Paul Mattick, Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism, Reaktion Books, London, 2011. 126 pp. £12.95 pb., 978 1 86189 801 2.

Stephen Harper

In 2008, as journalists and pundits struggled to account for the return of a crisis that was not – following political promises of ‘the end of boom and bust’ – supposed to recur, copies of Capital and The Communist Manifesto reportedly flew off bookshop shelves. Even some mainstream media commentators began to wonder if Marx might have been right all along. But such doubts – coming from commentators not accustomed to harbouring them – were often as ephemeral as they were grudging, and lay readers seeking robust but accessible understandings of Marxist thought have hardly been well served in recent years. This year, however, has seen the publication of at least two new, highly accessible books – written by, respectively, a veteran Marxist literary critic and one of the US’s most clear-sighted Marxist polymaths – which argue, in detail, for the continuing and deepening relevance of Marx’s ideas for our times.

In Why Marx Was Right, with characteristic erudition and verve, Terry Eagleton addresses the commonplace charges that Marxism represents a utopian, soulless, outdated, unduly statist, unnecessarily violent or economically determinist school of thought. Eagleton gamely takes on and demolishes these criticisms one by one, showing Marx to be a flexible, pragmatic and undogmatic thinker and arguing for the eminently human – even humanist – character of Marx’s political outlook. Importantly, too, he distances Marxism from the terrorisitic regimes of the twentieth century that claimed to operate in its name. Maoism and Stalinism, he notes, were ‘botched, bloody experiments which made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it’.The criticisms of Marxism addressed in the book are the ones typically levelled by Marx’s right-wing critics (while they are not mentioned by name, the latter would surely include philosophical anti-Marxists such as John Gray) – and rightly so, since these are the criticisms that Eagleton’s intended audience is most likely to have encountered. Those seeking some discussion of the more sophisticated interventions into Marxist theory made by anarchists, autonomists and left communists will, however, be disappointed. Indeed, while it would be impossible for a short polemic such as Eagleton’s to deal even cursorily with every political school of thought influenced by Marxism, the version of Marxism defended here is broadly Trotskyist, and other Marxist traditions are given somewhat short shrift. Eagleton dismisses as ‘ultra left’, for example, those Marxists who ‘look to revolution rather than to parliamentary democracy and social reform’, a point which is followed by a joking footnote that mocks the supposed absurdity of left-communist positions: ‘In the militant 1970s, … the true purists or ultraleftists … were those who were able to return an unequivocal No to the question “Would you call the bourgeois fire brigade”.’ This dismissiveness towards ‘ultra left’ positions is unfortunate, since elsewhere in the book Eagleton is at pains to emphasize that matters to which he devotes extended discussion – such as the desirability of ‘market socialism’ – have been the subject of serious debate among Marxists themselves; but it is also indicative of Eagleton’s tendency to emphasize the humanistic and reformist, rather than the revolutionary, aspects of Marx’s thought.

Indeed, while Eagleton is certainly not neglectful of history – he notes, for example, that the composition of the working class has changed significantly since Marx’s time – he does tend to present the reformist character of nineteenth-century socialism as more or less adequate in the current era. But capitalism today is not the same as that which confronted workers in Marx’s time. The nineteenth century, for all its horrors, was a period of rising wages and capitalist expansion, in which unions served as more or less effective organs of working-class reformism. The revolutionary wave of the early twentieth century, by contrast, indicated that the communist transformation of society was possible. The state, meanwhile, has grown enormously in size and scope since that period, absorbing the unions, which have in turn played a mostly reactionary role by supporting the world wars and dividing struggling workers by nation, sector and job role – however militant their rank-and-file members may be. However one describes such historical shifts (as a movement from formal to real subsumption, from ascendance to decadence, etc.), their political ramifications cannot be ignored. The qualitative differences between the capitalism of Marx’s day and ours have changed the rules of the game, transforming the nature of working- class organs of struggle. Admittedly, it is difficult to take full account of a century and a half of capitalist development in a short polemic such as Eagleton’s; nevertheless, Why Marx Was Right does rather underestimate the dramatic shift in the nature of capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century and its implications for proletarian political strategy.

On a more prosaic level, some readers may find the relentlessly puckish literary style of Why Marx Was Right irritating. Eagleton, as always, is droll; but the characteristic trope of illustrating abstract concepts with vividly concrete images and eccentric analogies – to which the author gives full rein – is often more grating than illuminating. ‘To judge socialism by its results in one desperately isolated country’, he writes of the Soviet Union under Stalin, ‘would be like drawing conclusions about the human race from a study of psychopaths in Kalamazoo’. Despite these reservations, however, Why Marx Was Right will provide reassurance to newcomers to Marxism – of which, in these troubled times, there are many – that Marx did not hold all, or even any, of the views attributed to him by his detractors.

Since Eagleton is more concerned with defending Marxism from attack than advocating it as a means of critique, a better – albeit less stirring – title for his book might be Why Marx Wasn’t Wrong. In fact, Eagleton’s actual title rather better describes the stance of Paul Mattick Junior’s  Business As Usual. At just 126 pages including footnotes, Mattick’s book offers a Marxist explanation of capitalist crisis for a lay readership in a highly condensed format. Beginning with an analysis of the longue durée of capitalist business cycles, Mattick shows, in characteristically precise and jargon-free prose, how Marxian economic theory offers resources for explaining the latest crisis of the system in its historical context. Mattick is well qualified for this task: just as his father, the council communist Paul Mattick Senior, had used Marxian economics to predict the ultimate failure of postwar welfare Keynsianism in his 1962 book Marx and Keynes, Mattick’s Marxist method has enabled him correctly to predict the ways in which the economic crisis would unfold since 2007. As Mattick stresses, such predictional accuracy is not a matter of intelligence or insight, but is rather ‘a matter of knowing how to think about what is going on’. Indeed, continuing the theme of one of Mattick’s earlier books, Social Knowledge, Marxism is posited here as the best guide to acquiring knowledge in the social sciences. As such, one of this book’s clearest messages – recalling his father’s argument in Marx and Keynes – has  to do with the bankruptcy of mainstream economic analysis.

In the first part of the book, Mattick addresses some common misconceptions, arguing that economic crises are not, as is often claimed, caused by ‘exogenous shocks’ to the system, but are internal to the dynamics of capitalism. However, the central problem with mainstream accounts of the recent crisis, Mattick argues, lies in their mistaken assumption that the point of capitalism is to create goods in order to satisfy consumer demand, rather than that capitalists aim to create profit. Thus, in response to Keynesian commentators such as Paul Krugman, whose recommendations for beating the recession include massive stimulus spending and job-creation schemes, Mattick points out that ‘capitalism is a system not for providing “employment” as an abstract goal, but for employing people who produce profits’. And therein lies the problem. Following the work of Robert Brenner, Mattick points to the more or less steady decline, since the mid-1970s, in levels of capital investment and profitability – a decline that would have led to a crisis much earlier had its effects not been staved off by enormous levels of private, public and government debt.

While emphasizing the cyclical nature of economic downturn, Mattick notes that the present crisis is unfolding in a radically different context to that of earlier depressions. The state-capitalist solution of large-scale government spending that was implemented by leaders from Roosevelt to Hitler in response to the depression of the 1930s is virtually impossible to implement today (and in any case, as Mattick points out, it was actually the Second World War, not these Keyenesian measures, that finally enabled capitalism to climb out of depression). Keynesians, argues Mattick, have never faced up to the long-term consequences of government borrowing, which has now spiralled out of control – in the USA it has risen from $16 billion in 1930 to £12.5 trillion today – raising the prospect of default for many countries. Governments are therefore caught between the rock of allowing the crisis to ‘play out’, imposing austerity and trying to contain the ensuing social unrest, and the hard place of stimulus spending, which will lead to disastrously high levels of government debt.

An added problem is that capitalism today is integrated as never before in its history, so that any solutions that capitalism invents to remedy its own problems must be international in nature – a virtual impossibility in a world of competing nation-states. World war has, of course, traditionally offered one such global solution for capitalism; but, as Mattick notes, although the world today is racked by conflict, mobilizing an (as yet) undefeated working class for a world war would prove difficult for the ruling class (although, in a world full of nuclear weapons, one wonders if troop mobilization would even be necessary). Moreover, even if the economy does temporarily recover, this will only exacerbate the environmental destruction and depletion of natural resources that already threaten to render the planet uninhabitable for human life.

In the book’s final pages, Mattick is upbeat about the decline of the ‘traditional’ Left of ‘parties, unions and radical sects’, arguing that the solution to the problems created by capitalism will have to come through the actions of ordinary people. This might begin with people simply taking and using housing, food and other goods, organizing production and distribution to meet their own needs. In this, Mattick sounds a refreshingly pragmatic and undogmatic note, and, unlike Eagleton, shows an awareness that organs such as the unions no longer serve the progressive function they once did. Inevitably, however, some Marxists will feel that Mattick, by seeming to present the overcoming of capitalist social relations as a process of communization that bypasses the need for proletarian dictatorship, underestimates the importance of working-class political organization to any post-capitalist transition.

Some will say, too, that Mattick’s account of economic crisis overemphasizes the causal importance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. There is a significant divergence, for example, between Mattick’s focus on profit rate and the more pluralist account of capitalist crisis given in David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital (another of the few accessible Marxist books about the crisis to have appeared of late). Those interested in Mattick’s critique of Harvey’s position will, however, need to look elsewhere for illumination, since Mattick focuses here primarily on his own thesis, rather than engaging in lengthy dialogues with the arguments of others. Still, whatever view one takes of the role of profit rates in capitalist crisis, Mattick’s book valuably locates the roots of the crisis in the nature of the capitalist system, providing a forceful counter-argument to those liberal-left commentators who have sought to blame the recent crisis on ‘greedy bankers’, ‘neoliberalism’ or other manifestations of ‘excessive’ capitalism, while arguing for a return to a regulated Keynesianism. Like his father before him, Mattick argues convincingly that neither the ‘free market’ nor the Keynesian policies of the ruling class offers a way to overcome the cycle of boom-and-bust in an increasingly beleaguered system. Indeed, both Eagleton’s and Mattick’s books serve as accessible reminders that, as Sartre observed half a century ago in Search for a Method, we cannot ‘go beyond’ Marxism until we have transcended the circumstances which engendered it.

Nathan Brown

We live in a time when tents have become the singular weapon of the people which power cannot tolerate, and against which it does not know how to defend itself. The bureaucrats are in shambles; the ‘city’ and its ‘police’ are at each other’s throats; middling reformists have no idea where to position themselves. Everyone agrees: it’s about to explode.

This is the situation as I write on the night before the morning of what will be the second police raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment, announced in a memo leaked this afternoon. It is a situation that devolves, primarily, from the fallout of the first evictionon 25 October. Like any important historical sequence,the story of what has happened in this city during the past two weeks is harrowing and inspiring, beautiful and unbearable…

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Occupy New York

Sabu Kohso

Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate Modern, London, 6 October 2011–8 January 2012.

John Timberlake

The only comic moment in Gerhard Richter: Panorama comes in the form of a double portrait of the artist with his long-term friend and interlocutor Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, outside the doors of an art school, but titled as if emerging from a church post-nuptially. There’s nothing particularly funny about two men getting married of course. Rather, the comic aspect comes in the form of the inescapability of the image itself.

A decade ago, Robert Storr’s exhibition of Gerhard Richter at MoMA New York featured the same painting. Storr’s 2002 show fashioned an alternative of sorts to the hitherto dominant account of the then 70-year-old, moving away from those critics who had sought to present Richter’s choices of media as merely contingent in a broader neo-avant-gardist project driven by the photograph as found object or readymade. This take on Richter is epitomized, if not indeed initiated, by Buchloh. It was Buchloh’s dialogues with Richter which, to a large extent, put the painter in digs in which he never actually seemed at home: the Frankfurt School. Indeed, there is something of the Pollock–Greenberg relationship here. The marriage was always dysfunctional, yet it did produce offspring – most notably in the publication of Richter’s Atlas with its partial correspondences with Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas project.

As the well-known 1988 conversation between them shows, however, it was, paradoxically, Buchloh privileging the neo-Warburgian aspect of Richter’s project which left no credible place for the artist’s other concerns, reflected, most notably, in the increasingly large number of abstracts emerging during the course of that decade. This leads to accusations of cynicism, in turn pushing an increasingly contrary and obstinate painter to assert belief in content. Whereas Buchloh nihilistically instrumentalizes the paintings, aiming at the bankruptcy of the forms, Richter retreats into them, focusing instead on doubts of his own efficacy in the face of painting’s putative transcendent capacity. It was Buchloh, also, who sought to describe Richter as ‘the heir to an historically divided and fragmented situation, in which there was no pictorial strategy that had any real validity … meditating on what was once possible’ at the very same time as Richter himself sought to recoup Hans Sedlmayr. And this conjuring of ghosts is what clearly unites them, for if, in its morbidity, retreat and self-absorption, Richter’s practice has always been more tragically Barthesean than Benjaminian, then his principal leftist interlocutor has done little to change that.

In many ways, however, Storr’s 2002 curation did show Richter in a light more germane to the artist’s words, not the least because it showed just how inept the painter could be, and that made the work all the more interesting. Up until then there had been the sense that this was a practice as slick and peerlessly engineered as a Baader–Meinhof Wagen out-driving the cultural cops, with no space for error or miscalculation. However, as Storr seemed to recognize, such an account overlooked that which was becoming increasingly celebrated and sought after in Richter’s oeuvre, namely his celebrations of colour and painterly abstraction, and the apparent embrace of the reassurances of genre, rather than any problematization of such. Storr’s show celebrated a career of hard-won proficiency, not least by its inclusion of misfires such as sand added to oils to make a bad joke of a beach scene, lazy slurred photo pieces that weren’t a patch on what Malcolm Morley had done at the same time, and heavy-handed opportunist stabs such as a maudlin pair of painted glass monochromes shaped something similar to how the World Trade Center looked, up until that Tuesday morning a few months earlier. There, Richter was, indeed, presented as a painter’s painter, off-days and all. Nevertheless, this last point is not easily dismissed for the resonance it probably carries with a lot of artists working today. In a massively expanded commercial and institutional art world with its attendant pressures, Richter comes to represent certain ontological claims amidst the internal and external pressures to be a certain kind of artist: namely the putative necessity of studio time and studio practice, and the desire to apply individually honed craft skill in a manner seemingly relevant to the contemporary world. Among practitioners, as with painters such as Bacon or Freud, this is where the appeal of Richter’s conservatism lies.

This is, effectively, where Gerhard Richter: Panorama show takes its cue. Over the course of fourteen rooms of Tate Modern, and spilling out onto the concourse, the show chronologically charts Richter’s work through the early 1960s to the present as a series of unmitigated triumphs. In Tate’s website clip, its director, Nicholas Serota, states: ‘For Baudelaire, Manet was the painter of modern life, and for me Richter was always the painter of modern life.’ Misattribution aside (it was Constantin Guys, and not Manet, of whom Baudelaire made the claim), therein lies the rub, since in the course of this show, the contrast between Manet and Richter could not be more evident.

This is because, rather than comedically concretizing the false universals of genre and art history in the contingent particularities of medium, moment and context – as with, say, Manet’s Olympia or, curiously enough, as an earlier incarnation of Jeff Wall managed to do with his Blackpool Donkey take on Stubbs’s Whistlejacket – time and again Richter’s oils assume an elevatory function. So, too, Richter’s Atlas, of course: in marked contrast to Warburg’s innovatory collection of popular mediations of works of high culture, Richter’s latter-day project has gained its reputation on the exact inversion, an ultimately tragic vision in which the snapshot, with all its attendant cultural instabilities, transmutes into a putatively universal statement in oils about the human condition. In Richter, the family album is raided to ensure we all have an Uncle Rudi, snapped in his Nazi uniform, and we all have blond daughters, like Betty, turning preferentially towards our immortal abstractions rather than meeting our ageing gaze. Like insects trapped in amber, this mostly becomes a sequence of dead exquisites: mournful archetypes distilled from domestic life and tourist snaps, rather than the agencies and ruptures of photography per se. It is his masterpiece, October 18, 1977, one of the true great works of the last century, which remains the exception to this rule, precisely because its song turns inwards at the point where it takes on that larger political tragedy, drawing it back to the deflationary and unlikely, whilst avoiding the single definitive image through awkward repetition and non-progressive sequence.

This essayistic aspect is celebrated in this retrospective, but for the most part Richter’s fan-brushing and squeegee-ing often reads as no more than an increasingly cloying stylistic painterly conceit, which, rather like Turner’s sulphurous smogs, detaches from its historical referent. As evident in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 2009, many rely upon a feathering back trick which might (just) be read as signifiers of the televisual or some strangely dot-free web-fed offset, so long as everyone present agrees. More often, now, it just looks teary-eyed. On those frequent occasions when a painting is more blurred or its blacks more dropped out than its photographic origin, there is an obstinate echo of Turner’s claim that ‘such things are, though you mayn’t believe it’. Looking more the result of inebriation than mediation, the vertical slurs of Demo (1997), a picture of a PKK demonstration in Cologne, bear this out, as surely as the artist’s insistence that he really did experience ‘feelings to do with contemplation, remembering, silence and death’ when knocking out the long sequence of candles ’n’ skulls in the 1980s.

This is not the first show to contrive Richter the enigma (as in Self Portrait, 1996) as Richter the innovator by suggesting he ‘raises questions’. There is an increasingly airless quality to the progression of rooms, ending, appropriately enough, in an enclosure of massive abstracts entitled Cage, a homage to John Cage. Perhaps by association this aims also to place Richter in a tradition. Nevertheless, the case that this is an artist who is still ‘Questioning Painting’ or ‘the Limits of Vision’ seems forced and unlikely. In the case of the former, there are black-and-white snaps of the surface of a painting, in Room 11, which, despite the blurb, actually don’t look like ‘landscapes’ because the plane of focus and depth of field are wrong; in the latter, paintings derived from micrography and two of the artist’s occasional forays into vitreous sculpture (Room 12) merely point to an occasional experiment, rather than a thought-out project of enquiry. This latter point is a shame: the glass and metal forms almost seem like apparatuses of some sort, and pushed further might have become interestingly madcap ocular contrivances. As it stands, it is increasingly difficult to see beyond the stultifying sense that this is a latter-day Vermeer’s take on Warhol, without even the possibilities or iconoclasms of the inverse.

Net

The initial explosion of the ‘global slump’ did not arise from the activities of any cyber- Left, but rather from finance capital’s self-destructive inability to handle safely the new means of communication, crystallized as high-speed trading and computerized risk management algorithms.2 But as the crisis unfolds, it offers another turn of the screw in the helical story of network counter-power. Resistance, slow to emerge, assumed a very different tone from alter-globalization, looking not to the possibility of another world but to the bleakness of no future. Confronting disaster arising from the global fluidity of networked capital, the response was to seize space, hold ground, occupy – a logic that spread from the streets of Greece to US university blockades, French factory seizures and British student occupations, and then abruptly spiked in the Arab Spring.

Occupations depend on bodies filling space. But they also involve communication, in at least two aspects – horizontalist general-assembly decision-making and networked social media: the very slow and the very fast. The role of social media in these uprisings is difficult to discuss because liberal commentators fetishize it so heavily – as if Facebook and Twitter, not unemployment, rising food prices and authoritarianism, were the cause of uprisings in Egypt. This is a backhanded way of vindicating hightech advanced capital, and one that locks attention on middle-class activists at the expense of workers and the poor. Nonetheless, despite this corrupt analysis, both digital networks (such as Cairo’s bloggers) and conventional media with developed digital strategies (such as Al Jazeera) were important to the struggles in and around Tahrir, and to the dynamic by which its example was relayed to the Spanish M15 ‘Take the Square’ movement. What began to emerge was the possibility that social media, built on the expropriation of Net commons, might themselves be subject to reappropriation.

Square

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has taken this tendency to a new level. The preconditions were provided by a US unemployment rate officially at 9 per cent, in reality close to 16 per cent; grotesque income polarization; widespread evictions; the paralysis of the Obama regime. But the spark was virtual. Or, better, there were sequences of virtual sparks, like a gunpowder trail. The initial Internet call to occupation from the anticonsumerist journal Adbusters was relayed through a circuit of left blogs and news sites; the independent, yet intersecting, establishment of the Tumblr micro-blog, ‘We are the 99%’, where the photo and text testimonials of the victims of the North American economic crisis also attracted a mounting number of hits. The endorsement of the occupation by hacker network Anonymous articulated it to the Wikileaks struggles. On the basis of scores of personal conversations on the first two days of the Occupy Wall Street I would say that the majority of the small group of unemployed, students and precarious cultural media workers that descended on Zuccotti Park, a group that mixed in almost equal numbers veterans of the alter-globalization movement and political neophytes, heard about the event exactly the same way I did: online. And it was also online that the news of the Occupation radiated out. Again, we can schematically chart the waves in this radiation: the relay of the general assembly proceedings from a media centre run from on-site generators to the livefeed site Global Revolution; continued use of social media, Twitter and Facebook but crucially again Tumblr. The posting of the much-referenced 29 September Internet manifesto, ‘Declaration of the Occupation of New York City’, followed the perpetually provisional user-editable list of proposed demands; and, as the movement spread, the aggregation of news in sites such as occupyeverywhere; more videography to occupyoutube; and fund raising for non-digital media, such as the Occupied Wall Street Journal, by online crowd-sourced fund-raising agencies, such as Kickstarter or LoudSauce.

All this emerged from a vortex that mixed up individual digital users, highly politicized, shoestring-budgeted media collectives, liberal small-scale media capital or would-be capital, and the not-so-small-scale resources of media celebrities – a concoction that explains both the political polyphony of Occupy and its fast escalating virtual presence. Over two weeks this networked irruption tipped the mainstream media response from a vicious circle of silencing dissent to a virtuous circle of movement amplification, a transition marked first by the New York Times decision to cover the occupation in depth, and second by the anomalous irruption of critical reporting about police violence against the occupiers on the network news of MSNBC. That Zuccotti Park used to be in the shadow of the Twin Towers occasions multiple ironies, one of which concerns Occupiers’ communication strategy. In the aftermath of 9/11 security pundits declared that al-Qaeda had mastered a netwar formula, namely staged a dramatic event, at a global media centre, conveying an unmistakable message and exemplifying an organizational modus operandi that could be relayed to and replicated without central control by numerous franchising groups. And this was pretty much the dynamic unleashed by Occupy, one week after the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Within a month, by 15 October, synchronized occupations and demonstrations proliferated across large and small cities in the USA, Canada and internationally – an extraordinary achievement. Three months previously, it would have been unbelievable that there would be a movement on the streets of a hundred North American cities, occasioning over a thousand arrests, for which polls show substantial public support; with internationalist connections denouncing social inequity, the concentration of wealth and, sometimes, capitalism itself.

Everywhere

Yet Occupy has its limits, limits largely coterminous with its strength. What its networked call summoned is a left populism, spanning reformist and radical politics, anti-corporatist and anti-capitalist positions. It is difficult to generalize about Occupy sites precisely because they are so widespread. Nodes on its network are localized and heterogeneous. Occupy Oakland is very different in racial composition from, say, Occupy Toronto or Occupy Philadelphia. But it is probably fair to say most Occupations will contain, in varying proportions, some mix of class struggle and libertarian anarchisms, New Agers, social democrats, proponents of left (and right) monetary reform schemes, and even Tea Party members. The outrage at capital’s inequity and excess is unmistakable, but so too are the difficulties in and struggles over platform and demands. More important, perhaps, is that, for all its ubiquity, the limits of Occupy are the boundaries of the squares, plazas and parks it has seized. These are sites of public assembly, but not sites of production. To the extent Occupy stays within them, it remains a symbolic protest, stopping nothing. It does not interrupt the extraction and circulation of value. Therefore it can be repressively tolerated. The press speculates on whether Occupy can last the winter. But the issue is not maintenance, it is movement – either containment as a waning signifier, slowly deserted by a briefly captured 24/7 media cycle, slipping into the various black holes yawning beneath an alternative urban lifestyle experiment, or expansion outwards.

The crucial vector is the relation of network to workplace. This relation is intrinsic to the protest: occupiers are workers, albeit often unemployed, potential or precarious workers. Their grievances relate to work, wages and worklessness. And there are also organizational connections to workplaces. Too easily overlooked in discussions of digital tactics is that the general assemblies of Occupy Wall Street had been preceded earlier in the summer by those of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, a coalition of trade unions and community groups against Mayor Bloomberg’s austerity measures. Many of the occupiers were members of this alliance. The official organs of the 5 American labour movement lay outside the circuits of social media activated by Adbusters and Anonymous; but once the occupiers were on the ground, surrounded and nearly outnumbered by NYPD, this omission was very apparent – labour committees were among the first working groups formed. From the other side, OWS resonated with trade unions in the aftermath of the failed attempt to halt attacks on public-sector workers by occupation of the Wisconsin state legislature, and of a series of strikes and labour disputes in the airline and communications industries.

Entangled with the net-wide media of Occupy is therefore a more occult communications story: that of the interface between anarchist horizontalists in the square and the vertical bureaucratized US labour movement – sclerotic, fractured, defeated, yet not extinct – and with some emergent sectors touched by the same dynamics as Occupy itself. After 17 September action, and before the 15 October day of global action, crucial moments for Occupy Wall Street were the marches between 27 September and 5 October, when occupiers were joined by Communication Workers of America, on strike against communications giant Verizon; the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), protesting the amalgamation of Continental and United airlines; the New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU), which went to court to prevent police from ordering union drivers to bus arrested demonstrators to jail; and other unions of teachers, construction workers and the public sector. Occupiers in turn sallied out to support Teamsters on strike at Sotheby’s art auction house. Unions are now among the most significant providers of funds and facilities – such as the medical care provided by Nurses United – for Occupy sites, a crucial connection even if this is sometimes more a matter of ‘presents than presence’.

To say that the relation is fraught is an understatement. Anarchist occupiers can rightly suspect the participation of big labour as a force dragging the movement to electoral co-option. Conversely, it is sometimes the more progressive sectors of labour, particularly organizations working with unemployed, immigrant workers and the racialized service sector – organizations that themselves are deploying networked media strategies to connect dispersed workplaces – that are most critical of what they see as Occupy’s privileged tactics of urban camping. Recently splits within the labour movement over support for the Keystone XL pipeline spilled into Occupy Wall Street. Nonetheless, the possibility exists of – as Alex Callinicos put it – ‘connecting the squares and the strikes’; of Occupy directly or indirectly contributing to a renewal of workplace militancy.3 The partial one-day general strike in Oakland protesting the injury of an occupier by police is so far the most important, but not the only, example of a dynamic whose outcome will determine the class trajectory of Occupy.

Class

The working class changes historically, both in its technical composition – the division of labour, the use of machinery – and politically, in its degree of subordination or challenge to capital. These changes in class composition occur in cycles of struggle. Capital restructures command by spatial expansion and technological innovation, which undo established forms of working-class power. These changes can, however, also catalyse the emergence of new struggles. The last forty years have seen the decline of the ‘mass worker’: the factory-based labour force, concentrated in capital’s core territories of the planetary north-west, politically organized through trade unions and mass democratic parties. From the 1970s on, a neoliberal offensive decomposed the mass workers’ assembly-line bases by robotization, container transportation and electronic communication, relocating industrial production to the periphery, and generating in the core a shift to service and technical work. The result has been a new class composition, the global worker: a collective labour organized not along the assembly line of the factory, but along planet-spanning supply chains; internationalized by the world-scale expansion of 6 capital; diversified by an increasingly complex division and integration of labour; universalized by the subsumption of women; rendered precarious by a massive world-scale reserve army of the unemployed, especially crucial in the global south, and manifest in the vast reservoir of rural and urban destitution powering the ‘economic miracles’ of India, China, and perhaps soon Africa; planet-changing in the scale of its activity (think global warming). Digital communications now play as strategic a role in the composition and decomposition of the global worker as the mass media of broadcast radio and television previously did for the mass worker. In this new composition, digitalization touches nearly every aspect of the labour process, but in differentiated ways.

In and around Occupy, various segments of this networked proletariat now swirl in what is, at best, a semi-synchronized choreography: at its core, in the squares, the precarious and unemployed, the students, the intermittent cultural and media workers, sometimes themselves becoming media capital; on its periphery, but expanding its orbit, workers in large-scale transportation and communications industries that circulate global capital; construction workers building world cities that are also communications hubs; public-sector workers, toiling in the infrastructures of what is in North America a substantially post-industrialized economy. Offstage, in this account, and only for the moment, are workers in the new manufacturing zones, doing the heavy lifting for the information economy in the electronics assembly factories of the Pearl river, the e-waste dumps of West Africa, and the coltan, lithium and rare-earth mines spread across the global south. Digital networks both connect and divide this workforce.

This is what makes the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’ simultaneously inspired and mystifying. Networks enable a circulation of struggles. They make the resistances to global capital by various segments of the global worker digitally visible, audible and legible to one another. But they do not spontaneously guarantee the commonality of these struggles, which must rather be constructed as a project of political articulation. This is the task of communist organization. The important radical formations of the future will be those that bring to this old task a new fusion of networked and terrestrial connection to actualize the aspiration emblazoned on the banner carried at the Oakland general strike: ‘Occupy Everywhere: Death to Capitalism’.

Notes

1. Harry Cleaver, ‘The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle’, https://webspace.utexas.edu/ hcleaver/www/zaps.html, 1995.

2. David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance, PM Press, Oakland CA, 2011.

3. Alex Callinicos, panel discussion at ‘Critical Refusals’ conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 27 October 2011 [nb. the host of the conference is incorrectly given as Pennsylvania State University in the original commentary].

Like a lot of urbanists, I’ve also been fascinated by what this means for urban politics. From Tahrir Square to Plaza del Sol, from Syntagma Square to Tottenham’s streets, from Zuccotti Park to St Paul’s Cathedral, the city has seemingly become the critical zone in which new forms of ‘occupational’ protest unfold. ‘Right to the city’ or somethingelse? If something else, what else? The global sway of Wall Street and City of London decision-makers has been called into question, contested, by collective bodies in the public realm; this at a time when an inexorable shift of the human population into urban agglomerations has occurred and when the city region is now viewed as the fundamental unit of economic development and potential environmental collapse. The occupations are politically stimulating, yet theoretically tricky to unravel, especially if one wears an urban cap at the same time as a Guy Fawkes mask.

Towards the end of his life, one of our greatest urbanists, Henri Lefebvre, expressed a desire that urban dweller and citizen embrace one another again in a space that they would collectively invent. (Lefebvre was a chip off the old Marxist bloc(k): ‘Are you an anarchist or Marxist?’ a perplexed student asked him in the 1970s. ‘A Marxist, of course’, the septuagenarian prof replied, ‘so that one day we can all become anarchists.’) In the 1980s, when Lefebvre tried to update his thesis on ‘the right to the city’, first set out in the late 1960s, he implied it was nothing less than a ‘revolutionary conception of citizenship’. Typically, Lefebvre never told us what he meant by this. Yet we might infer that it can only ever be a citizenship in which territoriality is something broader and narrower than both ‘city’ and ‘nationality’; a citizen of the block, of the neighbourhood, somehow needs to become a citizen of the world, a universal citizen rooted in place, encountering fellow citizens across the corridor and at the other end of the planet. This kind of citizenship is one in which perception replaces passport, and horizon becomes just as important as habitat. This perception is simultaneously in place and in space, offline somewhere local, and online somewhere planetary, somewhere virtual. How the two realms come together, how perception gives rise to a singular political perception, is where the politics of the encounter comes into its own.

The politics of the encounter hinges upon another conception of urban centrality. Centrality isn’t necessarily about being at the centre of things; it doesn’t imply some absolute centre, geographically located in absolute space, but is a locus of actions that attract and repel, that structure and organize a social space, that define the urban, like the way Zuccotti Park has helped define the trajectory of Manhattan and world radical politics. Centrality isn’t understood in the way Lefebvre himself once defined it in The Right to the City, as an absolute centre of a city that needs taking back, like the Communards reclaiming central Paris; urban politics can’t invoke that model any more. Instead, centrality is movable, always relative, never fixed, always in a state of constant mobilization and negotiation. It is the nemesis of centralization with its totalizing mission of domination and control. Centrality is the culmination of encounters, a new capacity for concentration, a tipping point, mediated by social media, which helps marginality centre itself, helps it do so horizontally. At that point, an encounter between people becomes an encounter between citizens who no longer ask for their rights, for the rights of man, for the right to the city, for human rights. Citizens meeting one another in ‘occupied’ global–urban space make no rights claims, posit no empty signifiers. They don’t even speak – not in the conventional sense of the term; they just do, just act, affirm themselves as a group, as a collectivity, as a ‘general assembly’, wanting to take back that which has been dispossessed. They don’t plead or ask any interlocutor for anything abstract, for they have little expectation of any rights, and don’t want any rights granted. If they say anything, citizens of the encounter talk a language that the group has only just collectively invented.

Just-in-time

At stake here, as I have argued elsewhere, isn’t ‘the right to the city’, but the Joycean ‘Here Comes Everybody’ (HCE) – the ‘normative letters’, as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake, of a universal dreaming collective.2 This HCE is collectively conscious of an enemy, of a ruling class that so evidently props up an undemocratic system. It is expressive of an affinity politics, of associative ties and modes of solidarity latent within everyday life. Citizens here aren’t so much concerned with seizing power as regaining control over their own lives. Nor are they necessarily conscious of belonging to any class. All want to disengage from the market ‘rationality’ of neoliberalism; all want to confront a small minority of the world’s population who commandeer global finance and global governance. Citizens in the encounter comprise disparate groups of people who have an uncanny knack of organizing themselves without organizers, of engineering ‘smart spontaneity’, of creating encounters in the heat of the moment and in the heat of the movement. Like capitalist production they arrange rendezvous just in time. Twitter and Facebook, mobile phones and SMS messaging have collapsed space and diminished the time of organizing, of rounding up troops or shifting them elsewhere, of supplying reinforcements when and where needed, of dodging heavy police presences. Spontaneous street assembly can be managed and orchestrated – media-staged, as it were; a newly forming, looser coterie of concerned citizens, spanning the globe and dialoguing across borders and barriers, all find collective lingua franca in an activism that comes home to roost in bites as well as bytes. They are creating group commonality because of a taking hold of bodies and minds in a certain space, face to face through ‘strong-tie’ offline activism, but also through online ‘weak-tie’ association.

The ‘urban’ (like Lefebvre, I prefer ‘urban’ to ‘city’) is nothing in itself, has no spatial existence outside these dynamic social relations, outside this coming together of people, this singularity sharing its passions and affirming its hopes. It is not in space that these people act: people become space by acting. So long as human beings can come together, so long as separation can be resisted, there is always a possibility of encounters between people. The potential progressive future of the urban resides precisely in its ability to promote encounters. In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre uses a beautiful turn of phrase: ‘the urban consolidates’ (l’urbain rassemble). The urban brings everything together, and transforms everything in that coming together: not only capital and goods, but also people and information, activity and conflict, confrontation and cooperation. The urban concentrates things, intensifies, creates simultaneity and difference, creates difference where no awareness of difference existed; ditto what was once distinct and isolated becomes conscious of its own universality in that particularity. The urban consolidates: it is both particle and wave, flow and thing; its own random uncertainty principle that prevails in everyday life. Yet if we follow Lefebvre’s own premise about urban society, the more urbanization continues to carpet over the whole world, the more encounters will likely take place, and the more a politics of the encounter will punctuate and define our urban landscape of the future.

We’ve witnessed such collective bonding, such collective occupation, on the streets and in the squares of Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madrid, Manhattan, Oakland, Los Angeles, Rome, Stockholm, Lisbon, Sarajevo, Hong Kong, Berlin, Sydney and London (the list is in no way exhaustive). Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have organized themselves without either organizations or leaders, and an online global ‘conversation’ has grown at the same time as offline street assemblies have taken hold, shaped up. While these encounters have unfolded in the heart of ‘the city’, the stakes of protest aren’t about the city per se, but about democracy in conditions of capitalist crisis, something vaster and simpler than the city as we once knew it (hence the preference for ‘urban’). Participants have simultaneously acted and reacted, been both affected and affecting; joy and celebration, tenderness and abandon, online and offline activism, all find structuring, all somehow find definition. ‘The beauty of this formula’, went one recent Occupy Wall Street statement, ‘and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity. We talk to each other in various physical gatherings and through virtual people’s assemblies … we zero in on what … would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future.’ The stake may not be strictly ‘city’; yet, perhaps, it is something about the staging of urban society that enables this declaration to be made, that permits and engenders such a definition, a definition in which people collectively can now publicly define themselves in front of the whole world.

So, donned in Guy Fawkes mask and urban cap (beret? slouch hat? baseball cap? hood?), the politics of the encounter in the end boils down to ‘mob analysis’. The term isn’t mine, it’s science-fiction godfather Isaac Asimov’s; neither is it meant to be pejorative. In his Foundation series of novels, Asimov presents ‘mob analysis’ as another word for psychohistory. 22,500 years into the future, psychohistory is the brainchild of Asimov’s central protagonist, the mathematician Hari Seldon, who formulates psychohistory to predict the future in statistical fashion. For Asimov, the concept of psychohistory is modelled on the kinetic theory of gases. Molecules making up gases move about in absolutely random fashion, in any direction, in three dimensions and at a wide range of speeds. Nobody can predict the behaviour of a single molecule. Yet, as a mass of molecules, as gases, you can somehow describe what the motions would be on average, and from there work out the gas laws with a very high degree of predictability. Asimov applied this notion to human beings. (In Asimov’s Foundation saga, there is no alien presence, no non-human life, save for humanly-made robots: his vision of the universe is all the more interesting because it is all-too-human.) All of us have free will, all of us as individuals exhibit behaviour and act in ways that defy predictability. Still, for vast numbers of people, for diverse societies, for ‘mobs’ of people, Asimov’s Seldon suggests that some sort of predictability is possible, like it is for gases. Thus psychohistory is ‘mob analysis’, predicting mob behaviour as intruding, intervening in historical contingency. The politics of mobs as akin to the kinetic theory of gases has considerable salience because it suggests something about the prospect of group encounters intervening in the historical-geographical logic of contemporary capitalism. But here, perhaps, it’s not so much psychohistory as psychogeography (in a nod to the Situationists) that’s akin to mob analysis, implying that any act of centralizing human behaviour, any human agglomeration, will likely create at a certain time, and especially in a certain space, a gathering of people that resembles a gathering of gases, a certain coming together of movement and stasis, of particle and wave. And this encounter possesses its own kinetic energy; sometimes negative energy, like indiscriminate rioting (we know about that one), but also positive energy, its own Brownian motion, perhaps generating an energy that’s enough to alter the course of history (and geography).

Should such an encounter really take hold, really gel, the social configuration would, this suggests, be a kind of political superstring theory realizing itself, a transformative conjoining around a collective boson. Like particle physicists today, we know, theoretically and mathematically from our radical hypotheses, that this collective reality exists, even if we have never yet witnessed it empirically. We are 99 per cent sure that the figures stack up, that those in the boson will be the 99 per cent. If that ever happens – when it happens – we might see before our eyes a beautiful collideorscape (the portmanteau is Joyce’s, again from Finnegans Wake), a ‘collision and escape’, a coming together, a sort of kaleidoscope, a passage into another political reality.

What might this collideorscape resemble? The imagery, the pictorial representation of resistance, the sight of a politics of the encounter unfolding in our mind’s eye, might come from abstract expressionism, from Jackson Pollock, and his 1950s’ canvas ‘Number 32’, which currently hangs in Dusseldorf’s Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen museum. Pollock’s patterning depicts the very act of fusion. Only two colours make up ‘Number 32’: a light tan-brown over which are splattered skeins of jet black swirls. One is struck by the energy that radiates from this composition; if you verge too close, it sucks you into its spiralling vortex. Energy enters via thin whorls and curves, thin threads of spontaneous black. Yet there are points of convergence, snowflakes and dendrites, where the black paint thickens and is nodal, highly charged. Modest inputs spiralling inwards seem, at these points of fusion, about to release enormous outputs, energy that pushes outwards, a diffusion unleashing a quantity–quality reaction, a critical mass of power. They kindle radical eruptions not random explosions, volcanic happenings rather than unannounced anarchy, because here there is underlying regularity, some inner structuring order. For in this imagery we glimpse not only radical fractals, but also the physicists’ concept of a wormhole coming to life, illusive shortcuts, tiny trails towards liberation.

Wormholes create new regions of urban space, blaze new spatial territories, a new political space–time dimension that secretly links, makes a bridge, or subterranean tunnel, between social movements everywhere. Wormholes complete the encounter, transmit messenger particles that unite all struggles across the planet. Charged particles transmit negative, repulsive energy, frequently saying to other particles ‘move apart’; yet every particle also has an opposite charge, has powers of attractions that say ‘come together’. In our contemporary, ever-expanding urban universe, little loops of energy generate incredible force; they literally make the world go around, light it up with electricity. It’s time, perhaps, for political struggles of the type exemplified in urban occupations to energize this new planetary charge, and convert it into unprecedented cosmic singularity – into our own concrete expressionism. Behind the mask lies more than flesh. Behind the mask lies an idea, and that idea circulates though the wormhole. There, it really is bulletproof.

Notes

1. The Guy Fawkes mask donned by the protesters is taken from the revolutionary hero of David Lloyd and Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta, set in a dystopian future Britain, and the subsequent 2006 film directed by James McTeigue. My title is also an allusion to this work.

2. See Andy Merrifield, ‘Crowd Politics, or, “Here Comes Everybuddy”’, New Left Review 71, September/October 2011, pp. 103–14.

The current cycle of protests began in April 2011, when the CONFECH (Chile’s confederation of university students) decided to strike, demanding improvements in the government’s financial plans and changes to the distribution of scholarships, social benefits and transportation passes. CONFECH represents students from traditional universities, of which FEUC (Students’ Federation of the Catholic University of Chile) and FECH (Students’ Federation of University of Chile) are the most important, along with FEC, from the University of Conceptión, in the south of the country. Very quickly many other universities and professional institutes got involved, along with secondary students from both private and public sectors; CONFECH actions were relayed by protests and 12 sit-ins organized by federations of high-school students (CONES and ACES), and by June the whole system of education was paralysed. The Chilean Winter had begun. Camila Vallejo, a communist militant, along with Giorgio Jackson, a socialist one, are the most visible leaders of a movement that challenges the hierarchical structures of political parties and other representative organizations and insists on horizontal decision-making processes (basismo), based on a commitment to democratic de-centralism.

The scale and impact of the protests are hard to exaggerate. Students have barricaded themselves into hundreds of schools, blocking access to teachers and staff.1 They have staged dozens of massive demonstrations, which have often incorporated elaborate choreographies involving thousands of people; the largest gatherings, from 10 to 25 August, numbered from 100,000 to 1 million marchers.2 These protests are far from over, and in November 2011 began intersecting with other regional mobilizations, notably in Brazil and Columbia.

After many attempts to invalidate the movement’s claims and legitimacy, on 19 July the government replaced its minister of education (Joaquín Lavín, an ex-presidential candidate for the right wing) with justice secretary Felipe Bulnes, and launched a round-table discussion strategy, from which nothing good has yet come. The rapid growth of the protest movement and the multiplication of public meetings and of innovative mass actions, along with some international pressure, have reopened the wounds left from Chile’s unfinished transition to democracy; by way of reaction, they have also helped revive the aggressively anti-communist rhetoric of the hard right, those who still consider Pinochet a national hero. This re-politicization of public debates, with its distinct streak of anachronism, has revived memories of the fight against military dictatorship in the national protests of the 1980s. For their part, student protestors draw attention to the structural complicity between the government and the main opposition parties, and remain deeply sceptical of formal political procedures, especially following the suppression of the 2006 ‘March of the Penguins’ by the government of Michel Bachelet (a socialist who belongs to the Concertation for Democracy – a set of anti- Pinochet parties that is today in opposition).

The most urgent task for both the government and the opposition, therefore, is not to find a solution to the students’ claims but to neutralize their direct political role, by redirecting the debate back to the formal-democratic institutions framed by the constitutional order set up to replace Pinochet’s regime. Repeating the sacred principle of security that underlies the neoliberal regime’s urbe et orbi, they insist that it is in the National Congress and between the professional politicians that the debate must take place, and not in the streets, among juvenile proto-criminals.

From its brutal inauguration until its dying day, Pinochet’s dictatorial regime was characterized by its reformulation of the nation’s social contract. With the new constitution of 1980 and with systematic implementation of neoliberal priorities (privatization of the public sector, deregulation of the economy, liberal tax policies, etc.), it was only a matter of time before something similar happened to the education sector. Sure enough, promotion of privatization as a means of compensating for the lack of financial resources resulting from the new orientation of the state – the distinctive feature of the new political economy blessed by the Chicago Boys and enthusiastically implemented in Chile in the 1980s – was soon extended to apply to education policies.3 The euphemism used to name that process was ‘rationalization’: in this context, ‘rationality’ involves an unfounded assumption about the virtues of market forces and the dynamic and efficient character of the private sector, basis for the reckless wager that its promotion to a commanding position in a new ‘competitive’ education sector would ‘drive up standards’ and improve the quality of teaching and research.

By the 1990s, with the new transitional governments, this tendency was accentuated thanks to what was presented as a new social contract between the state, the private sector and the universities.4 If the proliferation of private institutions of higher education was a consequence of the dictatorship’s policies, the deregulation proposed and radicalized in the 1990s explains not only the impoverishment of traditional and public universities but also a decline in quality in indicator after indicator (undergraduate teaching, libraries, laboratories, and professional and academic careers in general). The intervention of the private sector, contrary to original expectations, came to be widely seen as the cause of the corruption and collapse in standards that characterizes the current situation.

The corruption at issue here, however, refers less to a moral issue than to an effectively criminal conspiracy between the state and the private sector. This conspiracy is apparent in the ‘circulation of the elites’; that is to say, in the fact that the same politicians responsible for making decisions regarding the education system also belong to, or have belonged to, the boards directing these institutions.5

Along with this, many Chileans are scandalized by the financial arrangements whereby the banks, with state guarantees, lend money to students at extortionate interest rates. Today these rates make the cost of higher education in Chile, proportionally speaking, the most expensive in the world.6 The banks stand to make a killing, risk-free: if students default, then the state steps in to pay off the balance of their loan – a policy that fits very nicely with the widespread practice of hiring influential political figures to the boards of financial institutions. On the other hand, it is estimated that more than 40 per cent of the student population will not be able to finish their degrees, which makes the prospect of repayment still more remote. The whole configuration of student debt now operates as a mechanism whereby banks profit through a process of what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Systematic extension of the student debt relation has become a structural mechanism in the current accumulation process.7

Such accumulation through exceptionally punitive forms of debt can also be read as marking a final break with the old liberal apparatus of ideological interpellation – that form of interpellation that promised a fair and ‘socially responsible’ distribution of income, combined with the promise of social mobility through educational qualification. As the possibilities for social mobility tend to vanish, so then the whole argument of modernization is disclosed as an argument that overtly and emphatically complements the process of popular dispossession and the concentration of capital. Despite (or because of) the praise Chile has earned from the World Bank and the IMF over the past couple of decades, its distribution of income is now one of the most unequal in the world.8

If reduction of human beings to the status of human resources and human assets is at the heart of neoliberal biopolitics (to invoke Foucault’s analysis9), then nowhere has this process gone further than in Chile, where the conversion of students into customers and debtors is virtually complete.10 The same thing could be said about the precarization and casualization of academic labour and the emergence of a post-Fordist regime in which ‘academic careers’ are regulated through profoundly exploitative contractual regulations – a career status that in Chile has acquired the name ‘taxicab professorship’.

What is at stake in today’s student mobilizations, therefore, is far more than a discrete series of economic claims (lower interest rates for their loans, free public transportation, better scholarship programs, etc.). What is essential is the demand for free higher education for all, a demand that has been criticized as unrealistic and naive; this demand goes right to the heart of calls for a reformulation of the social contract inherited from Pinochet’s regime. The only way to implement free education for all is through a renationalization of the copper companies and through essential associated reforms, but to do that it is necessary to demolish the political equilibrium that still preserves the illegitimate constitution of 1980. This is why the student mobilizations are inherently political, and subversive: they expose the unjust distribution of wealth, and the real purpose of those mechanisms of appropriation and accumulation shaping the current class configuration of Chilean society. However spectacular the recent celebrations of Chile’s bicentenary, they could not hide the actual reality at issue in the temporality of capitalism. Piñera’s government has not listened to the students and perpetually challenges their claim for free education for all, replacing it with the empty notion of a ‘better quality’ education for all. The notion of quality operates in the government’s discourse in very much the same way as the notion of ‘excellence’ does in what Bill Reading calls the ‘University in Ruins’, as an ideological device that means more or less whatever you want it to mean, if not nothing at all.11

I would like to conclude, however, with an observation regarding what I consider to be the ‘limits’ of this movement. On one hand, the mobilizations can be treated as an eruption of the political into the midst of neoliberal Chilean democracy – that is, a regime organized around a small number of financial institutions belonging to a few rich families, working in conjunction with a few privileged foreign companies. The mobilizations thus serve to make visible what was formerly invisible, producing what Rancière calls a redistribution of the sensible. On the other hand, though, after more than eight months of demonstrations, the mobilization has fallen into a sort of routine. Its charismatic leadership has acquired a recognizable place in the political debate, and the government (together with the opposition) has largely succeeded in recasting that debate around the configuration of the budget for the new fiscal year. The students have good reasons for their rejection of political parties, but this, compounded by their relative inability to articulate their demands with other sectors of the population, has also served to isolate them and to weaken their position; the coming holiday season will also disperse many students, and take some of the immediate pressure of the government.

Nonetheless, I put the word ‘limits’ in scare quotes because the inability of students so far to articulate themselves as part of a counter-hegemonic bloc is actually not their responsibility but a failure of political understanding more broadly. If real victory requires more than a capacity merely to interrupt the distribution of the sensible, any ‘romanticism of the multitude’ is also insufficient to grasp what is at stake here. On the other hand, the return of what Daniel Bensaïd might call ‘the question of strategy’ need not involve a choice between starkly opposed options: either traditional parties or a new messianic political organization; either the self-assertion of the multitude or a more traditional form of class antagonism; either the traditional dogmatic Left or the chastened, reformist or ‘realistic’ socialism of the new millennium. To resolve these tensions is less the responsibility of the students than of the wider radical Left, one that is able to contest the ongoing savagery of capitalist accumulation without ceasing to imagine a better and more equitable world.

Notes

1. Gideon Long, ‘Chile’s Student Protests Show Little Sign of Abating’, BBC News, 25 October 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15431829.

2. See, for example, the online edition of Clarin.com: ‘Bajo una intensa lluvia y mucho frío, miles de estudiantes marcharon por Santiago’, 18 August 2011, www.clarin.com/mundo/intensa-estudiantes-marchan-capital-chilena_0_538146385.html. Cf. ‘Dozen Injured after Clashes on Day Two Of Chilean Strike’, Guardian, 25 August 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/26/two-chilenationwide-strike-violence; ‘Chile Strike: Clashes Mar Antigovernment Protest’, BBC News, 26 August 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14677953.

 3. Thanks to Anustup Basu for his generous help in the preparation of this article. See, in particular, Carlos Ruiz, De la república al mercado. Ideas educacionales y políticas en Chile, LOM Ediciones, Santiago, 2010.

4. José Joaquín Brunner, Hernán Courard and Cristián Cox, Estado, mercado y conocimientos: políticas y resultados de la educación superior chilena 1960–1990, FLACSO, Santiago, 1992.

5. María Olivia Monckeberg, El negocio de las universidades en Chile, Debate, Santiago, 2007. This volume complements a former one entitled La privatización de las univer$idades en Chile. Una historia de poder, dinero e influencias, Copa Rota, Santiago, 2005.

6. ‘Data from the OECD states that, at relative prices, higher education in Chile is the most expensive in the world. With an average cost of US$ 3,400 yearly, the rate of domestic tuition fees is equivalent to 22.7 per cent of GDP per capita, higher than nations such as United States, Australia and Japan’ (‘Chile, la educación superior más cara del nundo’, http://aquevedo.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/chilela-educacin-superior-ms-cara-del-mundo/). The cost of tuition has increased by over 100 per cent in the public sector and even more in the larger private sector over the last ten years.

7. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.

8. See the CIA World FactBook, www.indexmundi.com/chile/distribution_of_family_income_gini_index.html.

9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Picador, New York, 2010.

10. Particularly telling is the doctoral dissertation of the current president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, ‘The Economics of Education in Developing Countries’, Department of Economics, Harvard University, 1976. See also Sebastián Piñera, ‘El Costo Económico del “Desperdicio” de Cerebros’, Cuadernos de Economía, vol. 15, no. 46, 1978, pp. 349–405.

11. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996.

Rather than maintaining this spatial strategy at all costs, what is most interesting about Occupy now is that it is increasingly complicating static images of space by occupying time.

[...]

Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw hisadversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance. (Clausewitz, On War, 1832)

Receive our truth in your dancing heart. Zapatalives, also and for always in these lands. (Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee ZNLA, ‘Votan-Zapata or Five Hundred Years of History’, 1994)

2011 may well be remembered as the year of resistance.* The uprisings of the Arab Spring, the movement of indignados in Spain and Mexico, the Aganaktismenoi in Greece and the Occupy actions are all primarily movements of resistance. Even in the UK the term is acquiring political force: at the trade-union protests outside the Conservative Party conference at the beginning of October, Len McCluskey of Unite called for ‘a coalition of resistance, of trade unions, community groups, church organizations, and students and of our senior citizens, an amazing coalition of resistance to engage in every form of resistance, including coordinated industrial action.’ He did not mean every form of resistance, yet his use of the term to align the tactics of general strike and civil disobedience is testimony to its renewed significance. Resistance is on its way to becoming a word of power, emerging alongside the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘reform’ that Hegel saw defining the range of modern politics. Yet, while increasingly familiar, the significance and potential of the term are not fully recognized. This may be due to its equivocal character: resistance is at work in electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, immunology and psychoanalysis, as well as in politics and philosophy. But there is also something more and peculiarly resistant about this concept, if it is a concept.

[...]

* This is the text of an Inaugural Professorial Lecture, in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), KingstonUniversity London, delivered on 3 October 2011.