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ON THE RECENT #OCCUPATIONS
A COMMUNIQUE FROM THE W.I.T.C.H. ARMY FACTION[a]
BALTIMORE, AMERIKKKA
This occupation is inevitable, and yet we need to make it. There is no way for capital to continue its reign -- this is clear. And yet, capital will not behead itself: we know that we need to struggle in some way if we are to overcome it. This statement is not a rejection of the occupation -- as if it could be avoided, as if the present conditions were not so grave, as if we haven’t all had enough. But there are things that need to be said. We submit this critique in the deepest solidarity with those people of color, women, queer, and trans* folx that have endured this occupation while labouring on making it more livable from the inside.
Before anything else, we must frame this movement within a prior occupation, that of white settlers on Nanticoke and Susquehannock land. The genocide, expulsion, and dispossession of native peoples is foundational to the ascent of the US as a center of global capital; we cannot reclaim this country, only acknowledge it as a unit of capitalist destruction.
“We are the 99%.”
If we want to use this figure to underscore how far polarized the rich and the poor are today, fine. But those of us that don’t homogenize so easily get suspicious when we hear calls for unity. What other percentages hide behind the nearly-whole 99%? What about the 16% of Blacks that are “officially” unemployed, double the number of whites? The 1 out of 8 Black men in their twenties that on any given day will be in prison or jail? The quarter of women that will get sexually assaulted in their lifetime? The dozens of queer, trans*, intersex, and gender-variant folks that are murdered each year, 70% of whom are people of color? Is a woman of color’s experience of the crisis interchangeable with that of the white man whose wage is twice hers? Are we all Troy Davis? As austerity grinds down on us, who among us will go to prison? Who will be relegated to informal, precarious labor? Whose benefits will be cut, whose food stamps canceled or insufficient? Who will be evicted? Who will be unable to get healthcare, to get hormones or an abortion?
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital -- there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out. Because we know that whatever is next will be something we make, not something we ask for. Even if we don’t feel safe there, even if what little analysis and structure that has emerged thus far makes clear we are not a part of this movement, we radical feminist, anti-racist revolutionaries are going to keep bringing our bodies and ideologies to the occupation, for the same reason that women of color support and attend Slutwalk despite critiquing its white-centered politics: because we see potential for building resistance in our communities and affecting material change. But for this potential to be realized, we have to work together in solidarity with the understanding that unity must be constructed with an analysis of difference, not just plastered blindly over inequalities. Consider this text a chip at the plaster.
Anti-finance or anti-capital?
Nothing is more clear in the American debt-scape than racial character of everyday finance -- but it is sexed, too. And not only because women, like people of color, were disproportionately solicited for subprime mortgages (across all income levels). There is no better indicator that women and people of color cannot be assimilated to the faceless borrowers of the 99% than the strategic location of payday loan offices, tax-preparation outlets, and banks that specialize in subprime mortgages. A map of foreclosures, of adjustable-rate mortgages, a topography of interest rates: all these overlap neatly on the demographics of racialized and feminized poverty. It’s not a coincidence: today, race and gender are not grounds to deny credit, but indexes of risk. And as long as risk can be commodified, as long as volatility can be hedged against and profited from, our color and gender will be blamed for the inevitable collapse. This is the absurdity of everyday finance. We are the risk? We are the predators? Finance’s favorite game must be the schoolyard refrain: “I know you are but what am I?”
We know that economic crises mean more domestic labor, and more domestic labor means more work for women. Dreams of a “mancession” fade quickly when one realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the first to feel a crisis -- and the first to receive bailout funds. The politics of crisis adds to the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment and unwaged overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly justification of welfare and social security “reforms.” “Saving America’s families,” the culture war rhetoric that clings to heteronormativity, to patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown. Crisis translates politically to putting women in their place, while demanding queers and trans people pass or else. And the worse this crisis gets, the more the crisis is excused by a fiction of scarcity, the more the family will be used to promote white supremacy by assaulting women’s autonomy under the guise of population control. The old Malthusian line: it’s not a crisis, there’s just not enough -- for them.
Let us be clear: finance is not the problem. Finance is a precondition and a symptom, a necessary and contradictory part of capital. Deregulation, globalization, deindustrialization: none of these words can provide a substantial explanation for the present context. Each is only a surface phenomena of capital’s tendency to make its own systemic reproduction increasingly difficult for itself. Crisis and the reconcentration of wealth among capitalists is not only regular but necessary; the tendency to financialization has many historical precedents. Genoa in the 1557-62 looks like the Dutch Republic in 1780-83; Britain in 1919-21 looks like the US today. But even if financial booms and busts are as old as mercantilism, there is a qualitative change to the nature of these crises over the course of the eighteenth century, when capitalist production is imposed on the British countryside. Capitalist production creates an unparalleled need for credit, an unprecedented need to consolidate and centralize capital, a grotesque scale of fungible assets that strives to make everything solid melt into the sophistry of mathematics. Asset-backed securities and credit default swaps didn’t make this crisis, they only allowed it to heat up and billow out of control.
For those that recall the warm and golden age of American industrialism with dewy-eyed nostalgia: this crisis began with the failure of US industry in the late sixties. Real wages have been stagnant since then. The oil crisis of 1973 was the hinge; we are living in the declension of US global power. There’s no going back, no exchanging unproductive finance for good old-fashioned productive exploitation. Or is there? Today, American industry is indeed firing up again, as capital that had long flown from its shores returns to find wages lower than the so-called third world. “Reshoring”: a name for the farce that follows the tragedy of the post-war boom.
History insists on the eradication of capital as the only possibility of preventing crisis. Finance reform and “sanctions” are not enough: we will never see “the military industrial complex dismantled, the police disempowered, and the public sector fulfilling its obligations to the people” by redistributing wealth. Corrupt politicians and greedy financiers are only a superfluous, insulting layer on the thing that must be truly condemned: capital, which in our time is inescapable. With this realization, we don’t need to occupy Wall street, or any bank. We could pick any corner, any room, any building, and it would carry the social significance of what needs to be either appropriated or destroyed. The better question to pose when deciding what to occupy, is what do we want to inhabit? (On this point, it is worth mentioning that the tactic to occupy has evolved since its recent revival in the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago. What struck students in New York, California, Puerto Rico, London, Athens, etc. about this tactic was that its strategy to re-appropriate equipment, space, and organization could take place without recognition from the authorities. Demands were auxiliary to the best part: the immediate process of retaking control over the means of production.)
Whatever this occupation is, it is not a camping trip from capital -- we are still in the patriarchy, still in a white supremacy, still in a transphobic and disability-loathing society. In these places, assuming we are unified will only obscure the divisions produced by capital, divisions that need to be confronted before anything else.
On the politics of the occupation: liberalism, policing, and the uses and abuses of equality
The “99%” rolls their eyes at anyone that takes offense to signs referring to the current economic climate as “Slavery 2.0,” or asserting that “The free hand of the market touched me in a bad place.” Comparing (white) student debt to hundreds of years of violence and forced subjugation, entrenched as a system of enduring systematic racism; mocking sexual assault for effect -- these statements send a clear message to those of us linked to such oppressive acts. By trivializing our experiences, these signs simultaneously control and silence how we talk about our marginalized statuses and traumas. To those of us who hoped for Occupy Baltimore’s status as a safe, anti-oppressive space, we read these signs as “BEWARE.”
While some are already bristling at the “identity politics” of those that are offended by racist, misogynistic, survivor-hating signage, the placards that have been denounced the most loudly are those that attack capitalism. Concerns about “public opinion” being able to identify and sympathize with our collective messages abound. These so-called debates actively skew the agenda towards the watered down, apolitical, and (com)modified. GAs play out as if we (the comprehensive “99%”) all endorse these views, but communist, anarchist, and anti-capitalist perspectives are in fact excluded before they are given a chance to be voiced. Meanwhile more privileged niche groups like (hella pro-capitalist) small business owners remain front and center. We who are “taking things too far” get left behind by the “99%”.
As a result of this policing, liberal populism has dominated the occupation’s process, statements, and proto-demands. Or better, populism tinged with a healthy dose of hippie new-age individualism (a vaguely counter-cultural disposition suits contentless politics perfectly). Liberalism uses platitudes of “unity” and “equality” not to insist that we should act in order to be unified and equal, but to say that we already are -- and as such, should “put aside our differences.” Liberalism refuses to see racism, sexism, and class inequalities as material and systemic, reducing these to the level of individual attitudes of perpetrators and victims. Because liberalism only registers and disciplines individual oppressors, never structures, it cannot account for the systemic biases that enable and justify individuals’ oppressive actions. In the process, the demands made by the oppressed for changes in their actual material conditions are ignored, or worse -- appropriated, co-opted. (Take, for example, so-called “reverse racism”: the idiotic triumph of the liberal individual over history.)
The police are not “just workers” and they are not our friends
More than anything, the 99% will be divided by our relationship to the cops. They say: in the interests of “radical inclusivity” that we should avoid anti-police messaging; the police, after all, are part of the 99% that have seen wages, benefits and pensions cut along with the rest of the public sector. They say: we must remember that the police are people too, and not exclude them from our movement before they’ve had a chance to express solidarity with us. We say: just wait. These arguments assume that an individual can be separated from their institutional/social roles, that a police officer can be engaged with in a purely personal sphere, completely distinct from their occupation as an arm of state repression. A classic liberal tactic to humanize the oppressor, and thus to derail a structural analysis of oppressive systems, and invalidate the anger of those experiencing institutional violence. Advocating a cooperative, amiable relationship with the police brushes aside the violence of widespread racial profiling, sexual assault with impunity, the murder of innocents, and the war on drugs by universalizing a white, middle-class position that believes the police really serve and protect.
And it’s not only about police brutality. How can there be non-violence when there are still police? We need to know that as soon as we present a threat to any element of capital -- before this point, even -- we will be violently repressed. A peaceful, lawful protest by no means guarantees immunity against arrest and brutality: we only have to look at the women who were penned and maced at #Occupy Wall St. to know that. But unless this knowledge is at the forefront of our minds, the first to be arrested will be those that are most vulnerable to police brutality and to breaches of security. (A journalist in the room is a tip-off to immigration officials, not “good press”.) We must make our movement a safe space for the undocumented, for the homeless, those with criminal records, and for anyone else for whom contact with the police never takes place on friendly terms. However “nice” a police officer may be to you (FYI: police are often very “nice” to those from the right class and race) does not change the fact that the police are a powerful instrument of violent repression, deployed by a capitalist state to enforce its interests: namely, white supremacy, male domination, ruling class power, and the limitless pursuit of profit.
Why say “99%” when you mean “me”?
The reason #occupy Baltimore has not yet been anti-capitalist is because, for all its rhetoric of “unity” and “inclusivity”, it is really a movement organized by and for the white middle class. There is a reason why the people most afflicted by capitalism are not coming down to the McKeldin Square. When the organizers act like racism is a “second-tier” issue (for instance, by saying “We don't have time for that - We need to bring this back to the real issue: finance reform.” As if reinstating Glass Steagall will do a fucking thing!) it becomes clear whose movement this is. Let’s drop the false rhetoric: what’s wrong with the system is not that it isn’t fair to the 99%, but because it isn’t fair to them. The disappearing middle class reappears in the concrete environs of the business sector -- to better envision the jobs and upward mobility they desperately want. Don’t get us wrong -- there can be a lot of good in indignation, discontent, disillusionment. But we need to exorcise the living ghost of the middle class: the spirit of not giving a fuck who you fuck over. Why say “99%” when you really mean “me”?
And you know how it goes: the neutral “me” is the white dude with all the time in the world (we have to say it: the ideal occupier). Whiteness and maleness have been duly reinforced as the not-so-secret standard at this occupation, in many ways. One example: an announcement made by a young white man at a GA that “everyone is accountable when they speak to media, because they represent the occupation as a whole” (FYI: there is no literature, no point person, no infrastructure to guide new members; only judgment). The countless snaps and twinkles in support of such a statement demonstrated clear consensus. Those twinkles expressed a range of assumptions that people who are largely comfortable in their own skin tend to make: being present in a space makes you in charge of its representation; most everyone agrees with you (and should). Those of us that have daily to prepare ourselves for an immanent bash; immanent fight with hostile, privilege-denying strangers; an immanent insult (intended or not), we take issue with this coercion into representation. We don’t ask you to represent us (please god no); don’t fucking assimilate us to your views, and then make us responsible for them. We won’t even mention how much and how loud white dudes have been speaking.
Rather than policing the radical voices taking anti-capitalist, revolutionary, and anti-police positions, we should give these voices space to be heard, and listened to seriously. The anarchist in-joke “Make Total Destroy” has a grain of truth: that the real political agenda consists[b] in destroying state power, capitalism, and all its forms of coercive social control. Why was this phrase deliberately excluded from the agenda cards read out during a GA, while such platitudes as “We are All One” and “Peace on Earth and Good Will to All,” were deemed worthy to be shared? The liberal-or-else reformism of Occupy Baltimore is perfectly encapsulated by the imposition of goals of peace and love. Fuck peace: we need to formulate a coherent political analysis and a revolutionary agenda to destroy capitalism and dismantle state power. Rejecting outright the eventual need for an armed uprising reflects an unwillingness to pursue the logic of our own (proto-)demands to their full extent.
Don’t tell us to be “pragmatic,” to focus on piecemeal reforms and wait for our day in the revolt. Actually, reformism is idealistic: reformism believes in democracy under capital, in the possibility of redistributing wealth that is systematically dispossessed from its producers. Our revolutionary desire to destroy capital is not idealistic, abstract, or merely theoretical; nor is it inactive: this aim is embodied in a multitude of actions towards different immediate and faraway ends. To us, this means the revolutionary aim is not purely negative, not only about destruction: we work to confront racism, sexism, and class war in our community as an immediate goal, without losing sight that we ultimately cannot live like this anymore. For Occupy Baltimore, this means the 99% must relinquish its presumed equality and acknowledge division if it is to grasp the real conditions of society, and what must actually be done.
“The 1% are winning every time we fight amongst ourselves.”
When the excluded call out a movement, we are often told to put aside our differences: it’s only common sense that to accomplish anything, we need unity. But the only unity we have, the only equality we share, is the thinnest commonality -- the democracy of consumers. Already, in conversations with supposed comrades, our critiques have been met with concern that the “mainstream” won’t get it, that the precious, delicate momentum will be stopped. Interventions to a white-washed and patriarchal agenda (which is any agenda that denies the differential impact of capital on people of colour and women) are always received as interruptions. At best, they are conceded to with invitations, with “outreach”, and with promises to be more inclusive. We say: inclusivity without an adequate analysis is just unstated exclusivity. This is not identity politics: this is the anti-identity politics. For it is capitalism that pushes us to rank facets of our identities; to select one group as the vanguard and press marginalized identities to choose which aspect of their oppression to make a priority. We refuse this choice: we know that our difference is produced and reproduced by capital and therefore cannot be erased within it, that these differences are real (the most real) and thus should drive our analyses and our actions, and that no unity can be claimed until every social relationship is no longer defined by capital, but by us.
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ON THE RECENT #OCCUPATIONS
A COMMUNIQUE FROM THE W.I.T.C.H. ARMY FACTION[a]
BALTIMORE, AMERIKKKA
This occupation is inevitable, and yet we need to make it. There is no way for capital to continue its reign -- this is clear. And yet, capital will not behead itself: we know that we need to struggle in some way if we are to overcome it. This statement is not a rejection of the occupation -- as if it could be avoided, as if the present conditions were not so grave, as if we haven’t all had enough. But there are things that need to be said. We submit this critique in the deepest solidarity with those people of color, women, queer, and trans* folx that have endured this occupation while labouring on making it more livable from the inside.
Before anything else, we must frame this movement within a prior occupation, that of white settlers on Nanticoke and Susquehannock land. The genocide, expulsion, and dispossession of native peoples is foundational to the ascent of the US as a center of global capital; we cannot reclaim this country, only acknowledge it as a unit of capitalist destruction.
“We are the 99%.”
If we want to use this figure to underscore how far polarized the rich and the poor are today, fine. But those of us that don’t homogenize so easily get suspicious when we hear calls for unity. What other percentages hide behind the nearly-whole 99%? What about the 16% of Blacks that are “officially” unemployed, double the number of whites? The 1 out of 8 Black men in their twenties that on any given day will be in prison or jail? The quarter of women that will get sexually assaulted in their lifetime? The dozens of queer, trans*, intersex, and gender-variant folks that are murdered each year, 70% of whom are people of color? Is a woman of color’s experience of the crisis interchangeable with that of the white man whose wage is twice hers? Are we all Troy Davis? As austerity grinds down on us, who among us will go to prison? Who will be relegated to informal, precarious labor? Whose benefits will be cut, whose food stamps canceled or insufficient? Who will be evicted? Who will be unable to get healthcare, to get hormones or an abortion?
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking for better wages or a lower interest rate. We’re not even asking for the full abolition of capital -- there’s no one to ask. For now, we are simply critiquing this occupation for assuming we are there, while we have so far been left out. Because we know that whatever is next will be something we make, not something we ask for. Even if we don’t feel safe there, even if what little analysis and structure that has emerged thus far makes clear we are not a part of this movement, we radical feminist, anti-racist revolutionaries are going to keep bringing our bodies and ideologies to the occupation, for the same reason that women of color support and attend Slutwalk despite critiquing its white-centered politics: because we see potential for building resistance in our communities and affecting material change. But for this potential to be realized, we have to work together in solidarity with the understanding that unity must be constructed with an analysis of difference, not just plastered blindly over inequalities. Consider this text a chip at the plaster.
Anti-finance or anti-capital?
Nothing is more clear in the American debt-scape than racial character of everyday finance -- but it is sexed, too. And not only because women, like people of color, were disproportionately solicited for subprime mortgages (across all income levels). There is no better indicator that women and people of color cannot be assimilated to the faceless borrowers of the 99% than the strategic location of payday loan offices, tax-preparation outlets, and banks that specialize in subprime mortgages. A map of foreclosures, of adjustable-rate mortgages, a topography of interest rates: all these overlap neatly on the demographics of racialized and feminized poverty. It’s not a coincidence: today, race and gender are not grounds to deny credit, but indexes of risk. And as long as risk can be commodified, as long as volatility can be hedged against and profited from, our color and gender will be blamed for the inevitable collapse. This is the absurdity of everyday finance. We are the risk? We are the predators? Finance’s favorite game must be the schoolyard refrain: “I know you are but what am I?”
We know that economic crises mean more domestic labor, and more domestic labor means more work for women. Dreams of a “mancession” fade quickly when one realizes male-dominated sectors are simply the first to feel a crisis -- and the first to receive bailout funds. The politics of crisis adds to the insult of scapegoating the injury of unemployment and unwaged overwork. And the nightmare of fertility politics, the ugly justification of welfare and social security “reforms.” “Saving America’s families,” the culture war rhetoric that clings to heteronormativity, to patriarchy, in the face of economic meltdown. Crisis translates politically to putting women in their place, while demanding queers and trans people pass or else. And the worse this crisis gets, the more the crisis is excused by a fiction of scarcity, the more the family will be used to promote white supremacy by assaulting women’s autonomy under the guise of population control. The old Malthusian line: it’s not a crisis, there’s just not enough -- for them.
Let us be clear: finance is not the problem. Finance is a precondition and a symptom, a necessary and contradictory part of capital. Deregulation, globalization, deindustrialization: none of these words can provide a substantial explanation for the present context. Each is only a surface phenomena of capital’s tendency to make its own systemic reproduction increasingly difficult for itself. Crisis and the reconcentration of wealth among capitalists is not only regular but necessary; the tendency to financialization has many historical precedents. Genoa in the 1557-62 looks like the Dutch Republic in 1780-83; Britain in 1919-21 looks like the US today. But even if financial booms and busts are as old as mercantilism, there is a qualitative change to the nature of these crises over the course of the eighteenth century, when capitalist production is imposed on the British countryside. Capitalist production creates an unparalleled need for credit, an unprecedented need to consolidate and centralize capital, a grotesque scale of fungible assets that strives to make everything solid melt into the sophistry of mathematics. Asset-backed securities and credit default swaps didn’t make this crisis, they only allowed it to heat up and billow out of control.
For those that recall the warm and golden age of American industrialism with dewy-eyed nostalgia: this crisis began with the failure of US industry in the late sixties. Real wages have been stagnant since then. The oil crisis of 1973 was the hinge; we are living in the declension of US global power. There’s no going back, no exchanging unproductive finance for good old-fashioned productive exploitation. Or is there? Today, American industry is indeed firing up again, as capital that had long flown from its shores returns to find wages lower than the so-called third world. “Reshoring”: a name for the farce that follows the tragedy of the post-war boom.
History insists on the eradication of capital as the only possibility of preventing crisis. Finance reform and “sanctions” are not enough: we will never see “the military industrial complex dismantled, the police disempowered, and the public sector fulfilling its obligations to the people” by redistributing wealth. Corrupt politicians and greedy financiers are only a superfluous, insulting layer on the thing that must be truly condemned: capital, which in our time is inescapable. With this realization, we don’t need to occupy Wall street, or any bank. We could pick any corner, any room, any building, and it would carry the social significance of what needs to be either appropriated or destroyed. The better question to pose when deciding what to occupy, is what do we want to inhabit? (On this point, it is worth mentioning that the tactic to occupy has evolved since its recent revival in the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago. What struck students in New York, California, Puerto Rico, London, Athens, etc. about this tactic was that its strategy to re-appropriate equipment, space, and organization could take place without recognition from the authorities. Demands were auxiliary to the best part: the immediate process of retaking control over the means of production.)
Whatever this occupation is, it is not a camping trip from capital -- we are still in the patriarchy, still in a white supremacy, still in a transphobic and disability-loathing society. In these places, assuming we are unified will only obscure the divisions produced by capital, divisions that need to be confronted before anything else.
On the politics of the occupation: liberalism, policing, and the uses and abuses of equality
The “99%” rolls their eyes at anyone that takes offense to signs referring to the current economic climate as “Slavery 2.0,” or asserting that “The free hand of the market touched me in a bad place.” Comparing (white) student debt to hundreds of years of violence and forced subjugation, entrenched as a system of enduring systematic racism; mocking sexual assault for effect -- these statements send a clear message to those of us linked to such oppressive acts. By trivializing our experiences, these signs simultaneously control and silence how we talk about our marginalized statuses and traumas. To those of us who hoped for Occupy Baltimore’s status as a safe, anti-oppressive space, we read these signs as “BEWARE.”
While some are already bristling at the “identity politics” of those that are offended by racist, misogynistic, survivor-hating signage, the placards that have been denounced the most loudly are those that attack capitalism. Concerns about “public opinion” being able to identify and sympathize with our collective messages abound. These so-called debates actively skew the agenda towards the watered down, apolitical, and (com)modified. GAs play out as if we (the comprehensive “99%”) all endorse these views, but communist, anarchist, and anti-capitalist perspectives are in fact excluded before they are given a chance to be voiced. Meanwhile more privileged niche groups like (hella pro-capitalist) small business owners remain front and center. We who are “taking things too far” get left behind by the “99%”.
As a result of this policing, liberal populism has dominated the occupation’s process, statements, and proto-demands. Or better, populism tinged with a healthy dose of hippie new-age individualism (a vaguely counter-cultural disposition suits contentless politics perfectly). Liberalism uses platitudes of “unity” and “equality” not to insist that we should act in order to be unified and equal, but to say that we already are -- and as such, should “put aside our differences.” Liberalism refuses to see racism, sexism, and class inequalities as material and systemic, reducing these to the level of individual attitudes of perpetrators and victims. Because liberalism only registers and disciplines individual oppressors, never structures, it cannot account for the systemic biases that enable and justify individuals’ oppressive actions. In the process, the demands made by the oppressed for changes in their actual material conditions are ignored, or worse -- appropriated, co-opted. (Take, for example, so-called “reverse racism”: the idiotic triumph of the liberal individual over history.)
The police are not “just workers” and they are not our friends
More than anything, the 99% will be divided by our relationship to the cops. They say: in the interests of “radical inclusivity” that we should avoid anti-police messaging; the police, after all, are part of the 99% that have seen wages, benefits and pensions cut along with the rest of the public sector. They say: we must remember that the police are people too, and not exclude them from our movement before they’ve had a chance to express solidarity with us. We say: just wait. These arguments assume that an individual can be separated from their institutional/social roles, that a police officer can be engaged with in a purely personal sphere, completely distinct from their occupation as an arm of state repression. A classic liberal tactic to humanize the oppressor, and thus to derail a structural analysis of oppressive systems, and invalidate the anger of those experiencing institutional violence. Advocating a cooperative, amiable relationship with the police brushes aside the violence of widespread racial profiling, sexual assault with impunity, the murder of innocents, and the war on drugs by universalizing a white, middle-class position that believes the police really serve and protect.
And it’s not only about police brutality. How can there be non-violence when there are still police? We need to know that as soon as we present a threat to any element of capital -- before this point, even -- we will be violently repressed. A peaceful, lawful protest by no means guarantees immunity against arrest and brutality: we only have to look at the women who were penned and maced at #Occupy Wall St. to know that. But unless this knowledge is at the forefront of our minds, the first to be arrested will be those that are most vulnerable to police brutality and to breaches of security. (A journalist in the room is a tip-off to immigration officials, not “good press”.) We must make our movement a safe space for the undocumented, for the homeless, those with criminal records, and for anyone else for whom contact with the police never takes place on friendly terms. However “nice” a police officer may be to you (FYI: police are often very “nice” to those from the right class and race) does not change the fact that the police are a powerful instrument of violent repression, deployed by a capitalist state to enforce its interests: namely, white supremacy, male domination, ruling class power, and the limitless pursuit of profit.
Why say “99%” when you mean “me”?
The reason #occupy Baltimore has not yet been anti-capitalist is because, for all its rhetoric of “unity” and “inclusivity”, it is really a movement organized by and for the white middle class. There is a reason why the people most afflicted by capitalism are not coming down to the McKeldin Square. When the organizers act like racism is a “second-tier” issue (for instance, by saying “We don't have time for that - We need to bring this back to the real issue: finance reform.” As if reinstating Glass Steagall will do a fucking thing!) it becomes clear whose movement this is. Let’s drop the false rhetoric: what’s wrong with the system is not that it isn’t fair to the 99%, but because it isn’t fair to them. The disappearing middle class reappears in the concrete environs of the business sector -- to better envision the jobs and upward mobility they desperately want. Don’t get us wrong -- there can be a lot of good in indignation, discontent, disillusionment. But we need to exorcise the living ghost of the middle class: the spirit of not giving a fuck who you fuck over. Why say “99%” when you really mean “me”?
And you know how it goes: the neutral “me” is the white dude with all the time in the world (we have to say it: the ideal occupier). Whiteness and maleness have been duly reinforced as the not-so-secret standard at this occupation, in many ways. One example: an announcement made by a young white man at a GA that “everyone is accountable when they speak to media, because they represent the occupation as a whole” (FYI: there is no literature, no point person, no infrastructure to guide new members; only judgment). The countless snaps and twinkles in support of such a statement demonstrated clear consensus. Those twinkles expressed a range of assumptions that people who are largely comfortable in their own skin tend to make: being present in a space makes you in charge of its representation; most everyone agrees with you (and should). Those of us that have daily to prepare ourselves for an immanent bash; immanent fight with hostile, privilege-denying strangers; an immanent insult (intended or not), we take issue with this coercion into representation. We don’t ask you to represent us (please god no); don’t fucking assimilate us to your views, and then make us responsible for them. We won’t even mention how much and how loud white dudes have been speaking.
Rather than policing the radical voices taking anti-capitalist, revolutionary, and anti-police positions, we should give these voices space to be heard, and listened to seriously. The anarchist in-joke “Make Total Destroy” has a grain of truth: that the real political agenda consists[b] in destroying state power, capitalism, and all its forms of coercive social control. Why was this phrase deliberately excluded from the agenda cards read out during a GA, while such platitudes as “We are All One” and “Peace on Earth and Good Will to All,” were deemed worthy to be shared? The liberal-or-else reformism of Occupy Baltimore is perfectly encapsulated by the imposition of goals of peace and love. Fuck peace: we need to formulate a coherent political analysis and a revolutionary agenda to destroy capitalism and dismantle state power. Rejecting outright the eventual need for an armed uprising reflects an unwillingness to pursue the logic of our own (proto-)demands to their full extent.
Don’t tell us to be “pragmatic,” to focus on piecemeal reforms and wait for our day in the revolt. Actually, reformism is idealistic: reformism believes in democracy under capital, in the possibility of redistributing wealth that is systematically dispossessed from its producers. Our revolutionary desire to destroy capital is not idealistic, abstract, or merely theoretical; nor is it inactive: this aim is embodied in a multitude of actions towards different immediate and faraway ends. To us, this means the revolutionary aim is not purely negative, not only about destruction: we work to confront racism, sexism, and class war in our community as an immediate goal, without losing sight that we ultimately cannot live like this anymore. For Occupy Baltimore, this means the 99% must relinquish its presumed equality and acknowledge division if it is to grasp the real conditions of society, and what must actually be done.
“The 1% are winning every time we fight amongst ourselves.”
When the excluded call out a movement, we are often told to put aside our differences: it’s only common sense that to accomplish anything, we need unity. But the only unity we have, the only equality we share, is the thinnest commonality -- the democracy of consumers. Already, in conversations with supposed comrades, our critiques have been met with concern that the “mainstream” won’t get it, that the precious, delicate momentum will be stopped. Interventions to a white-washed and patriarchal agenda (which is any agenda that denies the differential impact of capital on people of colour and women) are always received as interruptions. At best, they are conceded to with invitations, with “outreach”, and with promises to be more inclusive. We say: inclusivity without an adequate analysis is just unstated exclusivity. This is not identity politics: this is the anti-identity politics. For it is capitalism that pushes us to rank facets of our identities; to select one group as the vanguard and press marginalized identities to choose which aspect of their oppression to make a priority. We refuse this choice: we know that our difference is produced and reproduced by capital and therefore cannot be erased within it, that these differences are real (the most real) and thus should drive our analyses and our actions, and that no unity can be claimed until every social relationship is no longer defined by capital, but by us.
THE TYRANNY OF NON-VIOLENCE
The Occupy movement, committed to peaceful protest, espouses a politics of non-violence. At Occupy Baltimore, this is made clear by the list of rules posted around the space, half of which are prohibitions of political violence, illegality, and police-antagonism. While outlawing violence among group members itself is necessary to the cooperative functioning of the movement, and essential for establishing Occupy Baltimore as a safe space for all marginalized identities, the political platform of non-violence in relation to the state raises concerns for those of us with radical, revolutionary agendas which cannot be pursued by peaceful means alone.
The doctrine of non-violence essentializes and polarizes political struggles into violent and non-violent movements, ignoring the fact that successful struggles use a variety of tactics which cannot be so easily categorized. Advocates of non-violence point to the civil rights movement in America as a winning example of non-violent protest, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Black Panther’s militant actions. Drawing a moral line between Martin Luther King’s dream and Malcolm X’s nightmare, and characterizing their movements as oppositional, white pacifists fail to recognize the solidarity between civil rights struggles and black militants. It was in the interests of the white media and politicians to emphasize the conflict between the non-violent and militant factions of the movement, in order to divide and conquer Black resistance. Malcolm X was well aware of this white agenda when he said, “Instead of airing our differences in public we have to realize we are all the same family.” While these leaders criticized each other’s tactics, their understanding of racial oppression shared an analysis, and their political actions collaboratively contributed to the momentum of the whole civil rights struggle. Black activists all over the country used a variety of tactics to advance their political struggle, including both the Black Panther’s Free Food program, and the forming of armed groups to protect homes and churches in Black communities from racist attacks. Riots, armed resistance, and revolutionary rhetoric were a part of the struggle just as much as marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, and this integrated diversity of tactics worked to strength communities, raise awareness, develop analyses, and win legal reforms. Those who claim the civil rights struggle as a non-violent movement, or attribute its power to non-violence alone, fail to see the struggle in its totality, manipulating history to support their ideology.
The occupation insists on non-violence without a critical analysis of its own position, or an understanding of what non-violence even means in this era. The pacifists rely on vague platitudes, claiming to be objective and reasonable. We are supposed to be non-violent because violence is always bad, and we want to create a peaceful society. But this position assumes a dichotomy of peace=good, violence=bad which fails to account for the ways in which political violence can be purposeful and constructive, and peaceful action can reproduce and support the status quo. This pacifism, a product of white middle-class activism, appeals to a particular moral code, assumed to be universal, i.e. violence is never the answer, ever, in any situation, and those who use violence to attain their goals will suffer the karmic consequences. MLK prescribed non-violence as a strategy for resisting the institutional, social violence inflicted on the Black population every day; but, he also considered it necessary to support the armed liberation movements in Palestine and Vietnam. Thus, his ideas had root in a specific history of oppression, rather than being theorized, abstractly, as the morally superior tactic. Assuming a moral high ground runs beneath the Occupation’s advocacy of non-violence, unchecked by an analysis of lived, everyday violence: it snobbishly equates direct confrontation with immaturity and ignorance, and passive resistance with dignity and spiritual victory. Like the liberal insistence on police inclusion, this idea speaks from a position of privilege which can choose whether or not to engage in violence. It presupposes an emotional, physical distance from conflict. Would these people tell Palestinians besieged daily by Israeli military brutality that they can’t throw rocks at the armed IDF soldiers, that such violence undermines the legitimacy of their struggle against Israel’s political, economic hegemony, and the forced occupation of their lands? Would they tell a woman who has been raped that she has no right to inflict violence on her attacker, or a community of color experiencing a violence police presence that they have no right to organize armed resistance? No person whose privilege exempts them from the direct experience of oppression has the right to tell someone else how to respond to or resist racial, gendered, and class violence.
Surely the pacifists would characterize the recent London riots as opportunistic vandalism perpetuated by ignorant mobs, which was the standard position of the bourgeois media, the UK government, and political conservatives. Yet the riots, perceived as inarticulate and apolitical, spoke the disenfranchised anger of Britain’s young, urban, people of color loud and clear. Beginning in response to the police murder of an innocent Black man, and specifically targeting corporations and the police, the riots had a radical anti-capitalist, anti-racial violence agenda--which is much more than we can say of the Occupy movement.
The platform of non-violence refuses to acknowledge the violent conditions of everyday life, or recognize that direct conflict is sometimes the only effective response to inhumane, brutalizing systems of racial, gender, and class oppression. Certainly any hope we have of dismantling these systems must not be limited to legal reforms and peaceful protests; we must not rule out the violent strategies of defensive action, factory occupations, riots, vandalism, and armed resistance. Proponents of pacifism warn that violence only leads to more violence, that the only way to end the cycle is through peaceful action which will call attention to our reasonable demands, and mobilize public/political opinion in our favor. Therefore, when peaceful protests are suppressed by the police, the protesters gain the moral highground, and highlight the unfair brutality of the state. But in order to come out of the struggle on top, karmically speaking, the protesters must only exhibit passive resistance. Otherwise, people might think we somehow deserved this brutality. People in the movement spoke about the incident of women being maced by police at Occupy Wall St. as if the violence they experienced was ‘good press’ for the rest of us, as in ‘see look what they do to us when we try to be peaceful!” The press made sure to characterize the women as “non-threatening,” and indeed they were all young and white. Would they have been perceived as more threatening if they were women of color? What if they were fighting back against the police? Would the video have gotten as much media attention? Would they still be 'good press' for our movement, or would they have deserved to be maced. Whether the women were threatening or not should not be factored into our sympathy for them as the recipients of police brutality. We should condemn all police violence against political protesters and agitators, not only those who meet the criteria of pacifists. We are calling out the hypocrisy of a position which disparages all violence, while strategically courting it for political aims.
The pacifist claim that we should all be martyrs to our cause, that suffering the violence inflicted on us ennobles our cause in the Objective Eyes of the World, becomes extremely problematic when applied to feminism. In this patriarchal society, women are socialised to endure the sexual, social, economic domination of men which often manifests as violence against our bodies and minds: this violence takes the overt forms of rape, forced motherhood, trafficking and prostitution, and the more covert forms of economic disadvantage, unrealistic standards of beauty, and the cultivation of submissive personalities. People who do not conform to the gender-binary and its assigned characteristics are policed through institutional discrimination and actual social violence into assimilating with dominant heterosexuality. The non-violence argument applied to gender leads to the conclusion that people should not form organized resistance against gendered violence, but suffer it nobly in the hopes of winning over the hearts and minds of men to our cause. In this case, women are queer people have been practicing non-violence for centuries, and where has it gotten us? Putting the power to end gendered oppression into the hands of the people who most benefit from it only further dis-empowers oppressed people, and reinforces the patriarchal construct of men as the arbiters of all decisions. We do not want to wait for these men to decide we are human enough not to be brutalized. We realize that we have the power to challenge patriarchy with our organized resistance, and that this resistance must embrace violence as an effective political, defensive tactic.
From amazing friends in Baltimore, eat it up kiddies! REPOST
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