Simon Critchley writes: The Arab spring, notably in Egypt and Syria, seems to be running out of steam. The vivacious drive of the Occupy movement has faltered and it is not clear what new life will appear. Can popular protest regain its energy and inspiration, or is that it?

Rather than retreating into the comfort of despair or cynicism, perhaps this is a moment in which we can try and gain a broader view of matters.

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people. The problem, as Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us, is that power and politics have become divorced. What we call democracy has become a sham. Power has evaporated into the supra-national spaces of finance, trade and information platforms, but also the spaces of drug trafficking, human trafficking and immigration – the many boats that cross the Mediterranean and other seas.

But the space of politics has remained the same as it has for centuries, localised in the nation state with its prosaic variations of representative, liberal democracy. Politics still feels local – we might feel British or Greek or whatever – but it isn’t. Normal state politics simply serves the interests of supra-national power. Sovereignty has been outsourced.

The premise of western representative democracy is the following: citizens exercise political power through voting; representatives are elected; governments are formed and these governments have power to get things done, a power identical to the will of the people.

The belief that many of us had (or perhaps still have) is that if we work for a certain party, then we can win an election, form a government, and have the power to change things. But every day this is proven to be wrong. [Continue reading…]

Susan Antilla writes: It isn’t every day that a reporter gets to sit in on a high-stakes policy meeting in New York’s financial district, but that’s exactly what I did on a balmy evening in late February at 60 Wall Street, the U.S. headquarters of Deutsche Bank AG.

No, the bank didn’t lose its institutional marbles and give me clearance to scribble notes while its cognoscenti mapped out corporate strategy. The confab I dropped in on was taking place under potted palm trees in the bank’s ground-floor public atrium, and the participants were 13 members of Occupy the SEC, a spinoff group of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I can’t help but conclude that their plans for petitions, marches, op-eds and sit-down meetings with banking regulators will be inflicting Wall Street with a long, nasty attack of agita.

Occupy Wall Street and its working groups, including Occupy the SEC, were supposed to be dead, in case you missed the obituaries. Now the protesters are messing with detractors’ heads with the emergence of a media-savvy collection of legal, banking and activist members who come off as sane and authoritative. This is not the way the Occupy bashers’ “welfare-bum hippies” propaganda script was supposed to play out.

On Feb. 13, seven writers who described themselves as “concerned citizens, activists and financial professionals” filed a 325-page comment letter to financial regulators, outlining their concerns about loopholes in the “Let’s Try to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis” proposal known as the Volcker rule.

It was among the longest and most detailed of 16,000 letters sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency during the public-comment period.

We may call it a “public” comment period, but in the real world it is deep-pocketed business interests, not Mom and Pop, who usually have the juice to persuade officials to amend financial regulations. It’s no surprise that Wall Street has been working furiously to dilute the rule’s restrictions on how banks trade and what investments they can own, and the industry has a heap of comment letters on the Volcker rule to show for it.

This time, though, there is a noisy voice plugging for the little guy, and it carries weight that these rabble-rousers understand the banking industry from the inside.

Or, as Occupy the SEC member Alexis Goldstein — who has worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank — explained the group’s line-by-line analysis of the Volcker Rule to me: “We’d say ‘OK, I’m a bank, so how am I gonna get around this rule?’”

Even veteran activists who advocate regularly for the public were wowed. “They understood the nonsense in the proposed rule,” said Bartlett Naylor, financial policy counsel at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. Public Citizen, which also wrote a Volcker comment letter, was “humbled” by the Occupy effort, Naylor said. [Continue reading…]

Natasha Lennard reports: For some months now, the allure of the general strike has quietly persisted in the Occupy movement. In recent weeks, calls for a nationwide general strike on May 1 have grown louder; more than two months in advance of the date, a deluge of propaganda – posters, banner drops and short online videos – portends a May Day that promises to up the Occupy ante.

The Arab Spring was galvanized by general strikes in Tunisia and Egypt, while in Greece general strikes regularly rupture business-as-usual and bring thousands onto the streets. In headier conceptions, the general strike – a withdrawal from and an attack on capitalism – is the most radical act of defiance available. Little wonder, then, that a general strike was attempted in Oakland, Calif., on Nov. 2. The call for a nationwide general strike, originated in Occupy Los Angeles, has gleaned support from Occupy groups around the United States, with the help of a Twitter hashtag (#M1GS) and a Facebook event that has more than 12,000 promised attendees.

For a movement seeking new directions and escalations, the general strike is historically resonant and attractively bold. But can it work in the United States? And, if so, how?

As with most things Occupy, it’s unclear. Many different notions about a general strike and organizing for May Day are developing through autonomous working groups and alliances that are building between labor organizers and immigrant rights groups. It was, after all, a mass boycott against U.S. businesses by immigrant workers (both legal and illegal) on May 1, 2006 — dubbed “A day without an immigrant” — that revitalized May Day in the United States. Indeed, the specific language agreed to in the Occupy New York general assembly to endorse a general strike nods to this immigrant justice work. It reads:

“May Day 2012 : Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99 percent, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: No Work, No School, No Housework, No Shopping, No Banking. Take the Streets!”

The sentences were painstakingly crafted over weeks of meetings by an OWS general strike planning group composed of contentious bedfellows including traditional labor activists, insurrectionary anarchists, immigrant justice workers and every permutation and cross-over in between. Disagreement raged about whether the language of general strike would alienate or put at risk unionized and immigrant workers (another reason for the inclusion of “a day without the 99 percent”). Make no mistake: Calling for a general strike in the United States carries profound risks.

Chris Hedges writes: The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe.

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems.

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

Canadian Business: Do you think the movement will gather momentum or fizzle out in 2012?
Kalle Lasn: After Mayor Bloomberg, in his military-style operation, took out Zuccotti Park [protesters], a lot of pundits pronounced the end of the movement. But I think it has just begun. Last month, we saw the young people of Russia suddenly rise up in a totally unexpected way. You’d think Putin had the game sewn up there, yet all of a sudden we have tens of thousands of people showing the same kind of fervour that we saw in Greece and Spain and, of course, in Tunisia and Egypt. To me, the core impulse behind this movement is the feeling among young people all over the world that the future doesn’t compute, that their lives will be full of ecological, political and financial crises, and that they will never have a life like their parents did. And unless they stand up and fight for a different kind of a future, they’re not going to have a future. When I see even the Russians rising up, then I have the feeling this movement—especially if the global economy keeps on tanking—could well morph into a full-fledged global revolution.

CB: Does this movement have the chance of making real change?
KL: This revolution is the revolution of the Internet. People are talking to each other intensely, all the time. Whenever anybody does anything interesting in Spain or Italy or Greece or Russia, the word goes out immediately and globally, so this truly is a global phenomenon. That’s why I think the possibility of a global uprising against the current status quo is possible. I think we will be able to influence the way the global economy works and implement things like Robin Hood taxes [on financial market transactions] and ban high-frequency flash trading and dismantle this global casino. I think this Internet generation can have a huge influence on how business is done in the future.

CB: What does success mean for the Occupy movement?
KL: Basically to keep on going. The political left has had a long history of fizzling out. In 1968, it fizzled out. The Battle of Seattle and all those global marches fizzled out. And the political left has been kind of a loony left—an ineffective, whiny political force—for a long, long time. There’s still a danger that the Occupy movement will meet that same kind of fate. So our biggest success will be keeping our spirits high and occupying campuses and coming out next spring and starting myriad projects. The big challenge is to just keep the movement together.

CB: What might the movement look like in 2012?
KL: I think the first phase that was all done in this beautiful, horizontal, magical way is over. There will be occupations in 2012, but I think the focus of the movement will move into surprise occupations of banks and corporate headquarters and economics departments of universities. Here in B.C., we’re planning a major occupation of the economics department of the University of British Columbia for early this year. [We’ll do] things like moving your money from big banks into credit unions. Surprise moves. The slogan that seems to be catching the imagination is something we put out in a tactical briefing recently: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” I think that’s a beautiful way to describe the future of the movement, because it’s going to be swarms of occupiers.

MSNBC reports: Sergio Ballesteros, 30, has been involved in Occupy LA since the movement had its California launch in October. But this week, his activism took an abrupt turn when he was arrested on a felony charge — lynching.

Under the California penal code, lynching is “taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer,” where “riot” is defined as two or more people threatening violence or disturbing the peace. The original purpose of the legal code section 405a was to protect defendants in police custody from vigilante mobs — especially black defendants from racist groups.

Whether its use in this case will be upheld by California’s courts is uncertain. But the felony charge — which carries a potential four-year prison sentence — is the kind of accusation that can change the landscape for would-be demonstrators.

“Felonies really heighten the stakes for the protesters,” said Baher Azmy, legal director at Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. “I think in situations where there are mass demonstrations and a confrontation between protesters and police, one always has to be on the lookout for exaggerated interpretations of legal rules that attempt to punish or squelch the protesters.”

Justin Elliot reports: Local occupations around the country are linking up through frequent, massive conference calls, tightening what is now an extremely loose national network that operates under the Occupy banner into a more focused force.

The effort, now known as InterOccupy, started out of Occupy Wall Street in New York in mid-October. It has since grown into an elaborate website with multiple weekly phone calls during which occupiers trade ideas, coordinate multistate actions, and plan for the future. Participants at about 150 occupations around the country (and a few internationally) have now participated in the calls, organizers tell me.

“The [weekly] national calls have brought people together, including people who are otherwise isolated in their own occupations,” says Nate Kleinman, an Occupy Philly participant and InterOccupy organizer. “There’s usually a strong particular culture at individual occupations. It’s immensely valuable to have a place once a week where people come together from across the country and share ideas and their hopes for what the movement can accomplish.”

Sometimes that has meant planning specific coordinated actions.

On Dec. 12, Occupy protesters on the West Coast held a day to “shut down Wall Street on the waterfront,” resulting in the partial closure of several ports. In the two weeks before the protests, there were six InterOccupy conference calls in which representatives from 25 occupations planned the day of action, according to Joan Donovan, an InterOccupy organizer and Occupy Los Angeles participant. Those calls covered everything from coordination of the timing of protests up and down the coast to lessons learned from Oakland organizers from a previous port demonstration to strategies to minimize arrests, she said.

I listened in on a recent general call and came away with two impressions: Despite the reduction in media coverage of the Occupy movement after the initial burst of interest and the evictions of physical occupations, there is an efflorescence of activism happening around the country that didn’t exist just a few months ago. And occupiers are planning and organizing in many directions at once.