OccupyLSX and the Poverty of Blue Labourism

At the Huffington Post and ABC Ethics and Religion, neither of which I feel much like linking to, you may find an article by Luke Bretherton offering unsolicited advice to the #OWS movement. His advice is rather strange and I’ll explain why. First, though, a note on Bretherton himself. While it is not very expedient for me to say this, I have not been very impressed by Bretherton’s work and I’m sad to see that he will be taking Hauerwas’ spot at Duke soon. He works generally in the field of what might be called “applied political theology” and all of his ideas generally boil down to a kind of Christiandom with a human face. He’s part of the “politics of paradox” crowd that unites the racist ideologies of Blue Labourism and Red Toryism (if you want to know more about that look at the other posts on this blog that deal with it). He’s also part of a group called Citizens United, which he holds up as a model for the occupiers to emulate. But this is a strange suggestion, for none of the things that Bretherton holds up as exemplary about Citizens United have, well, come to pass! For example, sure, Citizens United calls for a living wage to be implemented in London, but such a demand has never been seriously considered by the city government. What is advocating? Only that they look towards Citizens United as a model for how to fail politically but keep their veneer of respectability before the powers that be!

Now it has come out that Bretherton and Maurice Glasman (the entirely uncharismatic sexist and racist man at the centre of the limp theory of Blue Labourism) have tried to hijack the General Assembly meetings at OccupyLSX in London. Now clearly the OccupyLSX movement has been stalled, in part because the police reaction to the movement was so strong and in part because of the new problems that arose regarding St. Paul’s Cathedral, more a tourist trap than a house of worship. But what Bretherton and Glasman are doing, no doubt, is trying to completely change the character of the occupation. While I don’t believe in leaderless movements, or rather I think that such a phrase is an ideology that must be ruthlessly criticized from within the movement itself, the leadership style of Citizens United is entirely soft authoritarian. If the occupy movement allows itself to be co-opted by Blue Labourism or even Citizens United it will have already surrounded any chance it has of resisting and challenging the City (the Wall Street of London). Precisely because Blue Labourism is only capitalism with English characteristics. It is a form of extreme cynicism regarding what is possible within a human society masking itself as a high moralism which aims to protect all the old hierarchies at whatever cost. I can only hope that the London occupiers can see through the cunning dishonesty and hatred for true democracy present in figures like Bretherton and Glasman.

On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity

I’m not prone much to hope, but I do welcome enthusiasm

I have to say, the Oakland protesters have been surprising me very much. I remain wildly impressed at how savvy & diverse they are on this side of the Bay. (I’ve only visited the SF site a couple of times, but it seemed similar. They had a stressful night yesterday, w/ cops looming then gathering, gathering then looming, and all in all threatening to close down the camp. The presence of five council members most of the evening, as well as general round-the-clock vigilance, kept the cops at bay. The failure of the crackdown in Oakland may have contributed, too.)

As many of you no doubt know by now, last night in Oakland there was a call for a general strike on Nov. 2. (More specifics on this tonight or tomorrow.) To discuss it, we broke into impromptu twenty-person groups. (There were about 1,500-2,000 of us in the Plaza, I’d say. Originally, we were dangerously hemmed in by the weakly fortified fence erected by the city to keep us off the grass, but it was dispatched quickly enough. & later was put to more aesthetic use. Tents will surely follow.) In my group alone, the diversity was striking: one woman’s English was very rudimentary; three very articulately angry Latinas, one with a child on her back whose laugh was matched by her stare; a Vietnamese nurse who schooled us on healthcare unions; an African-American guy who said he hadn’t participated in anything like this before, and only just happened to wander by at all, but was remarkably eloquent about the power of the bus strikes in Alabama; and, interestingly, more white girls than white guys. Now, while I’d admit that the process from that point was interminably democratic & boring, the conclusion — i.e., let’s fucking strike on Nov. 2 — was not. It was raucous & celebratory, and I think it may well have legs.

There is, I find, a certain allure to the unknown with all this and where it might lead. I’m not prone much to hope, but I do welcome enthusiasm.

OccupyConferences

So, while I’m still suffering from a certain pessimism regarding the Occupy movement, specifically with regard to its anarchist (as opposed to communist) roots, the recent events in Oakland and some conversation with a Chicago occupier have convinced me that this isn’t a bad way to waste one’s time (as Brad has said). After all, even if I think we are screwed in the long term because of global climate change and our lack of action to stop it, why not go down swinging against the system that has made such action impossible.

In some comments I brought up the possibility of seeing if the AAR could do anything at its annual meeting in San Francisco to help both SF and Oakland occupying movements. This thread is open for people to make suggestions about what exactly that could look like. Seems like one option to avoid is the ineffectual and symbolic petition (which I’m sure will happen anyway). So what else can we do?

The Taste of Philosophy

My friend Virgil Brower, known to some of you as one of the primary coordinators of Northwestern’s Paul of Tarsus Reading Group, has been working on a dissertation on “the taste of philosophy.” This article, in which he proposes that we think of the tongue as the organ of touch in order to “restore the tang of the tangible,” represents part of that project.

Police, they do what they do

Let me start with the confessional preface: I’m not a protester. I used to be. I had my day, bandanaing-up on the streets of Edinburgh, say; or marching with thousands in the build-up to a war in Iraq whose inevitability proved more powerful than our collective will. I stopped not because I felt it was useless, though largely they seem to be. Or because they can be dreadfully boring, though all that talking and bombast, the avoidance of rhetorical landmines, it can certainly be tedious. I simply stopped, opting for different diversions, I suppose. I supported many a cause, mind you. Money here; pillows there. More than a few conversations. But I was no longer “on the ground,” as it were.

That stopped, at least for a night — beyond that, I don’t know — yesterday in Oakland. I’m not going to play maudlin. I kind of did that yesterday. But something snapped, or at least bent in a really awkward way, when I saw the Occupy Oakland camp upended the way it was. I had no real stake in that camp. I visited several times, and each time I joked that the medical tent needed to stock up on some more maximum strength deodorant. Moreover, I did not even think their presence would effect much, quite honestly. But I was happy they were there, and certainly planned to keep supporting them in spirit. Seeing the police trample through the remains of that spirit, lingering about and guarding it, protecting the occupants from themselves, was the official word, was simply too much. I commented elsewhere that at least rioters & looters have the good decency to leave after their destruction — that it takes a mob with a badge to honor its mayhem the way I saw yesterday. And, as I said then, I was angry. Angry enough to become once again a protester.

A critique of the police

What the police did in Oakland the last two days was, by any reasonable standard, a terrible crime. Faced with a group of peaceful, unarmed people exercising their constitutional right to free speech and free assembly, the police used brutal, military-style tactics to disperse them. They used chemical weapons whose use in war is banned by international treaties. They fired rubber bullets that, while not as deadly as normal bullets, can still cause very serious injury.

They did all this in order to disperse a group of people that was doing absolutely nothing wrong. As I said, this was a crime — and on the face of it, a profoundly malicious act as well. No moral person should consent to participate in such activities. Yet the Oakland Police Department not only apparently faced little resistence within the ranks, but was also able to get neighboring departments to contribute supplemental forces.

The degree of moral bankruptcy this act displays is shocking. Willingness to go along with it is indicative of one of three things. First, it might indicate that the person involved is morally depraved. We should not be surprised if a profession that requires the use of violence attracts people who enjoy using violence. Second, one might conclude that the person involved is completely unthinking, blindly following orders. Finally, it might indicate that the person involved is a moral coward who realizes what they’re doing is wrong but goes with the flow anyway. And this goes not just for exceptional acts like the breakup of these riots, but for the everyday acts of racism and repression that are part and parcel of contemporary law enforcement.

From this, I can only conclude that America’s police forces are profoundly corrupt and corrupting institutions. If you go into the police force as a basically good person, the odds are much greater that one will grow more morally callous than that one will remain true to one’s conscience. It is only in this context that the hero-worship surrounding police in American culture is understandable: only by imagining all police officers to be saints and heroes can we ignore the obvious facts about the nature of the job. I can imagine situations in which joining the police force would be a necessary or appropriate choice, but contemporary America is not one of them.

Okay, Now I’m Just Mad

While I’ve been supportive of #OccupyOakland since it’s beginning, showing up from time to time for marches, chatting at the camp, scratching some of the Occupying Doggie bellies, I remained pretty dispassionate about it all. But this shit . . . this shit ain’t right.

I bailed on work for a few hours this morning to check out the aftermath. I was expecting the worst but not quite how emotional the worst would make me. I was, quite honestly, shaking with a mixture of rage and sorrow. I was, to be even more honest, close to tears. Perhaps it was because I had so little invested in it all, and thus felt slightly guilty? Maybe it was just a general sense of impotence? But I wanted to scream “You break ours … We break yours,” and not as an idle threat.

This is all so unbecoming the distanced posturing we’re supposed to take at AUFS. But fuck it: I am angry.

UPDATE: This post was written in a strange emotional place. I want officially to retract my “distanced posturing” comment here. It wasn’t intended as a snipe but I certainly see how it functions as such. Not in any way related to the greater point of the post, such as it is, but I do retract.

Book Discussion Group: For Real This Time (Winter 2011 edition)

So, I’ve been talking a good game, on and off, for about six months or so, mostly behind closed doors, via email and such, about doing another literary book discussion group here on AUFS. The book that I keep coming back to when entertaining this notion is William Gass’ truly amazing debut novel Omensetter’s Luck. This is not simply because I want to read it again, though I do, but also because of all the novels I want to read at the moment it is the one that is mostly explicitly in the AUFS wheelhouse — fallen creation, vulgar limericks, evil preachers, vague rumblings of theology with an atheistic panache.

Is there any interest for such a thing, though? We can push it off until December, if that works for you working & student stiffs. I have in mind basically doing it like the Jennings reading group: open threads for a few weeks, followed by a cluster of three to five posts on a theme or direction of your choosing. If you’re interested, comment as such.

Entanglement & Occupation

Given that the OWS movement has been a consistent object of preoccupation on this blog (and everywhere else) recently… and that Adam has already posted, today, on both OWS and quantum mechanics… I thought it might be worth posting a link to Catherine Keller’s piece that’s up, today, on the new blog Theology Salon. OWS and quantum proverbs in one package. A sample:

It is hard now to see how such a rag tag assembly of micro-assemblies can do more than inconvenience the 1%. But it may: for might there be untapped power in the very mystery, the unspeakable uncertainty, of our creaturely entanglement? Might this process release new flows of democratic force, capable of operating at once immanently to the current system even as it transcends it? Can theology—even its theos and its logos—help? S/he/it will not save us from ourselves. But knowing that, now, might help us better tap the convivial life and spirit that pre-occupies the creation.