There is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing and all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well to bring down the winner. Let’s leave success and its achievement to the Republicans, to the Matthew Barneys of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers. The concept of practicing failure, perhaps, prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery and to [as Walter Benjamin put it] “withhold empathy from the victors.”
Looking ahead to May 1st, different individuals and groups are anticipating events and hoping for a multitude of different outcomes—there is no one idea shared even among organizers who have been collaborating to plan what a successful general strike would constitute that day. There’s at base a shared desire to see a huge number of people stopping work and taking to the streets that day, but that’s where it ends. It’s tempting to align with the media narrative and worry in advance about whether May Day will be a success, and what “success” here might mean. It’s better, perhaps, to keep in mind our beautiful and shared failures over the past six months. Indeed, with the fierce police repression meeting even the calmest of Occupy mobilizations these days, failure is in many ways unavoidable. We can, however, keep planning, pushing and finding each other; we can, in the words of Samuel Beckett, “fail better” and in so doing hopefully shatter whatever staid ideas of success we’re currently harboring.
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Daniel Marcus
Notes on Selma James at Occupy Philadelphia, March 7-8, 2012 It is Wednesday evening, and I am sitting with several dozen dissidents in the packed main room of the Lancaster Ave Autonomous Zone (LAVA), a West Philly meetingplace for local radicals. Tonight’s speaker is Selma James, a lifelong activist and author best known for having founded the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, who has come over from London to address the Occupy movement face to face—and to promote a new book of mostly old writings, Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (Oakland: PM Press, 2012). The winter months had taken their toll on the Occupy movement, drawing out divisions to the point of outright conflict—between reformists and revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists, all the familiar shades of internecine dispute. James’s visit was intended to energize a different sort of debate, one centered on women, their enemies and allies; to that end, she would preside over a special women-led general assembly the following night in celebration of International Women’s Day. Whereas the session at LAVA stuck mostly to matters of theory, Thursday’s GA would address the role of women in Occupy and in the radical milieu more broadly, a topic on which James has long been an authority. Her 1972 pamphlet, co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, argues that feminism and anti-capitalism cannot be considered as separate struggles; to destroy capitalism means overcoming the economic domination of women in all spheres, even in the trade unions and other enclaves of working-class power. (Not incidentally, The Power of Women was read collectively by a group of occupiers in the first weeks of the Philly encampment The argument sketched out by James and Dalla Costa begins by exposing a blind spot in Marx’s analysis of capitalism: the domestic sphere and the unpaid work of housewives. Supporting the above-ground system of production and waged labor is, they suggest, a sub-level of social reproduction, wherein care-taking, cooking, cleaning, and sexual service are combined to produce and maintain the worker as a creature fit to work. After all, it is only in the mists of fantasy (implicitly quite popular, nonetheless) that the workingman arrives self-constituted at the factory gates; in
ILLUSTRATION BY HILARY ALLISON (C.F. BOUGUEREAU’S “NYMPHS AND SATYR”)
Untitled masse through the city on unpermitted routes, that the chants of “we are unstoppable” boomed most apt. I was Those who once left for the West for stability arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge while for a normal life for their children reporting on the day’s events for the to get away from this trash New York Times. When I stood in plasthis Soviet mindset— are returning today to Russia, ticuffs with other arrestees, flanking where the local diumvirate has created a the bridge’s Brooklyn-bound roadway more or less awaiting our carriage in police buses, decent environment for the middle class it was cold and rainy; the bridge and and reasonable conditions for business. its iconic view have never looked so Not, of course, like in the good old days, exhilarating and beautiful to me. As the 1990s, but still better than now far as failing to cross a bridge goes, in the barbaric socialist West this was pretty spectacular. where the self-proclaimed people have And, of course, there was Septemgone into the streets, ber 17th, when Occupy first inserted the anarchists and the immigrants, itself into Manhattan’s landscape and hung huge banners and the broader public consciousfrom the buildings: ness. Reporting on the day itself, I was “Capitalism is outlawed!” skeptical. Why were people getting -Kirill Medvedev, translated by Keith comfortable on this drab stretch of Gessen corporate concrete? I was critical, too, about whether it could even be called an occupation—after all, at first, Bloomberg said the gathered crowd could stay—was this just a permitted protest, I wondered. I was wrong: it was an occupation on many fronts (an incursion into the city’s business as usual, a rethinking of space and its assigned uses, an occupying and derailing of standard political discourse and more). Furthermore, the very term “occupy” gained new signification and relevance. Because of Occupy, the question of what is or isn’t an occupation, or a successful occupation, cannot be answered using the same criteria that may have been applied before last fall. Yet, almost nothing that was discussed and planned for September 17th and the occupation of Wall Street materialized. So, again, technically speaking, Occupy’s official inception was perhaps the first in a line of resounding failures. But of course, it was a success. The point to take away is that, in the case of genuine interventions into politics and life as usual, any pre-existing dialectic of success and failure is shattered. I believe Occupy has been such an intervention, as evidenced by the struggle commentators have faced when trying to judge it by standard schematics of success and failure. Suffice here to pick examples from recent Occupy memory, to remember that valuations in terms of success and failure have regularly been upturned— and it’s been great. As Halberstam said, ending a lecture entitled “Notes on Failure”: