By the Language of Unity Working Group, Occupy Austin, USA
“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page.” -Harold Bloom
I can not speak for the global Occupy movement, but I think we here in
the US have done a poor job of representing ourselves. We are not
professional media spinners, and it is unfair to judge this movement
by what is shown on the television news stations. Even those
sympathetic to our cause, such as the John Stewart Show or the Colbert
Report, while often painting Occupy Wall Street in favorable light,
have been unable to avoid widespread misconceptions.
Please allow me a few words to attempt a more clear painting of what
Occupy is and is not.
First, our movement is radically inclusive. There are many supporters
from the right, center and left of the political spectrum. We have
many Tea Party-ers who are unhappy with how that movement has
developed. We have many Ron Paul supporters who do not believe he has
been treated fairly by the Republican party. We have Veterans
concerned about healthcare, and Green party supporters concerned about
environmental issues and genetically-modified foods. And yes, there
are some students, hippies, and anarchists; some homeless people
looking for a handout, and soccer moms looking for a cause. Continue reading ‘What Occupy Is and Is Not’ »
Thanks to Patrice Riemens. Steve Keen is a heterodox Australian economist whose Debunking Economics has just been reissued. He is a follower of Hyman Minsky and now argues for private debt to be radically reduced and government money expanded in its place. There are interesting parallels with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years, the main difference being that Keen understands what’s going on now a lot better. The two are complementary and it comes out in Keen’s support from the Occupy movement (BBC interview, 24 minutes).
A letter to Ed Philips on nettime in the thread, Debt Campaign Launch, 10th December 2011.
Well, Ed, that was worth waiting for, as Brian said. It may seem churlish, after your generous remarks, to harp on the one point of apparent difference between us, but I do so because, while I share many of your views on monopoly capitalism and bureaucracy, I believe that sharpening our historical vision and conceptual apparatus to grasp the changing composition and strategies of capital is important.
I start from the idea that we are going through the early stages of a world revolution as profound and far-reaching for humanity as the invention of agriculture. I also reject any linear evolutionary model of human history, which means that a shift as major as this calls into question the relationship between many modern revolutions of the last half-millennium whose legacies remain with us in an unstable mixture. So you are right to point out that many of the elements of today existed 150 years and vice versa. Making comparisons between periods involves judgment, not clearcut contrasting definitions or the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Continue reading ‘On profit and rent in the history of capitalism’ »
We all began by talking about a financial crisis and now we fear an unprecedented global economic crisis. At the centre of the second, but initially not of the first, lies the potential collapse of the euro as a regional single currency and rival to the dollar as a world currency. The link between these two moments, 2007-8 and 2011-12, is the persisting idea that we are facing the failure of specific financial institutions in the context of a boom/bust cycle of credit and debt. By taking a broader view of money than its current identification with finance, I aim to historicise the present crisis by placing it within a long-term narrative of social development, in the process offering a new explanation for our economic problems. As the economic crisis deepens, it is increasingly seen as a result of political failure, in sharp contrast to what came before, when politics was viewed as a hindrance to or mere consequence of markets. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today.Continue reading ‘The euro crisis seen as an episode in the history of money’ »
Over at the “Democracy in America” blog at The Economist, M.S. has a new post that replies to Florida Governor Rick Scott’s recent “we don’t need no anthropologists” statement. The author provides a rehash of the whole debacle, and then quotes Arizona State University president Michael Crow’s response to the situation:
[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.
Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.
M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.” So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power? Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:
Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology.
“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.”
The provocative article by William Bowles posted by Patrice Riemens
prompts me to sketch an analysis of the momentous events that
are finally creating a fearsome social opposition to the financial,
political, and technocratic elites that caused the Great Recession,
precipitating millions into misery and uncertainty.
The Great Recession has mostly hit Europe and America. It is in Spain
and now in the States that indignado/occupy movements have sprang most
forcefully against so-called financial dictatorship, i.e. more than 30
years of monetarist policy in Europe and of neoliberal deregulation of
financial markets everywhere, a way to echo the 2011 uprisings in
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain that have toppled (or not
yet) all-too real dictatorships. Other hubs of discontent have been
Greece (basically rioting and striking non-stop since 2008) and Chile
(the huge and hardy student movement against the privatization of
college education shares many traits of the young-precarious-led
Spanish indignad@s movement). Continue reading ‘Alex Foti The Rebellion of the Middle Class Precariat’ »
Over on nettime-l, a list for those who once thought “tactical media” was the way forward, the old question of men and machines has been revived with due acknowledgment to Marshall McLuhan. One contributor exclaimed that “of course the machines won” and another said this was “simplistic Luddite rubbish”. This was my response.
I can’t speak for Mark Stahlman, but I don’t imagine that anyone who can write so interestingly would dream of a world without machines. “Machines” should rather be taken as a metaphor for the organized attempt to reduce human beings to working on machines or like machines. Will machines serve people or people serve machines? At some risk of oversimplification, Marx’s project was based on the observation that what matter in our world are people, machines and money. As things stood then and still do, money buys machines and people work on them. The political task is to reverse the order, to put people in charge of machines and money. Marx hoped that machine production might generate the social conditions for this revolution and so do we. Maybe we can dispense with the apparatus of party, classes etc, but that is history. Continue reading ‘Did the machines win?’ »
The governments of the Soviet Union and its East European dependencies fell in 1989-90 with almost no loss of life. How could the most powerful and coercive bureaucracies the planet has ever seen collapse so quickly and utterly? They ruled in the name of equality through surveillance and fear, but their structures had been hollowed out. They no longer provided the means of life and people filled the void with their own initiatives based on kinship, religion, locality, the black market and similar informal practices.
Tunisia is a small country of no obvious strategic significance, but in post-colonial Africa and the Arab world, it pioneered the single-party state. After his medical coup d’état against Bourguiba, Ben Ali ruled through police violence and surveillance by the party. We are fortunate to have available a wonderful dissection of the techniques of repression deployed by the Ben Ali regime. Béatrice Hibou’s The Force of Obedience (Polity, 2011) was first published in French in 2006, but her analysis shines a bright light on the Tunisian revolt and its aftermath. Continue reading ‘What do the Tunisian people want from their election?’ »
The story about voting giving the people democratic power is an example of the cover-up that passes for education at every level in our societies. Politicians need money and money men need political cover. Central banking was invented to institutionalize their partnership. The Bank of England, Banque de France and Federal Reserve are all private institutions which were given the appearance of public authority in return for absorbing the “national debt”, that is of the King, Napoleon and Congress respectively. I am not sure about the ECB’s constitution, since one problem with the euro is that monetary union preceded political or fiscal union. Of course, the educators, including the vast bulk of academic social scientists, insist that our societies are built on the separation of public and private interests, when it hasn’t been so for over 300 years.
Perhaps the main thing that is new about neo-liberalism is not the privatization of public interests, which has long been normal, but rather its ideological promotion as an ideal, where before it was clandestine. As Umair Haque noted recently, this makes the Gilded Age look Leninist in comparison. In both cases any social contract between rulers and masses was torn up and revolution seemed inevitable. It is chastening to contemplate what happened after three decades of financial imperialism last stopped — in 1913/14. Continue reading ‘The privatization of public interests’ »
A response to Keith Hart’s call for renewing social anthropology
A R Vasavi is a social anthropologist and professor at the National Institute for Advananced Studies, Bangalore. This piece was written in reponse to one of mine: Kant, ‘anthropology’ and the new human universal, Social Anthropology 18:4, 441-447 (2010). An even shorter version of this essay is available online here. This post is closer to the published version. We intend to exchange thoughts here and hope that others may feel like joining in.
Keith Hart’s call (Social Anthropology, 18 (4) 2010) for anthropology to reckon with the ‘new human universal’ or the ‘emergent world society’ is worthy of attention and aligns with the corpus of his own creative and sensitive work. In seeking to address the needs of social configurations arising in the fast globalizing world, Hart makes a plea for an anthropology rooted in Kant’s foundational principles of recognizing the subjective in the objective world and the “ ‘cosmopolitan right’, the basic right of all world citizens, (to) rest on conditions of universal human hospitality” (2010: 442). Hart’s call is altruistic and seeks to develop an anthropology which can facilitate the building of “a more equal world fit for everyone’ (page 446). Continue reading ‘A R Vasavi: Deferring the “New Human Universal”’ »
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
