What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-1, Intermezzo]

By Paul McLean

[Video by Liza Bear]

[Narrative]:

New York City, May 1 2012-- Occupy Guitarmy musicians, led by Tom Morello, play Willie Nile's "One Guitar" before marchikng down Fifth Avenue to Union Square as part of May Day 2012. Filmed by Liza Béar, Squaring Off, Mobile Broadcast News. @owsmusicgroup@nothingofficial

[Morello/Guitarmy photo by Theodore Hamm]

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I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance. - "The movement as an end-in-itself?" An interview with David Graeber by Ross Wolfe http://platypus1917.org/2012/01/31/interview-with-david-graeber/

Planning for May 1 in New York began in January in a fourth-floor workspace at 16 Beaver St., about two blocks from Wall Street, [Marisa] Holmes said. The date serves as an international labor day, commemorating a deadly 1886 clash between police and workers in Chicago's Haymarket Square. - "Banks cooperate to track Occupy protesters" by Max Abelson for Bloomberg [posted at SF Gate, and elsewhere] - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/26/BUTK1O9L88.DTL

The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the "enemy", are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved. - Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Étienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Save the Greeks from their Saviors! February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Drew S. Burk and Anastazia Golemi. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-their-saviors/

If so, for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam. - "The Sadness of Post-Workerism..." by David Graeber

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Ethnic Groups of Madagascar

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David Graeber in his essay on Post-Workerism develops an argument about art in the section titled "the art world as a form of politics" that every artist associating herself with OWS should read, since Graeber is a self-described "author" and creator of central facets of it, or even the movement itself, if I understood him correctly at a talk I attended at NYU's Hemispheric Institute recently. Graeber's view of art is grim verging on toxic, but also thin as black ice in Madagascar, the island that he made his anthropological bones on, so to speak, and which is always going to be mentioned whenever Graeber talks or writes, it seems.

Madagascar.

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