Serendipity, Or retracing a path in order to leave it...

In light of the decentralized process used by the OWS people, and in anticipation of visiting the folks organizing for the cloned* undertakings in Concord, NH and Boston, MA, I decided to re-read a small book published during and after the French troubles of several years ago, one quoted here in months and years past. From that small book, a passage seemed to reach other from the page and grab me by the eyeballs:

"From Secretaries of State to the backrooms of alternative cafes, concerns are always expressed in the same words, the same as they've always been. We have to get mobilized. This time it's not to rebuild the country like in the post-war era, not for the Ethiopians like in the '80s, not for employment like in the '90s. No, this time it's for the environment. It thanks you for your participation... Voluntary austerity write large on their banner, the work benevolently to get us ready for the 'coming ecological state of emergency.' The globular sticky mass of their guilt lands on our tired shoulders, pressuring us to cultivate our garden, sort out our trash, and eco-compost the leftovers of this macabre feast.

Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hurricanes, epidemics, global overpopulation, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species...this will be our burden. We have to consume a little less to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically to keep consuming. We have to control ourselves to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself while giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince us to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we're ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us out of it.

Ecology isn't simply the logic of a total economy; it's the new morality of capital. The system's internal state of crisis and the rigorous screening that's underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this selection and screening will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different diets, one 'healthy and organic' for the rich and their children, and the other notoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn't be able to make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest whims weren't so scrupulously 'respectful of the environment.' Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag every objection to the exorbitant progress of control. 

Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being."

The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee, semiotext(e), 2009

It is Emergency which defines our coming age. It is to Emergency - and the preface to our age of Emergency was written in the extended verse of the "War on Terror" - that every justification for continued maintenance of the forms of power will refer. It is Emergency which mobilizes the masses. It is in the name of a succession of Emergencies that the ruling class and its states will attempt to strangle the arising and invigorated struggles against them.

So it means something, I think, that the folks involved in the OWS experiment have begun by rejecting the acculturated norm of Emergency and its consequent hierarchies, urgency, command orientation and urge to assign marching orders and battle order.

I know for Trots and Leninists like Richard Seymour, and the various dialectically constrained parties of Europe and sheltered academia, the OWS reclaimers and the inherent argument of their method (which echoes the quote above) are at best problematic, because it recommends abandoning the hierarchical and partisan organizational mode which dominated resistance to capital, imperial nationalism and colonial powers over the last one hundred fifty years. It further anticipates a fight which exceeds the limits of the party structure, and its intellectualist vanguard, who are obedient to norms which are no longer really prevalent. Those engaged with today's conditions are proving forward enough to identify the functional unity of state and corporation, as well as recognizing that the apparatuses used to obtain, process, share and utilize information, security and the capture of privatized knowledge are nested within each others' overlapping spheres of influence and authority.

The self-organized are not fighting old battles against dead enemies. Unlike the official socialist, social democratic, liberal and sectarian factions which seek to channel and corral dissatisfaction with living conditions into a capture of state offices and meliorative state policy, the latest wave of rebels - from Tunisia to Egypt to England, France and now the US - have begun from a starting premise, perhaps unvoiced, which recognizes the material conditions of our common now.

We live in a political and economic environment which strains at the edge of a closed system that has failed to expand fast enough to contain its discontents. It was once properly understood as an expanding closed system, but it has probably already passed its terminal point, and begun a period of both contraction and reaction. The second law of thermodynamics will not yield or compensate for the feedback loops the system produces within its own overlaid areas of control.

It is a system governed by men who have no choice to but recolonize their own homelands, to treat their captive populations as both markets and surplus stomachs and desires. But these feedback loops of discontent, the repricing of labor's value, the rise of debt and household overhead, the disruption of climate norms, the cascading failures of the food distribution system which follows and the accumulation of governing costs** that outpace the benefits given to those who rule: these have their own set of consequences, the most immediate of which is fracturing of the ruling class consensus of the last seventy years. It was once possible to satisfy the cultivated public demand for security and prosperity while retaining the control of the economy which allows for a ruling class, through a disciplining of workers and managers which bound them to a national project which purported to involve them in the pursuit of the chimera of economic growth. That this national project was largely defined by who it excluded did not matter much over the major period of its application, because it invested the type simultaneously most dangerous and most necessary to the system in the preservation of it; namely the aspiring middle class white male and his familial group.

It was the trade and union laborer which threatened the ruling class through the period encompassing the last decade of the nineteenth century and first three of the twentieth. And that worker was almost universally of European descent, and male.

Certainly, women and minorities played significant parts in the early labor struggles, as evidenced in Lawrence, New York, St. Louis and the Pacific Northwest - but they had no effective voice in how labor approached its struggle with capital. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Red Emma Goldman, Mother Jones and Voltairine de Cleyre might be famous, not the least of which for their notoriety - but they were the exceptions which proved the rule; formidable women who rose to prominence precisely in contrast to the white male norm, gaining influence and lasting import by their ability to break with it.

The New Deal, coupled with the so-called shared prosperity of the boom years of post-war America and successful anti-Communist propaganda (paid for by tax receipts and Chamber of Commerce ad buys) solidified the disciplining of labor by subsuming it within the national project. It vested the white male who controlled and comprised the bulk of organized labor in the creation and maintenance of the expanding closed system of American military power and economic might. He became its primary defender, and the preservative agent most resistant to revolution, and its paler cousin, reform.

Perhaps for this reason, those excluded from the dominion of prosperity - women, minorities, migrant workers and cast-offs from the Christianized nationalism into which labor had allowed itself to be co-opted - sought new ways of reaching the social escape velocity which would allow them to flee the gravity sink of the American culture and power; a culture which obligated them to do obeisance to the various hierarchies dominated by white men, this including labor, in order to share from the leavings and scraps of the expanding system's growth.

It is also worth noting that every time an economically viable group of them managed that escape, it became the priority of labor's official organs, as well as its allegedly representative national party (the Democrats, after 1964) to recapture them and mobilize their efforts, organizations and modes of existence back towards the controlled markets, household norms, political offices and especially the doctrine of growth and personal success which maintained the ruling class system as both distracting spectacle and iron gloved hand of control. It might be useful to see official labor and the Democratic Party as an early social version of the Star Wars program, organized to perform a defense more against internal discontent than any supposed outside threat.

Of course, some who broke away - the early lesbian separatists, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen (despite, or perhaps because of their flaws), Marxist and black feminists, the AIM and their like - could not be re-absorbed precisely because they rejected the chief signifiers of labor's compromise with capital: whiteness, male power and hierarchical control. These were handled in the usual fashion - criminalization, ostracism and slander. They were Othered, often violently, because the community in force was already defining them as those who marked the limit of that community by their exclusion from it; their exclusion reinforced the inside-ness of the white and male dominated norm. They were attempting necessary escapes, but those attempts themselves reinforced power by providing it with a domestic enemy:  as spectacles, as the internal outsiders who could not be trusted to sit beneath the table of growth and accept their allotted place and pittance. Theirs was a series of prison breaks. But, in attempting them, they reinforced the hand which held them and others to the disciplined norm. A double bind, and a terrible fate: to assert one's necessary freedom and to know that it strengthened the hold of the oppressor not only over those who were othered, but also over the disciplined white worker whose appropriated labor was the primary engine of ruling class power.

The normative laborer of the twentieth century was a creature of mobilization. He was disciplined to it. He was Taylorized in school. He was encultured to it at the kitchen table, the Boy Scout camp and at the altar. He was mobilized to war, in Europe, across the Pacific, and later in Korea and Vietnam. He was mobilized to beat the Japanese factory. And the German engineer. To save Africa. To stop the dominoes falling. To stop stagflation. He was mobilized to fight communism, to acquire debt, to own a share of the so-called American dream, to have the best math scores, to test higher than the Koreans, or the Finns. He was mobilized to do sport, and to watch it. He is even now mobilized to own a car and drive it everywhere. He is mobilized to save the economy, the nation and the American brand. He is a herded beast. One who was raised and indoctrinated to see himself, nonetheless, as entirely autonomous.

And he is dangerous when threatened, because he doesn't really know any other way to live. He is the least adaptive creature on the whole of a continent, because that continent was organized for his needs and his small satisfactions, so long as he traded the lion's share of his labor for his place at the table, and accepted the rule and the ranks of those who mobilized him.

It's with this in mind, through this lens, that perhaps we ought to understand the explicit refusal of the folks at OWS to mobilize themselves, to establish a hierarchy and a platform which replicates the forms of ruling class power and its sanctioned organs of captured labor. One which, also not incidentally, breaks with the top-heavy and institutionalized European model as well. It is not insignificant that in Greece, Italy, France and England, it's the self-organized and un-mobilized who have given rebirth to an active and militant Left, and who continue to survive not only the various States' increasingly brazen attempts to contain them, but the official and sanctioned "leftist" parties' efforts to capture and corral their efforts towards the capture of electoral offices.

Perhaps, abandoning the structures designed to capture and discipline, the new rebels - in Tahrir and Tunisia, in London, Paris, New York, Athens and all over the world -  have done so from a burgeoning awareness of the "rigorous screening" and the surveillance state which emerged from it. The decentralization of their social space, as well as their embrace of anonymity seems to suggest that this is so. Even in their eventual failures and setbacks (see, Tunisia and Tahrir; Greece), it is possible that they do and will continue to remain cognizant of the advantages and freedoms won through a refusal to be mobilized and disciplined into manageable and compromised bits and fragments of human terrain.

And if that's the case, even an aging Cynic has cause for a little hope...



* - rhizomatic?

** - which include entertainment and spectacle