#Occupy Goes To The Opera

How cool is this? The Occupy crowd went to the Met Opera House in New York last night, to point out the injustice of the 1% claiming that philanthropy excuses them from paying taxes. I love opera myself, but the problem with philanthropy is that it gets spent on things that make the rich feel good: opera, donkey charities, art funds while claiming that they're doing good. With taxes, democracy decides where the money needs to go.

But I digress. The Occupy people don't hate opera either. And, it turns out, the opera people don't hate Occupy. The performance was Philip Glass's Satyagraha, his sprawling minimalist eco-conscious, democratic masterpiece based on Ghandi's early life. When it was all over, the composer himself strolled past the police blocks - with some of the opera-goers - to quote the Bhagavad-Gita to the multitude (from about 3.00):

"When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again."

As slogans go, that's not bad.

This is what democracy looks like

If you follow American politics at all, you'll know there's a long and dishonourable tradition of trying to keep undesirables of the electoral roll, going back to the Civil Rights era. Sometimes it's bureaucratic: demanding more forms of identification than the poor and mobile are like to have or be able to afford, sometimes it's about intimidation and disinformation. It's happening here too: the Conservatives are about to abolish compulsory registration, in the hope that the poor and mobile (students, temporary workers etc) don't bother, leaving elections in the hands of the stable Daily Mail reading classes.

Ray Lutz is a candidate for the Democratic Party. He set up a voter registration desk in the Civic Center Plaza, where there's an Occupy camp: and was arrested for trespassing (remember me blogging about pseudo-public space a few weeks ago?).



Don't be a Klutz: vote for Lutz!

Support your student activists

While the SU of my institution is a craven and frail beast, other students are working hard to make sure that this government's attack on education as a public good isn't forgotten: Cambridge students forced David Willetts (who earlier this week encouraged discount institutions to start up in old office blocks, while admitting that he wouldn't want his kids to attend them) to abandon a speech, then occupied the building, and Birmingham University students have set up an alternative university in an occupied building (follow their exploits here).

You might question the tactics, especially given the UK's overwhelmingly rightwing media, but I think they should be encouraged. In the 1960s, students across the world, even the UK, occupied their centres of learning to demand that universities stopped being mouthpieces of hegemony, and started critiquing the status quo. I don't think our current crop of protesters are as engaged with theory: Marcuse, Laing and Gramsci aren't on anyone's lips now, sadly - but their aims are laudable. Take the banking crash: virtually no academic economists predicted it. Instead, influential academics operated as paid consultants and board members, producing the analytical work which promised everything would be all right. Only people outside the magic circle pointed out that the Emperor was dipping his dangly bits in our soup. It's time universities led opinion, not bowed to the fashionable orthodoxies.

Despite this afternoon's media students not knowing about the Leveson inquiry, or how the press operates, the vast majority are intellectually curious and idealistic. We shouldn't stamp on this, but encourage it. I'm on strike next week, because the space I use to examine cultural nostrums is being eroded. The students' struggle is just as valid. They aren't greedily demanding special privileges - they're demanding that we all recognise the liberatory potential of education and its benefits for all.

Solidarity: UC Davis Students and Staff

I occasionally have to exchange heated words with management in my role as union activist and freelance git, but we have it easy compared with our colleagues across the water. As the Occupy movement takes in university campuses throughout the US, the response from academic managers has been brutal: call in the cops and let them do what they want

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

A particular irony in this case is the cause: the University of California at Davis protest was against… police brutality. The quotation above comes from an angry, impassioned and admirable letter from a Professor of English at UC Davis to his Chancellor. I hope this isn't what we're heading for here.

PS: the pepper-spraying cop is now appearing in a number of famous paintings:

PPS: For a much more reasoned discussion of the pepper-spraying, head over, as usual, to Music for Deckchair's piece.

Occupation comes to The Dark Place

I woke to find these Anonymous/Occupy posters on the street crossings today:

I rather liked the semiotics of sticking it over the green man - associating Occupy with positivity and agency rather than negativity and prohibition. I'm not certain that The Dark Place isn't the victim of capitalism rather than a powerhouse of fiscal oppression requiring occupation, but I'm very pleased that the movement is spreading.

Ridding us of this meddlesome priest

As you might have noticed, I'm a keen atheist, albeit a Catholic atheist. So I've been watching the resignation of Canon Giles Fraser from St. Paul's Cathedral with interest and no little amusement.

He's gone because he wouldn't accept that the Cathedral should connive with the Corporation of London (i.e. the money) and the Mayor of London (the bankers' pet gnome) to get rid of the Occupy movement on the plaza in front of the Cathedral. Other clerics have been muttering about losing £20,000 per day, which is rather different from Jesus expelling the money-changers from the Temple.

Fraser's right: no church should be in the business of evicting idealists protesting against the obvious and demonstrably damaging rapaciousness of money power. But I can't thinking that it's a bit late for any cleric, especially one representing the Church of England, to suddenly object to doing deals with money and power.

Have you every been to a major church or cathedral? They're often festooned with military banners commemorating the glorious battles fought by local regiments against the unsuspecting natives of lands unfortunate enough to be attractive to the British Empire, from Ireland to Australia. The flags of Empire abound, as do memorials to the stinking rich and powerful. The Church of England, as an Established Church, did its deal with the élite centuries ago. It's too late to discover a radical streak now.

Not that the original church, the Catholics, have anything of which to be proud either. In the 20th Century they crushed the Liberation Theology movement, which posited that Catholic priests might want to help the oppressed in Latin American dictatorships: simply the latest in a series of disgusting moves which maintained power at the cost of morality. Many commentators are clear that Christianity lost all legitimacy when it was taken up as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Getting into bed with a slave economy meant suppressing any instincts against slavery and imperialism, for instance, hence the Church's early advice to slaves to be obedient rather than demand equality.

So two cheers for the canon, but he's utterly compromised. Religion's just another arm of the dominant hegemony. Don't expect radicalism from that quarter.