Die Neue Zeit
2nd May 2012, 05:08
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/urban_revolution_is_coming/singleton/
Some stuff, though much-needed criticism is needed:
My concern is that those million people who are living on $10,000 a year should have at least as much an influence as the top 1 percent. I call it an empty signifier because it’s about who gets in there and says, “It’s my right that matters, and not your right.” It will always involve conflict.
[...]
I don’t quite know why there hasn’t been more unrest. I think it has to do with the tremendous power of money to command a police apparatus. I think we’re in a very dangerous situation right now because any form of unrest is likely to be treated as a form of terrorism, as part of the post-9/11 security apparatus. What we’ve seen in places like Tahrir Square and other urban uprisings, with echoes of it in Wisconsin last year, there are signs of resistance beginning to emerge.
[...]
There’s a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn’t have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It had a message that it wished to convey, which was putting social inequality on the agenda, and I think they were very successful.
[...]
I’m not too fond of the term “precariat.” It’s always been the case that the people who produce and reproduce urban life look at their condition as being insecure, a lot of it is temporary labor, and have been different from factory workers. The left, historically, has always looked to the trade unions and the factory workers to engage its political base in the age of political change. The left has never thought of the people who are producing and reproducing urban life as being significant. This is where I think the Paris Commune comes in, because if you actually look at who made the Paris Commune, it wasn’t the factory workers. It was artisan workers, and a lot of the labor in Paris at that time was precarious.
What you have right now, with the disappearance of many factories, is that you don’t have an industrial working class of the same size and significance that existed in the 1960s and ’70s. So the question becomes, what is the political base of the left? And my argument is to make it all the people who produce and reproduce urban life. Most of those people are precarious, they’re often moving around, they’re not easily organized, hard to unionize, and they’re a shifting population, but nevertheless they have tremendous potential political power.
[...]
And the example I always use about that is the immigrant rights movement of 2006. A lot of the immigrant population refused to go to work for a day, and Los Angeles and Chicago had to close down, showing they had this tremendous power. We should be thinking about this group in the population. This doesn’t exclude organized labor, but organized labor in the private sector (as opposed to the public sector) is now down to 9 percent of the population. Precarious labor is huge. And if we can find a way of organizing them, and if they can find new means of political expression, I think they can be mobilized as a huge influence on how urban life is being lived and structured in a city like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or whatever.
[...]
I’m arguing that we have to look at the urban as a class phenomenon. After all, if finance capital is producing the city these days, and it builds the condominiums and it builds the offices, it is producing the city. If we want to resist the way they are doing it, then we have to wage a class struggle, in effect, against their power. I’m very concerned with asking a question like, How do we organize a whole city? The city is where our political future lies on the left.
[...]
What is striking is that if you had a map of protests worldwide which are against aspects of what’s going wrong under capitalism, you would see a huge mass of protests. The difficulty is that a lot of it is fragmented. For example, today we are talking about student debt and all the protests around that. Tomorrow people might be out resisting foreclosures; somebody else might be organizing a protest about the closure of a hospital, or a protest about what’s going on in public education. The difficulty right now is to find some sort of way to connect all of them. There are some attempts to create alliances, like The Right to the City Alliance, and the Excluded Workers Congress, so increasingly people are thinking about how to pull it all together. But it’s in the early stages. If it does all get together, you will find a huge mass of people who are interested in changing the system, root and branch, because this is not satisfying anybody’s real needs or desires.
[...]
In effect Occupy Wall Street was operating as a vanguard movement [a political party at the forefront of a movement]. They’ll deny it, but they were. They were talking for the 99 percent and they were not the 99 percent. They were talking to the 99 percent. There has to be a lot more flexibility on the left in terms of building different organizational structures. I was very impressed by the model of El Alto in Bolivia, where there was a mix of horizontal and hierarchical structures that came together to create a very powerful political organization. I think that the sooner we get away from certain rules of discussion, the better.
[...]
I think the successful movements always have a mix of horizontality and hierarchy. The most impressive one I’ve come across were the Chilean student movements, where one of the leaders was a young communist woman [Camila Vallejo], who is fully open to being as horizontal as possible, rather than having a central committee decide things. But at the same time, when leadership is called for, it should be exercised. If we start to think in these terms, we’ll have a more flexible system of organization on the left. There are groups within Occupy that are trying to get people within the Democratic Party to sign support for Occupy’s demands, and if not, they’re going to run candidates against them. There’s a wing doing that sort of thing, but they’re not the majority at all.
Some stuff, though much-needed criticism is needed:
My concern is that those million people who are living on $10,000 a year should have at least as much an influence as the top 1 percent. I call it an empty signifier because it’s about who gets in there and says, “It’s my right that matters, and not your right.” It will always involve conflict.
[...]
I don’t quite know why there hasn’t been more unrest. I think it has to do with the tremendous power of money to command a police apparatus. I think we’re in a very dangerous situation right now because any form of unrest is likely to be treated as a form of terrorism, as part of the post-9/11 security apparatus. What we’ve seen in places like Tahrir Square and other urban uprisings, with echoes of it in Wisconsin last year, there are signs of resistance beginning to emerge.
[...]
There’s a difference between an outburst of spontaneous anger, which doesn’t have a political objective, and a more measured response that we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It had a message that it wished to convey, which was putting social inequality on the agenda, and I think they were very successful.
[...]
I’m not too fond of the term “precariat.” It’s always been the case that the people who produce and reproduce urban life look at their condition as being insecure, a lot of it is temporary labor, and have been different from factory workers. The left, historically, has always looked to the trade unions and the factory workers to engage its political base in the age of political change. The left has never thought of the people who are producing and reproducing urban life as being significant. This is where I think the Paris Commune comes in, because if you actually look at who made the Paris Commune, it wasn’t the factory workers. It was artisan workers, and a lot of the labor in Paris at that time was precarious.
What you have right now, with the disappearance of many factories, is that you don’t have an industrial working class of the same size and significance that existed in the 1960s and ’70s. So the question becomes, what is the political base of the left? And my argument is to make it all the people who produce and reproduce urban life. Most of those people are precarious, they’re often moving around, they’re not easily organized, hard to unionize, and they’re a shifting population, but nevertheless they have tremendous potential political power.
[...]
And the example I always use about that is the immigrant rights movement of 2006. A lot of the immigrant population refused to go to work for a day, and Los Angeles and Chicago had to close down, showing they had this tremendous power. We should be thinking about this group in the population. This doesn’t exclude organized labor, but organized labor in the private sector (as opposed to the public sector) is now down to 9 percent of the population. Precarious labor is huge. And if we can find a way of organizing them, and if they can find new means of political expression, I think they can be mobilized as a huge influence on how urban life is being lived and structured in a city like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or whatever.
[...]
I’m arguing that we have to look at the urban as a class phenomenon. After all, if finance capital is producing the city these days, and it builds the condominiums and it builds the offices, it is producing the city. If we want to resist the way they are doing it, then we have to wage a class struggle, in effect, against their power. I’m very concerned with asking a question like, How do we organize a whole city? The city is where our political future lies on the left.
[...]
What is striking is that if you had a map of protests worldwide which are against aspects of what’s going wrong under capitalism, you would see a huge mass of protests. The difficulty is that a lot of it is fragmented. For example, today we are talking about student debt and all the protests around that. Tomorrow people might be out resisting foreclosures; somebody else might be organizing a protest about the closure of a hospital, or a protest about what’s going on in public education. The difficulty right now is to find some sort of way to connect all of them. There are some attempts to create alliances, like The Right to the City Alliance, and the Excluded Workers Congress, so increasingly people are thinking about how to pull it all together. But it’s in the early stages. If it does all get together, you will find a huge mass of people who are interested in changing the system, root and branch, because this is not satisfying anybody’s real needs or desires.
[...]
In effect Occupy Wall Street was operating as a vanguard movement [a political party at the forefront of a movement]. They’ll deny it, but they were. They were talking for the 99 percent and they were not the 99 percent. They were talking to the 99 percent. There has to be a lot more flexibility on the left in terms of building different organizational structures. I was very impressed by the model of El Alto in Bolivia, where there was a mix of horizontal and hierarchical structures that came together to create a very powerful political organization. I think that the sooner we get away from certain rules of discussion, the better.
[...]
I think the successful movements always have a mix of horizontality and hierarchy. The most impressive one I’ve come across were the Chilean student movements, where one of the leaders was a young communist woman [Camila Vallejo], who is fully open to being as horizontal as possible, rather than having a central committee decide things. But at the same time, when leadership is called for, it should be exercised. If we start to think in these terms, we’ll have a more flexible system of organization on the left. There are groups within Occupy that are trying to get people within the Democratic Party to sign support for Occupy’s demands, and if not, they’re going to run candidates against them. There’s a wing doing that sort of thing, but they’re not the majority at all.