What's the difference between spectacle and carnival? Showy revolt and revolutionary freedom?
It is along the knife-sharp edge of this narrow distinction that we "win the energies of intoxication for the revolution," as Benjamin said of surrealism.
"What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?"
"Don't like what you do / Won't take the abuse / Move to the truth / Before... come on that means you!"
We took an empty Wells Fargo building last night in Santa Cruz, raising the stakes of the occupy movement. With news cameras rolling, a line of riot cops was overwhelmed by a small group of committed oocupiers -- the banner hung across the entrance to the building read OOCUPY EVERYTHING -- who linked arms and demanded to know why the men with batons were there. The space was defended and cops retreated. I've never seen anything like it. More interminable "general assembly" meetings followed, and the crowd began to drift away.
A party and a police raid are planned for tonight in Santa Cruz.
The occupies are convinced that "freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardest sacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedly in its fullness without any kind of pragmatic calculation, as long as it lasts." We consider, as fact, that "mankind’s struggle for liberation in its simplest revolutionary form (which, however, is liberation in every respect), remains the only cause worth serving." Will the occupy movement be successful in welding this experience of freedom to the other revolutionary experience that we have to acknowledge because it has been ours, the constructive, dictatorial side of revolution?
The limits of our present struggle? Property and police. Wherever these limits are superseded, the occupy everything movement will begin to morph into a programmatic struggle to reorganize everyday life, "dictatorial" in the positive constitutive sense.
"There is a residue. The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto."
For the moment, the occupies understand its present commands. "They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds."
Come out tonight and dance to defend the occupation.
