‘Are the Greeks crazy?’
Here's a cleaned-up version of a conversation I just had about Greece's sudden U-turn on the rescue deal negotiated just last week. Enjoy.
Are the Greeks crazy?
No, they're just at the end of their tether. Europe is asking them to adopt more austerity than they're willing to bear.
OK, but they're spending too much money. Surely they know they have to cut back?
Sure, but the deals on offer are pretty unattractive. Europe wants to forgive half of Greece's debt and put them on a brutal austerity plan. The problem is that this is unrealistic. Greece would be broke even if all its debt were forgiven, and if their economy tanks they'll be even broker.
But that's the prospect they're being offered: a little bit of debt forgiveness and a lot of austerity.
Well, them's the breaks.
But it puts Greece into a death spiral. They can't pay their debts, so they cut back, which hurts their economy, which makes them even broker, so they cut back some more, rinse and repeat. There's virtually no hope that they'll recover anytime in the near future. It's just endless pain. What they need is total debt forgiveness and lots of aid going forward.
That doesn't sound like a very attractive option for the rest of Europe.
No, it's not.
So maybe they should just let Greece default and wash their hands of them.
Here's the thing, though: Greek debt is largely held by German banks that made the loans. [See update below.] If Greece has been irresponsible, so were the German banks that happily loaned out the money. So if Greece defaults, the banks go kablooey. But they're too big to fail, which means the German government would be forced to bail them out. And guess where the bailout money comes from? Tax dollars.
This means that German taxpayers have a bleak choice. They can shovel lots of money to Greece to keep them from defaulting, or they can refuse, and then shovel lots of money into German banks to keep them from collapsing. Either way, German taxpayers are going to foot the bill. They just haven't quite accepted this in their gut yet, and it's hard to blame them. They're pretty badly screwed no matter what.
Hmmm. Given that choice, they might decide they'd rather give their money to German banks than to Greek civil servants. What happens then?
Greece defaults. And that almost certainly means that Greece exits the euro.
Why?
It's the growth thing again. If Greece defaults, nobody will loan them any money. That means huge cutbacks, which means the economy will tank, which means even more cutbacks, etc. The traditional way out of this spiral is a massive devaluation of your currency. But Greece doesn't have a currency. It has the euro.
So if they want their economy to grow again, they have to (a) default, (b) exit the euro and re-adopt the drachma, and (c) devalue the drachma. This will cause massive amounts of pain, but it will also make Greek exports super cheap, which will eventually revive their economy.
So why not just let that happen?
It's just too catastrophic to consider. German banks, of course, would collapse and have to be bailed out. Ditto for banks in other countries that have lots of exposure to Greek debt. But that's not the worst of it. If Greece exits the euro, it will become terrifyingly obvious that other weak countries might exit too. Portugal, Spain, and Italy are the obvious candidates. Investors, spooked at the thought of their money being stuck in a country that might exit the euro and devalue all its bank deposits, would start huge runs on banks in those countries. The ECB would have to intervene and provide liquidity without limit. It would be a disaster.
So exiting the euro can't be allowed?
Right.
But if there's no exit, there's no devaluation, and Greece is pretty much screwed forever.
Right.
So who wins?
It depends on who blinks. Exiting the euro would be no picnic for Greece. But they could decide it's better than endless indenture, and threaten exit in order to get a better deal from the Germans. Then the Germans have to decide whether to call their bluff.
Wow.
Exactly. Wow. Everyone knows that somebody's going to lose a huge pile of money over this. What's really happening right now is a very high-stakes negotiation to figure out just how the losses are going to be parceled out. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: It's actually a little unclear just which country has the biggest exposure to Greek debt. Maybe Germany, maybe France, maybe Switzerland. See here, here, and here. And the ECB owns a lot of Greek debt these days too. But the general principle doesn't change much. One way or another, Europe's big countries have to decide whether to bail out Greece or whether to let them default and then bail out their own banking systems.
‘A people’s default is conceivable. A people’s austerity is not.’
On Monday, the Greek Prime Minister announced that his government would hold a referendum on the latest Euro austerity package. And look at the reaction to this ostensible democratic naivete. Stock markets slide everywhere. The BBC expresses its disbelief: "For whatever reasons, George Papandreou was standing up for democracy." German and French politicians throw tantrums, demanding accountability. Papandreou has been summoned to Cannes to explain himself and get chewed out. PASOK MPs have defected, and the Blairites are calling for Papandreou to resign. The cabinet has backed the PM, but a no confidence motion is being raised in parliament, and the government could easily collapse by the end of the week. Yesterday, Greece's military top brass was sacked and replaced by the PASOK defence minister. The ides of march forestalled? I'll come back to that.
The decision to hold a referendum is a tremendous risk for the government. As Costas Douzinas puts it: "Assuming it is not withdrawn amid all the political turmoil afflicting the ruling party, the vote is planned for January, and the issue will presumably be the latest bailout. But the real question will be: "Euro or drachma?"" As Papandreou has put it, the referendum would be on "our European course and participation in the euro". PASOK are talking as if they can win a referendum. Maybe they really believe this, because as yet most Greeks don't see the need to leave the Euro. Polls show that 70% favour staying in. But if the choice is between the Euro and a reasonable standard of living, it's very possible that people will choose their living standards. And even if a referendum happens now, it won't be over the present deal, which isn't going to be on the table. In the most polyannaish situation imaginable, Merkel et al would concede that things have reached a critical impasse, offer a much better deal, and allow Papandreou to put this to the electorate. But that looks very unlikely at the moment. Almost all the 'haircuts' applied to Greece's debts so far have been to the disadvantage of Greek banks, not French and German banks. Substantial further reductions would harm politically dominant class interests which makes it highly unlikely to happen.
One can imagine the fears that pro-Euro politicians would work with: banks collapsing, international capital flight, currency instability, rapid inflation or deflation, house prices slumping, years of painful re-financing, and Greek isolation within Europe. And that's not just scaremongering. Default would pose a set of challenges that can by no means be wished away. But it would allow Greece to stop the massive annual interest payments to bondholders, which Greece's productive base simply can't sustain, and prevent the need for further austerity. A people's default is conceivable. A people's austerity is not. Yet, if the scare tactics were going to work, one would have expected the middle classes to cave already, and that has not happened. The PASOK government has created a situation now where there's a realistic possibility of Greece simply pulling the plug on the Euro.
The consequences for the Euro as a viable currency would be dire. Douzinas is probably right that the managers of the ECB and the EU never intended to push Greece to the point that it may end up withdrawing from the euro. Yes, they're turning Greece into a basket case. Yes, they are literally asset-stripping the entire economy, presumably because they don't expect it to be a viable export market any time soon. Yes, it's a death spiral. But, they apparently imagined, that's no reason for anyone to go off in a huff. But French and German banks are probably unwilling to sacrifice a single cent of the debt interest they believe they have coming to them. After all, there isn't much money to be found elsewhere. As Michael Burke points out, the recovery in profit rates facilitated by the attack on labour over the last few years has been accompanied by a slump in corporate investment. There's little for the banks to invest their money in but speculation and debt. The EU leaders have said clearly that the main elements of the current deal are not up for renegotiation.
So, we're back to the ides of march. The replacement of the top generals, despite bland official assurances that it's all regular, suggests that PASOK smelled a coup in the works. There have also been hints that Papandreou may be unwise in going to Cannes, as a lot can happen while he's out of the country. The opposition are feigning outrage, hinting that PASOK themselves are the agents of a coup, but that seems unlikely. Now, the EU may not prefer a military coup, if it was possible to orchestrate the political collapse of the government through a no confidence vote, and facilitate a new right-wing New Democracy-led government. But the structures of the European Union have always been profoundly anti-democratic, and the politics of austerity, pushed most aggressively by the EU, are pushing the institutions of capitalist democracy to their limit.
Consider what Greece is up against. Guglielmo Carchedi, in a superior class analysis of the European Union, argues that the project of economic and monetary union is driven by European capitalist oligarchies, led by German oligarchies, with the aim of creating a new superpower. This would, of course, be an imperialist power, re-asserting European influence after decolonisation. It would allow Europe under united Franco-German leadership, to compete with the US by overcoming the limited scale of national markets and production. As importantly, it is a reaction by capital against the post-war influence of communist and socialist parties in Europe, and an attempt to create a political framework that would systematically reduce the power of labour. The project of European unification has, on these grounds, been successful.
But, a consequence of Carchedi's analysis is that, far from reflecting a community of interests, the EU is necessarily characterised both by class antagonisms (the working class has always made its presence felt, even while it has been excluded from the construction of the EU) and by national or inter-imperialist conflicts (Franco-German competition, and the predatory relationship between core and peripheral economies). The antagonisms at the heart of the EU could blow the whole project apart. The neutral (but intensely ideological) language of the mass media and the political classes treats the suppression and management of those antagonisms (in the interests of the dominant capitalist oligarchies) as a merely technical problem, albeit one complicated by various pressures. This is why they don't understand when politicians invoke 'democracy'. What has democracy got to do with it, they think, when Everyone Knows What Needs To Be Done? We're all in it together, after all. (This ideology was expressed concisely in a tweet I saw this morning, complaining that Greece was 'letting the team down': the hashtag said, '#globalvillage'.) In this view, the exclusion and suppression of working class insurgencies is a duty of 'responsible' politicians serving the general interest.
Greece's PASOK government has tried its best to fulfil its brief as a responsible government. But the severity of the crisis is overwhelming its ability to cope, and its referendum gamble has offended its masters in Europe. There is a continent of surplus value at stake. There is an imperialist super power at stake. There is decades of institutional construction and refinement at stake. There is a whole austerity formula at stake. For that reason, I suspect there'd be corks popping in Cannes if the government fell by one means or another.
What makes a strike ‘general’?
Tomorrow is Occupy Oakland’s general strike and day of action. I haven’t written much about it because I’ve been doing some work with the ad hoc media committee, which has been fantastic and frustrating and exciting and exhausting. If you watch the video of this press conference, you won’t see me:
Popout
But I was standing off to the side next to my bicycle, and, later, holding up the right side of the banner. That about sums up my very minor and very ad hoc role, which began because I showed up and gradually became more active, by imperceptible stages, until I suddenly found myself actually doing something, however small. The important thing is to register, very simply, what a transformative experience this has been and still is. I haven’t found the words — ironic that by getting involved with media, I’ve become a medium for the words of others, and put aside my own, for a time — but you can read Lili’s amazing piece on that, here, or Mike Konczal’s interview with Aakash, or if you’re in the Bay Area tomorrow, you can experience it yourself. I really hope you do. You will know more about the world you live in by doing so, and with a bit of luck, you will know that world to be a different place, because it has, a little bit, become one. That’s what I hope for tomorrow: not a “normal” general strike, as if there ever has been such a thing, but a day in which this movement continues to grow, learn, evolve, and re-draw the boundaries of what is possible. We will know more after it happens. Right now, there is only to do it, and to keep our eyes open.
But my friend Michelle Ty has written something which I want to pass on, and I would say that she speaks for me if I would dare to claim that I could have written these words. These are words I wish I had written:
What makes a strike “general” has little to do with surpassing some quantitative threshold of participants. What is implied in the adjective is not strictly about size—how “big” the strike is—but rather designates a political action that is qualitatively different from the typical labor strike.
According to Walter Benjamin (who himself is drawing from Georges Sorel), there are two essentially different kinds of strikes. In the political strike, partisans withhold labor, with the hope that their action—which interestingly is an omission of action—will cause an employer to make certain concessions that the strikers have specified beforehand. Because it is assumed that participants are ready to resume work once certain demands have been met, the strike can be thought of as the means to a determinate end (usually some form of material gain).
By contrast, the general strike is what Benjamin describes as “pure means.” Such an action differs from the paradigm of political activity that seeks only immediately practicable goals—like wage increases, health benefits, and certain modifications to the workplace. The premise of the general strike is this: work will not resume once this or that concession is made; instead, people will show their “determination to resume only awholly transformed work” [my italics]. In a characteristically wonderful phrase, Benjamin writes that the general strike “not so much causes as consummates.”
Likely, one can already see why, for the “occupy movement” that refuses to articulate “moderate” demands, the general strike would an apt form of resistance.
But before rushing into a consideration of the upcoming general strike that is just a day away, it is perhaps worthwhile to counterpoint Benjamin’s conception with that of Rosa Luxemburg, who cautioned that the “abstract, unhistorical view of the mass strike” would all too easily lose sight of the circumstances that made such actions possible.
When she wrote about the general strike in 1906, she had the Russian Revolution on the mind. From her point of view, the 1905 strikes marked a “new epoch in the development of the labor movement” and was the first time the idea of the mass strike—a mature form of the general strike—had been successfully realized. Here is an excerpt from her historical account of these events, which is quite astonishing if read with care:
The spring of 1903 gave the answer to the defeated strikes in Rostov and Tichoretzkaia; the whole of South Russia in May, June, and July was aflame. Baku, Tiflis, Batum, Elizavetgrad, Odessa, Kiev, Nicholaiev and Ekaterinoslav were in a general strike in the literal meaning of those words. But here again, the movement did not arise on any preconceived plan from one to another; it flowed tougher from individual points in each one from a different cause and in a different form . . . . In Tiflis the strike was begun by two thousand commercial employees who had a working day of from six o’clock in the morning to eleven at night. On the fourth of July they all left their shops and made a circuit of the two to demand from the proprietors of the shops that they close their premises. The victory was complete; the commercial employees won a working day of from eight in the morning to the in the evening, and they were immediately joined by all the factories, workshops and offices. The newspapers did not appear, and tramway traffic could not by carried on. . . In Elisavetgrad on July 4 a strike began in all the factories with purely economic demands. These were mostly conceded, and the strike ended on the 14th. Two weeks later however it broke out again. The bakers this time gave the word and they were joined by the bricklayers, the joiners, the dyers, the mill workers, and finally all factory workers. [my italics]
At the very least, the imagination should now be aroused. A six a.m. to eleven p.m. shift—utterly outrageous. One has the image, too, of the city’s bakers, rolling pins in hand, sending text messages to the bricklayers, reputed to be active tweeters, who then go on to spread word of the strike to the mill workers. Soon enough, all factory workers have their two feet in the street.
The conclusions that Luxemburg drew from her involvement in the revolution are worth repeating. For the ease of your eyes, some of these ideas are laid out in bullet form.
- It is absurd to conceive of a general strike as an isolated act; it is, rather, an “indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle.”
- Often, the general strike can be seen to oscillate with smaller-scale economic strikes—or what, in Benjaminian terms, would be called the political strike for economic gain. Thus, economic and political struggles seem to pass into each other and to be mutually animating.
- Although planning is involved in a general strike, a general strike cannot be “planned.” Its success cannot be entirely guaranteed by conscious initiative and direction. Rather, its fruition depends largely on a degree of spontaneity.
A word on this last point: Luxemburg’s emphasis on the necessity of spontaneity should not be interpreted merely as a caricatured expression of Romantic ideology. Her insistence on acknowledging the role of accident in history is itself a critique of a theory that would suggest that history is made up of the decisions of a few. Even a most cursory survey of the events of Arab Spring, or for an example closer to home, the building occupations in California, would seem to corroborate her hypothesis.
As the above passage illustrates well, Luxemburg noticed that the most significant events of the popular movement were not orchestrated or produced artificially but were often triggered by little, accidental occurrences, which—like the first dapple of color on the canvas—are to a degree unforeseeable. Without downplaying the importance of organization, Luxemburg insists that a mass strike cannot be called at will, and that the form it takes cannot be determined in advance.
The last general strike in the United States took place some time ago, here in Oakland in 1946. This was the same year that Gertrude Stein died, and a year following a wave of protests against the bombing of Japan. The 1946 strike was initiated by a few hundred clerks, mostly women, who were working in retail. In December, a relatively small strike prevented delivery trucks from supplying goods to two large department stores in downtown Oakland. The police exercised force to break up picket lines, and soon, several other labor organizations joined the strikers in solidarity.
More than a hundred thousand employees walked out of their jobs—sailors were among the first—and a “worker’s holiday” was declared (the force of this figure is only felt when one recalls that at the time, the total population of Oakland’s workforce was about 200,000). All stores were instructed to close, with the exception of pharmacies and food markets. Jukeboxes were set out in the streets and played tunes for free. By day two, the strikers demanded the resignation of the mayor.
That was in 1946. Since then, the practice of the general strike has been relatively dormant in America. The question must be asked, why a general strike now? Why here?
What does it mean to enclose public space in order to prohibit public space from being publicly used? This question was posed by the fences that were erected downtown, to prevent people from reclaiming a plaza that is ostensibly accessible to all.
We might also wonder (as Weber and others have), why it is that the state can lay claim to the exclusive right to the ‘legitimate’ use of force? And, given that the police do claim that their acts of physical violence are sanctioned, we might ask, from where does this sanction come?
As you have undoubtedly heard, the Oakland police raided the peaceful encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza last Tuesday—at five a.m. in the morning. Dressed in riot gear, the police destroyed tents and confiscated property, including medical supplies. Ninety-seven people were arrested. When, that evening, people gathered at the library and decided to reclaim the plaza, the police reacted with an even greater show of force. Against a crowd of unarmed civilians, they deployed rubber bullets, flash grenades, and fired not one, but six rounds of tear gas. In the fray, a projectile fired by an officer hit an Iraq War veteran, Scott Olson, resulting in a fractured skull and the impairment of his faculty of speech.
Some have argued that the protesters were forewarned that “chemical agents would be used,” that harm would come to them if they remained. But, as even the most rudimentary playground wisdom will attest, announcing one’s intention to strike out at another does not mean that doing so is okay.
The evening following the confrontation with police, over three thousand people congregated for a general assembly, during which the general strike was first proposed.
In this skeletal recapitulation of a now-familiar narrative, I want to call attention to the strange temporal dynamics at work in the local enforcement of law. The occupation of Oakland began on October 10th; an eviction notice was not issued until the 20th. On the tenth, the encampment was supported by the city; ten days later it was condemned. What was, at one point on Tuesday, recognized as a peaceful demonstration, by nightfall was declared an “unlawful assembly.” What should be evident, here, is that something awry is happening to the separation between law and its enforcement. That the very same act that is initially assessed not to be in violation of the law can be later, without any structural transformation of the act, be persecuted as an illegality, suggests that the law enforcement is not merely preserving the law given by the people, but that it is actually attempting to instate the law. This act of law-making by law enforcement does not derive its power from the people, but forcefully institutes law primarily by means of the threat of violence. This would seem a clear violation of democratic principles.
On occasion, concrete experience can bring unprecedented clarity to abstract contradictions. When, on Tuesday night, a police sergeant announced that he was “declaring this to be an unlawful assembly in the name of the people of California,” one woman in the crowd retorted, with some fervor, We are the people of California. Apart from the fact that such a comment reveals a sense of humor under duress that I personally find charming, the incident did make palpable the incongruity between a state that acts in “the name of people” and the people themselves.
A consequence of recent events is that for many Bay Area residents, this contradiction, which one might readily acknowledge as a fact, has lately been felt, heard, and seen. The prevalence of gas masks, a somewhat recent fashion trend, testifies visually to felt experience. Recalling Luxemburg’s reflections earlier discussed, these October events, which include developments in the occupation of Wall Street, might be thought of as the relatively small occurrences that flow “rapidly to a raging sea.”
The recent occupation of Oakland emerges, too, from a backdrop of various unresolved local and statewide issues that were exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008 and surfaced acutely in the past year—the gang injunctions that impose curfews in designated areas populated mostly by ethnic minorities, the closure of state parks and public libraries, the rise of California’s unemployment rate to over 12%, the shooting of Oscar Grant by the BART police, to name a few. Occupy Oakland also speaks to those state-level problems that have been percolating for decades. Although it is only one of numerous causes, many single out Proposition 13 (1978), which limits property taxes, as a significant factor that contributed to the unnecessary inflation of the state budget deficit, and the resultant enervation of public services, including California’s state education system.
From its inception, Occupy Oakland conceived of itself as a response to its local history of resistance, as well as to the occupation underway on the east coast. In part because it has decidedly formed itself as part of a national movement, many of the reasons to support the Oakland general strike coincide with arguments in favor of the occupation of Wall Street.
I will not rehearse the many motives that have now become buzzwords for the movement (i.e., “corporate greed”; the 99%). I will, however, suggest a few other, perhaps less familiar considerations, regarding these nationwide efforts.
1) To deny the legitimacy of a movement on the grounds that it does not make (practicable) demands is to deny political praxis the right to theoretical reflection.
Such a view restricts politics to the smaller realm of practical activity, then falsely asserts their coincidence. Although the occupy movement is often ridiculed for being directionless, it would seem even more absurd to insist that people are entitled to make feasible demands, yet denied any say over what constitutes feasibility. Popular politics should be permitted to devote itself to something that is not strictly immediately practical, but would actually be able to determine what the limitations of practical activity are (an assessment of aims, means, method).
It also might be added that, as in the moment of articulation, something is lost in the very act of definition. Something is lost when the constitutive power of people is constituted in discursive prescriptions and a set of norms. The point is perhaps most easily made by appealing to that experience, which you no doubt have had, in which something is felt yet remains unspoken. That moment of bringing to words what had before only existed, spread out like a mist, does confer upon something a new reality but also robs it of what it might have been.
2) The reaction of the state suggests an unfortunate predicament: although the state, in the name of austerity, is increasingly reluctant to provide for the welfare of citizens, it also prohibits citizens from providing for the welfare of one another, including those people who are not recognized as citizens.
When the Occupy Oakland encampment was first being set up, its priorities were telling. Medics and medical supplies were among the first things to be secured. Along with that, the camp ensured the provision of food, a library, a free school, a source of sustainable energy (a stationary bike powered a generator), a garden—and eventually daily classes in yoga and meditation.
Healthcare, education, sustenance, energy, and well-being. There is a sense that these things must not be provided for free. In Austin, occupiers were arrested for criminal trespassing (!) when they set up a food table in front of the City Hall. In Zucotti Park, firefighters confiscated gas canisters and generators that powered electronic devices and kept people warm. In more distant history, the FBI denounced as “communist” the Black Panthers’ social program that served free breakfast to children.
3) From the second point, we might arrive at a third, namely the rejection of the idea that what is extra-legal is necessarily illegal. The occupy movement, among other things, is attempting to make possible a politics that is not subjected to the mill of legal process. If the formation and regulation of law is often influenced by private interests, it would make sense for people to try to form a political process outside of a legal system that no longer reflects popular sovereignty.
4) To support the general strike would indicate support for labor rights more generally, which, in the past year especially, have been diminished in the United States. Labor rights, one can recall, are things that protect people who do not have any other resources to ensure their livelihood, apart for their own work and time.
Admittedly, I suffer from a feeling of enthusiasm that some noses might snub as naiveté. And though I am willing to admit the possibility that the strong impression made on me could have to do in part, with historical myopia, I do think something remarkable is happening here, and as a result, that remarkable things are happening elsewhere.
The immediate and attentive international response to local events is noteworthy. Within a day of the OPD’s show of police brutality, activists in Egypt announced their solidarity with California and organized a march on Tahrir square, issuing a statement that “Oakland and Tahrir are one hand.” New York responded quickly, too, with donations and a solidarity protest. Yesterday, the Philippine Airlines Employee’s Association issued a statement of support and are now planning to occupy airports in Cebu and Manila as a sign that they stand “shoulder to shoulder with the Occupy Oakland Protesters.”
A chant that has recently grown popular draws together two places with a copula: “Oakland is Tahrir”; “Oakland is Greece”; “Oakland is New York”; “Oakland is Denver.” Of course one should take careful note of where comparisons illuminate and where they only obfuscate important differences. The assertion of an unequivocal parallelism between Egypt and Oakland fails almost instantly in that there is an unmistakable difference between the occupations here and the struggle against dictatorial regimes in the Middle East. That said, such international alignments do draw attention to some shared economic conditions—and speak to the notion that the most pressing problems extend well beyond the borders of the nation-state and have to do with the workings of global finance and the uneven economic development in the world.
So then, we might say that the copula keeps distinct what it draws together.
* * *
Among the several reasons for supporting the general strike that we have considered, I have left out the one that, as the addressee of this letter, may hit home most closely—that is, the insistence on the import of accessible education.
Although the defense of public education may seem a remote or peripheral concern of the occupy movement, the connection between the two is indisputable. There is a financial pipeline that travels from public universities directly to Wall Street, and what is trafficked through this pipeline is not anything positive—rather it is debt. This year, student debt hit the trillion-dollar mark, surpassing credit card debt in magnitude. As Bob Meister has put it, student loans are one of the last legal forms of subprime lending—the practice of lending money to people, knowing that it is unlikely that they will be able to pay it back. Now that debt has been securitized—can be sold as an asset—it has become possible, on a large scale to convert debt (future labor) into a source of profit.
Nietzsche reminds us that the relationship between creditor and debtor depends on the wager of the body as collateral. The creditor lends what the borrower does not have. As a guarantee of repayment, the debtor agrees that in the event of default, the lender can inflict harm on the body as method of compensation. Although the workings of this principle of exchange have become abstract, and even spectral—at root, the economy still operates in quite the same fashion. Those who lack resources are forced to take out loans in order to provide for basic needs, like education, all while the cost of these basic needs becomes increasingly prohibitive; as a result of this unwise, but necessary borrowing, bodies are put on the line (the working body that can never seem to catch up to the interest that it owes; the sleeping body that is displaced from its shelter).
In response to speculative finance’s guise of being wholly immaterial, the form of political action called for by the general strike—the congregation of bodies—gives corporeal expression to what would otherwise remain abstract and therefore somewhat remote.
There is much else to say regarding how public education has played the double role of being a great casualty of privatization as well as its very conduit. One could point to the questionable investment policies of the UC Regents; the increasing ratio of managerial to faculty positions in the university; the still-escalating cost of student fees; the UC’s borrowing of money from banks and its pledge to raise tuition as a means of keeping its bond rating high; the liquidation of minority departments to cut expenses; the layoffs and furloughs imposed in the name of a fiscal emergency; the closure of libraries and schools; the rise of the for-profit education sector; the influence of the private sector on scholarly research; the uneven accessibility of education that seems to follow closely racial lines.
But perhaps all this talk is for another day.
Since its announcement, the general strike has been endorsed by the UAW, the union that represents Berkeley staff and graduate students. The Berkeley Federation of Teachers has also invited members to participate. And, as of yesterday, the Oakland Teachers Association endorsed the strike, after the board came to a unanimous vote.
* * *
The Plan
The Oakland general strike was called for on Wednesday, October 26, during the general assembly that convened at seven o’clock in the evening. When I say that a strike was called, what I mean is that the strike was discussed and voted upon by the people who attended, and that anyone was welcome to attend.
The official proposal calls for the city to be shut down; encourages workers not to attend work and students to walk out of school. The event is called a general strike and a mass day of action so that organizations that would otherwise be penalized for officially endorsing a strike can lend their support.
Protests will be held at Oscar Grant Plaza (14th and Broadway) at nine, noon, and at five. They have opted to schedule multiple mass convergences so that those who cannot leave the workplace can participate in the evening.
The evening plan, as I understand it, is to march south from the plaza to the Port of Oakland and to arrive before the change of shifts that will take place at seven o’clock. They plan to shut down the port, which happens to the fifth-busiest container port in the country. This is hardly an impossible task. In 2008, union workers and protesters who opposed the Iraq war successfully shut down much of Oakland’s port. More recently, ten ports in the East Bay were shut down by workers, who were demonstrating in solidarity with Wisconsin and Ohio.In Berkeley, people will congregate at 11 am at Sproul Plaza. The hope is to gather at least a couple hundred people so that a march to Oakland, through the streets, will be possible. There will be another convergence at four o’clock in the afternoon, but it seems that the earlier meeting may be the better option.
* * *
Among the most trenchant objections to participating in the strike is that it would seem imprudent to insist on the priority of education by encouraging students and teachers to abandon their schools. Though the point is well taken, it does seem to reveal some short-sightedness in that the worry about missing out on one day of school is incommensurate with the very possible loss of the whole prospect of affordable education.
And, of course, there is also that old objection about the inefficacy of protest, the possibility that the lion’s roar may turn into little more than the paper tiger’s whimper. To the repeated question, “What will a strike actually do?” we might recall Benjamin’s analysis, which suggests that such a question fails to understand something fundamental about the general strike. In addition, we could also heed the experiential wisdom of Luxemburg, who writes, “After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth.”
So yes, there is a real possibility that your hours ultimately may be of little consequence. That said, it does seem that to live by entangling heart and mind only with those things that are sure successes would guarantee little more than the very atrophy of life. And though I’m perfectly aware of how odd and rather perverse it is to close with the words of Wordsworth, I ventriloquize him in order to issue a different sort of call:
“Up, up! My friend and quit your books!”
General Strike!
Occupy Oakland has taken a new prominence in the occupy movement after last week’s stunning police violence, especially the maiming of Iraq veteran Scott Olsen by the police. As a response, Occupy Oakland has called for a general strike tomorrow, Wednesday November 2nd. There’s a lot of interest in the general strike – there’s already a list of endorsements. Also there will be a march – and a bike ride, with Critical Mass participating - to shut down the Port of Oakland.
I’m amazed that they are organizing this within the span of 6 days. Here’s their press conference from yesterday, held at the intersection of Telegraph & Broadway, the epicenter of the Oakland General Strike of 1946.
I think this is a big deal, a step forward beyond the general occupations, and wanted to learn more. I reached out to friend of the blog Aaron Bady (who is doing excellent writing and tweeting about the events in Oakland), who put me in touch with someone on the strike planning committee for an interview.
Mike Konczal: What’s your name, and how did you get involved with Occupy Oakland?
My name is Aakash Desai. After Occupy Wall Street first started, people in the Bay Area started talking about doing an Occupy Oakland both in solidarity and to further political struggles that are ongoing in Oakland. And so I started going to the planning meetings, getting involved there. And once Occupy Oakland started I would go to the General Assembly, I was part of the People of Color caucus, and now I’m more involved with the strike planning committee.
How did the decision to call a general strike happen?
The decision making process at Occupy Oakland is one where people can autonomously come up with proposals and bring them to the General Assembly for ratification. After the events of Tuesday people basically saw that Oakland was kind of a new focal point in the entire movement. There was extreme levels of police violence, and there were large number of people out in the streets and not holding back. And we also saw a new kind of level of politics taking place. People who weren’t even engaged in the Occupy movement were joining after what they saw on the TV.
That became a jumping off point. If we got this many people out, and there’s that many people interested, what is the next step? We have to start to put pressure on the city and the government. This realization was had by several people, that we had the social and political leverage to put forward as ambitious a proposal as a general strike. It was proposed and then brought to the general assembly, where it passed with 97% approval.
What is a general strike? Lots of people will have no historical memory of what one is.
Right. I’m 25, and I’ve never experienced a general strike in my life. I’ve read about them a little bit. A general strike is basically a mass action by a labor force in an area. The labor force – all kinds of workers – will walk out in solidarity. The intention is to shut down most of the public services, business and infrastructure in that place for a given amount of time. It is done as a collective and as a mass show of worker’s force against owners and managers. It functions as capacity building for labor. This forces the hand of authorities to react – hopefully by starting to listen. It’s a show of force and a show of solidarity to start building capacity.
What should people in the area around Oakland do for the general strike?
If you are working in the bay area, depending on your situation, come out in solidarity. Take a sick leave, take that day off, and join us in the street.
The day has three mass gatherings. You can see them at Occupy Oakland’s website. All the gatherings will be at 14th and Broadway. That’s the callout – 9am, 12 noon, and 5pm – those are the times we’ll gather in mass. From there its up to groups and organizations to develop their own self-strategy for that day and try to achieve what they want to achieve.
There is one point of unity. At 4pm and 5pm we are going to gather at 14th and Broadway and march to the port with an intent to block the workers from coming into their night shift and thus shutting down the port of Oakland.
Why was the port chosen?
The port was a proposal that was formulated separate from the main general strike planning committee. There were people who had been in contact with the longshoremen since the very inception of Occupy Oakland, and they came up with this proposal themselves. It passed with almost 100% ratification at the strike planning meeting. It’s a very interesting target. There’s a lot of capital that flows in and out of there and if you shut that down that’s not only a very symbolic gesture but also a very material show of force. That’s the justification for it. Port shutdowns are a very big deal, and there would be an excellent political victory if we could do that.
How would you respond to those who would say “I’m with your complaints about the 1%, the austerity class and the militarized police. But won’t a general strike hurt a lot of people who aren’t in those categories?”
It’s a valid concern. There’s always a danger with any kind of political struggle between balancing your consequences and trying to be effective versus being aware of other people’s experiences, other people’s positions within the movement or outside of the movement. There’s also something to be said for being receptive and not bulldozing over other’s concerns. A general strike may hurt a few small businesses in that area for that day, but in the long term the needs and possibilities it could open up in organizing capacities, community self-determination and solidarity will benefit everyone. And those benefits will outweigh any kind of short term minor economic losses on the part of individuals.
How can others who aren’t in the Bay Area stand in solidarity?
I would say publicize it as best they can through social networks. If they are writers or bloggers, write about it and blog about it. Watch it. Also, organize. If you are living in a place where there is already an occupied space that is organized and holding assemblies I would say go there. Try and organize a solidarity action with the Oakland strike. It would create a cluster of influence across the country.
‘This is not to say that the government knows better than private markets…’
I want to pick this thread up from Paul Krugman because I think some of my readers might be disinclined to accept Paul’s cursory treatment. However, its an important point.
In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes writes
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory),there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
This leads a lot of economists and thoughtful people to the conclusion that Keynes is either ignorant of or ignoring the role of productive activity and trade. How is it that people are to become wealthier in an activity which is clearly wealth destroying?
You can see the point though if you look at why Keynes choose this particular example. It’s because, it is exactly how a Gold Standard economy works. Keynes phrases it as this:
It is curious how common sense, wriggling for an escape from absurd conclusions, has been apt to reach a preference for wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles. For example, unemployment relief financed by loans is more readily accepted than the financing of improvements at a charge below the current rate of interest;whilst the form of digging holes in the ground known as gold-mining, which not only adds nothing whatever to the real wealth of the world but involves the disutility of labour, is the most acceptable of all solutions.
Though all of this might sound crazy. It actually extends from observations I think we all accept. Let me just through in one more of my favorite quotes and then get to the meatier explanation. I am going to place the whole thing in, though it is usually cut down. SourceEconLib:
In my opinion, it is only in this interval or intermediate situation, between the acquisition of money and rise of prices, that the encreasing quantity of gold and silver is favourable to industry. When any quantity of money is imported into a nation, it is not at first dispersed into many hands; but is confined to the coffers of a few persons, who immediately seek to employ it to advantage. Here are a set of manufacturers or merchants, we shall suppose, who have received returns of gold and silver for goods which they sent to CADIZ.*27 They are thereby enabled to employ more workmen than formerly, who never dream of demanding higher wages, but are glad of employment from such good paymasters. If workmen become scarce, the manufacturer gives higher wages, but at first requires an encrease of labour; and this is willingly submitted to by the artisan, who can now eat and drink better, to compensate his additional toil and fatigue. He carries his money to market, where he finds every thing at the same price as formerly, but returns with greater quantity and of better kinds, for the use of his family. The farmer and gardener, finding, that all their commodities are taken off, apply themselves with alacrity to the raising more; and at the same time can afford to take better and more cloths from their tradesmen, whose price is the same as formerly, and their industry only whetted by so much new gain. It is easy to trace the money in its progress through the whole commonwealth; where we shall find, that it must first quicken the diligence of every individual, before it encrease the price of labour.
This contains the central “Keynesian” observation, that sticky prices are the source of the non-neutrality of money.
Its particularly interesting to pull out the quote from Hume because he is not discussing the decision of a Central Bank to print more money but an increase in actual gold and silver.
Keynes is agreeing with this point and saying yes, if people were to discover more gold that would indeed boost employment through the same means that Hume describes.
However, the way one discovers gold is by digging holes in the ground. Which, in Keynes words, have no purpose other than the accumulation of gold which people intend to use a backing for money.
Why not then just bury money in the ground and let people dig that up?
This would have the same effect as the discovery of new gold deposits and would alleviate unemployment though the same means.
But, wait then he says. What in the world is the point of burying money in the ground just to dig it back up again?
Why not have people do something productive like build roads and schools rather than dig holes in the ground. In exchange you can give them money. It will work just like gold mining will but instead of having a whole in the ground to show for it, you have a road or a school.
This is not to say that the government knows better than private markets what money should be used for. Its saying the traditional means of getting money into the private market involves mining purely for the sake of getting money.
Why not do something productive for the sake of getting money into the private markets and then once its there let people use it for whatever they think best.