A History of Change II:
the Question of Cities
Occupy Vancouver Blog
November 17,
Steve Collis
http://occupyvancouvermedia.com/2011/11/19/a-history-of-change-ii-the-question-of-cities/#comments
November 17, as perhaps as many as 30,000 people marched through downtown NYC in support of OWS, here in Vancouver (as in many North American cities) a smaller group marched from the VAG along Georgia Street to the Royal Centre building, where Brookfield Properties have second-floor offices. Brookfield, as many now know, “own” Zuccotti Park, the once-and-future home of OWS in lower Manhattan; they, along with other members of the corporate 1%, pressured billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict OWS this past Tuesday morning.

In Vancouver, we tried to bring the fight to Brookfield.
This one’s for you, OWS: our sign on the security desk of the Royal Centre.

Brookfield places the issue of the Occupy Movement in an interesting light: a Canadian-based company, “one of North America’s largest commercial real estate companies,” as their website trumpets, one of whose “holdings” became the epicenter of, first, a local act of civil disobedience in NYC, and second, of a global movement for social, economic, and political change. Thus far, the Occupy Movement has been characterized by this duality: it is a movement of particular cities, particular urban “public” spaces, and it is a movement of the global city, writ large.

“Occupy represents not just the taking of space in our cities, but reclaiming the terms of debate in wider society. As the placard at Occupy Wall Street says ‘Apathy is dead.’ This tiny slice of pavement is a catalyst for argument….” (Hannah Borna & Alistair Alexander, The Guardian, November 15).

I can understand why the Occupy Movement is centered upon the struggle for public space in city centers—why the city is, in many ways, its focus (cities are, after all, the centers of accumulation and financial trading in capitalism). What is more puzzling is why the debate about the Occupy Movement has been “contained” (by state and media apparatuses) at the level of the city (rather than, say, the level of the Province/State or nation). Noticed any commentary on the movement from those levels of government? Me neither. The silence is telling.

Containing the “public” debate about the Occupy Movement at the civic level allows officials to approach it as a mere question of public “health and safety” and “sanitation” (the grounds civic governments have most commonly cited for the removal of occupations). It reduces the occupations to the level of mere zoning and by-laws—as though it’s just another permit decision along the lines of parades and public sporting celebrations (note the discussion, here in Vancouver, whether the occupation can legitimately displace the Santa Clause Parade, or what effect it will have on Grey Cup celebrations, as though they are comparable spectacles!).
Brookfield enters the issue here too: as a commercial real estate developer, their main interaction with governments is at the level of the city (building permits etc.). But again, hiding behind mere “locality” here is the issue of the global city: Brookfield is active in the contemporary city writ large, Vancouver, Toronto, NYC and beyond—wherever capital is accumulated through property speculation. It builds the spaces the corporate 1% inhabits, and profits along with them.

If higher levels of government entered the debate about the occupations, they would thereby acknowledge that the movement is in fact a provincial/state or national issue. It would take its place beside other “big” issues states have to deal with. It would no longer be a mere question of “health and safety,” but a question necessarily about the very “state of the union.”

But something else is revealed here: the redundancy of those higher levels of government. New, proto-national and transnational “governments” are being given expression in the Occupy Movement as mayors and police forces enter into inter-city discussions about how to deal with the multitudinous occupations (as Oakland mayor Jean Quan recently revealed), just as the Occupy Movement itself has inter-city committees sharing information and organizing expressions of solidarity between cities.

What does all this tell us? It’s probably still too early to tell for sure, and I would love to hear others’ thoughts (once again, this is an issue I will return to in a future blog), but it suggests two, probably fairly obvious, points of entry for further thought.

First, in terms of the “federated” structure of civic governments, it’s clear that the task of enforcing the compliance of the 99% with the dictates of the 1% is demanding the coordination of policing at a level, and in a way, we have not really seen before in North America. Police tactics have been increasingly “paramilitarized,” and we are increasingly staring in the face of a coordinated global “state police” (and police state) whose main focus is going to be dealing with civil disobedience.

Second, in terms of the Occupy Movement itself, resistance and civil disobedience is similarly taking on a decentered, “federated” structure where tactics and resources are shared and expressions of intra-city solidarity are as important as inner city ones. This is, in part, to say that if civic governments and police forces can “federate” to coordinate their activities, then so can and do the various occupations—both of them, note, operating outside the sphere of the normal centralized state apparatus.

Another way of putting this: at the level of civic governments, the state’s dirty work is being downloaded and outsourced (as it almost always is); at the level of the occupations, well, this is a revolution—we are building the new society in the shell of the old. That shell is resounding increasingly hollow, as it throws more and more police into the echoing streets.

We are indeed “occupying everywhere.” But the fact that those “everywheres” are particular cities is crucial—because the city is where we gather to debate what is and is not a just society. And this debate is not simply a matter of elections (Oh Vancouver, this day of our own civic election): it’s a matter of a return to where the real “demand for justice” is made—in the agora. I’ll end with this quotation, to which I will return in my next post:

“The concept of the city is oriented towards the question of justice. It is intended to be modeled on the kind of operations that actors engage in during disputes with one another, when they are faced with a demand for justification. This demand for justification is inextricably linked to the possibility of critique. The justification is necessary to back up the critique, or to answer it when it condemns the unjust character of some specific situation” (Boltanski & Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism 22)

—Steve Collis

See Occupy Vancouver Media Nov. 20, 21 and 22
for "HISTORY OF CHANGE III" and "OUR END IS OUR BEGINNING"
AT:
http://occupyvancouvermedia.com/