means that it must be tied to a new manner of living. And it must start from the here and now, the current composition of global society, large parts of which are still in the grip of the neoliberal zombie. This is the greatest challenge facing those advocating a New or Green New Deal. It isn’t a case of simply changing elite thinking or dabbling with government spending: it requires a more fundamental change. Not just a change of consciousness at the head of society, but a transformation of the social body.

From the Turbulence article then, we can define a zombie with the following elements:

1. It’s dead. Yet it’s still walking.
2. It’s dangerous. It can kill people, presumably through cannibalism.
3. It lacks intentional thought or long-term planning. It acts compulsively.
4. It continues to decay. It’s not capable of getting better or being reformed. It just has to be killed.

Capitalism

On my website endofcapitalism.com, I define capitalism as “the power structure that currently dominates all human society, and which has done so for the last 500 years. It is a system based on ecological and social exploitation for the profit of the wealthy few… Life under capitalism is increasingly one of work, consumption, debt, isolation, and emotional and spiritual emptiness. We are losing connection with the two most vital sources of meaning in our lives: community with other people, and communion with nature.”

John Holloway, in his book Change the World Without Taking Power, builds on the philosophy of Karl Marx to elaborate that the nature of capitalism is fetishization. In other words, the system’s power over us is rooted in the separation of “the doing” and “the done,” the subject and the object. Capitalism turns humans into objects – labor, consumers, and commodities. Meanwhile, objects under capitalism are given the illusion of subjectivity – think of any of the millions of commercials you’ve seen on TV; products and corporations are presented to you as living, breathing creatures, with personalities, hopes, and senses of humor.

When I was a teenager it used to be a joke that Carson Daly, host of the disgustingly popular MTV show TRL, was “a massive tool.” This was more than gallows humor, it was an honest reflection of fetishized reality. Capitalism simply transforms human beings into servants of capital, most at the level of alienated wage worker or teenage mallrat, a few at the level of smiling celebrity spokesperson, and the most loyal servants at the level of corporate executive or hedge fund manager – life becomes subordinated to the regime of money-making.

One of my mentors is the Italian autonomist feminist Silvia Federici, whose landmark book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation contains a fascinating critique of Marx’s (and by extension Holloway’s) argument. For Federici, the fact that capitalism dehumanizes and exploits workers through the production process is actually secondary to the primary violence of the system, which is aimed at the Earth, at women, at gender non-conformists, at people of color, and at all of our communities of care.

Marx acknowledged the immense violence which launched the capitalist system around 500 years ago – the genocide of the Native Americans, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Enclosures which evicted the European farmers from their land and into the urban workforce. He labeled this “primitive accumulation,” as if the system needed an infusion of blood and destruction in order to boost itself into global hegemony, but now it can coast along, fueled by the more mundane and subtle violence of wage labor. But Federici points out that this violent underbelly of capital never ended, it has merely extended itself into less visible forms of displacement, like the virtually ignored genocide, war, mass rape and child slavery in the Congo, a process that is by no means “primitive” since its mineral output forms the basis of the microchips computing trillions of operations in billions of laptops and cell-phones sold across the global market.

To this horror she adds the sexual division of labor, since it is merely an unspoken daily fact that women are the ones doing the vast majority of reproductive labor – the labor necessary to reproduce the working class so that capital always has a stable population of healthy workers. Reproductive labor being a term that includes not only birthing and raising children, but also cooking, cleaning, and doing the emotional caretaking of people which allows families and communities to continue to exist without completely disintegrating. All of which is of course largely unrecognized and unpaid labor.

Finally, unlike Marx, we can’t at all ignore the fact that capitalism would be nowhere if it were not for the constant encroachments on nature, and the complete disregard for ecological sustainability. The current economy literally could not exist if not for massive theft and destruction of whole bio-systems, which are, to be blunt, currently facing global collapse.

Leave these elements out of the equation, and you’re left with a textbook definition of capitalism, something about free markets and rational individual actors, which offers no real insight into the meaning of our world today or how it came about.

Zombie-Capitalism

Image by Zina Saunders.

For seven years I’ve been developing the theory that global capitalism is approaching an historic endpoint, and that a non-capitalist future, for better or worse, awaits us all. (Ultimately, I think it’s for the better, although it may be for the worse in the short run.) Since 2008, I’ve had to continually re-write my book and my website, both titled “The End of Capitalism,” as real-world events have begun to put the theory into action. I’m a little worried that by the time I publish my book, capitalism will have long-since ended and to state such a thing will be as old hat as comparing the presidential elections every four years to a choice between the “lesser of two evils.” Yes, this is obviously true, but what use it is to point out, if there are realistically no alternatives?

I don’t believe we’re quite there yet, so let me put my argument forth to you in the hope that it’s still an original idea.

The end of capitalism theory states that the global capitalist system is breaking down, due to ecological and social limits to growth, which are impeding global markets from continuing to expand, a necessary condition for the mobility of capital and therefore for the organization of global power through subservience to that mobility. In other words, the economy cannot grow anymore because

A) the Earth cannot sustain it – there aren’t enough resources left to develop and the damage caused to the biosphere by ever-increasing production levels is deteriorating the ecological base for economic activity, and

B) social movements across the globe are rejecting the possibility of increased exploitation, which is the only way that capital can re-fuel itself, and those movements are beginning to show more and more power from the Chinese workers movement to the Arab Spring to Occupy to Quebec to the General Strike across Europe which started on Nov. 14th.

These two prongs, ecological and social, are hard limits, which together form a vice-grip on the system, constraining it and preventing it from expansion. And for capital, expansion is survival. Like a shark that must keep swimming to breathe, capital is a beast which cannot exist without investing and expanding itself. It can only command by continuing to remain mobile. If it freezes, it suffocates.

In the summer of 2008, global oil production reached what appears to be its historic peak at about 82 million barrels a day.¹ Since then, although new horrible fuels continue to be exploited, like the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, production of the fuels so necessary for global transportation, food production, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and much more, has flat-lined. If we accept that this peak oil corresponds with the peak of energy production as a whole, which Richard Heinberg argues in The End of Growth, then right away the idea of an expansionary economy is obsolete. And this is without considering every other resource Heinberg argues is also peaking, from aluminum to zinc.

September 2008, the global financial markets crashed in the greatest loss of wealth in history. While committing trillions of dollars in relief funds to select “too big to fail” banks, President Bush proclaimed: “Democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised.”² Was he eulogizing the system which had just perished? Perhaps we underestimated Bush, and he possesses a keen sense of ironic timing. Come to think of it, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? “No Child Left Behind”? The whole Bush administration was little more than a joke on us after all.

Shortly before leaving office, he reflected, “Well, I have obviously made a decision to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse. I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”³ Since then the economy has not recovered. In the U.S. and across the industrialized Global North, unemployment remains high, debt is skyrocketing, and the cost of living continues to inflate. Is capitalism sick? Has it fallen into a coma? Does it merely need time to recover, some new products developed to get the machine of investment and consumption going again? Or, does it make sense to view the panicked bailouts of 2008 to the present as a last-ditch attempt to put the system on life-support?

Keep in mind, former investment banker Nomi Prins in her book It Takes A Pillage documented that the total in loans, loan-guarantees and giveaways from the US government alone has exceeded $12 Trillion. This level of government intervention in the supposedly “free” market is quite unprecedented. What if these efforts to “save the free market system” actually failed? What if the causes of the economic crisis go far beyond fraud and abuse in the housing market, speculative bubbles, and shady lending practices?

I argue that the shocks pulsing through the economy over the last four years are due to much deeper tectonic rifts in the system, namely capital’s aforementioned need for eternal growth ramming up against the limits of the Earth’s and the populace’s ability to provide for that growth by being even more exploited than we are already.

This is not 1929, when enormous quantities of fossil fuels remained to be tapped by the war, automobile and petrochemical industries. Nor is it 1971, when computerization had yet to multiply productivity ten-fold, and huge reserves of landless peasants still remained to be rounded up in places like India and China for rock-bottom wage labor. This is 2012, when capital has already saturated the entire globe and transformed it into its own image. Where else has capital yet to install itself?

If this argument is accepted, then capitalism surely must face mortality in the near-future, because its terminal sickness is not going to improve. There is no real avenue for recovery on a planet already stretched to the absolute maximum. So we could argue that the bailout/life support strategy is doomed, and the possibility of an economic structure not based on profit and exploitation might become more likely as the end of capitalism provides an opening through which new worlds can emerge.

This was roughly my argument until about a year ago. Lately, though, I’ve started wondering what it would mean if the end of capitalism had already passed us by and what we’re struggling with now is actually the rotten corpse of capitalism, lingering on past its expiration date.

Since the shock of 2008, capitalism no longer appears interested in saving itself in the long term, in creating the conditions for its own reproduction. Perhaps it has seen the writing on the wall, that there’s not going to be another massive round of enclosures, no new dramatic energy sources to replace the old polluting fuels, no way to coax extra work-hours and higher levels of productivity out of a public that already does little more than work and recover from work.

So instead of looking for legit solutions to this crisis, or even pretending that they exist, what is capital doing? It is cannibalizing. It is throwing everything into tumult in order to realize limited short-term gains, even at the expense of poisoning its own well. Cut social services! Cut wages! Cut everything! Offer the unemployed nothing! Offer the debt-ridden, the foreclosed, the post-traumatic stressed nothing! Just keep tightening the screws.

It’s not just the US, it’s also Canada, Japan and Europe, the entire Global North, which has embarked on this suicidal strategy. In the past, the US could get away with stagnating wages and shitty benefits for their workers because the economy was resting on an enormous bubble of debt, with most of the world confident in the US economy and willing to buy Treasury bonds at the drop of a hat. Meanwhile, debt in the forms of credit cards, student loans, mortgages, etc. was the supplemental income making it possible for the working class to steadily increase its consumption, the very consumption which has sustained global economic growth for decades. Austerity is making this all impossible now.

Clearly income levels and economic stability cannot be attacked and undermined across the entire Global North working class simultaneously as that same working class is expected to increase consumption new levels. Their marketing wizards may convince us to want that new car or the latest iPhone, but how can we buy them if we’re struggling just to make rent?

It makes no logical sense. If the goal were to boost spending and rescue the markets, the strategy would be similar to the New Deal, which rescued the system from the last Great Depression, except Green this time – massive public spending to restore incomes and the standard of living. Yet neither Obama nor Romney offered anything of the sort – just the opposite. It isn’t even being mentioned. So the only conclusion I can come to is that at this point, capital is willing to destroy its own system just for a taste of profits right now. It desires only to consume, and it will consume all that is living, without thought, so long as its bloodlust is immediately gratified.

Is There An Antidote?

November 14th General Strike across Europe. This photo is from Madrid, Spain.

Earlier I mentioned this theory of zombie-capitalism was a hopeful theory. Do I still think so? Yes, and in order to explain why, I need to acknowledge the biggest difficulty of all. To my earlier list defining the zombie, I now add:

5. Impossible to kill with the traditional methods.

The old idea of how to escape capitalism was to take state power and install socialism from above, i.e. Leninism. This notion of how to develop communism has now zombified itself; it’s long since faded into the dustbin of history, so the fact that this logic is still walking in our midst means that perhaps it, too, cannot be killed Yet it must be confronted, because the idea that we can put the good people in charge of the world and they will force everyone else to be good is just a way to escape our own responsibility for the world that we have created and continue to create through our fetishized behavior.

Capitalism is nothing without us, in fact it is the way we act, it is our relationships with one another. And so, if capitalism is a zombie, it is only because WE are the cannibals. Saying this does not evade the reality of class struggle, or the fact that there is a system of power of which we are all the victims. But it acknowledges that we are also the creators of this reality, and this power-structure could not exist without our daily activity which sustains it, our complicity in it.⁴ Maybe this is the reason we’re fascinated with zombies – we have become them.

Here then lies the hope. If zombie-capitalism is the outward expression of our activity and decisions, then we have the power to change it or destroy it. But what does that even look like? Overthrowing capital and the state was already a tall enough task, but how do you overthrow an undead social system?

First, we know what won’t kill it is to hide and pray. It will find us. Nor does it make sense to hunker in our bunkers, hoarding cans of beans and passing ammunition. Survivalism is just another word for predatory Social Darwinism. Let the rich try to escape to their fortress communities; we’re outside the compounds. We’re not trying to kill the zombies out there, like we’re pure humans, and the bad people are lurking in the bushes, ready to strike. The zombies are we, and so the first battle-line is in our own heads.

Are we going to give in to zombie impulses, obedient to a zombie culture and selfish, short-sighted desires, or are we going to snap out of it and treat one another as human beings? Why are brains what zombies most want to unleash their ravenous aggression upon? Perhaps because using our minds, seeing the reality of the world and patiently considering our goals and actions, is the only real way to evade zombie-ism. Like wearing the sunglasses in the cult classic political sci-fi film They Live, if you haven’t put them on, you don’t know the true radical nature of the world, and you’re trapped in a culture of complicity and obedience.

Equally important to seeing and knowing is to join a collective and fight for collective change. No individual, however radical their ideas or lifestyle, can escape the hoard alone. What we are interested in is total social transformation. And this is only possible through organizing, and building communities of care and support, which will allow us to fight that two-front battle, challenging ourselves as we challenge the system.

Perhaps what we most need is clarity of vision – we need to be able to articulate the world we want to live in. I submit that the core value we ought to fight for is life. So the goal of an anti-zombie movement is to create a world in which we learn to appreciate and honor life as the source and site of all value. In place of zombie-capitalism, my proposed antidote is the opposite: living radicalism.

Footnotes:

Together, we affirm that another world is possible: A world beyond oppression, beyond domination, beyond war and empire. A world where people have power over their own lives. We believe we stand on the cusp of something new in our generation. We have the potential to take action, organize, and relate to other movements in ways that many of us have never seen before. Something new is also happening in our society: the organized Left, after decades of decline and crisis, is reinventing itself. People in many places and communities are building movements committed to long-haul, revolutionary change.

SDS can play a vital role by redefining the student and youth movement and how it relates to others. Yet we have a choice ahead of us: We can do what has been done before – reinvent the wheel with the same old cycles – or we can build something new together, something informed by our past and grounded in a vision of what the future might look like. We envision the new SDS in the light of the second alternative.

SDS will forge itself through its actions and speak for itself with its own collective voice. In this statement of organizational vision, we want to highlight the most hopeful ideas and practices in SDS, offering a sense of what our organization might be and what it can offer others. The concepts below are building blocks for our organization.

Here, we begin to evoke our visions for the movement we want to make, but that is not enough: As Students for a Democratic Society, we will work to actually bring it about.

2007 SDS National Convention.

Who We Are

We are here to win.

We really believe we can create a more just society. It is possible, and we can do it – therefore we have a responsibility to do it. Our activism is not simply a matter of “fighting the good fight,” or of insularity or purity, but instead is grounded in the day-to-day reality of what it takes to build a movement that can win concrete objectives and ultimately transform society.

We are in it for the long haul.

Realizing that we can win, we think about what it means to be involved in long-haul struggle, and what it really means to do this for life. We believe there is more to a movement than taking to the streets for a day. We are building our power over the long haul. This helps give perspective on our goals and how we achieve them. We think about how we want the movement – and SDS – to look in five years, in ten years, in twenty years. We think about what we need to do now to get there. We will keep our eyes on the prize.

We are organizers.

As Students for a Democratic Society, we will dedicate ourselves not just to activism, but to organizing. Activists are people who take action to make change in society. Organizers are activists who also work to bring many other people into movements. They help build organizations and spaces that engage and activate new people.

As organizers, we try to meet people where they are, listen to their concerns, and help to amplify their voices. As organizers, we constantly reach out to new people and build alliances wherever we can. As organizers, we strive to see the big picture – not simply our own viewpoint and agenda. We collectively take responsibility for the direction of our organizations and groups. SDS will build a culture of organizing, in which we are always reaching out to people, working with them, building alliances, and creating empowering spaces to make change together.

SDS Chapter report-backs.

We will be relevant.

Our actions will be relevant to a context, a community, a target, and a movement. We believe change will be made by many, many people working collectively, not by an elite “vanguard” or a crew of professional activists. Real change is made by mass movements, and we see Students for a Democratic Society as part of a mass movement for social change. We will therefore organize around issues that provide tangible, concrete gains to meet real needs in our campuses and communities.

In order to be relevant and build power, SDS must grow. We have to continually grow in numbers and chapters, as well as in our capacity and the depth and sophistication of our organizing. We will continually reach beyond existing circles, building our base and expanding our scope. We will not allow ourselves to become activist cliques, nor allow our movement to be limited to one culture or subculture.

We seek to be an organization that students and youth from all walks of life can see themselves joining. We seek to build an organization with which groups and communities in struggle can ally themselves. We will strive to be inclusive and accessible.

We will present ourselves and our ideas in a way that captivates the political mainstream, instead of alienating it and marginalizing ourselves. A large majority of young people in our society are ready for change. We will appeal to the positive values already commonly held in our society and demonstrate how they are antithetical to our current system.

To build the movement, it is crucial that we maintain humble and open-minded attitudes. Elitist attitudes discourage new voices and ideas. We take seriously the way activist language, attitudes, and subcultures have been alienating and intimidating and kept us marginal. We can be ourselves while being mindful and attentive to the needs of others in their communities, respectfully, without putting appearances above and beyond the goals of changing society.

We will be strategic.

Our actions will be strategic, fitted to a collective purpose, a direction, and a need. Strategy is a lens with which we will approach our organizing. We will have a clear sense of our goals, and evaluate how our actions move us toward them. We will always act with respect to the community and context in which we find ourselves. We will always think about how to build our organization, develop new allies, and support other movements.

Strategic action is not a “line” – not a mandated set of rules, but a shared orientation. Strategic action looks different in different places. Our strategy will guide our tactics – not the other way around. Tactics are like a toolbox. If you are building a house, you need different tools at different times – sometimes you need a hammer, other times you need a screwdriver. But you need those tools to be part of a strategy if you want to build the house. More than any tactic for its own sake, we are committed to strategic action to win our goals.

The writers present the proposed document for approval.

We will all be leaders and mentors.

We want organizations and movements that create the space for new folks to learn how to organize and take action. Mentorship must occur intergenerationally between SDSers and movement elders and veterans, as well as internally among SDSers of various levels of experience. We especially value such relationships between people of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We view every new member of our group as a peer-mentor, someone to learn from, as well as encourage and teach.

We believe in collective leadership. We reject leadership that centers on individuals whom others blindly follow. Instead, we will strive to create a space where everyone can develop the skills and analysis to be an empowered change maker. We will strive for leadership development that pushes everyone up. We can all be leaders in a way that the different talents, skills and experience we each bring will be used for the good of the group.

If we are all leaders, we must each take responsibility for our choices and think about the group as a whole, not just ourselves. It is on us to develop each other’s leadership – to see the potential in one another and encourage it. We will build one another up, and we will support each other in becoming leaders and taking on responsibilities.

We are learning from the past. We will reinvent our movement.

Younger generations, without realizing it, often re-invent ways of organizing and thinking about change that have been tried before. As SDS, we will ground ourselves in a real sense of our organizing history, valuing the lessons of the movements that have come before us.

We are committed to a process of asking questions about past social movements and organizations. We will ask why and how the movements of the past have succeeded or failed. We will study each situation so that we are ready to build a stronger movement than ever before. To this, we will add our creativity and our own insights. If we hope to win, our generation must engage in a process of reinvention, on its own terms.

We can mobilize the collective memory of generations of organizers, dissidents and revolutionaries, living and dead, “Old Left” and “New.” We will not try to imitate and relive the past, but we will learn from it, improvise and imagine new meanings for our time and place.

We will also give our movement a new creativity in its form and direction, in its adversity to oppression, and in its construction of another kind of politics that hastens a better and more beautiful world. We will reimagine a politics of liberation, liberating our own imagination from the constraints imposed on it by the present system and by the past. If we hope to win, our generation must engage in a process of reinvention, on its own terms.

SDSers in line to speak, including yours truly.

What We Are Building

We affirm that our organization will be:

1. An Organization That Makes Connections

Students for a Democratic Society will make the connections between students and peoples’ struggles, and between “issues” and the bigger systems of which they are a part. We will ground our work in an understanding of how our issues intersect, how our struggles are connected, and how to actively question and creatively approach those things that separate us. We recognize the importance of fighting injustice on multiple fronts. We know that individual struggles are never won alone.

We are struggling to change a society which depends upon multiple and reciprocal systems of oppression and domination for its survival: racism and white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism and transphobia, authoritarianism and imperialism, among others. In order to create enduring change in such a society, SDS will take on these systems by nourishing interconnected and mutually sustaining struggles of liberation. We will consciously and effectively target systems of oppression through collaborative struggle rooted in concrete organizing. We will expand our understanding of issues often viewed as singular to include a more complex analysis of how peoples’ struggles are related and interdependent.

As we fight to end the wars we see every day, we will also fight against the unseen wars of empire, power and profit against people, especially poor and working people. Our common life will only be reclaimed through organized resistance, through local struggles linked together. We will come to know our friends and allies, and make ourselves real friends and allies to the struggles of other peoples.

2. An Organization for Collective Liberation

Oppressed people are at the forefront of movements for liberation. We understand that our work must target structures of domination in order to build powerful diverse movements for change. We realize that lines of power cut deep in our society, and we must be grounded in the work of combating systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, heterosexism, transphobia, and the many other forms of oppression thoughtfully and strategically.

We realize that having a verbal commitment to this work is not enough. We must be doing this work. We are committed to learning how oppression operates and how we can transform it. We are committed to leveraging whatever resources we as students and individuals have, thoughtfully, respectfully, and transparently, for the benefit of larger communities and movements.

We believe the campus must be opened, and the character of both university and education in society fundamentally changed from its historical role as the “Ivory Tower” bastion of privilege. We commit to the fight for access to education and higher education, because they are not privileges but rights, and because reparations for bias in admissions owing to systems of oppression are long past due.

We commit to changing the character of education and to affirm the necessity of Ethnic, Women’s, Queer, and African/a studies departments as correctives to the historical bias of academia. We further affirm that curricula in general must be challenged as to both their means and their ends. Education must liberate society from, and not perpetuate, the condition of domination by a select few.

Womyn’s Caucus meeting.

We are committed to listening to, learning from, and amplifying the voices of oppressed communities and their allies. On our campuses, we will prioritize workers’ rights, gender justice, affirmative action other and issues relevant to oppressed members of our communities. We commit to changing the function of the university, to ensure that the university is not above the community but an accountable part of it, and to ensure respect for workers’ rights, for freedom of inquiry, and for the rights of students.

We are committed to listening to, learning from, and amplifying the voices of oppressed communities and their allies. On our campuses, we will prioritize workers’ rights, gender justice, affirmative action other and issues relevant to oppressed members of our communities.

We know that peoples not traditionally recognized as part of the student movement have always been and still are organizing, at the forefront. We recognize that activism and knowledge is not the sole province of a particular demographic; nor is the struggle left simply for the oppressed to take up. Everyone has a duty to listen; everyone has a duty to act.

We will challenge the standards and scripts of activism and action that do not account for the experiences of peoples engaged in struggle, and will give action power by recognizing the diverse and significant ways in which people resist and combat oppression daily. Ordinary people are continuously resisting in extraordinary ways. We will recognize and support acts of resistance that empower people, whether or not such acts fit nicely into an activist mold.

3. An Organization in Solidarity and With Accountability to Others

As Students for a Democratic Society, we see our work as grounded in strong human relationships. We seek to build relationships on solidarity and trust, standing together and recognizing others’ struggles as our own. SDS will not simply proclaim itself in solidarity, but actively practice solidarity with communities, workers, oppressed peoples, and all allied movements in struggle.

We will build strong movements where we live that can both combat oppression at home and offer meaningful support to other movements and communities, here and around the world. Our solidarity will be locally rooted and nationally/globally linked. It will be solidarity across borders, and solidarity against borders.

Our solidarity will be horizontal, shared below. It will subvert and transform the present relations of power. It will build mutual aid between movements, communities, and peoples in revolt, and freedom and autonomy from the powerful. In order to win, we have to be able to rely on each other’s solidarity.

As Students for a Democratic Society, we will also strive to be an accountable organization, one that recognizes, respects, and responds to the collective agency of those struggling for liberation. We affirm our commitment to making our organizing actively accountable to the communities it occurs in and to the people organizing from within these communities. We declare ourselves ready to respect the experience, recognize the leadership of, and actively support the struggles of those directly affected.

Vote is counted.

4. A Democratic Organization for a Democratic Society

As Students for a Democratic Society, we believe that it has to be up to people themselves to decide what their common life and their society is going to look like, work like and act like. In a society where all power over people’s lives has been taken out of their hands and placed in the hands of the few, the rich and the powerful, this may seem like an impossible dream, but it can and must be made a reality.

As Students for a Democratic Society, we demand and practice nothing less than direct democracy in which everyone participates and nobody dominates. We reaffirm liberation movements’ historic call for “All power to the people.” We reclaim power, in the feminist sense, as “power with,” not “power over.” People must be free, and have the resources they need, to democratically determine the conditions and shape the possibilities of their lives.

We understand that we cannot really be free until all are free, until the means of a free life belong to everyone. We will therefore fight for autonomy and self-determination, alongside the communities most affected, for all of us who have been systematically denied it: For workers’ power in the workplace, for youth and student power in the schools, for empowerment of communities of color, of all genders and sexualities, and for peoples’ control over their own lands and the policies that affect them and their own lives.

5. An Organization That Practices Participatory Democracy

In SDS, participatory democracy is synonymous with direct democracy. We understand direct and participatory democracy to mean that all members of SDS have a right to meaningful participation in decision-making within their organization.

People have a right to participate in decisions proportionate to the degree they are affected by them. Everyone is encouraged to access channels to decision-making, and those who do access them will be held accountable to the rest of the organization.

We are committed to a process that ensures that all voices get heard. We are committed to setting up our organization in such a way that those with limited time and limited resources can all participate. If our organization is open only to those who can sit in endless meetings, it is not a participatory organization. If our spaces do not nurture diverse voices, they are not democratic spaces. Accountable, recallable delegation can be democratic. Roles and responsibilities can be democratic.

Participatory democracy must be horizontal, empowering, and organized.

6. An Organization that Values Autonomy and Accountability Among Ourselves

Autonomy and accountability go hand in hand. Local chapters know their needs and communities best, and they can best respond to their local conditions. We affirm a value of self-determination and self-governance. Autonomy is about building room for local experimentation and diversity.

Autonomy means little, however, without accountability. Without accountability, “autonomy” becomes reactionary. We are an organization because we are stronger together than individually. SDS chapters are accountable to one another and to SDS collectively. Being accountable means consulting with each other and offering positive, constructive critique, in a way that assumes the best about every SDSer. It means respect, and it means compromise for the good of the group. It means approaching one another as allies to build with.

In SDS, we will organize locally according to our own needs and the needs of our communities. At the same time, we will organize them in a way that is conscious of, and contributes to, the larger collective project we are engaged in together as Students for a Democratic Society. We will be accountable to our common goals, values, and commitments. We will be accountable to each other. Only through collective struggle will we win.

Break-out discussion.

Conclusion

Beyond our shared visions and principles, we are striving to build a certain culture in SDS. A culture can’t be written down on paper and approved at a convention. It must be made every day, every time we interact with each other.

If we really do want to win a new society, and really are committed to long-haul struggle, our organizations and movements must support us as whole people. They must be fun, nurturing, accepting, and positive.

We commit to supporting each other in our work for personal and collective transformation. We will see one another as allies, even when we disagree, and we will work to find common ground. We understand that we are on the same team, one that welcomes debate and dissent, and one that’s responsible to itself and to others.

We commit to building mutual support and trust in one another. That can be difficult, but we are up to the task. We recognize that politicization is a process. We know we all come into this organization with different kinds of understanding and experience. We will support each other in this process. We will meet one another where we are, and move forward together.

As Students for a Democratic Society, we will launch a project of renewal and reinvention. We will renew the Left and reinvent the way we organize. We will make our organization useful, accessible and intersectional. We will make our organization relevant to people’s lived experiences, easily understood and widely applicable, and aware of the complexity and interconnectedness of peoples’ struggles.

We will practice solidarity and work towards freedom and self-determination for communities and peoples. We will strengthen a revolutionary form of unity, from below and to the left, that recognizes our differences and builds our collective power.

Every positive change that appears to come from the powers above actually comes from below, through the struggles of “ordinary” people, writing our own history. We will draw our ink and prepare to write a new history together. Our generation does not have the luxury of cynicism. We do not have a scarcity of imagination. Resisting and rebuilding, remembering and reinventing, we will help make the world anew.

C.L.R. James is famous for being one of the most outspoken anti-colonial Marxist thinkers of the 20th Century.  His political career started in his native Trinidad, took him through Trotskyism to the Johnson-Forest Tendency, which defined the Soviet Union as state capitalist. After being deported from the US, he spent his final years living in London and married to Selma James, the influential Marxist feminist and founder of the Wages for Housework campaign.

The merits of this book are obvious, it is a blow-by-blow account of how the slaves of Saint-Domingue became the free citizens of Haiti. For its profound social history, it has become required reading for post-colonial theorists, pan-Africanists and anti-capitalists of all stripes. The book is made more relevant by the ongoing injustices against the Haitian people by the US government and international NGOs, which have kept Haiti in a state of poverty and dependence. It is important to remind ourselves that the Haitians are proud people with a history of self-empowerment.

The flaws of the book are perhaps more interesting. James wants to paint Toussaint L’Ouverture in the same stripe as Vladimir Lenin, who James sees as actually a heroic revolutionary leader. From this error stem all the peculiar sections of the book where Toussaint’s character become the main focus.  Most interestingly, James also criticizes some of Toussaint’s worst moves, correctly charging them as cowardly or counter-revolutionary, yet does not hesitate to explain them away by referring to Toussaint’s “genius.”

For me the bottom line is that humans instinctively desire freedom. We don’t need any authorities to create it for us, we either all create it together or we lack it. Generals like Toussaint tend to want to appeal to authority, whether Napoleon or the bourgeois Jacobins in Paris. It is a simple fact that people in power are more concerned about what other people with power think, rather than what the people think. Here lies Toussaint’s mistake, and the mistake of Leninism as well.

None of this should discourage the reader from reading and absorbing the social history behind one of the greatest popular democratic victories of all time. The point is to read history critically.

One such critical reader is my friend Daniel, who wrote the excellent review which follows, and which brings the contradictions of James’ work to life. [alex]

The Black Jacobins

C.L.R. James, 1938

Review by Daniel Meltzer.

This book was an excellent read. The strengths included breathtaking battle scenes, rousing rhetoric for freedom and against slavery, brilliant stories of liberation, and page-turning political intrigue. The weaknesses in the book come from self-defeating politics of discipline for the sake of discipline, and the heart-rending compromises that Toussaint L’Overture makes with people who see him and the republic he created as nothing more than slaves to be punished for their insubordination.

Millions of slaves were stolen from Africa in bondage to work in Haiti. Most would die on the slave ships or in the fields.

The utter brutality and injustice of slave ownership, and the barbaric treatment of slaves is scandalous. You will literally shake your head at the stories of how slaves were treated under the law in Haiti. A particularly unnerving example is the slavemasters filling a slave up with gunpowder and lighting a fuse, exploding the body of the slave, perhaps for punishment, but seemingly just as often because the slavemasters could.

The slaves began creating a series of low-level daily resistance to such a situation that is tragic and fascinating. “The majority of the slaves accomodated themselves to this unceasing brutality by a profound fatalism and a wooden stupidity before their masters. [...]Through the shirt of [a slave] a master can feel the potatoes which he denies he has stolen. They are not potatoes, he says, they are stones. He is undressed and the potatoes fall to the ground. “Eh! master. The devil is wicked. Put stones, and look, you find potatoes.”

There is also a peculiar living of the slaves when they are so close to brutal death. The phenomenon of poisoning struck me particularly, which was apparently quite commonplace in Haiti before the revolution. Slaves used poison to alleviate their slavery at great expense of human life. Revenge poisoning by a slave of a slave master was common, as was the avoidance of splitting up families by poisoning all but one son of a slavemaster so that there would be but one heir. But so was other, more insidious poisonings. If it was heard that a master was to undertake more ambitious plantations, the slaves would poison one another until the numbers had been reduced to where such an undertaking would be impossible, in order to keep their workload down. Or if a kinder master were leaving town, some of the slaves and the property (cattle) would be poisoned, so that the master would have to stay to sort out the mess.

It is no wonder, given the ferocity of life for a slave, that when they organized insurrection, not just day-to-day resistance, they were ferocious themselves. I was dazzled by haunting images of the oppressed Haitians finding their revenge. “The slaves destroyed tirelessly[...]they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they suffered much. [...] “Vengeance! Vengeance!” was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white child on a pike as a standard. And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them.”

Before the revolution, Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world. “Of the half-million slaves in the colony in 1789, more than two-thirds had been born in Africa.”

One particular passage left me breathless: that of Hyacinth. “Hyacinth, a bull’s tail in his hand, ran from rank to rank crying that his talisman would chase death away. He charged at [the French] head, passing unscathed through the bullets and the grape-shot. Under such leadership the Africans were irrisistible. They clutched at the horses of the dragoons, and pulled off the riders. They put their arms down into the mouths of cannon in order to pull out the bullets and called to their comrades “Come, come, we have them.” The cannon were discharged and blew them to pieces. But others swarmed over guns and gunners, threw their arms around them and silenced them.”

Very quickly, the narrative of the Haitian Revolution is made into the narrative of Toussaint L’Overture. Toussaint’s nickname and eventually surname, means “the opening,” which refers to the skilled general’s ability to tear holes through the lines of the French forces in the initial battles of the Haitian anti-colonial war, but also to the fact that he, like the author of this review, has a gap between his front two teeth. This is an adorable factoid.

There was much colonial political intrigue that I wasn’t expecting. The slaves initially fought the French, and Toussaint allied himself with the Spaniards, the enemy of his enemy. England, smarting from a recent defeat in North America, also wanted new colonies. Spain had the best offer on the table, so the Haitian slaves fought both the French and the English. Then a revolution broke out in France, and the new republic abolished slavery and held that the Haitian slaves deserved freedom, a much stronger sentiment than Spain’s promises. Toussaint and the slaves did a dramatic 180 degree turn, conquering the lands won for Spain back for the new French Republic, returning Spanish lands to France, losing land to the English, whom Toussaint expended a great deal of energy expelling from the colony.

As the French revolution turned sour and the Jacobins were replaced by the Napoleonic forces of reaction, Toussaint and his slave army attempted to stay loyal to France. But Napoleon had no use for a colony without slavery, and Toussaint’s slave army was forced to negotiate secretly with the English and fight off the French again, while the Spanish eagerly looked for a chance to take over. It was a pretty tense relationship with the major powers of Europe.

This was not the book I thought it would be. In ignorance, I had thought of the title of the book as an analogy, where the Haitian revolutionaries were akin to the Jacobins in France. As it turns out, Toussaint and his followers were in constant contact with the Jacobins, and saw themselves as fighting for the Jacobin revolution in France in one of France’s colonies. This social revolution in France is borne out in Haiti.

Unfortunately, the book spent a great deal of time describing Toussaint L’Overture avoiding social revolution, and attempting stability on the shakiest ground with conniving politicians that wished to see him back in chains. Toussaint was a brilliant general, to be sure, but he wanted to be a brilliant diplomat as well. This might have seemed practical at the time, but does not make for exciting reading, and is certainly not good revolutionary policy.

Every inch that Toussaint gave, the French took a foot, and insulted the bravery of the slave army. Toussaint began to mold himself to the wishes of these conniving politicians, and this was especially distressing. He even went as far as executing his cousin Moises, who was leading insurrection against the French at a time when Toussaint was attempting to make conciliations that would have deeply compromised the freedom he had already won for his people. It is in these moments of weakness and betrayal that “the masses looked on, confused, bewildered, not knowing what to do.”

“If [the slaves] had had the slightest material interest in the plantations, they would not have destroyed so wantonly. But they had none.”

.
CLR James wished to see in Toussaint and the Haitian revolution a Lenin figure, and Toussaint at his weakest, was able to give him that satisfaction.

The book takes a turn for the better just before the end, as the clutter of diplomacy with slaveowners and the compromise for the sake of discipline gave way to yet another war with France in the Haiti’s war for independence. “Neither Dessalines’ army nor his ferocity won the victory. It was the people. They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. [..."]We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labor, was the reply of this unknown anarchist.["]” “It was a people’s war. They played the most audacious tricks on the French. [A French officer] heard at a musket’s distance a low voice psaying “Platoon, halt! To the right, dress!” The French made their dispositions and waited all night for a sudden attack. When the day came, they found that they had been the dupe of about a hundred laborers. “These ruses, if one paid too much attention to them, destroyed one’s morale; if they were neglected, they could lead to surprises.”

The people of Haiti fought fiercely, not just with their lives, but with their deaths for freedom. “When Chevalier, a black chief, hesitated at the sight of the scaffold, his wife shamed him. “You do not know how sweet it is to die for liberty!” And refusing to allow herself to be hanged by the executioner, she took the rope and hanged herself.”

I intend to write much more about my reflections on Occupy, don't worry. - alex]

Originally posted on Bay of Rage (May 16, 2012) (broken link 5/28).

THE COMMUNE

For those of us in Oakland, “Occupy Wall Street” was always a strange fit. While much of the country sat eerily quiet in the years before the Hot Fall of 2011, a unique rebelliousness that regularly erupted in militant antagonisms with the police was already taking root in the streets of the Bay. From numerous anti-police riots triggered by the execution of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Day 2009, to the wave of anti-austerity student occupations in late 2009 and early 2010, to the native protest encampment at Glen Cove in 2011, to the the sequence of Anonymous BART disruptions in the month before Occupy Wall Street kicked off, our greater metropolitan area re-emerged in recent years as a primary hub of struggle in this country. The intersection at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland was, more often than not, “ground zero” for these conflicts.

If we had chosen to follow the specific trajectory prescribed by Adbusters and the Zucotti-based organizers of Occupy Wall Street, we would have staked out our local Occupy camp somewhere in the heart of the capitol of West Coast capital, as a beachhead in the enemy territory of San Francisco’s financial district. Some did this early on, following in the footsteps of the growing list of other encampments scattered across the country like a colorful but confused archipelago of anti-financial indignation. According to this logic, it would make no sense for the epicenter of the movement to emerge in a medium sized, proletarian city on the other side of the bay.

We intentionally chose a different path based on a longer trajectory and rooted in a set of shared experiences that emerged directly from recent struggles. Vague populist slogans about the 99%, savvy use of social networking, shady figures running around in Guy Fawkes masks, none of this played any kind of significant role in bringing us to the forefront of the Occupy movement. In the rebel town of Oakland, we built a camp that was not so much the emergence of a new social movement, but the unprecedented convergence of preexisting local movements and antagonistic tendencies all looking for a fight with capital and the state while learning to take care of each other and our city in the most radical ways possible.

This is what we began to call The Oakland Commune; that dense network of new found affinity and rebelliousness that sliced through seemingly impenetrable social barriers like never before. Our “war machine and our care machine” as one comrade put it. No cops, no politicians, plenty of “autonomous actions”; the Commune materialized for one month in liberated Oscar Grant Plaza at the corner of 14th & Broadway. Here we fed each other, lived together and began to learn how to actually care for one another while launching unmediated assaults on our enemies: local government, the downtown business elite and transnational capital. These attacks culminated with the General Strike of November 2 and subsequent West Coast Port Blockade.

In their repeated attacks on Occupy Oakland, the local decolonize tendency is in some ways correct.[1] Occupy Wall Street and the movement of the 99% become very problematic when applied to a city such as Oakland and reek of white liberal politics imposed from afar on a diverse population already living under brutal police occupation. What our decolonizing comrades fail to grasp (intentionally or not) is that the rebellion which unfolded in front of City Hall in Oscar Grant Plaza does not trace its roots back to September 17, 2011 when thousands of 99%ers marched through Wall Street and set up camp in Lower Manhattan. The Oakland Commune was born much earlier on January 7, 2009 when those youngsters climbed on top of an OPD cruiser and started kicking in the windshield to the cheers of the crowd. Thus the name of the Commune’s temporarily reclaimed space where anti-capitalist processes of decolonization were unleashed: Oscar Grant Plaza.

Why then did it take nearly three years for the Commune to finally come out into the open and begin to unveil its true potential? Maybe it needed time to grow quietly, celebrating the small victories and nursing itself back to health after bitter defeats such as the depressing end of the student movement on March 4, 2010. Or maybe it needed to see its own reflection in Tahrir, Plaza del Sol and Syntagma before having the confidence to brazenly declare war on the entire capitalist order. One thing is for sure. Regardless of Occupy Wall Street’s shortcomings and the reformist tendencies that latched on to the movement of the 99%, the fact that some kind of open revolt was rapidly spreading like a virus across the rest of the country is what gave us the political space in Oakland to realize our rebel dreams. This point cannot be overemphasized. We are strongest when we are not alone. We will be isolated and crushed if Oakland is contained as some militant outlier while the rest of the country sits quiet and our comrades in other cities are content consuming riot porn emerging from our streets while cheering us on and occasionally coming to visit, hoping to get their small piece of the action.

THE MOVEMENT

For a whole generation of young people in this country, these past six months have been the first taste of what it means to struggle as part of a multiplying and complex social movement that continually expands the realm of possibilities and pushes participants through radicalization processes that normally take years. The closest recent equivalent is probably the first (and most vibrant) wave of North American anti-globalization mobilizations from late 1999 through the first half of 2001. This movement also brought a wide range of tendencies together under a reformist banner of “Fair Trade” & “Global Justice” while simultaneously pointing towards a systemic critique of global capitalism and a militant street politics of disruption.

The similarities end there and this break with the past is what Occupy got right. Looking back over those heady days at the turn of the millennia (or the waves of summit hopping that followed), the moments of actually living in struggle and experiencing rupture in front of one’s eyes were few and far between. They usually unfolded during a mass mobilization in the middle of one “National Security Event” or another in some city on the other side of the country (or world!). The affinities developed during that time were invaluable, but cannot compare to the seeds of resistance that were sown simultaneously in hundreds of urban areas this past Fall.

It makes no sense to overly fetishize the tactic of occupations, no more than it does to limiting resistance exclusively to blockades or clandestine attacks. Yet the widespread emergence of public occupations qualitatively changed what it means to resist. For contemporary American social movements, it is something new to liberate space that is normally policed to keep the city functioning smoothly as a wealth generating machine and transform it into a node of struggle and rebellion. To do this day after day, rooted in the the city where you live and strengthening connections with neighbors and comrades, is the a first taste of what it truly means to have a life worth living. For those few months in the fall, American cities took on new geographies of the movement’s making and rebels began to sketch out maps of coming insurrections and revolts.

This was the climate that the Oakland Commune blossomed within. In those places and moments where Occupy Wall Street embodied these characteristics as opposed to the reformist tendencies of the 99%’s nonviolent campaign to fix capitalism, the movement itself was a beautiful thing. Little communes came to life in cities and towns near and far. Those days have now passed but the consequences of millions having felt that solidarity, power and freedom will have long lasting and extreme consequences.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the movement is now decomposing and that we are now, more or less, alone, passing that empty park or plaza on the way to work (or looking for work) which seemed only yesterday so loud and colorful and full of possibilities.

All of the large social movements in this country following the anti-globalization period have heated up quickly, bringing in millions before being crushed or co-opted equally as quickly. The anti-war movement brought millions out in mass marches in the months before bombs began falling over Baghdad but was quickly co-opted into an “Anybody but Bush” campaign just in time for the 2004 election cycle. The immigrant rights movement exploded during the spring of 2006, successfully stopping the repressive and racist HR4437 legislation by organizing the largest protest in US history (and arguably the closest thing we have ever seen to a nation-wide general strike) on May 1 of that year [2]. The movement was quickly scared off the streets by a brutal wave of ICE raids and deportations that continue to this day. Closer to home, the anti-austerity movement that swept through California campuses in late 2009 escalated rapidly during the fall through combative building occupations across the state. But by March 4, 2010, the movement had been successfully split apart by repressing the militant tendencies and trapping the more moderate ones in an impotent campaign to lobby elected officials in Sacramento. Such is the rapid cycle of mobilization and decomposition for social movements in late capitalist America.

THE DECOMPOSITION

So what then killed Occupy? The 99%ers and reactionary liberals will quickly point to those of us in Oakland and our counterparts in other cites who wave the black flag as having alienated the masses with our “Black Bloc Tactics” and extremist views on the police and the economy. Many militants will just as quickly blame the sinister forces of co-optation, whether they be the trade union bureaucrats, the 99% Spring nonviolence training seminars or the array of pacifying social justice non-profits. Both of these positions fundamentally miss the underlying dynamic that has been the determining factor in the outcome thus far: all of the camps were evicted by the cops. Every single one.

All of those liberated spaces where rebellious relationships, ideas and actions could proliferate were bulldozed like so many shanty towns across the world that stand in the way of airports, highways and Olympic arenas. The sad reality is that we are not getting those camps back. Not after power saw the contagious militancy spreading from Oakland and other points of conflict on the Occupy map and realized what a threat all those tents and card board signs and discussions late into the night could potentially become.

No matter how different Occupy Oakland was from the rest of Occupy Wall Street, its life and death were intimately connected with the health of the broader movement. Once the camps were evicted, the other major defining feature of Occupy, the general assemblies, were left without an anchor and have since floated into irrelevance as hollow decision making bodies that represent no one and are more concerned with their own reproduction than anything else. There have been a wide range of attempts here in Oakland at illuminating a path forward into the next phase of the movement. These include foreclosure defense, the port blockades, linking up with rank and file labor to fight bosses in a variety of sectors, clandestine squatting and even neighborhood BBQs. All of these are interesting directions and have potential. Yet without being connected to the vortex of a communal occupation, they become isolated activist campaigns. None of them can replace the essential role of weaving together a rebel social fabric of affinity and camaraderie that only the camps have been able to play thus far.

May 1 confirmed the end of the national Occupy Wall Street movement because it was the best opportunity the movement had to reestablish the occupations, and yet it couldn’t. Nowhere was this more clear than in Oakland as the sun set after a day of marches, pickets and clashes. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that tents would start going up and the camp would reemerge in the evening of that long day. The hundreds of riot police backed by armored personnel carriers and SWAT teams carrying assault rifles made no secret of their intention to sweep the plaza clear after all the “good protesters” scurried home, making any reoccupation physically impossible. It was the same on January 28 when plans for a large public building occupation were shattered in a shower of flash bang grenades and 400 arrests, just as it was on March 17 in Zucotti Park when dreams of a new Wall Street camp were clubbed and pepper sprayed to death by the NYPD. Any hopes of a spring offensive leading to a new round of space reclamations and liberated zones has come and gone. And with that, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland are now dead.

THE FUTURE

If one had already come to terms with Occupy’s passing, May 1 could actually be viewed as an impressive success. No other 24 hour period in recent memory has unleashed such a diverse array of militancy in cities across the country. From the all day street fighting in Oakland, to the shield bloc in LA, to the courageous attempt at a Wildcat March in New York, to the surprise attack on the Mission police station in San Francisco, to the anti-capitalist march in New Orleans, to the spectacular trashing of Seattle banks and corporate chains by black flag wielding comrades, the large crowds which took to the streets on May 1 were no longer afraid of militant confrontations with police and seemed relatively comfortable with property destruction. This is an important turning point which suggests that the tone and tactics of the next sequence will be quite different from those of last fall.

Yet the consistent rhythm and resonance of resistance that the camps made possible has not returned. We are once again wading through a depressing sea of everyday normality waiting for the next spectacular day of action to come and go in much the same way as comrades did a decade ago in the anti-globalization movement or the anti-war movement. In the Bay Area, the call to strike was picked up by nurses and ferry workers who picketed their respective workplaces on May 1 along with the longshoremen who walked off the job for the day. This display of solidarity is impressive considering the overall lack of momentum in the movement right now. Still, it was not enough of an interruption in capital’s daily flows to escalate out of a day of action and into a general strike like we saw on November 2.

And thus we continue on through this quieter period of uncertainty. We still occasionally catch glimpses of the Commune in those special moments when friends and comrades successfully break the rules and start self organizing to take care of one another while simultaneously launching attacks against those who profit from mass immiseration. We saw this off and on during the actions of May 1, or in the two occupations of the building at 888 Turk Street in San Francisco or most recently on the occupied farmland that was temporarily liberated from the University of California before being evicted by UCPD riot police a few days ago. But with the inertia of the Fall camps nearly depleted, the fierce but delicate life of our Commune relies more and more on the vibrancy of the rebel social relationships which have always been its foundation.

The task ahead of us in Oakland and beyond is to search out and nurture new means of finding each other. We are quickly reaching the point where the dead weight of Occupy threatens to drag down the Commune into the dust bin of history. We need to breathe new life into our network of rebellious relationships that does not rely on the Occupy Oakland general assembly or the array of movement protagonists who have emerged to represent the struggle. This is by no means an argument against assemblies or for a retreat back into the small countercultural ghettos that keep us isolated and irrelevant. On the contrary, we need more public assemblies that take different forms and experiment with themes, styles of decision making (or lack there of) and levels of affinity. We need new ways to reclaim space and regularize a contagious rebel spirit rooted in our specific urban contexts while breaking a losing cycle of attempted occupations followed by state repression that the movement has now fallen into. Most of all, we need desperately to stay connected with comrades old and new and not let these relationships completely decompose. This will determine the health of the Commune and ultimately its ability to effectively wage war on our enemies in the struggles to come.

Some Oakland Antagonists
May 2012

NOTES:

[1] The decolonize tendency emerged in Oakland and elsewhere as a people of color and indigenous led initiative within the Occupy movement to confront the deep colonialist roots of contemporary oppression and exploitation. Decolonize Oakland publicly split with Occupy on December 5, 2011 after failing to pass a proposal in the Occupy Oakland general assembly to change the name of the local movement to Decolonize Oakland. For more information on this split see the ‘Escalating Identity’ pamphlet: http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/

[2] The demonstrations on May 1, 2006, called El Gran Paro Estadounidense or The Great American Boycott, were the climax of a nationwide series of mobilizations that had begun two months earlier with large marches in Chicago and Los Angeles as well as spontaneous high school walkouts in California and beyond. Millions took to the streets across the country that May 1, with an estimated two million marching in Los Angeles alone. Entire business districts in immigrant neighborhoods or where immigrants made up the majority of workers shut down for the day in what some called “A Day Without an Immigrant”.

Yesterday’s packed event was the first in Occupy Philadelphia‘s ten-part educational series “Dissecting Capitalism.”  It was audio and video recorded, the audio is already online HERE.  Listen in!

[update 2/13: and here is the video of the talk, in two parts!]

Part 2:

Below is the outline I created for my talk (downloadable HERE). I tried to bring a holistic analysis of the system that could be understandable by the average person, but still contain a nuanced perspective of all the ways capitalism has screwed us over and screwed over our planet.  I’ll be fleshing this out over the next several days to revamp the “What is Capitalism?” section of the website. [alex]

What is Capitalism?

“Know Your Enemy” – Rage Against the Machine

2/1/2012 – LAVA

Alex Knight, endofcapitalism.com

1. Capitalism is a Global System of Abuse
   1. Common Sense Radicalism – speak to the core issue in a way everyone can emotionally understand
   2. How does it feel to live in a capitalist system? Like an abusive relationship.
      1. “The problem that has no name.”
   3. Social and ecological trauma
   4. BP Oil Disaster demonstrates system’s logic: profit over all, total lack of accountability

2. Power, Abuse, Resistance
   1. Power-Over and Power-With
   2. Internalized Oppression vs. Inherent Need for Self-determination
   3. Systems of Abuse/Oppression: Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Class
   4. Some Features of Class Societies:
      1. Inequality – the few benefit at the expense of the many
      2. Economic production disconnected from human need
      3. Forced labor – slavery, wage slavery
      4. State violence – punishment, repression
      5. Warfare, Conquest
      6. Propaganda
      7. Unsustainable ecological abuse
      8. Popular resistance
   5. Capitalism is the most advanced Class Society

3. Capitalism: Pyramid of Accumulation
   1. Financial Speculation
   2. Commodity Trading, Commodities
   3. Wage Labor, Wage Labor, Wage Labor
   4. Enclosures: the largest, but invisible part of the iceberg
      1. any energy, resources or labor taken by force or without just compensation

4. Stages of Capitalism: 1492 – Present
   1. Mercantile Capitalism (1492-1793)
      1. Land Enclosures – displacement of European small farmers
      2. Colonization, Genocide
      3. Slavery
      4. Witch Hunts – attack on women
   2. Industrial Capitalism (1793-1971)
      1. Fossil fuel
      2. Mechanized production – Richard Arkwright’s steam-powered factories
      3. World War
      4. Welfare state – rising living standards in the Global North
   3. Neoliberalism (1971-2008)
      1. Globalization – industry moves to the Global South, elimination of all trade barriers
      2. Privatization/Deregulation – attack on welfare, rise of nonprofit industrial complex, prison industrial complex, “Structural Adjustment”
      3. Computerization – extreme isolation of the individual
      4. Astronomical Debt – rise of credit card industry, student loans, housing bubble
   4. Zombie Capitalism? (2008-Present)
      1. Neoliberalism is dead. Yet it walks amongst us?
      2. Bailouts are life support to the tune of $12 Trillion
      3. Austerity = cannibalism – foreclosures, unemployment, cutting services, wages, benefits, retirement, etc. destroy the basis for the massive consumption propping up the global economy

5. The Addiction Dilemma
   1. “Leave it with me and it will kill me. Take it from me and I will die.”
   2. Self-Hatred is the psychological norm under capitalism
   3. Addiction is a response to Trauma – stress, abuse, deprivation and displacement
   4. A social disease, not a personal failing
   5. Self-destruction vs. self-sufficiency

6. The Need for Growth
   1. The system’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness
   2. Inevitability of Crisis – the Shark
   3. The Profit Motive and the necessity of a return

7. The End of Capitalism
   1. Ecological Limits to Growth: peak oil, peak uranium, peak water, peak food, peak transport, etc.
   2. Social Limits: resistance of everyday people, everywhere. Arab Spring, Occupy, Chinese workers.
   3. Recovery, Relapse, or Revolution?

Recommended Readings:

• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia 2004.
• Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1967.
• Heinberg, Richard. The End of Growth. New Society 2011.
• Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. 2007.
• Maté, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. 2008.
• Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Zed Books 1986.
• Turbulence. “Life in Limbo?” Vol. 5, December 2009. http://www.turbulence.org.uk

Alex Knight is the editor of endofcapitalism.com and is writing the coincidentally named book “The End of Capitalism,” which argues that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth, and we are transitioning to a noncapitalist future. Alex was active in the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 2006-2009, and now spends most of his time organizing with the wonderful people of Occupy Philadelphia.