ron salaj's List: social movements

• “We don’t just critique the system,” said Arifaj, “we actually become it, and make it seem ridiculous from within.”
• “taking the system more seriously than it takes itself seriously.”
• This strategy is, for Žižek, the only means of creating real subversive potential. The Žižekian form of overidentification finds the logical paradoxes within the system, rather than imposing an external logic or ethic upon it to reveal its flaws.
• “not because its irony is fun, but because it expresses truths about the system that the dominant political parties — self-proclaimed as ‘serious’ — prefer to hide.”
• Consider Jacques Lacan’s 1 + 1 = 3 equation. In Lacan’s terms, the official antagonism of the Two (1+1) is always-already supplemented by the invisible third. As such, the existing antagonism is never between the Two official forces, but between them and the invisible Third (a thing which exists only insofar as it declares its existence to the world). As applied to the Kosovar case, the antagonism in Kosovo’s political scene is not between Vetëvendosje! and the other ruling parties, but between them Two and the Third (Partia e Fortë’s) which, now that it actually exists, undermines the ideologies that gave rise to the Two.
• As one Party member put it, perhaps the only way to counter these overly-simplistic critiques is to consider the well-known joke from World War I. Towards the end of the war, the Germans wrote a telegram to the Austrians saying “here on our front, the situation is serious but not catastrophic,” to which the Austrians replied, “Well, on our front, the situation is catastrophic but not serious.”

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• "The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."

   

  — Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University
  Barcelona, Spain
• The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity
• Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?
• DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY

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• "There is now a menace which is called Twitter,"

• When the Prime Minister Erdoğan dismissed the protesters as çapulcu (looters), they joyfully reappropriated the term and identified themselves as çapulcu. They used it in anglicised form: “I am a chapuller,” “I am chapulling.” Any public relations campaign of the JDP regime against this humour seems ineffective at best, counter-productive at worst.
• The second characteristic is the middle class and lower middle class origin of the majority of the protesters.
• The immediate demands of the protesters reflect the liberal character of the protest: respect for the freedom of speech, right to assembly and to organise, the right to the city.
• The protest can simply be defined as a move of the middle class to claim the urban public sphere for themselves.
• a process in which urban public land is given to private construction companies for the construction of private residences and shopping malls.
• The exclusion of the middle classes from the public spaces in the centre of the city is a response to the neoliberal city planning of the JDP regime, which rests on an urban rent economy.
• The third characteristic is the significant role of Istanbulite soccer fans.
• In the last game in Inonu Stadium this year, Besiktas fans were attacked by the police with tear gas. The JDP’s practices in soccer matches reflect its attitude to such public events: authoritarian and brutal.
• The night when the crowds purged the police out of Taksim people were holding their beer glasses up in the Beyoglu district and chanting “Cheers to you, Tayyip!”
• The young generation is much more accustomed than their parents to living together with people who are different. This explains the vast plurality of the Gezi protesters: soccer fans, college students, feminists, LGBTs, anti-capitalist Muslims, Kemalists, liberals, nationalists, socialists, anarchists, ecologists, Alevis.
• Mi’raj and the Friday prayers on Gezi Park attest to the emergence of a new civic multiculturalism
• The image of a young man raising his hand in the shape of a wolf, the traditional symbol of the ultra-nationalist MHP, and shouting “shoulder to shoulder against fascism” is confusing to many on the Turkish left, who have been shouting this slogan against the MHP for the last 50 years.
• Another major controversial issue is the JDP’s control over the media.
• The airing of a documentary on penguins by CNN Turk, while major conflicts between protesters and the police were taking place in the centre of Istanbul, became the subject of public derision.
• The media manipulation of the JDP failed largely due to the availability of Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets. The JDP claimed that the protests were organised by a social media conspiracy by foreign agents and military coup plotters. Erdogan stated that “there is a curse called Twitter.”
• Finally, on the seventh day of the protests 2000 protesters consisting mainly of white-collar professionals convened in front of NTV, a major TV news channel, shouting “We do not want media for sale.” They attached lira bills to a cardboard saying “How much does it cost to be on air? We can pay.”

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• use of irony to ridicule the institutional old and vanguardist new lefts, particularly by the ‘‘Metropolitan Indians’’, the transversalists and other ‘‘creatives’’.
• Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Italian ‘‘1977 Movement’’ in its conflict with the grey, humourless political system was its use of irony to ridicule its opponents.
• Irony was central to the identity of the movement
• The paper, based directly on primary sources from the movement and on interviews with former participants, reassesses a movement usually characterized as ‘‘violent’’ by Italianist social history
• While the iconoclastic punk movement screamed ‘‘No future’’ in Britain, perhaps the main weapon of the revolt of ‘‘Year Nine’’ [3] against the austere, humourless, bureaucratic authoritarianism of the Italian Communist Party (ICP), and its ‘‘Historical Compromise’’ [4] with the corrupt Christian Democrat regime, was its caustic irony and satirical wit.
• Often wittily ironic, sometimes aggressively sarcastic, always disparaging, Seventy-Seven’s use of creative humour also had devastating political consequences. Such was the case of the expulsion of Luciano Lama, an ICP leader and head of the CGIL [6] trade unions, who along with his bodyguards and several hundred press-ganged trade unionists, was unceremoniously driven out of Rome University, after attempting forcibly to end an occupation: an historical turning point that marked the definitive end of the ICP and the New Left’s mutual tolerance and the rupture of any possible ‘‘Left unity’’ in that country.
• ‘‘Mao-Dadism’’
• ‘‘Second Society’’
• they were strangers in their own land.
• The movement exploded exactly in those parts of the social terrain considered to be securely occupied by the ICP, namely the universities and ‘‘Red Bologna’’, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, the main region of the ‘‘Red Belt’’ of northern central Italy and the ICP’s showpiece for its local government strategy of cooperation with the small and medium scale industry of the so-called ‘‘Third Italy’’.
• In the large open area of the campus where he was to speak, Lama found another platform already rigged up, with a dummy of himself on it (complete with his famous pipe). There was a big red cutout of a Valentine’s heart, with a slogan punning his name – ‘‘Nessuno L’Ama’’ [Lama Nobody [:::] or Nobody Loves Him]. Around this platform there was a band of Metropolitan Indians. As Lama started to speak, they began to chant ‘‘Sacrifices, Sacrifices, We Want Sacrifices!’’ (a parody of the State’s economic policy upheld by the Communist Party). ‘‘Build us More Churches and Fewer Houses!’’ (Italy has more churches than any other European country, and a chronic housing shortage). ‘‘We demand to work harder and earn less!’’ [:::]. The irony aggravated the humourless heavies. [18]
• The shock of Lama’s humiliating expulsion forced the ICP’s intellectuals to analyse seriously a movement that until then they had only derided or ignored.
• theory of the ‘‘two societies’’: a ‘‘first society’’ composed of ‘‘guaranteed’’ social strata, attached to the unions and political parties, whose interests were considered to be synonymous with those of the Historic Compromise; and a ‘‘second society’’ composed of ‘‘non-guaranteed’’ marginalized social subjects, particularly the young unemployed and underemployed trapped in unregulated black-market jobs, with whom an institutional dialogue over the ‘‘politics of austerity’’ implemented since 1973 to help the economy out of its worst postwar crisis was necessary if all but impossible.
• historical class divisions; a frequent mistake in Marxist analyses of new social movements.
• Seventy-Seven surprised the New as much as the Old Left with its break with the generation and politics of 1968, as the punks did with hippie values in Britain.
• Mao-Dadism defined itself as a hybrid by-product of both the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when ‘‘art [:::] became daily life’’, and the Dadaist rejection of ‘‘the separation between art and daily life’’.
• They used mocking humour and what the semiologist Umberto Eco called ‘‘Italo-indian’’
• Transversalism, named after Bologna’s A/Traverso magazine, was another example of the central role of language in the 1977 Movement.
• The mushrooming of ‘‘free radio’’ stations (radio libere) in the main cities in the mid-1970s made them the sounding board and cultural laboratory of the movements.
• Through phone-ins, ordinary people’s rich store of experiences addressed the real problems of everyday life that were ignored by the mainstream media. The use of ‘‘non-sense’’, to go through the ‘‘looking glass’’ of reality, helped to mirror the outside world. However, most radio stations closed down more through lack of skills and funds than police action. There was a failure to articulate and develop autonomous practices, although the present extensive network of free radio stations is thriving, if in a less experimental format.
• Radio Alice was founded by former Potere Operaio militants and began broadcasting in 1974 as the first ‘‘free radio station’’.
• When I came to Bologna in 1975 very soon I began to work with Radio Alice. At first I did a programme with some friends on poetry late at night. [:::] meeting these people who were slightly older than us, who had been in the ‘68 movement and had set up the radio. [:::] [During the rioting following the killing of a student in March] there were a lot of phone-ins and we all listened. The police broke in and closed the radio. This was reported live because the people in the radio were very clever. They hid the microphones and left the lines open. After that there were numerous arrests.
• ‘‘Let’s spread false news that produce real events’’.
• The most infamous prank was the false edition of La Repubblica (a centre-left national daily newspaper), produced by Il Male, a satirical magazine. Its front page splash featured the improbable ‘‘arrest’’ of Ugo Tognazzi, a popular comic actor, as the grande vecchio (godfather) behind the Red Brigades, so ridiculing the press’s obsession with terrorist conspiracy theories.
• The movement revolutionized language with conscious research, retrieving the printing methods of the underground culture.
• By using newspaper clippings, handwriting, and typewritten white paper, it created a new printing format that allowed flexible imagination to go beyond previous typographic schemes.
• Through the use of irony, detournement, sarcasm, parody, satire, mockery, puns, and anagrams, antagonistic political humour disoriented ‘‘the fundamental laws of human language [:::] subverting the discipline of their valorization’’
• Some preceding groups included the
   Situationist International, the Provos in Amsterdam, Kommune 1 in Germany, Black Mask in New York, and in Britain King Mob, who, dressed as Santa Claus, went into a department store on Christmas 1968 and began handing items from the shelves to children as ‘‘presents’’
• The use of intense theatricality, camp mockery and ironic provocation is now collectively organized as the ‘‘pink and silver’’ block of the alterglobalist movement, whose most notable exponents are the pink fairies of Tactical Frivolity, given to tickling riot police men with their feather dusters.
• language is the site of political struggle and the derisory laughter born of irony is one of the most potent weapons a social movement has, humiliating the ‘‘powerful’’ and inspiring the ‘‘powerless’’.

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