In most European countries, May 1st is traditionally a ‘Workers’ day – a day of Labor Solidarity, and a public holiday. In Los Angeles, it’s a day to celebrate and march in support of im/migrant rights. In protest against the corruption of the worldwide marketplace, which has led to illegal foreclosures, mass unemployment, low wages, high taxes and a penalization of all those who do not own the ‘99%’ of the world’s resources, and in solidarity with the im/migrant movements of May 1st, OLA decided to declare May 1st, 2012 a People’s General Strike. Instead of calling upon unionized Labor to make a specific demand (illegal under Taft-Hartley), OLA is calling upon the people of Los Angeles and the United States of America to take this day away from school and the workplace, so that their absence makes their displeasure with this corrupt system be known.

On December 19th, 2011, Occupy Los Angeles General Assembly consented upon the following statement:

“Occupy LA supports in principle a General Strike on May 1, 2012, for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace – and to recognize housing, education and health care as human rights, and calls for the building of a broad coalition to make that a reality.”

Occupations across the world have made similar calls for a General Strike, or day of economic disruption, in direct response to Occupy Los Angeles, or through a synchronicity of thought, a buzzing hive mind that feels the need to express solidarity with movements and people throughout the world who honor May Day and see this years expression of that as our next major step.

Occupy Wall Street |  Occupy Williamsburg  |  Occupy Portland  |  Occupy Seattle  |  Occupy Miami  |  Occupy Long Beach  |  Occupy Riverside  |  Occupy Los Angeles  |  Occupy Seattle  |  Occupy Oakland  |  Occupy Brooklyn  |  Occupy Chicago  |  Occupy El Paso  |  Occupy Boston  |  Occupy Pensacola  |  and more…

How can I participate?

If you are part of unionized labor, and your contract is up for negotiation, you can officially strike on May 1st. If you are not – call in sick. Take a holiday. Don’t show up to school. March with us, or join in one of the many events that will be taking place on May 1st, either in the day or in the evening. Block parties, rallies, protests, marches, family BBQ’s – this is a day when we take a stand against the way the system has enslaved us and burdened us with unmanageable debt, incredibly long working weeks, unfeasibly expensive healthcare — by taking a day for ourselves, being human again, spending time with our families and friends. Our bosses dictate everything to us — but not our holiday. The holiday of the working class, the 99%.

If you can’t participate on #M1GS, you can contribute in other ways. Spread the word. Poster your neighborhood. Help form Strike Committees in the workplace. Agitate. Tweet. Like. Donate here (Occupy Los Angeles) to help us get the word out, for logistics — and for TENTS.

STRIKE for:

IM/MIGRANT RIGHTS

ECONOMIC, SOCIAL & ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE and LABOR RIGHTS

PEACE WITH JUSTICE

CIVIL LIBERTIES — END THE POLICE STATE

HOUSING, EDUCATION AND HEALTH CARE AS HUMAN RIGHTS

WOMEN’S RIGHTS, LGBTQ RIGHTS & GENDER EQUITY

When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them — or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.

This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.

And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless — some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.

And then there was the violence.

The Faces of Violence

The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers, and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.  

On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.

That old line of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs, and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.

But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men — and with the rarest of exceptions they were men — who stole the world.

That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers).  And the police clubbed their opponents for them, over and over, everywhere across the United States.

The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence

Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.

The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon. Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.

Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.

A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants.  Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino, and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.

This country is segregated in so many terrible ways — and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land — this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time — a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 a.m. on October 25th. The sleepers were assaulted; their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2nd.

That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about.  (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.

That said, they are still a problem.  They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with.  They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement, and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.

But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere.  Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.

Those who advocate for nonviolence at Occupy should remember that nonviolence is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.   

Violence Against the Truth

Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2nd and January 28th.

The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported on the day’s events this way:

“Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said.  Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.”

Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.

I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That’s sloppy.”

The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the piece was meant to convey police violence as well.

When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).

Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” There’s always something.

Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption, and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades, and rubber bullets on January 28th. It’s true that a small group vandalized City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.

The action on January 28th that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons, and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs, and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.

Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.

All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.

Now for the Real Work

The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill.  Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.  

Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system.  If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront — and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.

Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere. 

In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies.  February 20th, for instance, was a national day of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day, and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville toSan Francisco have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.  

Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum.  A popular environmental campaign made President Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood.  Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joes into line with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.

These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power.  They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.

What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want, and how we get there, and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.

TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 (or so) books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Hope in the Dark. She lives in and occupies from San Francisco.

This article first appeared on TomDispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).

Hilary Wainwright (Red Pepper) You highlight the commonalities of the different revolts of 2011, but how do we understand the differences between revolts against authoritarian regimes and exhausted democracies? Is there a problem with this generality?

Paul Mason I’m looking for what’s common rather than making generalities. First of all, one revolt feeds off another, and you can’t underestimate the physical link: again and again, among people who were involved in March 26 in the UK, J14 in Israel, Wisconsin, you meet people who had been to Tahrir.

Spain isn’t Greece, and Tahrir and Tunis are very different. But there is the archetype of the educated youth whose life chances have been blighted by a combination of economic downturn and a regime they realise is unsustainable.

You can’t underestimate the extent to which those dictatorships had linked themselves to the economic programme of neoliberalism. Many say that the key moment in the Arab Spring was the loss of fear, and in the west it has been the loss of apathy, but the sources have been the same thing: people suddenly realising ‘change is necessary, change is possible’. The more I think about it, the more I trace it back to the collapse of the economic model – it just took a while.

Andrew Bowman (Red Pepper) One of the interesting things linking the revolts is that there isn’t an alternative economic blueprint they’re moving towards.

Paul The lack of a strategic, hierarchical alternative system is what makes this new for those of us who have lived through the late 20th century. But it’s very like the early years of social democracy. The debate in German social democracy in the 1890s was ‘are we trying to overthrow capitalism, or aren’t we?’ The left said ‘Yes, but it will take a long time and we’re doing it through a combination of voting and workers’ struggles.’ The right said ‘No, but in the process of building the movement, we’ll build a better capitalism.’

Eduard Bernstein was the progenitor of modern social democracy, and his key phrase was ‘the movement is everything, the ends are nothing’. Go down to Occupy Wall Street, and that’s what they’re saying. Looking through a 100-year prism, orderly German social democracy, with its libraries and clubs, looks like disorderly anarcho-syndicalism, with its libraries and clubs. It’s people doing what horizontalist theorists would call ‘living despite capitalism’ – creating the areas of civilisation within the jungle.

Andrew Related to this lack of a clear alternative, it looks like 2012 could be defined by a resurgence of economic nationalism, and so conservative forces may well have a good year. How will the movements respond?

Paul The power of the horizontalist movements is, first, their replicability by people who know nothing about theory, and secondly, their success in breaking down the hierarchies that seek to contain them. They are exposed to a montage of ideas, in a way that the structured, difficult-to-conquer knowledge of the 1970s and 1980s did not allow. We’re talking about different human beings; they have different ways of thinking.

And this is very difficult to contain, even by right-wing parties who get 20 per cent of the vote. Whether it’s the True Finns or Jobbik in Hungary, it’s ‘Kinder, Kirche, Kuche’ (family, church, and women in the kitchen) – that’s what they stand for. They do not stand for dance parties, multiple partners or women’s liberation.

But the protest movement isn’t immune from ideological disorientation. In Britain many of these people flip from being Lib Dems to class-struggle anarchists within weeks. In acute crises, you tend to get severe psychological flips in the population. We’ve had a big flip towards horizontalist leftism among the young generation, and its not impossible that it could flip in another direction.

Hilary I want to probe the newness you describe. To what extent is this generation picking up and reconfiguring ideas that were developed in the 1970s, appropriated by the ‘new capitalism’, and are now being rethought?

Paul In the book I say there is a linearity from the New Left to feminism and such movements that attempted to do networks. But they were up against different hierarchies, and those hierarchies corrupted what was liberatory about them. They were also squashed by class, by technology and one other thing that this generation might have to go through again: repression that works.

In the 1960s, the non-violence turned into violence, because non-violence didn’t work. And then the workers acted and a lot of former anarchists just decided they had to be Leninists, or something hierarchical at least.

Andrew There are interesting issues in terms of how technologies fit into these new movements. Social media technology has made horizontalism in revolts more possible, but it has also led to a certain amount of deskilling – as Facebook and Twitter rise as organising tools, groups and protests emerge very quickly, but also disappear very quickly.

Paul These are all the attributes of modern work: a flat hierarchy, weak ties, constant deskilling, the ability to learn a new skill more important than having a skill. Companies that were big 10 years ago don’t exist anymore – that’s modern capitalism.

In the Fordist era, you would have big, hierarchical companies that would persist for a long time on one strategy, and you also had oppositional movements with hierarchies, permanent strategies, strong ties. Here’s the heretical thought: those old movements thought they were movements for overthrowing capitalism. By and large they didn’t, they co-existed with it and mirrored its attributes. What you’re seeing here is probably more honest: movements that don’t like capitalism, which don’t have a strategy for replacing it on a global level, but are highly adapted to living despite it.

Actually the problem they have is that capitalism is in crisis. Social democracy had this problem too. There was a 40-year programme for getting more votes, so that in the 1890s they imagined they would maybe have an electoral majority in the 1920s.

In the middle of the process, bang! World War One; bang! women and unskilled youth flood into the workforce. Suddenly, their world is gone. This is the problem for this movement now – what if the world goes bang?

Andrew What do you see in terms of responses to the precarious, come-and-go features of the current movement? The Camp for Climate Action, for instance, disbanded this year.

Paul The big question for horizontalist movements is that as long as you don’t articulate against power, you’re basically doing what somebody has called ‘reform by a riot’: a guy in a hoodie goes to jail for a year so that a guy in a suit can get his law through parliament.

After a while in the 19th century workers saw there were other ways: form your own party and stand in elections, with all the difficulties that has, or your own newspaper, and basically join the grown-up world of taking responsibility for stuff. I think a lot of people in the horizontalist movement are at the point of considering this, but are hesitant.

Hilary Isn’t there something that is between durability based on hierarchy and structure, and complete chaos? For example memory and also sociality of a meaningful kind.

Paul You identify an important dichotomy between technology-based social networking and face-to-face socialising. The thing I observe is that the progenitors of the big ideas within the protest movement were also strong in the ‘flesh world’. The Tarnac Nine, who wrote The Coming Insurrection, said ‘find each other’, do little things together.

Activists I have spoken to about the book say ‘you’re over-emphasising the technological, you’re neglecting the personal’. But it’s a bit like telling a member of the Levellers in the 17th century that ‘what you do would be impossible without the printing press’. I say, ‘what you’re doing would be impossible without this technology’. Without it, the Tarnac Nine would just be the nine people.

Andrew There are signs of attempts to constrain the liberatory use of the internet. Looking at the history of the printing press, you go from having dozens of radical, mass circulation working class papers, to the press becoming an establishment tool. Is a similar trend possible with the internet?

Paul Ask yourself this question: what businessperson or politician can really be on Twitter – saying ‘I just split up with my girlfriend, I just drank three gins’? The hierarchy wants to own Twitter but it can’t. Even if they did, they would have to live in that world of gin and girlfriends.

A great moment in the Egyptian revolution must have been when Mubarak shut down the internet and people came to him and said ‘general, they are getting round this by a website called hidemyass.com’. So the biggest military in the Middle East was being defeated by hidemyass.com.

During the Reformation and the Renaissance, over a period of generations, the old world was dragged into the new. So eventually the behaviour and ideas of the elite change.

You could say the printing press civilised the reactionaries as well as empowering the agents of change. The possibility exists that today’s tech revolution civilises the old order. But to the extent that elites can’t use this technology, they can’t exist in the modern world.

And the noticeable thing about modern politics is the disconnect between the elite and the masses. The masses are much more homogeneous: the way a young slum dweller in London lives, and the way a student lives, and the way a young professional lives, are not that different. They share a common culture in Twitter and Blackberries.

By contrast the elite are building themselves into a kind of walled turret – that’s dangerous for democracy, and it’s dangerous for them.

Hilary Given your role as an observer, what do you see in terms of new ways of articulating with power? Do you see signs from your global travels that there are other ways?

Paul In Hungary mainstream politics fell apart. The government is right-wing nationalist, the main opposition is far right and anti-Gypsy.

But the NGO-based left suddenly formed quite a successful party – Politics Can Be Different – which now has MPs, power etc. If Hungary is the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the EU, I would expect some of today’s horizontalists in Europe, North Africa and America to start forming parties in the next years.

Andrew How would you sum up the experience of 2011?

Paul To me this movement – weak-tied, mercurial, sporadic – this is completely the product of modern work of a certain kind. This movement is content to live within capitalism, to create its space with capitalism, but the problem is capitalism might be about to go into the level of crisis that doesn’t allow you to do that.

This generation of protesters could easily suffer the fate of social democracy. In 1914 it had to choose between being a recruitment sergeant for mass slaughter, or becoming an underground movement, and there was no middle ground. That could still happen in the world of 2012.

Paul Mason’s new book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: the new global revolutions, is available now, published by Verso

In their now classic study of traditional media, Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky explain the basic business model of newspapers as being the production of an audience for advertising. Their analysis suggests the counter-intuitive notion that publishers’ main product is not the newspaper, which they sell to their readers, but the production of an audience of readers, which they sell to advertisers. In short, the readership is their product. This explains why newspapers will often offer a significant discount for students, as this enables them to catch future affluent consumers early on as they establish their media consumption habits. In its more extreme variants, this can lead to the thesis that even watching television can be understood as a form of labor, as by watching TV you produce the audience, which is the broadcaster’s main product – an idea that was neatly captured in an Adbusters’ video a few years ago.

On this understanding we can certainly position the users of Facebook as laborers. If labor is understood as ‘value producing activity’, then updating your status, liking a website, or ‘friending’ someone, creates Facebook’s basic commodity. It produces marketing data about you, which they can leverage for market research purposes and to better target advertising you might be interested in. It also produces an audience, as your ‘friends’ receive updates, follow your links, or log on to Facebook to join a conversation. This is why Facebook adds ever new functions; Zuckerberg wants us to spend as much time on his platform as possible, as time is literally money.

This is the kind of work that Tiziana Terranova has called ‘free labor’. It is not work as employment, because it is unpaid and freely given to the company, but it is also free from compulsion. This is not new, as Chris Prener notes and as Marx recognized in his own use of the concept of the ‘free laborer’, who was free both to choose his employer and free from any other means of supporting himself than to sell his ability to labor to the highest bidder. The formal freedom of the employment contract was therefore underpinned by a substantive lack of freedom resulting from the institution of private property and, specifically, from the enclosure of the commons upon which other means of provenance could historically be secured. Marx’s laborer is only free insofar he or she is free to be exploited by those who own property. The main difference today is that the bourgeois class does not have to own big factories (although note Facebook’s need for huge, energy hungry data centers; it can simply conduct its business over the web.

If we really want to understand the economic position of Facebook, the idea of ‘free labor’ needs to be combined with this concept of enclosure. For an increasing number of people today both work and other social relations are mediated by Facebook and other social networking sites. If people want to develop their social capital, maintain friendships, or just arrange a night out, they are increasingly obliged to do so through Facebook. In short, Facebook has enclosed the informational commons of social networking via the Internet by managing the protocols for communication and branding the site. Although no direct charge is made for using the site, Facebook can capitalize on the activity of its users, through the brand, by selling their data, their friends, and their attention to advertisers. But maybe this is not so much a form of labor. Perhaps we might better consider this as the extraction of a ‘rent’, albeit at one step removed, in the same way as Žižek explains Microsoft’s profits? The difference is that Microsoft extracts a direct rent, through licensing their software, which provides users with access to the protocols of computer mediated communication. In much of our work we are dependent on their software and so pay a form of rent through the license. Universities, for example, are completely dependent on Microsoft Windows and Office. Ours does not support any other platforms, locking all staff and students into the properties and closed protocols developed by Bill Gates’ microserfs. In the same way, Facebook has achieved a kind of ‘lock in’ for the social networking functions of the web. Many of our students don’t even seem to use E-mail anymore; they are just using the messaging service of Facebook.

The value of Facebook to investors is based on a kind of enclosure through branding. The site has become an indispensable tool for communication and social reproduction. Through the brand, Facebook secures future participation and the attention of audiences, which the company can sell to advertisers. So long as it dominates the virtual space of social production, and maintains its status as an obligatory point of passage for access to valued social networks, its business proposition is strong. If Facebook maintains its virtual monopoly on web-based social networking, it has a valuable audience to sell to advertisers, and investors should hence be able to expect stable and healthy profits. Let’s remember though that these profits are only possible because of the time and labor we, as users, invest in Facebook. Having said that, to restrict the analysis of Facebook to free labor misses this crucial point about how the company is successfully privatizing online communicational media in order to extract what we might call a ‘rent on attention’, capitalizing on this through its brand. As Hugh Willmott has recently argued, just looking at labor and the production of value misses the location of such activities within a much wider circuit of value, in which branding and enclosure are central figures.

But is this it? Will Facebook dominate the web or even all our social connections forever? Of course not! As much as we love Facebook, people are also starting to hate it, to mistrust it, to expose itsprivacy game. It is perhaps not coincidental that Facebook’s IPO comes hot on the heels of political and media debates over Intellectual Property Rights in the wake of the SOPA and PIPA acts in the US. The social web and its politics are still up for grabs.

Chris Land and Steffen Böhm are both professors at the University of Essex in England.

http://oowsection.org/2012/02/22/they-are-exploiting-us-why-we-all-work-for-facebook-for-free/

Posted by Niel – O.T.R.O on 02/23/2012 in Stories · 0 Comments

 

“Days of Strike” (click on cc for subtitles)
A short documentary on the strike at Halyvourgia Ellados’ steel factory in Aspropyrgos, Greece. For more than 2 months, around 300 workers are fighting for what elsewhere is common sense: an 8 hour day and a 5 days working week, accompanied by a dignified salary.

For more info in English, click below:
http://whenthecrisishitthefan.com/2012/01/09/days-of-strike-2/

Script – Interviews: Kostas Kallergis, Giannis Vakrinos
Director of Photography: Alexandros Theofylaktou
Editors: Theodora Katrimpouza, Ilias Tsiampouris
Music: Andreas Koulouris (from the soundtrack of “To Rodi” by Christos Karteris)

Eleftherotypia’s Workers are back with their own newspaper!

Here it is ! Done ! The workers at Eleftherotypia, one of the biggest and most prestigious greek daily newspapers, go forward undertaking the great endeavour of editing their own newspaper “Workers at Eleftherotypia”!

As from Wednesday, Feb. 15^th, the kiosks all over the country are displaying one more newspaper next to the usual ones, a newspaper written by its own workers. A newspaper which does not only aim at bringing to the fore the fight of Eleftherotypia’s workers, but also seeks to be a thorough information newspaper, especially at such critical times for Greece.

The 800 men and women workers at the firm H.K. Tegopoulos, which edits the Eleftherotypia newspaper, from journalists to technician staff, from cleaning ladies to clerks and caretakers, have gone on a renewable strike since 2011, Dec. 22th as their employer has stopped paying their salaries since last august!

Eleftherotypia workers, seeing that their employer has requested application of section nr. 99 from the Bankruptcy Act, with a view to protecting himself against his creditors, i.e. in reality his salaried workers to whom he owes a total of approximately 7 million euro unpaid salaries (!) have decided, along with mobilizations and legal action, to have their own newspaper published. A newspaper distributed by news agencies all over the country, at the price of 1 euro (against the usual 1.30 euro for the other newspapers), in order to provide financial support to the strike fund.

As they haven’t been paid for the last seven months, the women and men workers at Eleftherotypia are being subsided by a solidarity movement from various collectivities or even isolated citizens who donate moneys or in kind (foodstuffs, blankets, etc.). By publishing their own newspaper and thanks to the money collected through its sales, they will be able to support financially their strike without any kind of mediation. In other words, they are making progress towards some kind of self-management.

The newspaper has been produced in a friendly workshop, in an ambiance that reminded of clandestine newspaper editing, since the management, as soon as they found out that the journalists go on with their publishing enterprise, first cut off the heating, then the system used by the sub-editors to write their articles, and last, shut down the workshop itself, even though access to the newspaper’s offices still remains free for the time being. Worker’s Eleftherotypia was printed at printing works that do not belong to the company, with the support of the press workers’ unions, because the staff of its own printing works felt reluctant to occupying their working place.

The management, afraid of the possible impact of self-managed publication of the newspaper, have threatened to have recourse to legal action; they are using intimidation by threatening of firing the editorial committee who were democratically elected by the general meeting of the strikers.

However, Greek public opinion, and not only Eleftherotypia readers, had been eagerly waiting for its publication – we were overwhelmed by messages cheering the journalists on publishing the newspaper by themselves- since dictatorship of the markets is coupled with media dictatorship that makes Greek reality difficult to read and interpret. Had it not been for the general consensus that was maintained by most media in 2010, based on the argument that there was no alternative to Papandreou government signing the first Memorandum, whose patent failure has now been acknowledged by everyone, we might have seen the Greek people rising up much earlier in order to overturn a policy that has proven disastrous for all Europe.

The case of Eletherotypia is not unique. Tens of private sector enterprises have long ceased paying their employees, and their stockholder have virtually abandoned them waiting for better times…In the press, the situation is even worse. Because of the crisis, the banks have stopped lending to companies while employers refuse to pay for it out of their pockets and choose to call on section 99 – at least 100 listed on the stock exchange companies have already done so- trying to save time in view of a possible bankruptcy of Greece and a probable exit of the euro zone.

Eleftherotypia was created in 1975 as “its sub-editors’ newspaper” during the period of radicalization that followed the fall of dictatorship in 1974. Today, in times marked by the new “dictatorship of international creditors”, Eleftherotypia’s women and men workers have the ambition to become the bright example of a totally different way of information, resisting against “terror” from the employers as well as the press lords, who would not like at all to see workers take in their hands the fate of information.