Occupy Response
2012; The MIT Press; Volume: 142; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/octo_a_00122
ISSN1536-013X
AutoresJaleh Mansoor, Daniel L. Marcus, Daniel Spaulding,
ResumoOccupation as a revolutionary tactic has a long history, from the factory takeovers in post-World War I Italy, to the Sorbonne in May 1968, to Tahrir Square in 2011.The use of "Occupy" as a rallying cry is of more recent origin, however.In December 2008, students at the New School barricaded themselves inside a student center that had been slated for demolition, demanding the university president's resignation.In the aftermath of their eviction, "Occupy Everything" became the movement's slogan.The following autumn, students at the University of California schools amplified the call to Occupy, launching a spate of campus occupations and blockades in an attempt to forestall proposed tuition hikes and budget cuts.On walls and banners, the slogan "Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing" marked a break in the usual codes of student protest: faced with the dismantling of public education, students did not so much demand redress for specific grievances as seek to initiate a total transformation of the university, and of the student-administrator relationship.These struggles marked a transition away from a politics of visibility towards one of direct expropriation of space and resources, parting ways with the media-based activism of the previous decade.The shift in tactics from protest to occupations owes much to French and Italian ultra-left and insurrectionist theory.Sometimes called the "communization current," this strain of Marxist thought transects several generations, from Jacques Camatte and Gilles Dauvé to the collectives Théorie Communiste, Tiqqun, and Endnotes.Focusing on the nexus of social relations that sustain the capitalist mode of production (wages, competition, exchange, marriage), these writers abandon the view that capitalist relations will be altered only after a revolutionary break; instead, they define revolution as the continuous process of instituting communist relations directly and immediately-from exchange into free giving and taking, from wage labor to wageless life.In this body of literature, "communization" is the name for this activity (revolution as activity) of making things available for communal use, expropriating what a community needs without getting it from capital, and without the prior mediation of organized labor or the mass party.Last autumn, the three of us became interlocutors (we hadn't known each other previously) in an argument regarding the stakes of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its implications for contemporary art and art history.Informed by the university occupations, we saw the proliferation of encampments as a first step in the direction of communization, and as a spur to rethink the relation between art and politics.Following feminist theorists/strategists Silvia Federici and Selma James, we interpreted this shift as a straightforward reversal of values: from the reproduction of capital through the labor process to the reproduction of society through communization.Here we saw an unfolding politics of care far more
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