On Oct 19, 2011, at 8:46 PM, dndlllio at aol.com wrote:
> I was multi-tasking while watching the video, and by some contingent goof, the parts where Natasha L was speaking didn't catch my attention like the others, but, references to Foucault aside, wasn't she saying something similar to what Graeber wrote today in Naked Capitalism, and what's so bad about that?:
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> "Above all, I am happy to work with anyone, whatever they call themselves, willing to work on anarchist principles—which in America today, has largely come to mean, a refusal to work with or through the government or other institutions which ultimately rely on the threat of force, and a dedication to horizontal democracy, to treating each other as we believe free men and women in a genuinely free society would treat each other. Even the commitment to direct action, so often confused with breaking windows or the like, really refers to the refusal of any politics of protest, that merely appeals to the authorities to behave differently, and the determination instead to act for oneself, and to do what one thinks is right, regardless of law and authority. Gandhi’s salt march, for example, is a classic example of direct action. So was squatting Zuccotti Park. It’s a public space; we were the public; the public shouldn’t have to ask permission to engage in peaceful political assembly in its own park; so we didn’t. By doing so we not only acted in the way we felt was right, we aimed to set an example to others: to begin to reclaim communal resources that have been appropriated for purposes of private profit to once again serve for communal use—as in a truly free society, they would be—and to set an example of what genuine communal use might actually be like. For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free."
I had an exchange with David yesterday about some of this. Before I quote any of it, I want to say this is a whole lot more thoughtful and substantial than the things that Harris and Lennard were saying.
That aside, I was struck by the piece in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Ed on academic influences on OWS by the passage quoting Graeber. He said that, for example, instead of petitioning to the gov to build a well in a poor country, people should just build it themselves. As it happens, Liza had spent some of Saturday painting the radiator in Ivan's public school - because the city can't fund that stuff. The amount of money and work that parents have to raise and do for the public schools in NYC is a scandal. So I wondered how David's position was all that different from neoliberalism's: instead of taxing the fatcats so that well-paid public workers can do this labor, parents should do it themselves. David's answer was that painting the radiator was only a start - parents should occupy the school with the intention of turning it into a parent-teacher run cooperative. I'd rather agitate to tax the fat cats and hire the workers.
Here's where the anarchist obsession with ethics comes in: taxing/hiring only reinforces the commodity-money-wage relation. Taking over the school would challenge it. So I asked David what happens when the cops come in? How would he deal with Jay Gould's bit of wisdom - he could always hire half the working class to kill the other half. David's answer was that the hope was the cops could be persuaded to drop their weapons and join the occupiers. This is the logic behind the occupation of Zuccotti too.
I just don't buy it. I don't think that we can get anywhere without changing the state. But purity demands that we not do that because it would step on the prefiguration.