Joshua Clover’s talk on “Austerity” from 25th October

http://imgur.com/a/sCxiE

Talk at Nov. 15th Rally at UC Davis

Hello, I am Geoffrey Wildanger

I am a graduate student at UC Davis, but I was here as an undergraduate student too.

I transferred here in 2008. Some of you might remember that year. It was the year that global capitalism collapsed. The year after that, in 2009, Mark Yudof began the first of his annual fee rate hikes.

That year, 2009, Yudof raised fees 32%, and 52 members of the UC Davis community–a lot of students and at least one professor–were arrested.

I remember getting out of jail that morning–it is hard for me to sleep in jail, so I was tired. It was raining, and several hundred students were marching. They were marching in the cold and in the rain impromptu, because they were incensed that the police would arrest 52 people for a sit-in.

On the march we passed by Sproul hall, and I took a detour to explain to my german teacher why I had not been in class, had not taken the day’s quiz. He said, “It’s alright. I’ll give you a make up. You have more important things to do.”

That was in 2009 and now it is 2011. Those arrests came after one of the first occupations in the UCs, now there are occupations all over the United States–indeed there are occupations all over the world, including one in downtown Davis.

Many of you are not in class right now–as I am not and was not then–, although arguably you could be.

But, we have more important things to do.

Sometimes the University today, in fact the world today, feels like that Indiana Jones movie. When Harrison Ford and the other archeologist descend into the tomb of the crusader and there is a lot of rats, remember? If you don’t, I’ll gloss it: the bad guys light the tomb on fire somehow, Harrison Ford and the other archeologist hide under the water as the thousands of rats struggle and burn.

The UCs don’t make me feel like Harrison Ford, but like the rats.

There are thousands of us, and we are all fighting to set the curve, to get the best letters of recommendation for graduate school, or to get the best job.

Sadly, I have some bad news. There is no hope.

Fight as hard as you like, and maybe you’ll end up among the tiny portion of the population that earns enough not to constantly worry. But almost certainly you won’t, because that percentage–those who feel safe–is small and it is constantly getting smaller.

On some level, we all know this. I could cite some statistics, but they’d just make us all sad and angry.

But maybe those emotions are good sometimes. Here is one set of numbers, there are about 18.4 million unoccupied homes in the United States–that is 1 out of every 9 homes is empty. Strange read alone, but here’s its companion: there are 1.6 million homeless.

That means that there are approximately 11 homes for every homeless person in the United States.

But the world out there–the world right here–is totally fucked. We all know that. We know that the so called recession never ended. We know that real wages for the bottom (bottom!) 90% of the United States have stayed the same for 40 years while healthcare and real estate have increased exorbitantly. We know that Europe is in crisis, that the middle east is in crisis, that asia is in crisis, that latin america is in crisis, that the united states are in crisis. We know all that because we are alive. We are living now. We are here at a time in which the whole world is falling apart!

We cannot go back to the way things were–not that things were all that good anyway. We are ensconced in a global economic system that even conservative economists like Nouriel Roubini, Samuel Brittan, and George Magnus have described as reaching a fundamental crisis.

We were always told that the economy will get better and we will get jobs. We will not get jobs. If we do get jobs they will almost certainly be poorly paying ones in the service sector, jobs that barely pay us enough for us to afford to pay back our student debt.

We will not get jobs, or if we do get jobs they will be crap, because we are ensconced in a global economic system (it has a name, it is called capitalism) that has reached its historical limit.

We will not get jobs because capitalism is in crisis. This crisis did not start today or in 2008, but in 1973.

The highest average profit in any industry since 1973 is lower that the lowest average profit in the period from 1946 to 1973. To this fundamental crisis–you can’t have capitalism if you can’t have profit–the response has been to generate debt. Massive amounts of debt.

Despite what you may think you know about China and India, the global unemployed has been growing–these are the people who will never in their life have a job and so they cannot buy things which means that people who make things can’t sell them and can’t make any profit. And so the economy has been fueled by debt.

The debt has been built up with credit cards, mortgages, and student loans, and then its been packaged up and sold off so bankers can sell it short or sell it long; hold it to term or get it off their books.

Debt was seemingly the most profitable product of the capitalist economy, until 2008.

But now this economy has been fueled by debts that WILL NEVER be paid back. I am not even talking about the $1 trillion student debt in this country. That is pocket change. I mean the $50 trillion that simply vanished in 2008 with the financial crisis.

Do you know why it vanished? Because it never really existed.

All that money never really existed. It could never have been paid back, but the economy needed it, because it needed to grow. Now it has outgrown itself and collapsed. We do not need to figure out how to abolish capitalism. Capitalism is destroying itself. However, it is, at the same time, also destroying the planet, it is also destroying us.

Things are not going to just get better. Because the jobs do not and will not exist; because the capitalist economy is broken; because global inequality is historic; because the environment is being destroyed. Pick your cause, they are all true. Things are not just going to get better.

The politicians won’t make things better if we vote more strategically–remember we elected progressives overwhelmingly in 2008. The bankers won’t make things better if we just move our money to credit unions–the only possible good of a credit union is its small size, a status necessarily ended when millions of protesters transfer their money to one. The capitalists–yes, I said capitalists–won’t make industry more fair or less polluting if we “vote with our dollars.”

Things are not going to get better. We must make them better.

All that I said above, those are facts. And facts are important. We have to know why we are here, and we have to know what are the challenges we face. But we are not only here because of all these facts.

For this reason, as a way to close, I want to talk about why I felt so sad for a long time and why I do not feel sad any longer.

I grew up in the South Bay, went to an alternative, public high school staffed with full time activists, and I hung out with older leftists all the time. All these people kept telling me about how my generation wasn’t as great as theirs; how their generation brought down Richard Nixon and stopped the war in Vietnam, but ours couldn’t even slow down George W. Bush or the War on Terror. I didn’t know if they had their history right, but I knew that they had the present right (they had the present right).Things have been getting progressively worse for the vast majority of the world’s population for a few decades in a row now. It has (it had) been a while since the People (and I mean the people just like those old school revolutionaries meant the People, with a capital “p”), it had been a while since We had a victory.

So I felt sad. And I felt lonely. I felt like there was not anyone else who knew what it felt like to yearn, yearn so deeply that you get a stomach ache, to yearn for a different society, a better society.

I felt like I was the only one left, because we kept on losing, and losing makes us act tough and distant. And losing makes us hard.

But I don’t feel sad any longer. I haven’t felt sad for nearly a year, it is coming up on January 5th my one year anniversary of happiness, it was the day after January 4th, the day after Mohamed Bouazizi died, the day that began the Tunisian revolution.

I don’t feel sad because I look to the middle east and I see my comrades, and they are winning. I don’t feel sad because I look to asia and I see my comrades; I look to latin america and I see my comrades; I look to europe, to greece, to spain, to france, to portugal, to britain, and I am filled with joy because everywhere I look I see my comrades; I am in the united states and I look north to canada to see my comrades, I look to occupy wall street and see my comrades, to occupy philadelphia, to occupy portland, to occupy davis, to occupy oakland, and everywhere and all the time I see my comrades.

And we are winning!

We are winning because Oakland is going broke trying to get rid of us. We are winning because we can shut down the biggest port on the west coast with no effort. We are winning because in one week we can organize 20,000 marchers to support the first general strike in the united states since 1946.

We are winning because last night New York City had to bring out the cops’ counter-terrorism squad to deal with unarmed protestors. And because New York City knows, just like UC Berkeley knows, just like Oakland knows, that cops may disperse the occupiers, but they can not stop the occupation from reconvening, from re-occupying.

We are winning because everywhere around the world the bankers, the cops, and the politicians are scared. They are offering us deals desperately trying to negotiate–to make things a little less unfair if only we’d stop.

BUT WE WILL NOT STOP!

We will not stop, because if we do not stop then we WILL win!