A new Class Analysis for the Modern Insurrection

by JUDITH REVEL and TONI NEGRI

It did not take much imagination, once the analysis of the current economic crisis had been brought back to its causes and social effects, to foretell urban revolts akin to jacqueries. Commonwealth had predicted that already in 2009. What we did not expect, on the contrary, is that in Italy, in the movement, this prediction could be rejected. It seemed in fact, we were told, ancient; they told us, instead: now is the time to rebuild broad fronts against the crisis and establish within the movements forms of organization-communication-recognition to address political representation.

Well, now we are nonetheless facing movements that express themselves in more or less classic insurrectionary forms and yet are everywhere, thus uprooting the old geopolitical grammar within which someone stubbornly kept thinking. What we have is, therefore:

1)      A new proletariat, made of precarious and unemployed workers, joins the middle classes in crisis. These are diverse subjects unifying in unusual ways in the struggle, asking, as in the countries of the Southern Mediterranean, new, more democratic forms of government. The political dictatorship of the Ben Alis and the political-economic one of our fake democracies may not be equivalent – although for decades the latter have accurately built, supported, and protected the former – but by now the urge for radical democracy is everywhere and marks a common of struggles emerging from different sides, blending and intertwining, cross-breeding one another’s demands.

2)      The very same social forces, those suffering from the crisis in societies with class relationships by now definitely controlled by financial regimes within mixed, manufacturing and/or cognitive economies, are moving across different terrains (first movements of workers, students, and precarity more generally; now complex social movements of the “acampados” kind) with equal determination.

3)      The resurgence of movements of pure refusal is crisscrossed by a societal composition as complex as ever, stratified both vertically (i.e. middle classes plunging towards the excluded proletariat) and horizontally (i.e. in relation to different sectors of the metropoles, torn between gentrification and – as Saskia Sassen notices – “Brazilianized” zones, where clashes among gangs start leaving the marks of AK-47 bullets on the walls of those neighborhoods where the sole – dramatic, entropic – alternative to organized struggles is organized crime).

The current English revolts belong to this third kind and are quite similar to the ones that some time ago have affected the French banlieues: a mix of anger and desperation, fragments of self-organization and crystallizations of other kinds (neighborhood associations, networked solidarities, soccer fans’ clubs, etc.) expressing by now the unbearability of lives turned to rubble. The rubble, surely unsettling, these revolts leave behind them is not in the end so different from what the everyday lives of so many men and women is made of today: shreds of life in one way or another.

How can we open a discussion on these complex phenomena from the standpoint of thinking the common? What we argue below has the mere intention to open a space for debate.

First and foremost, it seems to us that we need to debunk some interpretations voiced by the mass media of the ruling classes.

They argue, to begin with, that these movements we are discussing should be considered, from a political point of view, in their “radical” diversity. Now, it is obvious that these movements are politically diverse. But to say that they are “radically” so is simply idiotic. All these movements are, in fact, radically characterized not only because they oppose Ben Ali or other dictators, whatever is the case, or because they denounce Zapatero’s or Papandreou’s political betrayal, or because they hate Cameron or refuse the impositions of the European Central Bank. They are, rather, characterized as radical because all of them refuse to pay for the consequences of the economy and the crisis (nothing would be more mistaken than considering the crisis as a catastrophe striking a fundamentally sane economic system; nothing would be more terrible than nostalgia for the capitalist economy before the crisis), which is to say the huge movement of wealth that is now taking place to the benefit of the powerful, organized as they are in the political forms of the Western regimes (democratic or dictatorial, conservative or reformist alike…).

These are revolts born, in Egypt, Spain, or England, out of the simultaneous refusal of the subjection, exploitation and plunder this economy has prepared for the lives of entire populations of the world, and the political forms within which the crisis of this biopolitical appropriation has been managed. And this is also true for all the so-called “democratic” regimes. Such a form of government appears only preferable for the seeming “civility” with which it masks the attack on the dignity and humanity of the existences it crushes, but the vanishing of political representation is now at the point of collapse. To argue that there are – according to the criteria of Western democracy – radical differences between the representativeness of Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Cameron’s Tottenham or Brixton, is simply to denying the evidence: life has in both cases been so violated and plundered that it cannot but explode in a movement of revolt. Not to talk of mechanisms of repression, which are bringing England back to the times of primitive accumulation, to the jails of Moll Flanders and the factories of Oliver Twist. To the mugshots of youth in rebellion posted on the walls and the screens of England’s cities one should really juxtapose large sized prints of the swinish faces (a variant of the PIGS?) of the bankers and financial corporate bosses that have turned entire communities to that condition, and keep fattening their profits out of this crisis.

Let’s go back to the newspaper’s trivia. They also say that these revolts are different from an ethical-political standpoint. Some would thus be legitimate, as in the Maghreb countries, because there the corruption of dictatorial regimes has led to miserable conditions; the protests of the Italian students or the Spanish “indignados” would still be understandable because “precarity is bad”; the revolts of the English or the French proletariat are, instead, “criminal” as they are allegedly marked by mere looting of other people’s property, hooliganism and racial hatred.

All this is largely false, because these revolts tend – with all the differences among them, which we don’t deny – to have a common nature. They are not “youthful” revolts, but revolts that understand social and political conditions that increasingly large layers of the population consider entirely unbearable. The degradation of the working and social wage has gone beyond the threshold identified by classical economists and by Marx with the level of workers’ reproduction, which they called a “necessary wage”. And now, we dare the journalists to argue that these struggles are produced by excesses of consumerism!

Here comes a first conclusion. These movements can be defined as “recompositional”. They actually penetrate populations – be they workers guaranteed up to now or precarious ones, unemployed or those who have only known odd jobs, improvisation and off-the-books activities – exalting their moments of solidarity in their struggle against destitution. Declining middle classes and the proletariat, migrant and not, manual and cognitive workers, retirees, housewives, and youth are joined in poverty and the struggle to oppose it. Here they found conditions for a united struggle.

Second, it is immediately apparent (and this is what mostly terrifies those who assume consumerist characteristics in these movements) that these are not chaotic and nihilistic movements, that they are not about burning for burning’s sake, that they don’t just want to sanction the destructive potency of an unforeseeable “no future”. Forty years after the punk movement (which on the other hand was, in spite of the stereotypes, passionately productive), these are not movements declaring the end, recorded and internalized, of every future; they rather want to build the future. They know that the crisis affecting them is not due to the fact that the proletariat does not produce – either under a boss or in the general condition of social cooperation by now underpinning processes of capture of value – or does not produce enough, but is happening because they are robbed of the fruit of their productivity; which is to say, they are forced to pay for a crisis that is not their own; they have already paid for healthcare, retirement and public order systems while the bourgeoisie was accumulating for war and expropriating for its own profit. But mostly they know that there’s no way out of this crisis until they, the rebels, don’t handle the power mechanisms and the social relations that regulate those mechanisms. But, one may object, these are not political movements. Even if – the critics add – they expressed politically correct positions (as it has often happened for the North-African insurgents or the Spanish “indignados”) these movements are prejudicially outside or critical towards the democratic order.

Of course, we would like to add: it is difficult if not impossible to find, in the current political order, passages and paths through which a project attacking the current policies for overcoming the crisis can take place. Right and left are, almost always, alike. For the former the wealth tax should hit incomes of 40-50,000 Euros, for the latter of 60-70,000 Euros: is this the difference? The defense of private property, the extension of privatization and liberalization are in the agendas of both sides. Electoral systems are by now reduced to the pure and simple selection of delegates from the privileged strata, and so on and so forth. These movements are attacking all this: are they political or not when they do so? These movements are political because they position themselves on a constituent, not a claim-making, terrain. They attack private property because they know it as the form of their oppression and rather insist on the constitution and self-management of solidarity, welfare, education – in short of the common, because this is by now the horizon for old and new powers.

Of course no one is so stupid to think that these revolts immediately produce new forms of government. What, nonetheless, these revolts teach is that “the one is now split into two”, that the seemingly flawless solidity of capitalism is by now only an old phantasmagoria, which in no way can be brought back together, that capital is immediately schizophrenic and the politics of the movements can only locate itself within this fracture.

We hope that those comrades who believed insurrections to be an outdated tool of autonomist politics will be able to reflect on what’s going on. It is not by wearing ourselves off waiting for parliamentary deadlines but by inventing new constituent institutions for the common in revolt that we can understand together what is to come.

* http://uninomade.org/commoninrevolt/

Translation courtesy of: Franco Barchiesi, A Tribe of Moles

Educational classism: beyond the curriculum and the resources, the (in)commonality of time. Class Diary #3

Last two weeks of class, I could insert an exhaustible amount of obscenities here but I'll leave that out. Well, maybe one, FUCK MY LIFE! Alright that out of my system. This is always a very aggravating time for me and one that slams most of us with the dilemma of class assumptions in education from elementary ed to higher ed. The issue of time management in education usually references the concept of not writing papers the night before or breaking up your study sessions so as to ingest the information more effectively. There are obvious class obfuscation in this. Its much harder for someone who is working full time to write a paper or study for a largely inclusive exam, even more insurmountable for someone who also has a family they care for. The idea of writing a paper in sporadic busts of 30 minutes one week, 1 hour another day, staying up after work to write and go to work in the morning doesn't usually produce an essay worthy of publishing. There is to this also an issue a dual issue of cultural capital and crossing class tensions. The assumption that it is easy to insert in your daily planning the time to work on a research piece or studying for an exam his a very middle class twinge to it. Usually this time must be sacrificed from other activities that are for those of us in the working and working-poor are for purposes of subsistence and hygiene (cooking, doing laundry, or in some cases showering) [don't kid yourself many of us have skipped a few showers in the week for the sake of an extra few minutes of sleep] While the students from the managerial class and up may also endure the sleep deprivation they are for the most part not time investment in school work for time invested in life's necessities (partying, leisure, social obligations) The issue of crossing class arises in the tensions caused within any living situation when the activities of necessity are sacrificed for school work. Those who are either dependant on or assume the student to fulfill these requirements at home can at time become aggravated that their partner or child is ignoring their responsibilities at home for their school work.
There is another form of time management that represents a very class biased assumption made by higher education authorities and educators themselves. Now I know I've harped before on the idea that education is not a preset trajectory in which we can be segregated into year of progress, age, and so on. however, in the established institution this is not the reality of need for the working and working-poor student. for us it there is a very real and pragmatic need to obtain a degree in as little a time as possible while incurring as little debt as possible. The cost benefit balance of education for the working class student is very different for perhaps a more bourgeoisie student capable of "bettering themselves" over a long period of time without much of a worry on the cost incurred. Those of us with scanter resources are very sharply in tuned with the costs in time and opportunity in taking an extra semester, in dropping a class and pushing back graduation, in a 5 year education Ba program. (*COUGH *COUGH)
This is the paradox of class effects on time management in education for the working and working-poor student. We do not have the resources available for an prolonged educational career and thus endure enormous pressure to expedite the process of getting a degree to better our economic situation or gain some stability. While at the same time we also lack the cultural capital for appropriate time management to really excel in our class or are meet with resistance from push and pull forces in our homes from either necessary chores or personal relationship tensions. The educational institution provides little in the way of providing aid in dealing with this dilemma because it is based on a large swath of middle class assumptions about what a student is.
So we are in the current status of things doomed to write our papers after work while the laundry is drying and wondering if we'll get over 20 hours of sleep this week.

**disclaimer** this is not an attempt to convince professor Schuster not to assign the website analysis. But if by chance it did have that effect...it wouldn't be a bad thing

Clearing the Streets: Class Diary

My job provides a disgustingly blatant view into the the acts and effects of the current alignment of power structures in society. A small non-profit hospital in which a dozen of top administrators make well over a million dollar, 32% of the employees barley break the federal distinction for poverty level income, and strict anti-union policies are enforced, located in a deindustrialized hub city still finding itself in dealing with racial demographic changes. I work 32 hours a week, 4 evening shifts every week with one weekend on and one off. I worked last weekend, Friday-Monday. I've had quite a few days that have brandished themselves into my memory while working there, names I wont forget for better or worse. An emergency room can provide a time lapse image of all the best and worst of life in an eight hour shift. I've seen new lives come into the world, and others find their way out of the world to young and to often. However, class is ever present. I've worked there fore 5 years now, its weighed on me I can't hide that. Its not easy walking into work knowing that chances are you will be a part of the worst day in someone else's life. With all that's side about how nurses or doctors save lives, how they can ruin them is far more taboo. This weekend was especially graphic from a class perspective. this being the weekend before Thanksgiving the local police departments decided to start "clearing the streets" for visiting families, often coming back from Cape Cod or Cambridge. Clearing the streets fairly accurately denotes the mentality of the officers. They bring in the homeless, the addicts, the transient, the trouble makers, and they throw them in an ER cell complete with its own selection of drugs. Of course to the doctors and nurses, they are nothing but an unnecessary work load for the holidays. Many people I find are not aware of the legal ramifications of being poor or homelessness, that is unless they have had experiences as such or in medicine or law enforcement. Allow me to help, it is illegal to be homeless, it is illegal to need help, it is illegal to hurt yourself in desperation and beg for someone to help you. Not only is it illegal but it is also grounds for incarceration without a trail or without even being arrested. Its called a Section 12, the other pink slip. A Section 12 allows a doctor or police officer to hold someone against their will for an unlimited period of time based on the impression that they are at risk of harming themselves or others. Once sectioned into a hospital the staff have the legal ability to physically restrain a person, tie them in 4 point restraints to a stretcher and if necessary chemically restrain you. This weekend we wrote over 45 pink Section 12's for those brought in from the PD's street cleaning efforts. These were men and women with no families, berated over and over about the "joy" of the holidays, the thanksgiving feast, the season of giving. This as they sit in the bar with the only feast that they were ever welcomed to, on the street finding the only joy allotted to them through chemical euphoria, knowing damn well what society gives to those deemed unsuitable for one reason or another. As I went on break, back into the staff lounge the TV was on the local news channel, a report of how stop and shop was handing out free turkeys for the needy. I sat down, unable to really talk. Class isn't a new concept to me, class struggle isn't a four letter word in my mind, but this, this fucking endless tragedy of the privileged class torturing the have-nothings, mocking them, this is the lowest it gets. Ever year it hits me more and more around this time, the endless self satisfying rhetoric, the philanthropic masturbation of stop and shop and other who think a night in a soup kitchen makes the year long massacre a little more bearable, it brings me to a stand still every year. The doctors who "struggled" through Med School, the nurses whose current generation reap the benefits fought for by those who came before them for a fair wage and personal protection who spit on those brave women's graves by forsaking compassion for those they supposedly serve, they are only the actors of the final scene of a long and historic production: the rape of the lower classes from above. The personal attacks fly like linguistic trench warfare, "He's a loser" "How pathetic" "These fucking drunks fill up the ER" "Why can't I see real patients" "We should I waste my time, he cant even help himself, hes disgusting." Not an ounce of understanding of what lead to this, the family issues, the abuse, the addictions, the evictions, the unplanned children, the lack of employment opportunities, the devastating deaths, and strung throughout all of this is the almost total absence of a sincere and effect system of social support for those who suffer most in our society. By no means is this an analytic entry in a class diary, I understand this doesn't fully analyze the dynamics of class and its reproduction in the ER, but sometimes its so blatant that any analysis will most the raw and basic observation, it can't capture the suffering of the ones for whom the holidays mean being cleared from the streets like garbage and locked in a cell.

Clearing the Streets: Class Diary

"The Working Class and the Employing Class have nothing in common!"

I felt the need to quote the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World as the title of the post because all of these readings remind me of the collective memory of the working classes. The Poet and the Pauper is in some ways the re-telling of the Joe Hill story. The child of scarcity conciously seeing the beauty in the wains and surges of the workers. Just as Maliza Banales "would be a writer wether I published or not." So to Joe Hill would be a song writer wether his songs were re-written hymns or if they were banned for their seditious nature. The both "Saw living as a luxury and survivng as a reality." However, they are also both persuaded by the anture of their times. Hill saw himself at war, in a time when the working class had an eye on a world they could take back. Maliza saw resistance to the edifices of power and domination as an act that urged pride in oneself worth. I wonder wether this more contemporary view can at times be counter-productive. When she describes her mothers unwillingness to accept "welfare" benefits she describes it with pride and as a difiant fighter. Hasn't her mother worked to deserve these benefits? She toils at home and at her occupation t feed and nurture a family which will one day too prove to be an even greater part of society as a whole. By refusing what she has rightfully earned for fear of the condemnation of the employing and managerial class has she become not defiant but in a way submissive. Would it not be more defiant, more revolutionary to take the benefits and proclaim them not as hand outs or welfare but her rightful assistance, the resources she is owed by the upper crust which consumes so much more?

In "Steal Away" by Dorothy Allison the beauty and marvel of what can be described as the lumpen class is wonderfully illustrated. The lumpen classes and what more contemporary wobs and anarchists have described as the lumpen struggle is a struggle by and for those who linger on the lines of the working poor. Those who struggle against class oppression but also against mental health issues, addiction, and homelessness. They may choose to compensate for the starvation of oppression with acts deemed illegal or by living lives of resistance through regression into more primal and primitive lifestyles. Allison admits she felt an expectation to becomes a member of the lumpen struggle ("I became what had always been expected of me- a thief.") In the lumpen struggle and in the class struggle as a whole there can be seen a certain beautify in the thief, an elegance in skirting the punishment of the oppressive classes. In this lifestyle their is a means of usurping power from the upper classes, the thief recaptures power by choosing to live outside the legalities of the rulers. Just as Allison takes pleasure when she exerts her power in refusing to acknowledge the sociology professor calls in the hall ways. Here, Allison like Maliza express an emotion that the ruling classes can never under stand through an expression that misleads them: a smile.

The pyramid of capitalist society as presented by the first of the Wobs has a very distinctive third tier, those who deceive you.Wether it be convincing you of the necessity of burying a gangrenous leg in a plot which parcels the land to the working class through the capitalist hands of the land owners. If it is not the clergy then let it be the need for self intoxication as a last ditch effort to forget the hardships of working life that distracts the working class from the need to re-take the means of production. This has been a devastating tactic, it seems that alcohol is always cheaper and more available in the slums, the ghettos, and the skeletal remnants of industrial towns. Drunks tend not to organize themselves.

One of the goals of the Industrial Workers of the World was to develop and strengthen a proud working class culture. Through workers halls, the little red song book, and adopting their own rules of interaction the Wobs sought to counter the immense trepidation of the oppressive classes culture trying to gentrify their own. With the downfall of the IWW after World War II and the rise of the AFL as a union of and for the bosses working class culture was degenerated to become a badge of shame to be tossed off and the middle and upper class culture would be grafted on. The epoch of middle class white patriarchal culture in the 50's and 60's would soon wain with the counter culture of the 70's where middle class youth would reproduce the expectations of their class and simply blur the periphery of cultural acceptance. It was in the 80's that in this country there began a conscious movement to resurface working class pride. With the emergence of punk and American hardcore, the realities of Reaganomics hit hard the already wounded working classes, these classes began to hit back. This was the time when winter coats where replaced with mechanic jackets bedazzled with patches, when green been casserole became a badge of honor. Just as Terri Griffith describes the sharp recognition of the schools eye of judgment devaluing her mothers parenting through superficial observations this period brought back a sense of class consciousness resembling the early 20th century. Hopefully this resurgence continues to swell and becomes a tidal wave one that sweeps away the condemnation, the power, the privilege, the oppression of the upper classes in economics, social status, culture, and power. Then we can rebuild a society of aristocratic peasants who are proud of both intelligence and their aptitude for industry.

As we prepare to eat the rich...

Ill admit I wont be able to keep up to much with this blog because of alot of what is going on including my involvement with the Occupy Providence movement. I just wanted to update everyone. As of right now their have been a few decisions made by the various general assemblies of Occupy Providence (I'm gonna call it OccuProv for the sake of fending off carpel tunnel) We have formed committees delegated to the needs of food, sanitation, medical, media, safety, and entertainment. We have come to an agreement to maintain a non-violent methodology so long as the current environment and relationship to the authorities sustains itself. We have decided that all marches and demonstrations shall be done without regards for permits, this is because we sees these streets as our streets and therefore we are no longer willing to ask permission from the "owners" to use our city streets to voice our grievances. We have voted to stand in solidarity with SLAP (Student Labor Alliance Project) in their fight to prevent the injection of corporate education into the providence school system through the proposal of a mayoral academy run by Achievement First Inc. Most importantly we have decided that this Sat. Oct. 15 will be the day in which we begin the full occupation of Burnside Park in solidarity with the call put forth for a national day of resistance and action by the Occupy Together movement.

Tomorrow or the day after I will be posting pictures from General Assembly meetings.
Tomorrow also marks the second call for a day of college rebellions in which college students and faculty show solidarity in their own desired ways with Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Together Movement. I hope you all can take even just 15 minutes to do something anything, even just bring the topic up in class  to show support for the Occupy movement

In solidarity with the 99%
Kevin

eat, sleep, drink, urinate employability

I went to William Davies Voc Tech school and spent for years there studying to be "employable."

Davies is considered a district in itself. Lincoln, the town surrounding Davies has a median home income of $52,455, while Pawtucket the city from which the majority of the students come from has a median home income of $31,775 for a two parent household. However, the median home income for a single parent household (female) in Pawtucket is $23,391, and that is the situation that the majority of these young people are coming from. Central Falls and Providence, the other major areas that send kids to this school both have median household incomes in the low to mid $20,000. So, imagine if you will, taking the bus from the post-industrial city of Pawtucket passed the Broad street area of Cumberland, through the Valley Falls area of Lincoln and arriving at school in the middle of Lincoln surrounded by the mansions of Butterfly Way, Twin River, and CCRI.I live right next to Slater Mill, my parents have worked in factories since the time that my memory serves me. The factory conditions of school were usually quite obvious to me. So I went to Davies to learn a trade, I would follow my father who is a machine extruder and was able to use his sway as a skilled worker to help fight for improvements for himself and his unskilled fellow workers. I took auto body as my shop choice, hearing about the new water based paints that were being applied to electric vehicles I though it was an excellent avenue. I wanted to have a job, be in a union, and raise a family. The problem was I was imitating a dream that was already decades dead. Throughout the school day, with every new rule, every useless curriculum change, the work horse phrase was that everything being done to us was in the hope of increasing employability. Davies touted this as its achievement, a high ratio of its graduates were employed in their fields of study. This to we hear no in the discussion of the emphasis on science and math in public education. We need to get ahead of the curve on the bio-tech field, we need to develop educated workers to fit today's tech driven economy. Its almost laughable if it wasn't so sickening. The bells, the age limitations, the compartmentalization, the factory system of public education has bent so little to the needs of educating the whole human being! But this was a low income school and therefore the goals were reached if any one of us were tossed a middle income job, the rest of us showed claw passed out peers for the scraps of what is left. Jean Anyon describes a working-class school work as "mechanical, involving root behavior and very little decision making or choice." Until we contrive an education system that sees even working class students as worthy of a whole education, of mind and body, based on critical thinking, we reproduce the concept that the life of the working class is less valuable than the enriched classes.