Lentil Stew at the White House

Much to tell, maybe, now I am in Madrid. I've been holed up writing, but made a few forays – to Tabacalera CSA on a busy night, buzzing with many immigrants there for a music night and African crafts show in the bar. It's a huge, busy social center with the disconcerting presence of uniformed security officers paid by the state. This is counter-culture and this is official. Wild. I was there to meet videotistas from Tabacanal, the on-site internet video project. They were to videotape some visiting South American cultural officials – I never got the details. But they were hidden in one of the many rooms, and no one seemed to know where. (The administration of this big CSA is straining the resources of the assembly, I am told.) This weekend AK KRaak video collective from Berlin is presenting there. I'll be in the mountains, sigh.
But I also escaped the writing cabin for a drink at the bar of Casa Blanca, a newer CSOA not far from the Reina Sofia museum. It's smaller than Tabacalera, of course – but no guards! I bought a t-shirt. The shirt lists the successive occupations that have culminated in this one: “06 La Escoba, 07 La Alarma, 08 Malaya” and “10 Casa Blanca.” Last night I returned, as the Madrid Critical Mass bicycle ride wound up there. (A related poster features a drooling wolf riding along above a prowling cat.) The post-ride party started with a giant bowl of lentils, rice and veggies. I didn't stay for the basement dance party...
Meanwhile, Back in School –
I'm getting promo from Edu-Factory for their February European Meeting of University Movements in Paris. Buckets of folks are going to discuss their struggles against austerity. (Their 2009 book, “Towards a Global Autonomous University,” is available as a PDF download in English, Spanish and Italian on their site.) Resisting austerity seems like small change compared to overthrowing the government – northern Africa is going wild... But folks all over now have to fight for their future.
A lot of ground-level action is also covered at Occupy Everything. They've got the scoop on the recent Paris occupation across the street from the president's house! They're crusty, too -- i love the "DIY Book Bloc" videotape, showing how to make a street shield from Italian UniRiot TV. (Maybe a little too crusty; I don't like gun show propaganda any more than the thought of professors packing turns me on...)
Even the E-flux crew has put out an interesting journal on the topic – with contributions from some of the newly emergent usual suspects: Paul Chan, Claire Bishop, Brian Holmes among the U.S. names. It's not exactly on the topic. In the best tradition of philosophical-critical perspective mongering, most essays circle around it – except for Gavin Butt's on “being boiled,” penned by the London cops during the recent demonstrations. That's low level brutality compared to Mubarak's police, but cut from the same bolt of repressive cloth. Still, I am glad that our egghead powers-that-be are coming around – you can follow the turnaround on E-flux news reports of demonstrations – from the anxious report of Prince Charles being jostled in his car in early December, to a major union leader's remarks on 12/30 that “workers should be inspired by student protests against higher tuition fees.'The magnificent students’ movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped,' McCluskey [of the Unite union] wrote in the Guardian newspaper today[12/30]. 'We have to be preparing for battle.'” Workers and students united – De Gaulle's nightmare...

Links:

Tabacanal TV project – in Spanish
http://blogs.latabacalera.net/tabacanal/

AK KRaak video collective – in German & English
http://akkraak.squat.net/
and Youtube user/akkraakantiquariat

Casa Blanca CSO, Madrid
http://www.csocasablanca.org/

Madrid Critical Mass – in Spanish
http://bicicritica.ourproject.org/web/

European Meeting of University Movements: Paris, 11-13 February 2011
http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/european-meeting-of-university-movements-in-paris-list-
of-participants/

Occupy Everything
http://incorporealcommittee.wordpress.com/

“DIY Book Bloc” video posted at:
http://occupyca.wordpress.com/

E-flux journal
http://www.e-flux.com/journal

E-flux art & education updates
http://www.artandeducation.net/updates/2011

The "Occupation Cookbook"

How long have I been asleep? The always excellent "news" at eipcp.net points to the impressive "Occupation Cookbook" produced in Zagreb, now online at slobodnifilozofski.org/?p=1915. Based on experiences in spring 2009, "The Occupation Cookbook or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb" contains practical descriptions spiced with some theory of the way to organize the change we want to see.
They write, "The Occupation Cookbook is a 'manual' that describes the organization of the student occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences that took
place in the spring of 2009 and lasted for 35 days. It was written for two reasons: to record what happened, and to present the particular organization of this action in such a way that it may be of use to other activists and members of various collectives if they decide to undertake a similar action. "The Cookbook" is currently being translated into several languages. At the moment, all but the final few chapters have been translated into English, and the Introduction has been translated into Spanish. (Although it seems also a German version is available.)
The website slobodnifilozofski.org has many texts, videos and photos, as well as links to other movements in Croatia and beyond.
Contents of the Cookbook:
Foreword by Boris Buden; Introduction
The Organization of Student Control at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
How to Organize a Plenum?; The Plenum; The Rules and Guidelines of the FHSS Plenum
Code of Conduct During the Student Control Over the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
The Plenum Minutes; Delegates and mandates
The Media Strategy, the Media Team and the Media Working Group
The Operational Tasks, Logistics and Security Team
The Program and the Program Team
The Inter-Plenary Working Group; The Plenum Technical Issues Working Group
The Document Analysis Working Group
The Mini-Actions Working Group
The Working Group for Spreading Direct Democracy
The Blog/Portal and the Blog Team
While it may seem a little socialist-technical (it is after all sort of dedicated to Lenin), this is an admirably coherent attempt to synthesize a code for successful peoples' action in the school.
Avanti!
Photo by: Damir Gamulin of “5 do 12″ (”The Eleventh Hour”) mini action in Zagreb city square.

Games for a New Class

Do the young people working job to job, contract to contract, without expectations that sustained their parents, and the migrants being exploited with no labor rights constitute a “new class” of precarious workers, a “precariat”? Or are they somehow in a temporary limbo before “real” work, or simply living the new conditions of labor with no claim on any kind of historical destiny? This was a thread in the discussion after the presentation of Alessandro from the San Precario group in Milan, in New York recently as the guest of the 16 Beaver Group.
The show began with a video of a young man in bed tossing and turning for fear of rent, losing his job, all the insecurity – and the figure of San Precario appears to him. The revelation, however, is different: Do not believe in me, believe in yourself and the power of others like you; I am a saint so that you do not become a martyr. San Precario figures in the banners of the “precarious conspiracy” of volunteers in Milan, the Chainworkers collective, which continues to organize temporary workers. The group has some 30-50 members, each of them networked to other political groups. They use “viral media and subvertising” to advance their agendas in the media and the public eye.
Some of these usages were cute, like saint cards for San Precario. Others were game-like, in the spirit of Jasper Groetveld's “marihu” schemes that organized the Provos in Amsterdam. A precarity puzzle assembles into a schematic picture of a different world. Trading cards depict “superheroes of precarity” (collect them all!). An elaborate precarity tarot, carefully designed, can indeed be used to predict the (limited, insecure) future. A pad of lotto-like slips form a game called “Welfare for Life”; it promotes (propagandizes) the “dream demand” for a guaranteed income, “flexicurity” for the new conditions of labor.
This isn't such a dream, it seems. The question is being debated in Lombardy, the province of Milan. It's a rich one, accounting for some 25% of Italy's GNP. To put this into discourse is an achievement. Just as the Chainworkers efforts have shifted the term from “flexible” worker to “precarious.” “We went against that word,” Alessandro said. “They were using it at first.” To shift mainstream political discourse through creative political agitation is a great achievement. In the U.S., it seems only the rightwing can do this (e.g. “death tax,” and “Obamacare”) through sheer weight of media capital (Fox).
There's a lot more – the most glamorous achievement of the group's “spectacle phase” was a spectacular intervention into Milan Fashion Week 2005, a trumped up controversy between the designer Serpico Nari and the social centers of Milan. (The Chainworkers were based out of CSOA Pergola.) The radicals vowed to blockade the modista's runway show, and a phalanx of cops showed up. The designer and radicals were one in the same, as it turned out – Serpica Naro is an anagram of, well, you can figure that one! And the media reported on the rough conditions workers in the fashion industry live with. And Euromayday, a carefully nurtured by now Europe-wide “rebranding” of the great workers' holiday as a street festival of the new class.
Those who want more can check out the links to videos, and Stevphen Shukaitis' essay explaining it all very well at: 16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/003168.php

the image is from metadesigncom's photostream

News: UK & Hamburg

From London, JJ writes to tell us that the Slade School of Art -- two buildings of it -- was occupied by students two days ago. They are planning 3 days of alternative education, art, activism and disobedience this weekend, from Friday night 3rd to Sunday 5th December. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination will be supporting this and we are calling on all art activists friends to take part in this act of creative rebellion against the cuts in the UK... Its going to be a great space for planning, discussing, plotting the next steps of what looks like a rising movement in this country, but one that needs our collective radical imaginations .... pass on and proliferate xx
Folks there are invited to either:
1) Propose a workshop/event/ talk/ performance/action/installation/ that you could contribute to the weekend ( a short description of it, what you need space and time wise etc )
2) Write a statement of support to the occupation - esp from international artists etc .. would be great
3) Just turn up with your body and rebel soul
The blog for this is -- http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/. Please email your ideas to me at John@labofii.net and sladeoccupation@gmail.com.
Meanwhile, in Hamburg, the travelers are out for the holiday season: Michel Chevalier writers that the banners they are carrying say "squat the city...accept alternative housing... self-determined living.. allow bauwagenplätze...an end to hight rents, gentrification and displacement/expulsion... let's take over the city." Ho ho ho! (Photo is from the Hamburger Morgen Post.)
http://www.mopo.de/hamburg/panorama/galerie/index.php?GID=4254

Consensus Assembly versus State Authority

To a full house at ABC No Rio, Amy Starecheski reported on her stint as a researcher in residence at Christiania, the famous, long-lived “free city” squat in Copenhagen. In the back of the room, on the grimy graffiti smeared cartons that serve as a countertop, the Brooklyn anarchist group In Our Hearts was “doing distro,” laying out a buffet of books and pamphlets.
Amy is an oral historian and student of anthropology. Her presentation mixed sound clips of her interviewees, videos and stand-up analysis. She talked principally about the consensus process of decision-making at Christiania, and how it has played out during the recent years of negotiation with the Danish state. After 30-odd years of existence, operating autonomously, and thereby largely outside the laws of Denmark and the city of Copenhagen, a rightist government was elected with a pledge to “normalize” the district. Their plans included privatization of all land and buildings, and development through high rise towers. The community – which charges “use fees,” not rent to its residents – appointed a negotiating committee to talk to the state. This committee insisted to the authorities that it had no power, and must report back to the assembly of all residents to make any decision. Amy observed that, from her study of the history of colonization, peoples who refused to designate and empower leaders were more difficult to colonize. In this sense, she said, consensus decision making turns out to be a mode of strategic resistance.
After some time negotating, the assembly was faced with a deadline, and a devil's bargain to privatize and develop Christiania. As part of the negotiation process, they were required to give an answer to the plan, yet were unable to reach any consensus. “Let's send someone out to play the flute,” one resident suggested. This idea excited and united the group. At an infamous 2006 press conference, a red curtain was raised and a flute player tooted while a jester dancing and scattered paper scraps. This was taken by the state as a non-answer. Clearly rooted in Christiania's long theatrical and circus tradition, this gesture was the only thing that everyone could agree upon. Despite the absurdity of it, the flute player's strategic response to the state helped to bind the community together.
Why did the state forebear? Why not just clear the place? The site is surrounded by woods and clearly indefensible. As a shoemaker told Amy, Christiania is “as famous for their riots as for their hashish.” The place also enjoys wide public support in Copenhagen. With the flute concert, Christiania called the state's bluff. There were no evictions.
In March, the adverse possession case of Christiania will reach the Danish supreme court, and Christiania is expected to lose. The peril to the “free state” is far from over.
But for the while, the very form of Christiania's governance has proven an effective form of resistance. “The state abhors consensus democracy; that's the beauty of it,” said one woman. The snail is an emblem of this process, and there is a large sculpture of one at the entrance to the community. It is the mascot of Christiania.
The consensus process, however, can be boring. It means many and interminable meetings. It can stifle new ideas, and keep people from speaking freely. The eloquent can use the meetings to garner power. One of Amy's interviewees said that for five years three angry people ruined every meeting by their raging. “When the structure is so loose,” she told Amy, “there will be a heightened power group. It's just not official.” (This point of view echoes the essay “Tyranny of Structurelessness” that came out of the U.S. feminist movement in the 1970s.) There were some attempts to reform the consensus process, but these were blocked by the substantial groups of drug dealers in the community, called “pushers.” Amy's interviewees agreed that in consensus assemblies there needs to be an understanding of the proper role of charisma, and controls on those with the gift of gab. When they act as spokespersons that is okay; but when they use their suavity to garner power, it is wrong.
After Amy's talk, Rolando Politti, a recycling artist from the Lower East Side of New York who was also a resident artist there, spoke about the process of “normalization” that is slowly and relentlessly asserting itself in Christiania. Brindalyn Webster, another artist who researched in the community, passed out elegantly printed envelopes with quotes printed on them from interviews she had conducted. (Inside were folded up longer texts, and, unaccountably, a seed packet of catnip.) The packed house of 30-odd folks read aloud from these texts, as Brindalyn passed them out in waves. In the process, we all became a sort of theatricalized assembly of Christiania, ventriloquizing the cogent, often passionate beliefs of these remarkable people.

photo: the flag of Christiania

Links: ABC No Rio, NYC cultural center
http://www.abcnorio.org/
In Our Hearts
http://www.myspace.com/anewworldinourhearts
promotion for Amy Staracheski’s talk
https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/ohro/2010/11/13/ohro-oral-historian-amy-starecheski-to-present-at-abc-no-rio/
website of Christiania
http://www.christiania.org/

There's a flood out in California...

[I've been writing, and neglecting this blog; more soon on Amy's trip to Christiania. For now, a spot of breaking news via the Edu-Factory list, your source for worldwide student revolt news...]
Protests against new fee hikes being met with violence
By mtd
via http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/protests-against-new-fee-hikes-being-met-with-violence/
San Francisco – As of 8:45am, 200-300 students are blocking entrances to the William J. Rutter building at the UCSF Mission Bay campus, where the Regents are scheduled to meet. On the agenda today and tomorrow are another 8% fee increase and a move to change “fees” back to “tuition,” which was formally prohibited under the California Master Plan.
Cops have reportedly donned riot gear and have begun to arbitrarily charge and assault the student pickets. Already, 2 UC Berkeley students have been arrested for unknown charges.
This also follows last night’s news of an agreement between the UC and UAW Local 2865, the union representing Teaching Assistants, Graduate Student Employees, and Academic Student Employees. Following 5 months of bad faith and illegal bargaining practices from the UC, unfair labor practices, stalling, walking away from the table, lying, and refusal to concede anything, the UAW bargaining team has accepted UC’s original proposal on wages, employment notification, and summer childcare in exchange for a minor concession on childcare reimbursement. If the contract is ratified by the membership, TAs will receive subinflation wage increases of 2% a year locked in for the next 3 years.
8:55am: There was a confrontation between students and police in the parking garage. Many of the Regents have been able to enter, smiling as they watch cops hit students.
9:15am: Reports that students and workers have pushed through the police barricades and are storming the building. Several students are badly hurt from police attacks and some have been maced. More arrests, 5 total: 3 Berkeley, 1 Santa Cruz, 1 Davis.
9:20am: Confirmed: students are inside the building!
9:30am: Police are indiscriminately pepper spraying students. Police have put masks on.
9:45am: Daily Cal reports that Berkeley student government Vice President Ricardo Gomez was among those pepper sprayed by police.
n Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Liz Mason-Deese wrote:
Cal Admins Blockaded
From: http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/cal-admins-blockaded/
BERKELEY, California – As of 6:30am this morning, students at UC Berkeley have begun blocking the entrances to the California Hall, the main administrative building on campus. All entrances are surrounded.
UPDATE:
8:50am: UCPD has opened up an entrance. Alameda sheriffs have come as back up.
9:40am: Numbers are still low, between 50-100. Expecting more, for now they’re just waiting. [correction: numbers closer to 40.]
10:20am: More from thosewhouseit.
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Hanse City Dream Squat

Despite late Hamburg action and some visits in Berlin, I posted nothing here for a while, because I was on vacation. We rolled off to the Baltic Coast, starting out from Lübeck. Like Hamburg, Lübeck was a city of the old-time Hanseatic League, but the most westerly one, which was not part of the communist east Germany. The old city is rather small. It was ferociously bombed during the world war. The Marienkirche was deliberately destroyed in the last months of 1945, as revenge for the Luftwaffe's destruction of the cathedral in Coventry. Now the old gabled buildings of Lübeck have been lovingly reconstructed, and the city is rich again.
Just outside the old city is the Lübeck Alternative, a small grandfathered squat center which began in 1978. (I have the book, but haven't read it.) Behind the group of buildings is a Bauwagenplatz, an encampment of trailers for living. The Alternative is right across the street from a giant ugly new convention center, making for a curious juxtaposition. On one side of the road, punk concerts and a grungy bar. Across the street when we visited, a beer company was sponsoring a festival with bland entertainment and local restaurants offering “tastes” for many Euros.
Out of Lübeck we journeyed eastward along the coast, Wismar, Stralsund, Greifswald, Wolgast – Hansa League cities all, except for the last, part of the old Pomeranian duchy. (Their lead coffins have been returned to the church crypt in a new installation.) Many gabled roofs, half-timbered houses, fat straw roofs, and many many vacation rooms. Tourism seems the main industry now along the coast, that and making smoked fish. The tourists are nearly all Germans. Unless you speak the language, you can have a hard time.
Along the road on Rügen island we passed an abandoned dance hall, a mssive weathered gray edifice from socialist days. There are abandoned buildings along the coast – especially those beside the railroad. (The new Alternative is in one of these.) But I saw no evidence of any occupation action, and only one political sticker on the whole trip, one warning of talking to the police. That tiny shred of political evidence was balanced by a nazi graffiti on a medieval tombstone stuck into the wall of the Kloster ruin, a site made famous by Caspar David Friedrich's paintings. There is road- and trainside graffiti, big letter work, maybe by one or two vacationing artists. Otherwise, not even any evidence of alternative culture. (“Live jazz” once a week at a town cafe no longer counts.) The Baltic coast of eastern Germany seems a desert in this respect, but who knows what is hiding in the cracks? Driving through Greifswald we spied a clutch of punks on the street. The town is no tourist mecca, and there were a good number of abandoned buildings. We didn't stop. Could that be the punk Baltic? Inquire in Lübeck.
Caspar David Friedrich also made Hiddensee island famous with his early 19th century painting of the striking steep chalk cliffs, one of the first tourist postcards. That view, now clogged by trees, is today the site of a multimedia nature show. We visited Ahrenshoop, on Hiddensee island, touted for its history as a former artists' colony and resort of famous modernist authors and thinkers. Now it is mostly a massive encampment of resort hotels crammed together on a narrow spit of land. The art colony is sporadically evoked, mainly by galleries alternately schlocky and craftsy. (An interesting project, a “museum box” investigating the island's cultural history, is run by a school and was closed for the summer.) How many “sleepy fishing villages” became artists' colonies, and thereafter massive modern resorts? When artists arrive rural working people should shiver in their boots.
We fetched up in Ahlbeck for a couple days, a classic old-style Baltic coast beach resort town with all the trimmings: Long pier, cabanas for rent, horse and buggy rides, and garish sea palace hotels, all that – but no artistic pretensions. In our hotel I dreamed of a squatted social center called Squat Anya. In this fantasy I was being shown around by a guy who led me up tottering stairs in the back of the place past piles of sodden paint chips which had flaked off the walls. The front rooms were still dry, with dusty décor left over from a gala party. One banner read, “Making Revolution” with paper cutouts of 18th century soldiers. Another read “Taking Revolution,” hung over abandoned buffet tables. A girl told me that was where they held their VoKu, or weekly free meals. I suppose in dreaming this that I was thinking about the seaside resorts in the U.S. south that have appropriated revolutionary iconography as décor. Here in the former DDR (socialist east Germany, ended in 1989) I have no idea how folks relate to their pasts. Almost no one speaks English and my German is rudimentary. Ahlbeck is mostly old folks and families. A less hip place is hard to imagine. Occasional outbreaks of kitsch that make rural Georgia look modernist add to the claustrophobia. My sense of the place – and somehow I took it as exemplary of the whole coast – is that the people are overwhelmingly conservative. We watched the reactionary Frenchman Jean Le Pen on Pomeranian German TV making a visit to Japan. He went to a shrine associated with the Japanese military which even government ministers avoid. Le Pen may be old and doddering, but his venom is fresh. Even without translation it leaks through the TV to corrode the comfortable furnishing of contemporary liberalism, by vociferously honoring the defeated forces of a militant genocidal imperialism. But how is this kind of defeat internalized if it is always repressed, always kept out of public view? In the east of Germany first fascism and then communism fell – the first violently, amidst unimaginable ruin, and the second quietly, but leaving behind complex remnants. Does “Ostalgia” – fond feelings for a vanished egalitarian albeit relentlessly repressive regime – translate into any grounds for new forms of contemporary resistance to hyper-capitalism?

Link:

a Myspace page for the Lübeck Alternative concert space
http://www.myspace.com/treibsand_luebeck

Photo: Caspar David Friedrich, "Kreidefelsen auf Rügen," 1818