Verbatim Mac

Alternative Solvency

Boring Politics

Radical theory is inaccessible to most people and directly trades off with resistance – empirics prove

Frank, 12 – PhD, History, University of Chicago and Political Analyst (Thomas, “To the Precinct Station,” Baffler, No. 21, http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/to-the-precinct-station)//SY

What I object to is the opposite: high-powered academic disputation as a model for social protest. Why does the subject of Occupy so often inspire its admirers to reach for their most elevated jargonese? Why would certain Occupiers break from the action to participate in panel discussions? Why did others choose to share their protest recollections in the pages of American Ethnologist and their protest sympathies in the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies? Why would the author of an (admittedly very interesting) article about drum circles feel the need to suggest that he is contributing to “scholarly literature”? Why would a pamphlet clearly intended as a sort of Common Sense for the age of Occupy be filled with declarations such as this: Our point of attack here is the dominant forms of subjectivity produced in the context of the current social and political crisis. We engage four primary subjective figures—the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented—all of which are impoverished and their powers for social action are masked or mystified. Movements of revolt and rebellion, we find, provide us the means not only to refuse the repressive regimes under which these subjective figures suffer but also to invert these subjectivities in figures of power. And dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory? A journal that then proceeded to fill its pages with impenetrable essays seemingly written to demonstrate, one more time, the Arctic futility of theory-speak? Is this how you build a mass movement? By persistently choosing the opposite of plain speech? Yes, I know the answer: For a protest to become a broader social movement it must analyze and strategize and theorize. Well, this one did enough theorizing for all the protests of the last forty years, and yet it somehow never managed to make the grade. Occupy did lots of things right: It had a great slogan and a perfect enemy and it captured the public imagination. It built a democratic movement culture. It reached out to organized labor, a crucial step in the right direction. It talked a lot about solidarity, the basic virtue of the Left. But in practice, academic requirements often seemed to come first. OWS was taken as a proving ground for theory. Its ranks weren’t just filled with professionals and professionals-to-be; far too often the campaign itself appeared to be an arena for professional credentialing. Actually, that’s an optimistic way of putting it. The pessimistic way is to open Michael Kazin’s recent book, American Dreamers, and take sober note of the fact that, with the partial exception of the anti-apartheid campaign of the eighties, no movement of the Left has caught on with the broad American public since the Civil Rights / Vietnam War era. Oh, there have been plenty of leftists during this period, of course—especially in academia. Studying “resistance” is a well-worn career path, if not the very definition of certain sub-disciplines. But for all its intellectual attainments, the Left keeps losing. It simply cannot make common cause with ordinary American people anymore. Maybe this has happened because the Left has come to be dominated by a single profession whose mode of operating is deliberately abstruse, ultrahierarchical, argumentative, and judgmental—handing down As and Fs is its daily chore—and is thus the exact opposite of majoritarian. Maybe it has happened because the Left really is a place of Puritanical contempt for average people, almost all of whom can be shown to have sinned in some imperialist way or other. Maybe it is because the collapse of large-scale manufacturing makes social movements obsolete. We do not know. And none of the accounts under review here get us any closer to an answer.

Concrete political demands are key to resistance despite the wrongdoings of the state – their vain protests replicate Tea Party activism

Frank, 12 – PhD, History, University of Chicago and Political Analyst (Thomas, “To the Precinct Station,” Baffler, No. 21, http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/to-the-precinct-station)//SY

Leaderlessness is another virtue claimed by indignados on the right as well as left. In fact, there’s even a chapter in the 2010 “Tea Party manifesto” written by Dick Armey that is entitled, “We are a Movement of Ideas, Not Leaders”—which is ironic, since Armey is commonly referred to as “Leader Armey,” in recognition of the days when he was majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. The reasoning, though, is the same here as it is with Occupy. As Armey puts it, “If they knew who was in charge, they could attack him or her. They could crush the inconvenient dissent of the Tea Party.” Occupiers, of course, say pretty much the same thing: if you have leaders, they can be co-opted. Surely, though, the distinctive Occupy idea that protesting is an end in itself—that “the process is the message”—surely that is unique, right? After all, Occupiers and their chroniclers have spent so much brainpower theorizing and explicating and defending the idea that horizontalism is a model and a demand and a philosophy rolled into one that it can’t possibly be shared by their political opposite. But of course it is—with the theory slightly modified. “We call this complex and diverse movement ‘beautiful chaos,’” writes Leader Armey in his Tea Party manifesto. “By this we reference what is now the dominant understanding in organizational management theory: decentralization of personal knowledge is the best way to maximize the contributions of people.” While the glorious decentralization of OWS was supposed to enact some academic theory of space-creating, the glorious decentralization of the Tea Party enacts the principles of the market; it enacts the latest in management theory; it enacts democracy itself. Big-government liberals, on the other hand, are in Armey’s account drawn to hierarchy as surely as are the big-media dumbshits scorned by Occupy’s chroniclers: “They can’t imagine an undirected social order,” Armey declares. “Someone needs to be in charge.” Armey’s coauthor, Matt Kibbe, then grabs this idea and gallops downfield. “This is not a political party,” he insists; “it is a social gathering.” Tea Party events don’t have drum circles, as far as I know, but Kibbe nevertheless says he is “reminded of the sense of community you used to experience in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead concert: peaceful, connected, smiling, gathered in common purpose.” It is “a revolt from the bottom up,” he declares. It is “a community in the fullest sense of the word.” If you look closely enough at Tea Party culture, you can even find traces of the Occupiers’ refusal to make explicit demands. Consider movement inamorata Ayn Rand (a philosopher every bit as prolix as Judith Butler) and her 1957 magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, where “demands” are something that government makes on behalf of its lazy and unproductive constituents. Businessmen, by contrast, deal in contracts; they act only via the supposedly consensual relations of the market. As John Galt, the leader of the book’s capital strike, explains in a lengthy speech to the American people Rand clearly loathed: “We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” A strike with no demands? Wha-a-a-a? Why not? Because demands would imply the legitimacy of their enemy, the state. Rand’s fake-sophisticated term for this is “the sanction of the victim.” In the course of actualizing himself, the business tycoon—the “victim,” in Rand’s distorted worldview—is supposed to learn to withhold his blessing from the society that exploits him via taxes and regulations. Once enlightened, this billionaire is to have nothing to do with the looters and moochers of the liberal world; it is to be adversarial proceedings only. So how do Rand’s downtrodden 1 percent plan to prevail? By building a model community in the shell of the old, exactly as Occupy intended to do. Instead of holding assemblies in the park, however, her persecuted billionaires retreat to an uncharted valley in Colorado where they practice perfect noncoercive capitalism, complete with a homemade gold standard. A high-altitude Singapore, I guess. Then, when America collapses—an eventuality Rand describes in hundreds of pages of quasi-pornographic detail—the tycoons simply step forward to take over. One last similarity. The distinctive ideological move of the Tea Party was, of course, to redirect the public’s fury away from Wall Street and toward government. And Occupy did it too, in a more abstract and theoretical way. Consider, for example, the words anthropologist Jeffrey Juris chooses when telling us why occupying parks was the thing to do: “the occupations contested the sovereign power of the state to regulate and control the distribution of bodies in space [five citations are given here], in part, by appropriating and resignifying particular urban spaces such as public parks and squares as arenas for public assembly and democratic expression [three more citations].” This kind of rhetoric is entirely typical of both Occupy and the academic Left—always fighting “the state” and its infernal power to “regulate and control”—but it doesn’t take a very close reading of the text to notice that this language, with a little tweaking, could also pass as a libertarian protest against zoning. Since none of the books described here take seriously the many obvious parallels between the two protests, none of them offers a theory for why the two were so strikingly similar. Allow me, then, to advance my own. The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one another is because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism that suffuses our idea of protest these days, all the way from Disney Channel teens longing to be themselves to punk rock teens vandalizing a Starbucks. From Chris Hedges to Paul Ryan, every dissenter imagines that they are rising up against “the state.” It’s in the cultural DNA of our times, it seems; our rock ‘n’ roll rebels, our Hollywood heroes, even our FBI agents. They all hate the state—protesters in Zuccotti Park as well as the Zegna-wearing traders those protesters think they’re frightening. But here’s the rub: only the Right manages to profit from it.

Engaging the state is key to disrupt neoliberal hegemony – ideology is insufficient to effect change

Goldmann, 13 – MA, Political Economy, University of Auckland (Bartek, “Social Movements and Contestation in Post-Crisis Capitalism: A Case Study of Syriza,” New Zealand Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 3, 120-121, http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/6720/FINAL_NZ%20Sociology%2028-2%202013.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y#page=120)//SY

The global financial crisis has manifested itself in a variety of ways in different locations and around the world, producing a variety of protest and social movements on a massive scale not seen since the late 1960s. The contemporary politics of the street and the square are timely mobilizations against financial shocks, the commodification of public services, reckless consumerism, rising levels of public and private debt, and a widespread perception of malfunctioning democracy and elite-driven politics. In occupying squares and other public spaces, the multitudes engaged in these new politics contest the claim that ‘there is no alternative’ and in doing so, create a voice for themselves by refusing to engage with the fake conflicts constructed by neoliberal hegemony. Contestation and protest are necessary elements of democracy and civic participation, since the electoral process (institutional politics) has proven itself to be an insufficient vehicle for class struggle, and requires additional pressure from below (non-institutional politics). The two are both necessary and interrelated. Resistance to economic orthodoxy in the post-crisis era is a pressing urgency since governments dogmatically pursuing structural adjustment are doing away with basic democratic rights and whittling away the welfare state—the hard-won products of a long series of struggles. This essay argues that we must step back from particular theoretical frameworks and concepts of resistance since they have very real ramifications on politics and protest movements, in some cases inhibiting their potential. The contemporary left, infatuated with anarchist ideology, has developed an allergy to the idea of taking state power and is hesitant to consider the state as a site of political contestation. Furthermore, there appears to be an emerging tendency among today’s activists to fetishise the processual aspects of democracy (selforganization and horizontal, open-networks, assemblies where all participants are free to voice their concerns) at the cost of enduring political gains. This trend shall be demonstrated through the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) which refrained from directly engaging with the state apparatus, and instead opted to occupy space on its peripheries, a strategy which was ultimately ineffective in shaking the hegemony of neoliberal economics. In response, this essay will conceptualise a more suitable theoretical perspective by analysing Syriza, a Greek radical leftist party. Syriza is the exception to the aforementioned trend because it demonstrates that if social movements are to fulfil their aims and induce political change that is not only meaningful but durable, they ought to make strategic associations with the state apparatus rather than neglect it as a site of struggle. Syriza is in that sense the counterpoint to OWS. This is not to say that egalitarian self-organisation at the street level is a bad thing, however it is a recognition of the fact that if social movements are to contest the social effects of the crisis and generate outcomes for large numbers of their populations, for example by means of public policy, they must develop from mere carnival and into enduring aspects of their respective societies.

Leftist impulsiveness and rejection of institutions like the state foreclose the possibility of tangible change

Goldmann, 13 – MA, Political Economy, University of Auckland (Bartek, “Social Movements and Contestation in Post-Crisis Capitalism: A Case Study of Syriza,” New Zealand Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 3, 123-125, http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/6720/FINAL_NZ%20Sociology%2028-2%202013.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y#page=120)//SY

From this perspective then, what is necessary is a type of resistance that is based on free forms of association, and whose teleological end-point is stateless society. Since state-power is doomed, revolutionary social movements should withdraw from politics since it has become (or perhaps always was) a corrupt theatre of domination and pursue transformation through non-institutional avenues. As Thomas Frank points out, activists involved OWS as well as the Tea Party, have been sensitive to anything they perceived as elitism or ‘unnecessary’ hierarchy, adding that bureaucracy, routine and boredom are “no way to fire the imagination of the world” (Frank, 2012). Today’s activists seem to exhibit an aversion to state power and to authority in general; vanguardism and leadership are defined as the problem, and hierarchy is identified as the opposite of creativity. They prefer to occupy spaces at the peripheries of the state (parks and other public commons), and to directly transform the texture of social life in an organic manner. The reasoning is that it is these everyday practices of cohabitation and deliberation that sustain the entire social structure. Such were some of the foremost concerns of the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park. However in retreating to the peripheries outside of the administrative ambit of the state, and by levelling their critique primarily at a cultural-discursive level, the protestors fail to engage the state-capital nexus directly on the planes that really matter: ownership over the means of production, consumption, environment etc. The left has a tendency to become impulsive and enamoured by the transformative potential of anything that promises radical social change, and risks falling into an “infantile radicalism” (Saad-Filho, 2013). With all the capacity for incisive and penetrating critique, it appears to be completely unable to put itself under the microscope and recognize the enchanting fantasies and ideological mystifications that structure its own field of vision. Witness the enthusiasm with which so many narrated OWS and the Arab Spring as unprecedented and ground-changing events, for example David Harvey’s speech at Occupy London (Harvey, 2011). No doubt, it is difficult to not be enthralled by the potential of such a mobilization after a prolonged period of economic recession and political inertia. It would appear that the transformative potential of the movements, the Evental symbolism which has inspired people in distant locations, is at the same time hamstringing the prospects for actual political gains and change that is durable and entrenched in civil society. A buzz-kill like Žižek is sometimes completely necessary to burst the bubble: “We have a nice time. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” (Žižek, 2011). His remarks to the OWS campers are even more relevant now than before. In the following section I will identify and demonstrate the tendencies in Greek society that might provide a realistic, politically attractive alternative to the current post-democratic inertia and the prospect of another decade of austerity, which certain politicians and economic ‘pragmatists’ claim to be the only viable solution. This will be done by overviewing Syriza’s politics and noting its position on two key topics: its economic programme, and its role towards the European Monetary Union (EMU).

Institutional engagement to achieve radical goals provides focus to resistance but doesn’t necessitate ceding personal agency to the state

Goldmann, 13 – MA, Political Economy, University of Auckland (Bartek, “Social Movements and Contestation in Post-Crisis Capitalism: A Case Study of Syriza,” New Zealand Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 3, 131-132, http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/6720/FINAL_NZ%20Sociology%2028-2%202013.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y#page=120)//SY

In examining Syriza’s history and development, I demonstrated a case of political engagement with existing state and political structures that combines the potential of street movements with the authority of parliamentary politics. Social movements that are organised this way are able to mutually reinforce the political agency of individual subjects as well as the institutionalised groups they form. Syriza is the counter-example to the trend of political disengagement from the state which has been present within recent protest movements such as OWS. Many of the movements that emerged in the USA and around Western Europe in 2011 carried with them a hope that they would develop into something of a contemporary ‘68, a counter-hegemonic movement to be reckoned with that could eventually instigate a broader social transformation. Through the example of OWS, this essay argued that for the most part they have failed in this, and that a significant cause for this outcome has been the movement’s anarchistic ideology, its organizational structure and consequent lack of focus. That being said, this essay does not intend to be dismissive of the new political culture that is emerging on the streets and squares around the world, but rather recognizes it as the ideological basis or precondition for a society which gives a voice to the excluded and inexistent, those who exist socially but not politically. Writing in the context of the struggles of the late 1960s, Herbert Marcuse points out that it would be irresponsible to overrate the chances for transformation (Marcuse, 1969: ix). What he said still pertains today: critical theory should refrain from making utopian speculations about today’s mass movements but instead analyse existing societies in light of their own capabilities, and to identify and demonstrate the tendencies (if any exist) which might lead beyond the current state of affairs. To write these movements off as hopeless, utopian or unrealistic leads to cynical resignation to the status quo and merely reinforces the ruling ideology. On the one hand the political desires for change that so many on the left have placed their hopes in are the multitudes’ constitutive driving force, the creativity and enthusiasm which has given these movements their character and hopeful tone, in a context where pragmatic political leaders stress the reality principle of austerity. At the same time, for purely practical reasons, if these movements are to achieve any practical gains, the thinly-veiled class warfare of austerity politics demands that we continue to be engaged in the struggle, while maintaining a critical distance to the romantic spectacle of the square.

Specific concrete actions through the regulatory state are necessary for resistance against neoliberal ills

Peck & Tickell, 94 – Research Chair, Urban and Regional Political Economy and Professor, Geography, University of British Columbia AND Professor, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London (Jamie and Adam, “Jungle Law Breaks out: Neoliberalism and Global-Local Disorder,” Area, Vol. 26, No. 4, December, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20003479.pdf)//SY

If as we have argued neoliberalism is socially, economically and geographically unsustainable, the search for an after-Fordist institutional fix continues. We maintain that a coherent fix is a necessary, but in itself insufficient, prerequisite for the restoration of sustainable accumulation. It must meet the following minimum requirements. First, it must prevent the regulatory undercutting that is becoming a feature of national and regional competition (see Leyshon 1992), which renders regional economies vulnerable to the vagaries of capital and undermines social contracts. Second, it must mitigate and contain uneven development, which both disenfranchises poor regions and places unsustainable pressures on growth areas. Thirdly, it must have the capacity to control the global financial system, perhaps the defining feature of the Bretton-Woods settlement. Fourthly, and most importantly, it must be sustainable in social and ecological as well as economic terms. This calls for putative solutions based at different spatial scales. Many of these will require regional, national and supra-national co-operation. Local strategies have a role, but this must be within a supportive national and supra-national framework. Local development cannot and should not be the concern of local people alone; nor should it be seen as the remedy for all social and economic ills. It needs to be embodied in a larger policy framework that includes supra-local considerations and objectives, as well as links with supra-local actors. Local development does not imply the deactivation of higher levels of governance; it does not mean simple ' decentralization ' in the sense of replacing national level organization of govern ment with local. Rather, it means developing local policies to complement national ones as part of coordinated, multi-tiered approach . . . Resource inputs need to be supplied both locally and from higher levels. Otherwise, there is a strong risk of highly uneven and unequal development among regions and areas (Sengenberger 1993, 324, 327). Local strategies will not realise their potential if they are formulated in the context of the self-destructive processes of beggar-thy-neighbour competition and regulatory undercutting. As long as neoliberalism prevails-with its emphasis on competitive relations, individualism and the fast buck-sustainable growth will be difficult to attain. In the continuing disorder of the after-Fordist crisis, localities' place in the sun is likely to be increasingly short-lived. Attracting growth may be difficult, keeping it will prove harder still. In the face of systemic instability at the level of the global economy, claims that a new global-local order has emerged seem premature, not to say misfounded. The nation-state may have been eroded from above and from below, but the nature of this erosion has been different in each case. Below the nation-state, local regulatory systems (particularly local states) have been conferred responsibility without power: regulatory responsibilities have been handed (or have drifted, as they have been shunned by nation-states) down from the nation-state level, but localities can wield little in the way of political-economic power in the context of globalising accumulation and global deregulation. Above the nation-state, supra-national regu latory systems have inherited power without responsibility: remaining wedded to a neoliberal agenda, they continue to fuel global economic instability with apparent disregard for its damaging effects on national and local economies and its pernicious ecological and social consequences. Workable after-Fordist regulatory ' solutions ' at the national or local scales are unlikely to stabilise until there is a truce between the ' hostile brothers '. The pressing need, then, is for a new supra-local regulatory framework. Of course, we are not suggesting that some Bretton Woods II would provide the solution to the world's problems, that it would guarantee sustainable growth, but it would be at least a start. It would provide a basis for halting the neoliberal spiral of regulatory degradation. Global financial institutions, then, must be harnessed and reformed, a process which will require concerted action through nation-states. It is consequently important that the nation-state is not written off as a site in this regulatory struggle (see Gertler 1992), for this is likely to remain the principal scale at which democratic control and political power can be (re)coupled. True, the nation-state may have become ' hollowed out ' during the after-Fordist crisis, but a resolution to this crisis may-perhaps must-involve some degree of ' filling in ' of the nation-state in order to effect a stabilisation of local-local and local-global regulatory relations. Solutions to the crisis of uneven development in after-Fordism are unlikely to come from the bottom-through local competition-but instead must begin with action from above-through national and global co-ordination.