MARTHA ROSLER - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

MARTHA ROSLER

Artists have been deeply engaged in occupations in the U.S., Europa, Canada,
and Australia, as well as manifestations in Japan, Hong Kong, and Moscow. Estos
occupations famously have drawn inspiration from the uprisings across the Arab
world, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, driven by the frustration of the young edu-
cated middle classes—fairly new ones, confronting societies controlled by hugely
rich ruling elites but with little hope of a secure future for themselves, despite their
university educations. But that is not the whole story, only the one about thwarted
expectations. Another story is about denied expectations, and yet another about
none at all. In other words, it is about the rising middle class, modernizing elites,
and the aspiring-to-middle-class members of the working class, and those who know
they had no chance. (As is so often the case, it seems that food was the original
spark, in Algeria.) I am talking about the ongoing and recent tuition revolts in
Quebec, Chile, and the U.K.; about the movements in Spain and Greece, y el
huge housing encampments spurred by an art student in Israel; about the working-
class statehouse occupation and push-back in Madison, Wisconsin; and the earlier
rebellion of the banlieues in France, and the teachers in Oaxaca. Obvious differ-
ences aside, Occupy protesters are aware of sharing conditions in this long-term
global financial sinkhole that are functionally quite similar. To put it simply, ellos
share an awareness that the future, which should be theirs, is manifestly in the
hands of others, who have grabbed it with both fists.

Occupy seems to be in a direct line from the alt-globalization movement,
including the World Social forums, but to have little connection to the antiwar
movement of the past decade, for most of which it was difficult to get young peo-
ple into the streets. I’m relieved not to have to explain the need to get out there
en masse to people who were inclined to cynically dismiss mass protest as mani-
festly ineffective (hey, kids, that’s what our elders told us back in the ’60s, that it’s
the tactic of the past—it’s over!), since the huge demonstrations in early 2003
didn’t stop the war. It’s exhilarating to see the mobilizations; but it’s not so great
to see the American ones refusing to also follow an electoral strategy just as we did
back in the day. We also believed that (socialist) revolution was just around the
corner, and refused to vote. I’ve changed my mind about voting (less painful than
a dental visit, and takes less time too!), but why should they change theirs?

There hasn’t been much of a vocal presence of the organized left in Occupy;
the alt-globalization movement found its theoretical basis during the period when
the end of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc had removed the underpinnings of
most of the left, organized and unorganized, while political movements refounded
themselves in anarchism(s) and ecologies. But earlier generations of protesters, de
the ’60s movements whose biggest component was organized, from the left, against
war and racism, quickly fell in with Occupy, greeting it as more than simply critically

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OCTUBRE

necessary—as the biggest thing to happen in ages. (Feminist messages, sin embargo, still
need to be relearned, it seems.) Labor, much straitened, supported Occupy as well.
(Teachers and academics too.) Important differences between then and now account
for the lower levels of animosity and rejection. In the Cold War 1960s and ’70s a lead-
ing sector of organized labor, the Teamster s and building trades, as the
representative of (white, masculino) patriotic manhood of real America—in Nixon’s term,
the silent majority—had prominently clashed with the mobilizations of the streets,
identified as dirty fucking hippies and communists—and not without reason. Este
time around that doesn’t play so well.

The movements of the 1960s were largely rejectionist: antinationalist and
anticapitalist, and often antiurban, and some were insurrectionary. It was easy to
organize opposition to them on the basis of appeals to traditional values: lo mismo
ones that engendered the political backlash driving Republican strategy to this
día. But American flags are not burned but fly at Occupy camps as they have been
at Tea Party rallies. Ex-soldiers have joined up, in uniform and not, as they did
during and after Vietnam even though this time there was no draft: so much for
the doctrine of the professional army.

In the ’60s, the nation was fairly prosperous; wages were rising and many
people were entering the middle class, defined economically for some and in
terms of social position for others. En efecto, that was the last time all this could be
said to be true, as wages have stagnated or dropped since then, and the economy
is flat or cratering. People all over, including those unmotivated to become
involved, recognize the issue as their own, and so far at least passersby clap and
honk when Occupy mobilizes. The narrative is of saving the nation from the
banksters: we are the 99%, both nationally and globally.

The summer of 2011 was a summer of rumbling discontent in the U.S., y
there was already a New York encampment against budget cuts—Bloombergville,
after the mayor, modeling itself on the Walkerville tent city in Wisconsin—and the
convening of a group calling itself the New York General Assembly (NYGA). por el
time Adbusters, that fancy artist/hipster magazine out of Canada, put out a call to
occupy Wall Street, artists had already been meeting with theorists and activists
nearby. Anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, famously, is implicated in these
events (well known in the alt-globalization mobilizations, he wrote articles in
Adbusters before its call to occupy Wall Street, the epicenter of the financial crisis, ask-
En g, “If in Egypt, why not here?"), but not only he. Before the occupation proper,
artists (including me) participated in late August of 2011 in a seminar on debt and
the commons; presenters were Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, and Graeber, OMS
had just published his giant history of debt. Debt and theft were on everybody’s
minds. The seminar was held at 16 Beaver, the artist-run discursive space in the Wall
Street district. In attendance were David Harvey and some Spanish indignados/encam-
pados, as well as the Greek anarchist artist Georgia Sagri, who quickly formed a
tactical alliance with Graeber, and they joined up with the NYGA on September 17,
2011, helping to introduce anarchist forms and procedures.

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Questionnaire: Rosler

The artistic imagination continues to dream of historical agency. Artists, como
other participants, wish to lend themselves to social transformation and utopian
dreaming, but not necessarily within institutionalized frames. Unruly for quite a
few centuries now, artists are perpetually chafing against the dead hand of society,
the mechanistic juggernaut of mass destruction that Surrealists saw in modern
industrial society, with its hypercapitalist alienation and exploitation. We can see
the Occupation activists as setting up a new public sphere, demanding the rein-
statement of politics by refusing to simply present demands to representative
government s and instead enact ing democracy, challenging inst itut ions of
exploitation, and making theater out of procedure. Artists have a reputation for
being difficult to organize, but there is always a sector ready to organize itself
around a cause, an activity, an action—perhaps not anarchistic but anarcho-syndi-
calist? This is a good time for that. It is not simply as image makers and symbol
wranglers that artists have chosen their means of participation but also as organiz-
ers, occupiers, strategizers, publicizers, spokespeople, working-group members,
and librarians.

Artists are also always disposed to point to the deceptions and shortcomings
of those whom they appear to serve—the 1%, in present terms—and perhaps like
all unruly servants, especially the ones who feel they could do a much better job of
running things, they have plans for changing the world. I plan to be there.

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MARTHA ROSLER is an artist based in Brooklyn.
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