The movement generally pegged as anti-globalization is more properly referred to by its members and supporters as the “alt-globalization” movement or some variant of that term and is anti-corporate more than anti-globalization—although globalization is a term derived from its enthusiasts; see the discussion of Theodore Levitt below.
See → and →. Roubini begins this blog post of October 14, 2011, by alluding to “social and political turmoil and instability throughout the world, with masses of people in the real and virtual streets”: “the Arab Spring; riots in London; Israel’s middle-class protests against high housing prices and an inflationary squeeze on living standards; protesting Chilean students; the destruction in Germany of the expensive cars of ‘fat cats’; India’s movement against corruption; mounting unhappiness with corruption and inequality in China; and now the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in New York and across the United States.”
I addressed this issue in an essay of 1981 on documentary photography (“in, around, and afterthoughts: on documentary photography”). I was pointing out that ideological images were employed in the United States, during the Great Depression, to mobilize support for the very poor under the Roosevelt Administration, with the understanding that alleviating suffering would forestall revolt.
Roubini, ibid. I am using Roubini here as a convenient figure, since one might quote from quite a few other economists, particularly Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, and Paul Krugman of the New York Times, or Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, to outline the fears of the left-liberal wing of Western economists.
Latvia, a tiny Baltic country that (like the other two Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania) broke free of the collapsing Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is so far the sharpest example of this syndrome; one might also cite Ireland and possibly Greece, Spain, and Portugal in the coming year— all of which stand in contrast to the course of Iceland (the tiniest economy of all of these, but, as luck would have it,not a member of the Eurozone), which was promptly to reject any terms imposed by international financial agencies and instead defaulting on its debt and pursuing their top bankers for criminal fraud. In the early 2000s, Latvia’s center right government instituted aggressive neoliberal measures in large part to join the euro and escape the dominance of Russia. After the financial crisis of 2008—, Latvia experienced the most precipitous financial decline of any nation, losing about a quarter of its GDP in 2 years. Its government then applied stringent fiscal austerity, including slashing pensions and wages. The budding middle class, in a familiar story, had been induced to buy homes on cheap credit, but this mortgage debt (owed largely to Swedish and German banks) cannot be repaid, while property values have also plunged. The austerity measures have failed to improve Latvia’s balance sheets but has sent the middle class, not to mention the poor, into subsistence mode—or emigration. Tens of thousands of Latvians have left, and unemployment stands at or above 20 percent. A reference from 2010 is →, and from 2011: →. Yet, like Ireland, Latvia is bizarrely hailed as a successful example of austerity budgeting. (Krugman writes: “A few more successes like this and Latvia will be back in the Stone Age.”)
The European Commission in 2011 voted in “the six pack,” a group of measures that overrides member states’s abilities to control their budgets, reinstituting the Maastricht Treaty’s limit of 3% on deficits and 60% of GDP on debts, beyond which large fines will be levied, among other penalties. According to economist Susan George, the Commission is also engineering a shift in worker protection leading to longer work weeks, lower pay, and later retirement. See Susan George, “A Coup in the European Union?,” CounterPunch, Oct. 14, 2011, →.The still-developing situation in regard to Greece (which will have EC monitors in place enforcing austerity measures) shows the anti-labor direction, a hallmark of neoliberalism, of the European financial governors.
Although Western European protests in response to the prospectless future, such as the indignados or encampados in Spain and the many demonstrations in Greece’s Syntagma Square, were critical examples, and the uprising in Tunisia was ultimately at least a partially successful one, the sheer scale and unlikely success (similarly only partial) of the occupation in Cairo’s Tahrir Square made it the touchstone for the movement, and it remains so regardless of its as-yet unfulfilled aims, In recognition of its role, veteran occupiers of Tahrir Square sent a message to Occupy Wall Street: “The current crisis in America and western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets. So we stand with not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.” See →.
See Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capital, trans. Kristina Lebedeva and James Francis McGimsey (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2011).
The New Oxford American Dictionary has since 2005 come installed on Apple computers using version OS X.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), 78.
Levitt writes, in distinguishing what he considers a multinational mind set from a global one, “The Hoover case illustrates how the perverse practice of the marketing concept and the absence of any kind of marketing imagination let multinational attitudes survive when customers actually want the benefits of global standardization. The whole project got off on the wrong foot. It asked people what features they wanted in a washing machine rather than what they wanted out of life. Selling a line of products individually tailored to each nation is thoughtless. Managers who took pride in practising the marketing concept to the fullest did not, in fact, practise it at all. Hoover asked the wrong questions, then applied neither thought nor imagination to the answers.” Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” The McKinsey Quarterly (Summer 1984): 13.
In the homogenizing world market, certain goods, such as pizza, tacos, and bagels, become near-universal signifiers of difference.
The Wall Street occupation was set in motion by a number of events, which I can only partly sketch out here. The occupation had been foreshadowed a couple of months earlier by Bloombergville, a three-week encampment of labor leaders and grassroots activists held at City Hall Park against draconian budget cuts and named after the mayor of New York. (Another important precedent: the weeks-long occupation of the Wisconsin State House in Madison, supported by unions, including police unions). An article speculating on the possibility of emulating Tahrir Square by anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber was published by Adbusters, a Situationist-inspired, high-gloss Canadian magazine. Adbusters subsequently put out a general call for a Wall Street occupation on September 17. Discussions about the possibility of building a movement had been held over the summer at 16Beaver, an artist-run discursive space in the Wall Street area. An ad hoc meeting at 16Beaver, after a Debt/Commons seminar heavy with activists and academics at which Graeber discussed his work on debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York, Melville House, 2011), was the final impetus toward the occupation centering on a General Assembly. The Bloombergville group put together the Sept. 17th occupation, but Graeber, together with Japanese anarchist activist Sabu Kohso and anarchist artist and activist Georgia Sagri, whom he had encountered at the 16Beaver seminar, then organized the General Assembly along anarchist lines.
Drugs, that is, not considered part of the approved Big Pharma formulary. This is important because among other things it allowed adolescents to make distinctions between good and bad drugs, but often based on criteria other than legality.
Since racism was an important motivator, the resulting urban shrinkage is often attributed in no small part to “white flight.” Small towns often became dormitory towns for city workers. The small town has remained the preferred location of US residents for most of its history and was idealized during the high point of American sociology that spanned the Second World War.
Although the demonization of working-class and poor residents in areas ripe for real-estate harvesting is a tactic of long standing, the in-coming “good people” have only recently been granted a profile of their own; previously, class privilege was taken for granted as a deserved entitlement.
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Florida did not come up with the idea of the creative class, but he did populate it with statistical categories. According to his thesis, the creative class makes up about 30 percent of U.S. workers, but as we shall see, the groupings he uses are problematic.
See →.
See note 1.
Toronto, Florida’s base, is currently afflicted by a mayor with a take-no-prisoners, right-wing populist style, complete with racist and anti-gay pronouncements and actions. In repudating the previous government’s agenda, Ford has cut funding for bike lanes and light rail. Asked about Florida’s response, Torontonians with whom I spoke said that he has been largely quiet but had complained that the city was cutting all the things that made Toronto “his city.”
Recently Florida has been criticized again for sloppy interpretation and aggregation of polling data and economic statistics in his article “Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative,” published in the venerable magazine The Atlantic (these days politically center-right), where he is one of 19 editors. See →.” Many other commentators read the data quite the opposite way and claim that the US electorate is, on the contrary, growing increasingly liberal in its beliefs while US politics, thanks to the radicalization of the Republican Party, have moved to the right. See, for example, → and →.
Florida ingeniously includes in his mix a statistically small bohemian group, which includes gay people, but as Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has reluctantly noted, his data regressions suggest that in only two cities—in, yes, the state of Florida—does the gay population help the economy.
[T]o harness creativity for economic ends, you need to harness creativity in all its forms. You can’t just generate a tech economy or information economy or knowledge economy; you have to harness the multidimensional aspects of creativity. … there are three types of creativity: technological creativity…; economic creativity, … turning those things into new businesses and new industries; and cultural and artistic creativity, … new ways of thinking about things, new art forms, new designs, new photos, new concepts. Those three things have to come together to spur economic growth.
These quotes are from a job announcement put out by a department at a major university that offers “a Master’s Degree in Arts Politics which treats, in an activist key, the nexus between the politics that art makes and the politics that make art.” Despite my skepticism, I don’t want to dismiss the potential of such training and network formation; the problem lies in the short life span that such initiatives can have before the institution render them zombies. See the latter two installments of my Culture Class essay (→, →) for a discussion of the culturalization argument of Fredric Jameson and its adoption by George Yúdice to argue that art that can be framed as social practice may put the artists in the position of unwittingly serving the aims of the state and, by focusing on melioration, of abandoning the possibility of critique. See also footnote 4, above.
See →. There was an unsuccessful effort by artists to occupy the lab during a day of artists’s actions.
See →. Urban Omnibus is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council. The Architectural League was founded in 1881 by Cass Gilbert and has long sought to recognize the importance of the arts in relation to architecture.
The phrase “how we live now” evidences a predictable set of assumptions about who constitutes the “we.” As I write, in March 2012, there is a feature on the site in which a freelance writer describes an Open House at the newly renovated Brooklyn House of Detention, designed to placate the neighborhood gentrifiers that all will be well. See →.
See →.
The most prominent sign of technological sophistication is the frequent visual reference to Anonymous, an amorphous group of hackers, or hacktivists (of which one small international groupuscule, LulzSec, was arrested in February 2012), in the form of the Guy Fawkes masks from the V for Vendetta franchise (worn by protesters and occupiers and used on signage). "Anonymous" apparently has carried out denial-of-service attacks against the websites of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain during the attempted revolutions there, and it has expressed or enacted support for Occupy. See →.
Here I am looking not only to the town meetings of the early days of the American colonies but explicitly to the model of nonviolent participatory democracy propounded by one of the groups central to the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Many of the young student activists had joined SNCC’s Freedom Rider campaign to disrupt racial segregation in the American South, which influenced the principles outlined shortly after in the Port Huron Statement, a foundational document of the student/antiwar movement. Naturally enough, the history, origins, and influences of these movements are more complex than I can sketch out here. The widely noted, galvanizing speech of Berkeley student leader Mario Savio, delivered in the Berkeley campus quadrangle on Dec. 2, 1964, during a stand off with university police, includes the following in its preamble: I ask you to consider – if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something – the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw materials that don't mean to be – [to] have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product!... Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
Sharon Zukin, Loft Living, p. 180.
This essay is an expanded version of a paper given at "Labour of the Multitude? The Political Economy of Social Creativity," a conference organized by the Free/Slow University of Warsaw and held at the University of Warsaw on October 20-22, 2011, just over a month after the Occupy movement began. The essay has benefited greatly from Stephen Squibb's comments and discussions.