Thanks for your excellent series of posts, derridata. I hope you're avoiding Spiked, which is running pathetic pieces comparing Occupy to the Tea Party!! Is Occupy the product of astroturfing funded by the Koch brothers? Uh, no, so there's really no comparison--but you'd never know that if you relied on Spiked.
Anyway, you've probably run across this latest atrocity, which reinforces the point of your post about paramilitary policing techniques:
In the video, you see a police officer [Update: UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike] walk down a line of those young people seated quietly on the ground in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, and spray them all with pepper spray at very close range. He is clearing a path for fellow officers to walk through and arrest more students, but it's as if he's dousing a row of bugs with insecticide.
This 8-minute video was uploaded just a few hours ago, and has already become something of an iconic, viral emblem accross the web. We're flooded with eyewitness footage from OWS protests right now, but this one certainly feels like an important one, in part because of what the crowd does after the kids are pepper-sprayed. Watch the whole thing."
My advice would be to avoid like the plague the kind of "analysis" offered in online forums such as Spiked! I don't think Frank Furedi has written anything insightful or fresh in the last ten years or so when examining social movements. He ALWAYS says their appeal is predicated merely on "moral authority". That criticism is so lazy because it merely obfuscates the differences between movements by refusing to engage with any concrete proposals on their own terms.
As an antidote, I recommend taking a look at the following video, which clearly sets out four reasons why Wall Street should be occupied. It also demonstrates the missed opportunities in the past when there was a chance to act in a pre-emptive fashion, and thereby avoid, or at least minimize, the catastrophe that has unfolded. Of course, regulation alone will never be a solution to the problems capitalism creates, but as a prelude to the "Great Emancipation", the social democratic reforms in the video have considerable merit.
Marx was a realist; the real romantics think you can have capitalism without great crisis:
"Officially authored by 'The Invisible Committee,' an anonymous group of activists and intellectuals, The Coming Insurrection is a slim manual that predicts the imminent collapse of capitalist culture and outlines a plan for the regeneration of collectivist values. Written in the wake of widespread riots that gripped French suburbs in 2005, the text is interpreted by some as an anarchist manifesto, a situationist-inspired call to arms. The French government sees it as a 'manual for terrorism.' The move against Coupat and the rest of the Tarnac 9 was intended as a preemptive strike against the burgeoning anti-capitalist movement in France. While the others were released with relative speed, Coupat was held under 'preventative arrest” until May of 2009 and labeled by the government as a 'pre-terrorist.'
"And there, buried within the idiom of conservative fear – leftist, anarcho, collectivist, commune – is the word that points to the real danger in this story: pre. Preemptive. Preventative. Pre-terrorist. The French government, fearing the societal upheaval that a mass rethink of capitalism would spawn, exercised the principles of preventive medicine as the doctrine of law. It suspected the presence of renegade cells, mutating into malignant tumors of dissent and threatening the health of the entire body politic, so the government acted preemptively by swiftly excising the tissue in question."
"Much of L’insurrection’s tableau of modern European (more specifically French, and even more specifically bourgeois Parisian) misery is compelling, especially when it heeds the situationist injunction that to ‘understand what sociology never understands, one need only envisage in terms of aggressivity what for sociology is neutral’.7 Like the Debord of In girum, it can even strike notes of dark comedy: ‘Europe is a penniless continent which secretly shops at Lidl and flies low cost so it can keep on travelling.’ At its core lies something like a social-psychological portrait of the micro-managed and multitasking subject of contemporary work, the function of which is regarded as fundamentally political: that of ‘biopolitically’ governing the entirety of social life and perpetuating a regime of exploitation that is increasingly superfluous. Though the insight is hardly novel, the Comité Invisible does succeed in pungently capturing the horror and imbecility of the current proliferation of disciplinary devices such as ‘personal development’, ‘human resources’, ‘social capital’ and other managerial monstrosities. L’insurrection encapsulates this under the aegis of what it calls the ‘ethics of mobilization’, the colonization, through work, of the very domain of possibility:
Mobilization is this slight detachment with regard to oneself … on the basis of which the Self [le Moi] can be taken as an object of work, on the basis of which it becomes possible to sell oneself, and not one’s labour-power, to be paid not for what one has done but for what one is. … This is the new norm of socialization.
I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life. Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives. I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars. You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.
This is our decision, to live fast and die young. We've got the vision, now let's have some fun. Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do. Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.
Forget about our mothers and our friends We're fated to pretend To pretend We're fated to pretend To pretend
Please no citation or reproduction of any original writings or images appearing on this blog without the permission of its authors.
"Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do; such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe" (David Stove The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies 1991: 188)
