From Blackspot Blog
Three days after Adbusters put out a call to #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month during the May G8/NATO summits, spectacular clashes erupted between #OCCUPYOAKLAND militants and armored police. Attempts to occupy an abandoned building were put down with tear gas, less-lethal munitions and baton charges. What was new, and surprising, this time around was that some Oakland occupiers came equipped as altermodern Hoplites with plastic and tin shields. And to everyone’s amazement they performed an eerie quasi-military discipline and phalanx formation that had clearly been worked out beforehand. They came ready and willing to confront police. On a symbolic level, the Oakland street battle struck a chord in the movement because its theatrical staging functioned as an inverted repetition of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests that electrified the first phase of Occupy.
In both cases, a group of protesters engaged in the ostensibly illegal behavior (blocking traffic, occupying space) courageously faced down police while spectators, journalists, photographers recorded the scene from the left flank on higher ground. Both events are watershed moments that define phases of the movement. #OCCUPYOAKLAND’s phalanx and #OCCUPYWALLSTREET’s mass arrest represent different, at times compatible and sometimes conflicting, futures of #OCCUPY. That is why #OCCUPYOAKLAND’s public performance of a West Coast anarchist ethos has sent a chill down the international spine of #OCCUPY, sparking raging debates on many movement email lists.
At stake is not who will determine the future of #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. At stake is who will determine the future of #OCCUPY… which is to say what vision of the movement will emerge during the next big showdown, #OCCUPYCHICAGO in May?
Until now many people have believed that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET is synonymous with #OCCUPY and that the beautiful spirit of Zuccotti will forever dictate how the movement unfolds. But this assumption is fracturing as it becomes clear that the movement is actually comprised of dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of autonomous forces acting in concert. The perfect example is OccupyWallSt.org, the flagship website of the movement which is not itself of, or beholden to, the movement. Coding for the site began weeks before any on-the-ground meetings were held in NYC. OccupyWallSt.org explains that they are an autonomous “affinity group” that is not “a subcommittee of the NYCGA nor affiliated with Adbusters, Anonymous or any other organization” which means that they do not receive orders from nor accept the authority of any of these organizations, including the General Assembly of NYC. They are allies but nonetheless autonomous. Of course, this is the same position that Adbusters, Anonymous and the NYCGA take in regards to each other as well. And, when you think about it, it is also the same position that your local #OCCUPY might take towards the dictates of #OCCUPYOAKLAND, #OCCUPYCHICAGO or even #OCCUPYWALLSTREET.
With today’s hindsight it is obvious that what have been called the core principles of the #OCCUPY movement have been overdetermined by an East Coast vibe inherited from the pre-September 17 meetings of the NYC General Assembly, another organization that predates #OCCUPY but has been considered synonymous with it. It was in these meetings that consensus-based general assemblies were agreed upon as the model. It is interesting to read the various declarations of the NYC General Assembly in light of the waning influence that New York occupiers over #OCCUPY as a whole. In these declarations, for example, one detects a frequent slippage between the NYCGA speaking for itself and speaking for the movement as a whole. This used to make sense but it no longer does as murmurs on the West Coast suggest a growing sentiment that the folks on the East Coast have gotten a bit too comfortable with the NGOs, unions and behind-the-scenes power-brokers in DC that the movement explicitly rejected before September 17. #OCCUPYOAKLAND’s powerful emergence is a symptom of the fracturing of the movement as various autonomous forces push-and-pull the movement in new, surprising directions.
The consensus of the movement over itself has been lost. It will take weeks, perhaps months, for these debates to simmer into discussions and then be settled within the movement. Ultimately, the matter will not be decided until we see what plays out in Chicago when the world’s supposed leaders meet and 2,500 journalists are watching. The situation is made all the more difficult because consensus decisions in New York City cannot dictate the consensus in Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland or Chicago. Inter-occupy conference calls are now happening to address this reality. And perhaps even more significant is the looming possibility of multiple #OCCUPYs in the same city. If there are two #OCCUPYOAKLAND general assemblies, one which embraces militant street battles and one which does not, who is to say which has greater authority over the name? Or, what if there is a defunct #OCCUPYX and a new crop of people move in and claim to speak for #OCCUPYX? What is the relationship between a preexisting #OCCUPY and an autonomous group who comes in later, acts autonomously and claims the right to also speak in the name of that city’s #OCCUPY? The old answer would have been that all #OCCUPYs must abide by the declarations of the NYC General Assembly… but this no longer seems tenable.
Behind this soul searching is the unresolved question of whether a movement that fractures into smaller autonomous groups can still build and maintain a consensus larger than its individual parts. The answer is probably yes… after all, we’ve been doing it unconsciously up until now. What is different is that we’re being forced to acknowledge that autonomy is a core principle of the movement, for better or worse.
by Tzvetan Todorov
From Adbusters #98: American Autumn
In American prisons scattered across the various countries of the world, but outside the United States, prisoners are regularly raped, hung from hooks, subjected to waterboarding, burned, attached to electrodes, deprived of food, water or medicine, attacked by dogs, or beaten until their bones are broken. When on American military bases or on American territory, they are subjected to sensory deprivation or other systematic mistreatment of the senses. A hat is put on them to stop them from hearing anything, a hood to stop them seeing anything, surgical masks to prevent them being able to smell, thick gloves to neutralize their sense of touch. Or they have “white noise” inflicted on them, or else violent noise and total silence alternate at irregular intervals. They are prevented from sleeping, either by having a strong electric light kept on day and night, or by subjecting them to interrogation that can last for up to 24 hours at a time, for 48 days in succession. Or they are forced to pass from extreme cold to extreme heat, and vice versa. None of these techniques, it is alleged, cause the “deterioration of bodily functions” that would constitute torture.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians
by Micah M. White
From Adbusters #98: American Autumn
You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.
swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.adbusters.org/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/1pixelout/player.swf", "swfobject2-id-13286090571", "290", "24", "7", "", {"soundFile":"http:\/\/posterous.com\/getfile\/files.posterous.com\/temp-2011-10-11\/nnhjfxmkAmpgroBiBCFHuxDeqGicfalovIABzvvqFgeEfIbhBJxEvGpDuhlj\/Adbusters-98-6.mp3"}, {"swliveconnect":"default","play":"true","loop":"true","menu":"false","quality":"autohigh","scale":"showall","align":"l","salign":"tl","wmode":"opaque","bgcolor":"#FFFFFF","version":"7","allowfullscreen":"true","allowscriptaccess":"sameDomain","base":"\/","src":"http:\/\/www.adbusters.org\/sites\/all\/modules\/swftools\/shared\/1pixelout\/player.swf","height":24,"width":290}, {"id":"swf13286090571"});Guy Debord, the maverick Situationist philosopher, practiced living as if it were a game because he theorized that doing so could spark a revolutionary upheaval. “The sole thrilling direction remains the fragmentary search for a new way of life” beginning with “systematic provocation” that transforms existence into an “integral, thrilling game,” a 24-year-old Debord asserted in 1955. And in the years following the May ’68 uprising, while he grew increasingly reclusive, Debord privately dedicated himself to inventing Kriegspiel, a military strategy board game.
Half a century later, in practically every domain of human endeavor, whether it be selling cat food or meeting up at a bar or planning an insurrection, an operation is struggling with how to “gamify” itself. A dozen or more recently published books cover the application of gaming to life – from alternate reality game designer Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken to Tom Bissel’s Extra Lives and Tom Chatfield’s Fun Inc. But the one author who really glimpses what the future holds is media theorist McKenzie Wark. In his seminal manifesto, Gamer Theory, published in 2007, Wark makes the profound ontological claim that it is no longer a matter of transforming life into a “thrilling game,” as Debord believed, because life under consumerism has already been gamified.
“Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember?” asks McKenzie Wark. “You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere in gamespace but you can never leave it.”
If Wark’s proposition is true then every being, from friends to fedoras, has become either a player or a prop in an immersive global game of consumerism in which no matter what we do or how we play, capitalism gains. A bold claim, for sure, but Wark’s argument transcends philosophical quibbling: it offers us a profound way to rethink the future of internet-enabled activism.
The tactical genealogy of nearly every major online activist organization can be traced back to the fortuitous sale in 1997 of a Berkeley, California, gaming and screensaver software company whose flagship product was You Don’t Know Jack, an “irreverent” trivia game. The $13.8m sale of Berkeley Systems made husband-and-wife founders Wes Boyd, a computer programmer, and Joan Blades, a vice president of marketing, overnight millionaires. With an excess of leisure time, they founded MoveOn and brought activism into the digital age.
Within months of its formation, MoveOn established itself as a brilliant pioneer of leveraging the nascent internet to transform everyday people into political activists. MoveOn’s success was arguably due to its unique mixture of the spirit of gaming with activism. By connecting members with each other on a local level, MoveOn built a decentralized, grassroots network capable of pulling off surprising nationwide missions that were fun, game-like … and had a political impact.
In 2003, for example, MoveOn members held voter registration house parties and collectively made 300,000 calls in a single afternoon; volunteers visited the offices of every US senator to voice opposition to the impending war; then, in a stunning kickoff, they organized public peace vigils on every continent and in thousands of small towns … with only six days notice. MoveOn’s website at the time conveyed optimistic exhilaration. Members used an ActionForum to sway the direction of the larger organization by posting suggestions and voting up or down on the ideas of others. Those ideas that achieved a critical mass were then acted on by the group. Powered by digital flows, offline campaigns were going viral and not just at MoveOn: from our small office in Vancouver, Adbusters watched in awe as practically overnight Buy Nothing Day became a global sensation. All of us were getting a taste of what might happen if a vibrant activist community were to emerge from a playful cyberspace.
Today, digital activism has reached adolescence and its adult years look to be more game-like than ever. At Adbusters we’ve got KillCap brewing, an anticonsumerism game built on the simple premise of escalating missions that target the visible signs of consumerism: 10 blackpogs, or in-game experience points, for walking away from Starbucks, 15 for defacing the Golden Arches, and 25 for subverting American Apparel’s patriarchal advertising. Here the proverbial “ladder of engagement” that online campaigners reverently talk about becomes a literal leader-board where the highest rank goes to the most active jammers. The beauty of KillCap is that knowing such an urban game is being played alters one’s perception of the city and what constitutes a political act. A jammed billboard, an anticorporate prank and a capitalist hit with a pie, rather than being seen as isolated events, all become signs that jammers are earning blackpogs in KillCap, an exciting game you’ll also want to play.
KillCap works by appropriating the gamespace of consumerism for radical play where jammed corporations become opportunities for leveling up. But it is just the beginning of a whole new kind of activist game. A clue as to what comes next can be found in the emerging field of indie storytelling and roleplaying games. Here the emphasis is placed on the construction of an alternative reality, a counter-narrative that reimagines life. Picture a roleplaying game that takes place in real life where players become actors in an unfolding story whose final scene is global revolution.
Out there, right now, I anticipate that an eccentric game designer is working to craft precisely this kind of narrative activist game that weaves a story bold enough to disassociate players sufficiently from the mores of consumerism. Once “in character,” perhaps players will find the courage to live without dead time, to assume a heroic posture toward life, to embrace a destined overthrow of the corporatocracy. With a strong story line, compelling characters, sufficient players and an element of playful risk, the game world takes on a life of its own. Played seriously enough it becomes reality.
Combining all of these elements is WikiSwarms, perhaps the most rebellious game of all: one that upgrades the MoveOn ActionForum to the needs of playful social revolution. Imagine flashmobs of jammers that appear suddenly, function without leadership, and are the pure manifestation of an anonymous will of a dispersed, networked collective. Targets are suggested, actions are proposed, manifestos drafted … everything is voted on and next steps chosen within minutes. One hour, neoclassical economics departments across the nation are flooded with Kick It Over manifestos, and the next, an impromptu anti-banker street party is being held on Wall Street. One day, a thousand volunteers show up unexpectedly at a nonprofit and ask to help out for a few hours, and the next, overnight guerrilla gardens appear in backstreets. In the downtown Niketown a flash-trial has convened to sentence the swoosh to death row, and online hacktivists are leaking emails that expose city council shenanigans. In this kind of metagame, where a constant people’s assembly determines the rules and objective of the game, anonymous players vie to influence the erratic swooping of the swarm. Welcome to the thrilling world of WikiSwarms, the culture jammer game being played right now in which the future of the Earth is at stake.
The revolutionary spirits of the future – the next Bakunin, Mao, Malcolm X and Debord – will be the ones who create these kinds of fluid, immersive, evocative metagaming experiences that are both playfully thrilling and, as a natural result of their gameplay, an insurrectionary challenge to the capitalist state. We are not far off from a time when revolution is an unauthorized game modification played across the gamespace of entire cities, states and cultures … a kind of radical play that re-enchants the world and transforms our subjectivity, a détournement of the symbolic order at the deepest level.
The moment we cannot escape.
by Shane Adair
From Adbusters #98: American Autumn
Spooky was a wild black cat with yellow eyes. She was taken off a farm and given to my older sister as a gift. I remember thinking about her all day at school. My brother and I would run home after school to play with Spooky. We trained her right from the beginning. We would wrestle with her and get her riled up. Then she would grab a hold of our arms and bite us. As time went on her jaw got stronger.
One game we played with her was called “Barry in the Backfield.” This game consisted of two players. I was on one team and my younger brother was my opponent. Spooky was a neutral player. She was the all time running back and I was the quarterback. My brother kneeled across from us as a defender. Then I would say,
“Blue forty-two, blue forty-two, set hut.”
And I’d turn around and set Spooky on the floor. As soon as she hit the floor she’d take off around me and attempt to run around my brother. If my brother were able to tackle Spooky, I would get no points. If Spooky ran around my brother and off somewhere, I would get seven points. I don’t think we ever finished a game.
My older brother had his own way of training Spooky. He would hold a towel perpendicular to the floor, and Spooky would run at the towel. As she got close to the towel she would jump and clench her jaw into the towel. After some time she learned to lock her jaw into the towel and hang. My brother would shake the towel and try to make her fall, but she wouldn’t.
One gray and rainy day our family sat around the living room watching television. All of a sudden we heard this loud high-pitched shriek come from upstairs. It sounded like a girl in a horror movie walking into a room to find a bloodied corpse on the floor. Concerned, we yelled up the stairs to make sure sister was all right.
“Tina, what happened? Are you all right?’
“No. Someone come get this cat.”
My brothers and I ran upstairs. We walked into the bathroom and saw sister wrapped in a towel. Spooky had her claws dug into the towel and was climbing up our sister.
My older brother said, “Thataway Spooky. She’s learning.”
“She sure is,” I said.
“Get her off of me.”
“Okay, okay.”
We got her off of sister and brought her downstairs to the living room. My brothers and I laughed.
Spooky continued to grow until she was full-grown. When she stopped growing she was quite the cat. She looked like a miniature panther. She was large and very muscular. When she walked you could see her different muscles flexing.
At one point in time I believe our teachers began to worry about us. My younger brother and I would show up to school with a new scratch on our faces everyday. The worst one was on my younger brother. Spooky got him right under the eye and all the way down to his chin. He was lucky she didn’t get his eye.
After some time of getting beat up we began to learn. We learned we had to carry a blanket and a pillow. First you hit Spooky with the pillow then you threw the blanket on top. That gave you just enough time to get away. Every morning when I woke I’d grab my pillow and blanket. Then I’d crack the door open and look both ways to see if Spooky was around. If I didn’t see her, I’d run as fast as I could up the stairs and she’d dart out of some corner and chase me. When I got to the top of the stairs I’d slam the door and lock it. Spooky’s head would bounce off the door, then her paws would reach under. If she was there waiting right outside of the door, I’d have to use the pillow and blanket.
In the summertime the weather would be very hot and humid. And when there was nothing else to do, my younger brother, a friend and I would come looking for Spooky. She was the biggest and toughest cat in the neighborhood. She was usually good for some entertainment. One time the three of us were messing around one way or another when I heard loud hissing and growling. I ran around to the side of the house to see Spooky and another cat squaring off.
“Kevin, Larry, hurry up.”
They ran around to the side of the house, and the three of us began cheering Spooky on.
“Get her Spooky, get her.”
The two cats stood facing each other growling and hissing. After a minute or two the other cat tried to run around Spooky. When the cat got to Spooky’s side, Spooky pounced on her and got a hold of her neck. Her jaw clenched and locked. It was just like the towel drill. The other cat shook and tried to whip Spooky loose, but she wouldn’t budge. Her jaw was locked, and the rest of her body whipped back and forth like a flag. We saw blood start to gush out of the neck, and then Spooky let her go. The other cat wobbled off scraggily and Spooky watched her closely.
The following year Spooky got into many fights. If we heard the hissing and growling sound, we knew what was happening. She got us through some very slow times. Then one day she came home and didn’t look so good. A chunk of her head was bitten off and her eye was all bloodshot. A new cat was in the neighborhood, and this cat was twice the size of Spooky and twice as tough. For a long time Spooky was the biggest and toughest cat in the neighborhood. But shortly after she got beaten up, we never saw Spooky again.
From Adbusters Blog
Waves of unrest are sweeping through Chile. Led by the youth, this burgeoning revolution, which started as a protest for access to education, now threatens to overrun the governing neo-classical economic paradigm.
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/jan/13/chilean-protester-cami...
by Franco Berardi Bifo
From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet?
What if society can no longer resist the destructive effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no longer resist the devastating power of financial accumulation?
We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do that, we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy: the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of energolatria, a cult of energy, has dominated the cultural sense of the West from Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy isn’t boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading. I think we should reframe the concept and practice of autonomy from this point of view. The social body is unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force.
When workers were strong in the 1960s and 1970s, they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services, and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply declare their wish: they enact it. They make things happen; they invest, disinvest, displace; they destroy and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is force? What is force nowadays?
The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias?
Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in contemporary history. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean renouncing it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force.
When we think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the financial politics of neoliberalism, it’s hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work within the world machine. Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class.
The age of modem social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it’s hard to imagine how society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator state, the heir of the Enlightenment and socialism, has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social equilibrium. When, at the end of a ferocious class struggle between labor and capital – and within the capitalist class itself – the financial class has seized power by destroying legal regulation and transforming social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble.
I anticipate that scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much from them. They’ll be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. Just as the long wave of counterglobalization’s moral protests could not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network.
The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones) will be a peaceful process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight between the mass ignorance produced by media totalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect.
We cannot predict what the outcome of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This strategy of nonconfrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It’s impossible to predict what should be done in the case of unwanted conflict. A nonviolent response is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of well-being with private property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting with autonomous forms of production using high-tech low-energy methods – while avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.
Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming years. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicky because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss their dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way to a happy adaptation. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The development of autonomy is not totalizing or intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic therapy it should be considered an unending process.
Our mental software is ill prepared for the technological experiment humans have unleashed on the natural world … but it’s not too late to update the program. If you haven’t already, check out this award-winning documentary inspired by Ronald Wright’s 2005 book, A Short History of Progress.
URL: http://survivingprogress.com
by Adbusters
From Adbusters #100: Are We Happy Yet?
Emilio Morenatti/AP Images
This article is available in:
We awoke one morning to the dark realization that humanity is being dragged into a black hole of ecological, financial and spiritual catastrophe … that our democracy has been seized by a corporatocracy … that every day two hundred species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become forever extinct … that a deluge of advertising is sleepwalking our civilization to the brink of insanity … and that unless we fight back in the most visceral and creative way possible all will be lost.
And yet, what sets our struggle apart in 2012 is that we are not fighting to save a distant future. We are not trying to prevent some terrible event that is still to come. This is not about our unborn grandchildren. Instead, many of us sense that the threshold has already been crossed; the tipping point has already happened and what we are fighting for is our present. We are living in that tragic moment of eerie stillness where the fatal damage has been done, widening cracks can be seen, yet the edifice still stands and business as usual continues … but for how much longer?
Our days may be shadowed by this dark realization, but there is reason to be deeply optimistic for “where danger is, grows the saving power also.” Never before has the tantalizing possibility of a Global Spring, a worldwide people’s insurgency for democracy, seemed as close. For perhaps the first time in human history, we just might be on the edge of an everywhere-at-once revolution against the financial fraudsters, corporate lackeys and the ideology of consumerism that has brought the Earth to the precipice of collapse.
In this, the era of the total and transcendent indignato swarm, we look to each other, not to the masters above, to find out what it will take to pull off the ultimate culture jam: spiritual insurrection.
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
From Adbusters Blog
The “cancelled future” generation has undergone a radical shift from apathetic despair to inspired action, says journalist Paul Mason.
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/jan/23/paul-mason-rev...
From Adbusters Blog
When the G8 meet in Chicago in May, it will be a major moment of truth for the global economy.
Already there are all sorts of ideas percolating – Robin Hood tax, banning high frequency flash trading, a true cost economy, bio-economics – that will lead to reform of the global financial system.
But in the meantime there is something we can all do to set the stage for #Occupy Chicago, and that is the personal action to move our money away from the big banks.
It’s easier than you think. You find the credit union in your town or city that you like. You make an appointment. You tell them, “I would like to leave my bank and join your credit union.” They say, “you got it, we'll take care of it.” It will be the most pro-active hour of your week.
On February 1st if you haven’t already taken the opportunity, join these Canadian rabble-rousers to move your money.
Move Your Money Day Canada: February 1 / Move Your Money Project
"Winner Take All Politics" authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson discuss Washington's preoccupation with the economic concerns of the 1% at the expense of the rest.
From Adbusters Blog
This article is available in:
Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,
Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.
And so will we.
On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.
And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.
And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.
And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.
Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …
for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ
CANG8.org / ChicagoMassAction.org / Occupy Chicago
Adbusters / Facebook / Twitter / Reddit
From Adbusters Blog
Legendary British historian Eric Hobsbawm discusses the “pathological degeneration” of capitalism today.
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9682626.stm
From Adbusters Blog
This years’ World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, marks the start of the perennial capitalist meet-and-greet summit season.
The economic equivalent of the Oscars, the WEF is a time for the 0.1% to celebrate the achievements and successes of free-markets, and to discuss how to keep the crumbling ship from running ashore; it’s also a time to get in a few good runs on the slopes, deep tissue massages and a soothing hot tub session on the 99%’s dime.
Nestled in the picturesque Swiss Alps where the melting glaciers are deceptively intact and the hotels serviced by an army of invisible temporary workers, approximately 2000 global elites discuss everything from redistributing their obscene profits (a.k.a philanthropy) and environmental sustainability, to forecasting new areas of expansion and the future of capitalism.
On this latter note, delegates will be treated to a special brainstorming session on corporate capitalism’s forecast led by the wisdom of Bank of America CEO, Bryan Moynihan. Then to jazz things up, there will be several roundtable discussions with social media and internet hotshots, Facebook and Google, on how the revolutionary elements of web organizing can reinforce market growth.
Gag. Why hasn’t a stink bomb already gone off in this place?
Here is the latest on the Occupy igloo’s outside the Davos security permitter.
The Occupy movement has taken much of its inspiration from Spain's "Outraged" movement. What lessons does Spain have for Occupy now?
Via The Real News. Transcript of the interview available here.
From Adbusters Blog
This article first appeared on Socialist.org
THE PAST four months of the Occupy Movement have brought the American left to new heights. For the 99 percent, who represent the vast majority of the world’s population, the Occupy movement was long overdue.
Occupy has been a podium from which muzzled mouths have made a militant microphone. From this platform, we have mic-checked the 1 percent, and finally, it seems that we have found a voice of our own.
As with any movement, Occupy has fostered an internal debate about what tactics are necessary to take the movement forward. It’s an important question that requires careful consideration of the relation of social forces at play, the existing support outside of the movement and, perhaps most importantly, what possibilities lie in front of the movement–that is, the tangible goals the movement can set for itself.
Some Occupiers feel strongly that the movement should demand absolutely nothing from the economic and political system it’s rising up against. After all, the argument goes, the strength of the Occupy Movement thus far has been its potent indictment of the ruling class, coupled with its refusal to make any discernable demands or empower any official spokespeople.
However, by taking direct aim at the relationship between capital and the state, Occupy has raised the issue of class struggle in the U.S. That gauntlet having been thrown, the question in front of the movement is how to advance the interests of its class: the 99 percent.
In a sense, Occupy has diagnosed the ailments of the American political system, but hasn’t yet prescribed any cures. Having raised the level of political awareness, the movement must now fashion class consciousness into political action.
This task cannot be accomplished by maintaining a dismissive attitude toward the 1 percent and the state that represents them, or by failing to articulate demands against them, but by equipping ourselves with the political tools necessary to develop our movement.
To the ruling class, Occupy has been aggressive, but maddeningly oblique. “What are the demands?” Who are the leaders?” the fat cats of high finance ask. Occupy’s tactics have certainly been effective: the ruling class stretched itself thin to receive Occupy’s attack, overcompensated violently and exposed its ideological flank.
The legitimacy of the system failed, revealing its true nature. The democracy of the 1 percent is a sham; their police are but armed mercenaries. Their rebuttals to our encampments: Sanitation! Safety! Security! They are pale cover words for: Repression! Repression! Repression still! As if we are to believe that suddenly they care for the people who live every day of their lives in squalor and crime.
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THE OCCUPY Movement should be least concerned with what the 1 percent thinks of us, and only concerned with what the 99 percent thinks about us. And to this end, we do need demands, not to explain ourselves to the 1 percent, but rather to anchor Occupy in the daily lives of the people whom we aspire to involve in our movement.
The exposed hypocrisy of the ruling class has provided us with a blank slate. We can leverage the capitalist state’s claims to democracy against their determination to squelch free speech and the right to assembly. We can fashion the violence of the police into a tool revealing the true nature of the armed thugs “policing” our streets.
The state is the executive board of Wall Street, but Occupy is the anvil of the people. We can build our base. We can craft a culture of the 99 percent to counter that of the 1 percent. We have the ability to forge our movement into a hammer that can shape a new reality.
But what is needed to advance our movement to these bold new positions? Again, Occupy’s tactics have been effective so far, but we must anticipate that the ruling class will adapt. The coordinated repression against encampments nationwide speaks to this–as well as the 1 percent’s penchant for answering a challenge with blunt force.
Just as we must continue to challenge the 1 percent, we must also do so on a radically inclusive basis with concrete politics rooted in our daily lives. This means formulating demands and crafting slogans. However, some feel that to propose demands is only to legitimize the status quo. Take, for example, the arguments put forward by Deric Stingh in a recent Occupy Chicago DIY publication The Supplement:
Some of us have spontaneously conjured reformist schemes trying to divert us back into the very status quo we rebelled against, speaking in the voice of the Masters, “The Occupy Movement needs to have a set of concrete demands.” By doing so, we will “explain” and “justify” to “mainstream America” our actions. This is fatuous, a false prerequisite and a reflection of the poverty of imagination. These reformist schemes have been expressed in seemingly innocuous forms like “Tax the rich” or “Where’s our bailout?”
This, however, is a misstep made all too often in the movement. We can draw new people into the movement not just with our opposition to the 1 percent, but also with a message that has the potential to resonate within the awakening consciousness of the 99 percent.
In the U.S., the Occupy movement has attracted a vast layer of supporters who are not yet involved. What is needed to activate them? Politics! Not in the abstract. But concrete. With demands we can demonstrate to all the soulful refrain of the Paris Commune: “Our interests are the same.”
Furthermore, the demand of “Tax the rich” implicitly operates beyond the scope of this current capitalist economic system. This demand represents a dialogue of wealth redistribution beyond the scope of the 1 percent’s project of capital accumulation.
Likewise, the rallying slogan of “Where’s our bailout?” directly calls into question the bank bailouts of 2008 and begs the question of why the 99 percent were expected to sacrifice under this tremendous recession, while those responsible for crashing the economy have raked in billions of taxpayer dollars.
“Where is our bailout” is a fair statement in favor of both wealth redistribution and for a just and equal society. After all, let’s consider what kind of government would enact these demands: a government comfortably ensconced in the pocket of the 1 percent, or a government of the people?
This isn’t a question of asking for table scraps from the 1 percent–this is about taking a stand on issues that directly impact our lives. Giving the proverbial bird to the existing power structure in the face of unbearable living conditions the world over isn’t enough at the end of an equally unbearable day.
Remember that demands for reforms may also germinate broader, more radical platforms. Rather than dismiss them as the murmurs of sold-out activists lacking imagination, the sincere left must claim these slogans and demands for our own, infuse them with radical politics and demand greater concessions still. Will the 1 percent not concede? Then we will continue to expose them! This is our political legacy: fight for reforms to realize our collective strength and power in struggle, then continue on to actualize our revolution.
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CAN THE historic task in front of Occupy be accomplished in its current form? It cannot. This presupposes a unity that the heterogeneous ideologies that flow under the surface of the movement have yet to achieve. Occupy rests across a spectrum of politics ranging from liberal to radical, from revolutionary to reformist. Some activists are still developing their political opinions, while others carry the blueprint for a new society.
Despite this broad spectrum of views, Occupy has gone from public square occupations to attempted general strikes, from skirmishes with police to national days of action against police repression.
It is necessary to articulate demands, and grievances that are bound under a unified set of independent political principles. We cannot ignore the 1 percent–who control the media, poison our skies and seas, and whisper consumer nothings in our ears. We must topple them–they who oppress us as people of color, they who condemn us as the poor to ignorance, they who bash us as queer, they who destroy and degrade our earth, and they who have stripped us of our people’s history.
What is needed is a more potent injection of politics, reclaimed history and the fortitude to continue to fight back. We have to heal the fissures of the left–we have to scrape out sectarianism, bandage coalition and promote solidarity. When they beat us back with repression, we will return the blows with democratic organization.
The success of concrete political tactics is measurable. We can see perspectives play out, we can assess our collective actions, and we can structure our strategy to be most effective. “Going off the grid” isn’t an option; we have to face a brutish system that wants us to lose.
There are tangible ways to measure our progress–student activity, the involvement of organized and unorganized labor, and the activation of sympathetic, community support. All of this is made possible with politics.
From Adbusters Blog
As Occupy gears up for the American Spring, our European counterparts will soon have one OWS victory to put in their cap. In France this past week, lawmakers put their backing behind a bill for a Robin Hood (Tobin) Tax. The tax, a fraction of a percent on all derivative, currency and securities transactions, will equate to billions of dollars for social programs (at a nominal cost to the markets) and will reign in the worst elements of speculative trading in Europe.
This marks the long beginning of the necessary radical shift in the economic paradigm of our age. Germany and the Eurozone states are already on board, leaving only the U.K. and the U.S. defending unbridled neo-conservative free market gains.
For all of us this side of the Atlantic, the obvious question is: why not a Tobin Tax here?
When the G8 meets in Chicago this May, lets make sure that Occupy is there to greet them with a demand for Robin Hood.
(Reuters) – France wants to target bonds and derivatives, as well as stocks, with a new tax on financial transactions which the conservative government hopes to introduce before an April presidential election, Finance Minister Francois Baroin said on Tuesday.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government is keen to push ahead with a “Tobin tax” even without its European Union partners …
Read the entire article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/10/us-france-tax-idUSTRE8091BC201...
From Adbusters Blog
Earlier this month, reporters from Canadian Business sat down with Adbusters Editor-in-Chief Kalle Lasn to ask his thoughts on what Occupy might look like in 2012. Here’s what he had to say.
Canadian Business: On the U.S. presidential election:
Kalle Lasn: Most young people, 99% of the occupiers I would say, are pretty disillusioned with Obama. We feel that he has become a kind of a gutless wonder who didn’t do what he had promised. He has disappointed us bitterly. When it comes to a choice between somebody like Rick Perry and Obama, then of course people will vote for Obama, but not in great numbers and without much enthusiasm.
I think the really interesting thing that could happen leading up to the presidential election is that there will be rumblings of third parties. Especially people in the Occupy movement are totally sick of this Coca-Cola/Pepsi kind of choice that Americans have had for so long. They’re yearning for a real choice, for real democracy, and we may well see the beginnings of a third party rising next year. Of course, I don’t think that it will suddenly challenge the Republican and Democratic parties, but it could well play the role of the spoiler in the way that Ralph Nader and Ross Perot and the Green Party have never quite been able to do.
Read the entire interview: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/66423--interview-kalle-lasn-publ...
Once a rising star in the industrialized world, Ireland now has the highest per capita national debt in the world – a debt to be paid by the people, not the 1% behind the crash.
Read more at Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2012/01/2012119847466...
“Shoot first, think later.”
Watch and learn about the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being debated in Washington, legislation that will give big companies and government agencies the power to shut down any website they please.
Find out more at http://http://americancensorship.org
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