What are the Spending Priorities of the Government?

In the debate raging over increased costs of tuition in Quebec, increased debt loads of the federal and provincial governments, the need to reduce costs – impose “fiscal austerity” – and find “solutions” to these problems, very little context is given. As students fight back against increased fees, the counter argument simply states that people must pay for their education, that governments must reduce their deficits, and therefore, cuts in spending and increases in tuition are necessary, though undesirable. But how necessary are they? Where is the government putting its money?

The question really comes down to one of priorities and approach. What are the spending priorities of the government, for people in need or for the benefit of the rich? What is the government’s approach to spending in terms of addressing a major social and economic crisis, to treat symptoms or address the cause? A great deal is revealed about the moral, ethical and humanitarian considerations of a state in terms of how and where it spends its money. Canada is no exception.

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Read more: Canada’s Economic Collapse and Social Crisis: Class War and the College Crisis, Part 5

We can certainly discuss the possibilities for a student strike, but it should NOT be framed -- as the first thesis of "Five Theses on the
Student Strike" does -- as a withholding of labor power by wage earners at the "point of production."

This first thesis is way off target. It leads to misapprehension of the wage relationship. profits, the exploitation of labor and social
weight of labor. It also leads to the logical outcome of framing academic workers -- teachers -- as exploiters of student "labor."

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Read more: Response to "Five Theses on the Student Strike," by Students at the CUNY Graduate Center

1929
“Between the sphinx and the bank vault, there is a taut
thread
that pierces the heart of all poor children”

cried Federico Garcia Lorca after visiting Wall Street in 1929. His vision sharpened
by gathering storms of fascism, in his native Spain and across the European
continent, compounded by new forms of corporate control in the US, and a broken
heart over unrequited love, he poured his soul into the powerful “Poet in New York”
poems. Visiting Wall Street, the sidewalks barely swept of fall leaves and the
remains of leaping bodies—small‐time investors convinced that untold wealth shall
be theirs only to see life‐savings vanish, and of the occasional banker who followed
their lead ‐‐ his eyes pierced Capitalism’s many veils.

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Read more: Between the Sphinx and the Bank Vault

In the last few days, I have come to the conclusion that I will never have to work in a conventional sense again. Occupy Wall St. has given me the freedom to actualize seemingly any genuine goal I could imagine. The ability to achieve that goal only depends on how genuine that goal is. For two months now I have aggressively networked in the most progressive environment imaginable, affording me a mass of connections so true and genuine that most of them can best be described as friendship. This process of networking was one of the first steps in creating an opening almost devoid of restrictions.

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Read more: A Crisis of Freedom

 

“Mic check!”

General assembly, sparkly hands, consensus, concern, temperature check, block, process: this is the vocabulary and embodied performance of occupy theory. Each word has an equivalent embodied gesture, which is the means of indicating how you’re feeling about a proposal: fingers up for feeling good, horizontal for not sure, down for against.

The strongest sign is raised, crossed arms for a b

lock: an ethical or safety concern over a proposal that might cause you to leave the movement. Proposals are “consens-ed” by facilitators so that a clear majority approve. It’s not always quick but it is always interesting. It’s occupy theory.

Don’t make the phrase into a noun: it’s not a theory of occupation. Occupy theory is what you do as you occupy. It is the process that has become in some sense the purpose of the direct democracy movement, known by its signature instance Occupy Wall Street, or #ows.

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Read more: Occupy Theory

Whether it be through the policeman's truncheon or the bureaucrat's pen, authority rules us all. We live in a society with a clear and obvious political, economic and social hierarchy that could not exist without the willingness and ability on the part of those at the top to coerce, manipulate and control those who are not. The horrors that we see perpetuated every day, across the world, is both the consequence of this state of affairs and the means by which it is kept in place.

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Read more: On The Moral Nature of Anarchism