What Does Europe Want?: The Union and Its Discontents

SREĆKO HORVAT

PREFACE

WHAT DOES THE U.S. WANT, OR WHAT TO DO AFTER OCCUPY?

During these last couple years of unending crisis, the following joke has been circulating around Greece:

A tourist is asked by the passport control officer at Athens International Airport, What is your nationality?

German, he replies.

The officer then asks, Occupation?

The tourist answers, No, only holidays.

When I arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York in October 2011, my immediate reaction to the question Occupation? was the opposite—Yes, to Occupy.

This was not the first time I gave this answer; in fact, I lived out this very scenario earlier on my flight to New York with Roger, a fellow passenger. For the first few hours, other than a polite hello from both parties, there was silence. Neither of us undertook any unnecessary conversation, even though we would be travelling together for the next ten hours. But then the meal arrived. Instead of a single-serving sugar, a singleserving cream, a single part of butter, and a possible new single-serving friend, we started something that initially seemed like another single-serving small talk. My companion asked me why was I going to New York, and I replied, asking him to keep it as our little secret, I’m going to Occupy Wall Street. He laughed. I asked him what the purpose of his trip was. He said, I’m going on holiday, before ironically adding, but I’m a banker. We both burst out laughing at that moment: on the one hand, we had someone going to protest against the banking system, while, on the other hand, we had the representative of this very system, but with a human face.

It turned out that Roger worked for UBS, one of the largest Swiss banks, an institution present in more than fifty countries and with an office on Wall Street. He works in human resources, and, this description being quite vague, I asked him what this meant exactly.

He gave a brutally honest answer: I used to work on hiring people. Now I help to get them fired.

"Something like Company Men, the film where the purge affected even the big fish?" I asked.

Well, not exactly. We really do try to take care for our former employees, retraining them and finding them new jobs, even though it sometimes takes half a year. Roger failed to add that UBS fired approximately 11,000 people from the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007 until 2011. So I asked him whether the situation will soon improve. Yes, he responded, Soon there will be more regulation, new laws at the level of the European Union, and banks will recover. At least in Switzerland.

Of course, I was thinking about the people, and he was talking about the recovery of banks despite, ironically, dealing with human resources. That same evening, I arrived at Zuccotti Park. Just the night before, the police threatened to evict the protesters, but at that moment there was euphoria. It stemmed partly from these small, defiant victories, but it was also because of their large protest on October 15th, which grabbed headlines across the world. Occupy Wall Street, as part of a wider trend of global protests, expanded to more than 1,500 cities around the world. My first impression, I have to admit, was similar to that of Nathalie Rothschild, who negatively compared the Occupy Wall Street to a Monty Python skit; she said that the surreal protest in New York’s financial district will certainly leave the system shaking. With laughter.¹ In the night, the heterogeneous multitude counts only some hundred people, while the steel and glass skyscrapers around them loomed like the walls and towers of a dark, impenetrable fortress, showing a complete and daunting indifference towards the occupation of the small park.

This was best seen when Jeff Mangum, indie-rock legend and singer of the band Neutral Milk Hotel, appeared at Zuccotti and played a show. It was a moving and powerful scene when, at the end of Oh Comely, he and the audience sang We know who our enemies are against the backdrop of the skyscrapers rising into the dark Manhattan sky. The discrepancy between this huge upheaval of populist enthusiasm, mainly from young people, and the stoic, utterly static symbols of power that surrounded them thus became even more tangible. Yes, we know very well who our enemies are, but the enemy also knows who we are. Maybe even better than we do.

But do they really know? To find an answer to this question, we can consult the official newsletter of the banking system. On October 20, 2011—more than a month since Zuccotti Park was occupied—the Wall Street Journal published two, at first glance very different, articles devoted to the events going on in their own backyard.

The first was entitled The Occupy Wall Street Brigade Has a Point, by Simon Nixon, and the other was Squatting on Wall Street by Daniel Henninger. Judging from these headlines alone, we could surmise that the editorial policy of the Wall Street Journal is very democratic in how it allowed the publication of two differing messages. A closer look, however, banishes the illusion. Nixon’s article easily dismisses the protesters as the same largely incoherent rabble that led the antiglobalization protests a decade age, but concedes that their rage against the financial sector is easy to understand, particularly now that governments are being forced to cut spending and raise taxes to repair deficits caused partly by the cost of bank bailouts.² And though Henninger’s article also agrees that all this fuss is about a rabble, it does not recognize the legitimacy and depth of the protesters’ anger. Moreover, it claims that Zuccotti Park was actually a marijuana oasis, and that Occupy Wall Street was the reincarnation of the squatters movement that occupied Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side in the 1980s.³ Zuccotti Park was framed as the physical center of a movement of degenerates, much like how Tompkins Square and its surrounding neighborhood became a magnet for drug freaks, organizers of pro-Sandinista rallies, homeless people, bad musicians and a lot of very lost kids once was. Henninger’s ultimate conclusion is that the ethos of that tumultuous period never left New York, and that it now lives again thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What is the difference between these two articles? Though the difference seems immense at first sight, if we look more closely we find that there is almost no difference between them. Both articles are ultimately critiques of the protests; the only difference is in the type of criticism each chooses to deploy. The first article is much more dangerous because it uses a tactic that ostensibly recognizes the demands of the protesters, thus attempting to calm them and assure that all that is really needed is a cosmetic surgery of capitalism. What point did the Occupy Wall Street Brigade make, according to Nixon? That instead of trying to change the very presuppositions of the current system, the protesters were just looking for more market regulation, which would allegedly succeed in reining in wild capitalism. On the other hand, it is easy to see through the second article as another type of defamation that was popular in the Croatian context, when students occupying faculty buildings in 2009 were described as a motley crew of young enthusiasts who can easily go on fire, and even as similar to terrorists who hijacked an aircraft.⁴

On October 18th, just two days earlier, Barack Obama remarked in an ABC News interview that these protests were, in some ways, not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the conservative-leaning Tea Party: Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them. He then said that the most important thing he could do as president was to express solidarity with the protesters: The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded.⁵ In short, Obama and the Wall Street Journal did agree on one thing: although the protesters might be dirty squatters and drug addicts, we should support them. In fact we should explain to them what they are really seeking! And that’s, you guessed it, capitalism with a human face. We should have more state regulation and the protesters should rely on Obama, who two years earlier pumped 700 billion dollars to rescue the freefalling banking system and who himself came to power in large part thanks to the donations from the very same system.⁶ The protesters should also trust the NYPD, who received a donation of 4.5 million dollars from Chase Bank the same day when 700 occupiers were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Recently, when we were bombarded by eulogies following the death of Steve Jobs, the entrepreneurial genius of the twenty-first century, we saw what capitalism with a human face really was. If there is any company in the world that stands for capitalism with a human face, then it’s definitely Apple Inc. After his death, Jobs was quickly transformed into a saintly combination of Einstein and Mother Teresa, a man who was not only so ingenious that he changed the world forever with his technology, but who also had a big heart and whose good intentions gave us all a chance to enjoy the benefits of his inventions.

The first myth is substantiated by Apple’s first logo, which depicts Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. The individual genius of Apple’s founder can be seen as a God-given gift, rather than as an accumulation of knowledge and discoveries over centuries of thought and work. This logo was then replaced by the rainbow Apple, the now-ubiquitous rainbow-colored silhouette of an apple with a bite taken out of it. Although this logo is often erroneously referred to as a tribute to Alan Turing, both designer Rob Janoff and Apple deny any homage. So, again, what we have here is a symbol of the apple of inspiration, which Jobs ate and thereby came to his invention. According to the biography by Walter Isaacson, Apple was so named because Jobs had been coming back from an apple farm, and he was then on frutarian diet. He thought the name was fun, spirited and not intimidating.⁷ So here you have it: ingenuity and modesty, a screen behind which actually lies nothing else than a lifestyle. Or as Isaacson would note: Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie.⁸

The truth is, as always, quite different. And that truth is best described by the Daily Mail in an article with a title that already says it all: Inside the Chinese Suicide Sweatshop Where Workers Toil in 34-hour Shifts to Make Your iPod.⁹ In 2010, two journalists managed to slip into Foxconn, an electronics contract manufacturing company in China employed by Apple, and showed what a typical work day looked like. The day begins with the Chinese national anthem, which features the words Arise, arise, arise, millions of hearts with one mind being played over loudspeakers. The workers sleep in prison-like corridors, in cramped rooms furnished with triple-decked bunk beds to save space. Despite summer temperature hitting 95°F (35°C) with 90 percent humidity, there is no air conditioning.

In the last few years, more than twenty Foxconn workers have committed suicide. When the workers started throwing themselves off the top of tall buildings, instead of improving the working conditions, Foxconn approached this problem in the best manner of capitalism with a human face: they installed suicide-preventing nets and asked employees to sign no-suicide pledges. Workers were even forced to sign legally binding documents guaranteeing that they and their descendants would not sue the company in the instance of unexpected death, self-injury, or suicide.

According to the New York Times, one of these workers, 19-year-old Ma Xianqqian, worked 286 hours in the month he died, including 112 hours of overtime, about three times the legal limit. He was found dead in front of his high-rise dormitory. ¹⁰ For all of that, even with extra pay for overtime, he earned the equivalent of $1.00 an hour. The factories in Shenzhen, where workers live and work in similar conditions, have more than 400,000 employees. The suicides prompted twenty Chinese universities to compile a report on Foxconn, which they described as a labor camp. How did our hero Jobs react to all this? Stressing that he found the deaths troubling and that he was all over it, the billionaire tellingly said, You go in this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s pretty nice.¹¹

Is there a better example of capitalist cynicism? Of course, the Foxconn factories can’t be compared to labor camps that existed throughout Europe during the Nazi era, but what catches the eye is certainly Jobs’s explanation that the factories where workers are literally working until death are actually pretty nice places with swimming pools. Exactly in that sense, Jobs’s statement may be associated with Terezin (or Tehresienstadt), the notorious concentration camp in the Czech Republic where the so-called Prominente (prominent Jews, who were often writers, artists, scientists, musicians, etc.) had their own rooms and were free to indulge in cultural activities. In a propaganda effort designed to fool the Western allies, the Nazis publicized the camp for its rich cultural life.

When a delegation of the Danish Red Cross was due to visit the camp on June 23, 1944, the Nazis conducted additional Verschönerungen (beautifications): they deported 17,517 Jews to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding, built a playground for children and a music pavilion, and even recorded a movie often called The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews. The delegation was welcomed by the Ghetto Swingers. It was supposed to be a crucial piece of evidence about the pretty nice place, especially since the Nazis previously banned jazz and swing, considering the music degenerate. Just three months after the inspection of Terezin, another delegation of the Red Cross visited Auschwitz and did not realize that the room for showering actually served as a gas chamber.

In the book Words That Are Slaughtered: Testimonies of Survivors of Jasenovac, Hinko Singer from the Croatian town of Karlovac recalls a similar event when International Committee of the Red Cross—a group which also included German, Hungarian, and Italian journalists—visited Jasenovac, the biggest extermination camp in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during the Second World War. He describes the extensive preparations for the visit. In only three days, the detainees had to clean and repair the entire camp area. They had to be shaved and received detailed instructions how to behave when in contact with or in the presence of the committee. They weren’t allowed to say their names, but if a member of the Red Cross or a journalist asked them, they had to answer the following: I’m prisoner number … If they were asked How are you? or Is the camping difficult?, the only thing they were allowed to answer was: Thank you—good.

Is it so difficult to imagine that identical or at least comparable preparations don’t occur immediately before international commissions visit factories in China to confirm that the conditions are in accordance with international law? To cut a long story short, all of those beautiful iPhones, iPads, and Macs wouldn’t exist without those low-paid, overworked Chinese workers, or they would be even more expensive than they already are. In other words, that’s capitalism with a human face. It is a sad, dishearteningly real repetition of the famous joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not Be (1942). In the movie, when asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, the Nazi officer snaps back, We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping. Today, the Americans do the shopping and the Chinese do the sweatshops.

As things stand now, it is only a matter of time when the anecdote told by a doctor who spent three years in Jasenovac will be repeated. When this doctor returned home from the concentration camp, his son discovered some documents showing that his father’s teeth were repaired five times in just two months. The son then joked, Well, you went to Jasenovac to fix your teeth! Today, we can imagine some naive Chinese child greeting his father upon the latter’s return from three years in Foxconn, Well, you went to the factory to play on the iPad, while we were starving here! Clearly, capitalism with a human face is actually worse than honest and brutal capitalism because even exploited workers who commit suicide are portrayed as slackers who just spend their time in nice places with swimming pools, complaining and whining instead of working harder. If they accidentally start killing themselves, no problem, we’ll put safety nets under the windows so they can immediately return to work!

Why did Occupy Wall Street then start in the United States if the American working class is actually based in China? When at a conference on the island of Vis in Croatia in August 2011, Tariq Ali recalled that in the mid-1960s at the invitation of the International War Crimes Tribunal, he went to Vietnam where he spent several months collecting evidence and testimony on the American intervention there. The Vietnamese soldiers in Hanoi told him the following anecdote. Just a few months earlier, a delegation of the Italian Communist Party arrived to see Ho Chi Minh. After a long meeting, the Italians asked the Vietnamese leader, How can we help you? Ho Chi Minh did not hesitate, automatically answering, The best way to help us is to start a revolution in Italy. Coincidence or not, this answer was transformed into one of the leading slogans of the antiwar movement in the United States and embraced by the Weatherman, whose main message was Bring the war home! Couldn’t we imagine a similar dialogue during the Arab Spring between an Egyptian worker at Tahrir Square and a young American who wanted to help the Egyptian struggle? Instead of asking him to join the revolution, the Egyptian worker calmly tells the American, Bring the revolution to the U.S.

That’s exactly what happened in some sense with Occupy Wall Street. Instead of trying to change the bad working conditions in sweatshops in China, we need to change the conditions in our own countries. We could say that the boomerang came back where it started. Though we were all enthusiastically watching and supporting the awakening of democracy in Africa and the Middle East, this is not enough—we have to bring the revolution home. The advice of Ho Chi Minh is more relevant than ever.

In just one month, Zuccotti Park turned into a real commune, a city within a city, a new political entity that could not be reduced to a singular protest or political subject. In short, Occupy Wall Street sprung up in a country where the labor unions had begun to weaken in the 1930s and where, at least since the 1960s, there has been no real alternative to capitalism. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Obama made every effort to fit OWS into his last presidential campaign, and the mainstream media followed suit. If the first attempt at co-option was to define the protesters as kids requesting capitalism with a human face, the second was to present them as a "protest with a human