OCCUPY SANDY: A SKYPE CALL

In our first collective meeting, we called Susana who has been involved in Occupy Sandy in New York, to hear and ask about her experience of this mobilization, its effects on the wider Occupy movement, its organizational dynamics and further perspectives.

The transatlantic connection was shaky but we really enjoyed the converstation!

Discussion notes - Questions asked and answered in common by the participants

• This resonated with Black Panther Party in many ways...
• But I found that exactly when it came to asking the question 'how is this political' there isn't really an answer – like mutual aid in itsel is something that christian aid or migrant communities do all the time, but it doesn't change political structures in any way...
• But I also have to say i'm not quite sure what these terms mean, I can only guess what the difference between mutual aid and charity might be defined...

• In terms of where it comes out of, the mutual aid discourse comes from the anarchist tradition, and charity comes from the church..
• I think charity is also something top-down, you give to someone but it doesn't have the mutualness to it
• But then when she was describing these suspicions that they experience every now and then, maybe that's not top-down but seemingly there are also hierarchies, or class issues, or whatever you want to call it then..
• I guess it's also that mutual aid is very community based, and that when you come into a community that you're not a part of, they say 'why do you want to be mutual with us? We don't know you, why should we trust you, etc..?' And then they have to say 'well actually we do it cause we have some political ideas or ideals'... this would have been interesting to talk about a bit more; how they talk about Occupy, whether they say they wanna change american society, or curb the power of Wall street, or how do they representat that to communties – because they have to explain why they're there, without being a charity
  
• what I found interesting as a resonance with the Black Panther Party is that she said that the Occupy movement got into the media again through these Sandy initiatives, that Occupy regained some momentum or reinvigorated itself, and that's a very nice confirmation in some sense that engaging in these kinds of struggles is really powerful and that when it happens in the right moment in a movement it makes you very visible, much more than certain other actions...
• and to me it's in fact very political, to bring people together and to realise that you have more power together – so maybe we have to talk about what we mean by political. also this doesn't have to be so much about visibility then... empowerment is a strange concept, but still...
• But if you only do community work this doesn't question the state. Then the state can say 'oh, it's nice if you do our work for us, it's even cheapter for us'. And it's nice that people get together and like each other, and are building up new connections, and I think that's important and i'd also call that political, but it has an end (or limit).
• It depends where the end is, cause if it's also about becoming like a state within a state, where you have your own structures or become a kind of... and maybe also leave the capitalist shit behind somewhat, then that can get very dangerous I guess, cause people are not supposed to support eachother, so I think there's something powerful behind it. But I also see the ambivalence with this privatisation-state-mutual aid complex.
• And I think that's the question that came up right at the beginning of Occupy – everyone was happy that it's a new form of organisation, we don't have representatives that are speaking for us or others, and so there are no representatives, and there are new ways of making decisions within bigger groups, which is very important and has to be developed and is also very difficult to develop.. and it was also a good thing to say 'we don't have a programme, and once we reached that then it's over', but I still feel there is a vacuume, where I don't have real answers.
• I've only been to occupy london which was smaller and less exciting than new york but it was still interesting. And there what was interesting was not the organisational forms themselves – you can have that in climate camp, etc, and some people get some experiences out of that of course – but what was more was that people were in a space where they weren't supposed to be, and where the owners of the land and the police wanted to kick them off. So it meant that you were there not just exercising nice grassroots democracy but you were in a conflictual relationship with the powers that represent the society that you want to change. Which meant you can't just say 'oh we have a nice little thing here' but you had to deal with the fact htat there are power structures in society, that have weapons, thousands of police officers, money and all those things – that's present all the time, it's clear that there was a conflict in society. And this is maybe what we didn't talk about much here – 'we did something that the state can't do' – well so do church charities all the time, where's the conflict?
• But I think she did speak of that being challenged...
• but it's still ahrd to say where the conflict is, you can't tell the national guard to fuck off cause they might save someone that might otherwise drown, you can't stage the conflict with the state...
• but this maybe very much goes into this question of 'how to go on', how do you follow up on this kind of thing..
• I was also thinking that this context of a desaster is very special, at some point she was talking about the politics of everyday life, and yet a catastrophe is not really everyday life, it's what's then forcing you to collaborate with the national guard, the fema, etc... so it'sa tricky situation that's also very special
• but maybe that's also a kind of situation that's similar to the state of exception is european countries that are being fucked over right now, so not a natural desaster but a human made one...
• Another case study, if we want to also have negative case studies at some point, is that we could look at the Big Society in the UK is interesting to look at, cause it's really such a clever... even if now it's not as threatening as we thought it was a few years ago because it's been discredited a lot, people think it's bullshit, they know that it's bullshit, but it's a very clever programme for vampirizing and sucking up communal energies that people put into time banks, food programmes, free schools, etc... it's basically a synonym for privatisation... it'd be happy to do that sometime. I think we shouldn't have too many negative examples but a few would be useful!
• I think it's one of the most important examples right now...
• but it's also one of the examples of policy that was taken from the united states. Let's say 'we empower this church where the majority of people who live in this area belong to... we empower this church to give this or that service to the community...' which is a very strongly normalizing thing also, so suddenly you have to engage with this church to get a service that was previously run by the state. Or we get private businesses that call themselves charities and we give them the money and then they run away with it... I think it's normal policy from the US that was proposed in the UK...
• it's the Caritas...
• I agree that Caritas is terribly paternalistic, this charity approach has little to do with the collective approach we're discussing here – there are many things that a charity like Caritas can't allow given its status and disposition... for instance in the church that's currently occupied by migrants/refugees right now, they've put security guards by the church and are running their own little programme... [see refugeecampvienna.noblogs.org for background]
• it would be good to look at NGO business and why they are seen as imporant and positive for the community... it's of course a topic now with the Caritas now in the church occupation, but it's a huge business more generally... and it's really strange how it works in relation to subjectivation. And that's the problem for the Caritas now, that the migrants are now not victims but political subjects, and the Caritas doesn't know how to deal with that at all...
• Maybe someone who works for an NGO wants to have a collective psychoanalysis here sometime and come talk to us about their work... hahah...