On Saturday I attended Toby Sanger’s talk at the VAG on the Robin Hood Tax and participated in the march with my two daughters. It was all pretty low-key—a street party really (the band was, as usual, a lot of fun), with a few memorable moments (such as Eric Hamilton-Smith’s impassioned speech outside the Industry and Services Canada Offices at 300 West Georgia, complete with Leninesque pose).

 

 

What I like about the Robin Hood Tax campaign is that it offers a simple, straightforward “demand”—a 1% (or less) tax on all currency trading and speculative financial transactions. Because the volume of such trading is so immense, the tax would generate a substantial amount of money to be directed towards social programs, effectively replacing what is being lost due to austerity measures forced upon people by those same financial powers and their government debtors. It is also in some ways a more “realistic” goal, because it has some “high-level” support: France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel have voiced support for the tax (though Canada’s Stephen Harper is a vocal opponent).

 

 

With all the rhetoric around 99% vs 1%, a 1% tax has even more symbolic traction, seemingly concocted for the occasion (though it’s actually been around for some time). I don’t have a problem with it, and would support it. But here’s the issue: it’s yet another plan to make adjustments to the system that we increasingly realize is fundamentally broken. It keeps the current system tottering along—and while it redistributes wealth to some extent, it’s still just skimming 1% off the 1%.

 

Making demands is, to some extent, part of the old politics. It assumes there is some (potentially benevolent) power to which demands can be put. One can’t really demand that there be nothing to demand, or no one to demand things of. But this is what’s happening in Occupy Everything—we are demanding another world—we are demanding the impossible. Zizek is right when he says:

 

“The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.”

 

There’s the key demand—the first real demand, from which we can begin to build others. We demand an alternative. We demand to be able to take time and talk, to figure out what a real alternative might be. To work at it, from the bottom up, in tents in the middle of our cities if need be. Capitalism isn’t built for this: it’s built for efficiency. It needs a top-down structure, because it needs to move quickly, to react to markets and “volatility.” We demand that we don’t move quickly anymore. Moving quickly has got us nothing but environmental destruction, inequality, and exploitation. Tar Sands and Pipelines and climate change. Massive corporate profits for the 1% and diminishing expectations for the 99%.

 

 

I don’t know how we can avoid making demands in the long run, but a clear sign that we need to be cautious is the mainstream media’s appetite for such demands: they know the drill; give us your crazy, your idealism, your impossible, your fringe. We know where to put it! Front page, with the other entertainments.

 

I’ve been thinking about the 1871 Paris Commune a lot these past few weeks. There are many parallels with the Occupations: an experiment in direct democracy amidst economic and authoritarian pressures; in the midst of a seemingly hopeless situation, the discovery of some fresh reserve of hope—an imaginative leap towards another world. The parallel is even more poignant when thinking of Oakland and other Occupations that have faced police violence and the state’s brutal response. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But they do change. We come around to the same historical moment, and realize we’ve learned something. The tools are different too. Maybe they will work to our advantage this time? “Now the field is open,” Zizek says. Let’s see if we can keep it open.

 

I’ll end with some poetry—an on-going attempt to weave the past into the present, and so find new futures.

 

Commune,
they have us all
on the wrong side
of the global tracks
watching the show
unfold on the
plush other

 

Commune,
which side will
you be on?
Can you see
what’s happening
as the puppets drop
from the hands of
hidden dictators
reaching for their
balance sheets
cameras and guns?

 

Commune,
does it make sense
to speak this way
anymore? The terms
“us” and “them”
are being re-inscribed
each day to
“their” advantage—
where is it
that “we”
fell off the map?
Absence is
Contagious—
just ask every
revolutionary
we have long forgotten

 

but if we could
find that spot
we went invisible
maybe some
shooting gallery in
an eternal Paris
side of a cable
TV truck or city
intersection once
blocked by a
barricade—
we might through
the magic of
atemporal solidarity
conjure ourselves back
onto the brink
arm raised with a stone—
everywhere some kid
with a stone in front
of soldiers and tanks

 

Commune,
I need a moment
to catch my breath
before I join the fray—
I hope I can and will—
it’s not easy
the comforts are many
the distractions
the pressures
and preventative
measures—
commune,
did you ever imagine
we’d be so many
alone and with
no other way
of mustering but
some corporate
sports event
series of tweets
or texts?

 

I will go with you
tonight and see
what can be made
of this we
its transports and
energies of transformation
love theory and death
the lights on the highway
the flags over the barricades

 

Commune,
we are an endless poem
and we are right here
at your elbow

 

–Steve Collis