A Movement Without Demands? | Possible Futures - 0 views
-
Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice
- ...86 more annotations...
-
Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York
-
should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking
-
First, demands are said to be potentially divisive as they may alienate those who disagree with them and discourage newcomers from a variety of backgrounds from joining it
-
insofar as Occupy aspires to be a movement that expresses the views and interests of the vast majority of the social body, every attempt to define it through a politics of demands entails a reduction of this potentiality
-
Some counteract this third objection with the idea of releasing “impossible demands,” i.e. demands that cannot be met without igniting a radical transformation of the system
-
designation of an existing sociopolitical entity that would define itself in opposition to the 1 percent
-
never the right time for demands. Demands always and necessarily activate a state apparatus apart from and over and against society
-
anarchists and libertarians in the movement have repeatedly blocked proposals for introducing taxes on financial transactions and stronger oversight of the banking sector on the grounds that such proposals would expand the size of the government and the scope of its intervention
-
emphasis on consensus, the refusal of demands, and the refusal of representation may well have served the purpose of inciting political desire and expanding the social base of the movement in its first phase
-
The autonomist approach, then, emphasizes the creation of autonomous structures and new political organizations and practices
-
fear of co-optation posits that the strength of the movement comes from a kind of unity of anger and dissatisfaction that will dissipate in the face of any particular success
-
For autonomists (and anarchists), the practice of occupation and the very mode of existence of the movement are themselves prefigurative of a new, more democratic and more egalitarian world
-
It thus reinforces, in the attempt of preventing it, the very fragmentation that has long plagued the contemporary Left
-
Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants!
-
demands reduce the autonomy of the movement insofar as they endow an external agent—notably, the government or some other authority—with the task of solving problems the movement cannot solve for itself
-
by meeting some demands the government would be able to divide and integrate (parts of) the movement into the existing political landscape, thus undermining the movement’s very reason for being
-
pragmatists who argue that if demands are to be issued they should focus on attainable objectives so as to show that the movement can achieve concrete and measurable changes
-
movement is an organic and undifferentiated bloc comprised of people from all walks of life, and all racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds
-
Introducing demands now would hinder the organic unfolding of a collective discussion whereby the movement can articulate its own interests and desires
-
Both the anti-representational and the autonomist objections fail to recognize two key features of demands. First, we can make demands on ourselves. Second, demands are means not ends
-
In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality
-
The finitude of the commons enables us to address social inequality and environmental limits to capitalist development in their dialectical unity
-
commons does not exist. Destroyed and privatized by over two centuries of capitalist enclosure and “accumulation by dispossession,”1 what Elinor Ostrom calls “common-pool resources”2 have been reduced to tiny pockets of the world economy
-
first question that stems from a radical politics of the commons is “how can truly anti-capitalist commons be created, recreated, and expanded”?
-
Weary of the historical failure of actually existing socialism—and lacking large-scale models of alternative development—most Occupiers seem to content themselves with a neo-Keynesian politics that begins and often ends with demands for fiscal reform and government investment in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health care
-
vast majority of the resources managed by the movement are produced and distributed according to capitalist logic
-
while neo-Keynesian and socialist positions downplay and overlook existing processes of self-organization, the autonomist perspective cannot address the issue of the long-term sustainability of the movement insofar as it fails to recognize that the massive accumulation of wealth in the private sector is a major obstacle for an expansive politics of the commons
-
autonomous organization of the movement and a politics based on radical demands have to go hand in hand if durable transformations are to be achieved
-
Once an expansive politics of the commons is adopted as the centerpiece of the movement’s strategy, demands become tactical devices in the service of such strategy rather than floating signifiers power can use to divide and conquer
-
tactical use of demands creates opportunities for testing and learning from experiments in managing the commons
-
manage these resources not as commodities but as goods whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of their users and producers
-
commons not as a one-size-fit-all solution but as a mobile concept that can and should operate at different levels of granularity and on different plateaus
-
1) the management of land and natural resources; 2) the production and reproduction of social life (including care work, housing, education, and labor); 3) the production and allocation of energy, knowledge, and information
-
understanding that the commons is a finite resource that can not only be extracted but needs to be actively reproduced
-
This system has been thriving by constantly overcoming the limits to its own expansion—with the result of producing an unprecedented demographic explosion while bringing the life support systems to the brink of total collapse. The Occupy movement is an extraordinary opportunity to rethink this model
-
movement has to dispel the illusion that all proposals and visions are equivalent as long as they are democratically discussed, and begin to set priorities on the road to a truly transformative and visionary politics