“The coming occupations will have no end in sight, and no means to
resolve them. When that happens, we will finally be ready to abandon
them.”
When we wrote that in December 2008 in New York City, after occupying
a university building by Union Square, we were treated as youthful
idealists, nihilist anarchists, even fascist thugs. What are your
demands? they asked. But what are you for? they wondered. Occupy
everything? they shrieked.
Alas. Our premonitions have come to pass.
It was only a matter of time. When the crisis first hit in the fall
of 2008, its effects were diffuse, with individuals all over the country
feeling it simultaneously, yet not collectively. Students, who have
both the time to act and think free from the imperative to work,
naturally reacted first. With an insurrection in Greece brewing, and a
legitimation crisis of the American economy at hand, occupations without
demands spread from New York to California, with thousands involved.
Demands are irrelevant when no one can hear you, and so the only real
demand was to occupy itself. Immature maybe, but not stupid. With
foreclosures growing exponentially, and unemployment skyrocketing as
well, occupying one’s space and means of living is the most obvious of
actions. In the most unpolitical of Western democracies, one must first
create a space for politics to emerge.
But students on their own are nothing. Especially left radical ones.
Always half way in and half way out of work, the student can only
express frustration of what is to come, not what has been. Hence, the
theoretical advantage of the current wave of occupations, which takes it
starting point not as the looted future, but rather the broken present.
From here, one no longer needs to “convince” others what “may” happen;
rather, the present itself is cracking underneath everyone’s feet. And
only those living in skyscrapers can avoid the initial fractures.
