Obscene gesture at 46:36!
Seriously, this is great. I think Chris Maisano starts the segment that sets out the basic disagreement around 26 minutes in:
"I agree that this has been brilliant, and has succeeded where, say, last year's One Nation Working Together rally in Washington failed utterly. But where does this go? This is a tactic. Occupation is a tactic, it's not a strategy, it's not a movement and it's not a program. Part of me feels like people just expect tactical victory to pile up on tactical victory, and at the end you have some sort of revolution in which we've all figured out how to organise production and governance. I just don't see it." And then he asks how people who are reluctant to make plans beyond the day to day organisation of action see it working.
Seth puts it more specifically to the anarchists on the panel: "When you talk about insurrection, occupation, and these kinds of tactics as posing a particularly serious threat to the powers that be... what is your image or scenario in which these kinds of tactics ultimately have an effect beyond making everyone talk about inequality and social domination and all the rest of it, and actually 'fuck shit up' for the ruling class?"
And they can't really give an answer. Natasha Lennard objects to the 'powers that be' line: "If you say 'the powers that be', I don't - it's a classically Foucauldian point - I don't think the 'powers that be' only enact as repressive forces from above. I see them reproduced and constituted in how we governmentalise ourselves. So things that can be broken down through new political spaces, new interactions, new sorts of relationality and experiments - those in and of themselves challenge the 'powers that be', in that the powers that be don't just come from Washington or the stock exchange and enforce themselves on us; they're everywhere, in all of our coded relations. So if you in the past two weeks have interacted in an uncoded way, a way that you didn't expect, or a way that was totally surprising to you, not based on how you assumed you could relate to the people around you - that is a challenge to the powers that be. That might make you feel differently about how you live, eat, work, fuck, spend, and that I think will challenge the 'powers that be' in the more traditional sense of the people that you would say financially benefit from the uniform governmentality, i.e. Washington and Wall Street. "
I'm not sure what Foucault would have said about the possibility of interacting "in an uncoded way". But anyway, is this not saying 'it's all in our heads', the manacles are mind forg'd? Even if this were true, if we all needed to just cast off the 'codings' in our relations, how is it supposed to spread into society at large? The movement develops through the bulk of the population being drawn into activist culture?
Mike