I am still jet-lagged, or is it a cold? I can’t tell. Whatever it is, I have not been up to par for the past few weeks. The trip to Europe, including visits with my daughter and her family in Paris and the seminar in Wroclaw, was more challenging than expected. Naomi, my wife and Deliberately Considered’s Art and Design Editor, and I slowed down in our posting. But now, we are back. I expect to regain my strength, and you, dear Deliberately Considered readers, can expect in the coming weeks more posts on Wroclaw and on American and global politics and culture. Here, today and tomorrow, my thoughts on OWS responding to the discussions at the Wroclaw seminar. -Jeff

The starting point of the Wroclaw Seminar was Occupy Wall Street. It then served as our primary case for comparative investigation throughout and informed our final conclusions. Seminar participants Pamela Brown and Sidney Rose suggested additional readings for the seminar when we focused on OWS — Rose on the link between Anonymous and OWS. She was particularly interested in the online pre-history of OWS. Brown, an Occupy activist, was focused on the present challenges and recent accomplishments of the movement.

Rose suggested a piece describing an embrace between Cornell West, the philosopher, social critic and activist, and Gregg Housh, a leading figure in the shadowy group, Anonymous, at an occupy demonstration in Boston. This informed our discussion about the virtual infrastructure that supported the embodied occupations. As we tried to understand what is special about the new “new social movements,” the interaction between virtual and the embodied was a topic we knew we needed to explore.

We discussed how events in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with virtual actions, led to Occupy Wall Street, and sparked a global social movement wildfire. Following the Arab Spring, OWS developed with an Adbusters initial proposal to occupy wall street on September 17, 2011 , supported by politicized hackers such as those associated with Anonymous. Suddenly, with a minimum of organizational planning, things changed. Thousands quickly made global connections. Governments fell. The economic order was challenged. A new power seemed to have emerged. Through the new and old media solid authority melted. The inevitable seemed vulnerable (Al Jazeera was crucial in the Middle East). Traditional autocrats were no longer secure. Economic plutocrats were fat targets for social outrage. Clearly the new media order contributed to this. Something very new had been brought into the world (i.e. Hannah Arendt’s idea of what politics can do).

While I think it is a mistake to consider these movements as having been created by the new media (“the Facebook revolutions”), it is hard to imagine their rapidly formed links and the coordination and organization of the movements without new media. Hierarchical organization, a command structure, a disciplined party organization and the like were no longer necessary. The “iron law of oligarchy” which Robert Michels analyzed in his classic study of social democratic parties , was made obsolete. Coordination could be and was more horizontally achieved. And many of the movements, OWS in particular, made this capacity a matter of principle. Decision through consensus promised to be not only an ideal: it was becoming also an operating reality.

Yet, this promise is not without peril, apparent in OWS and in many of the new “new social movements.” Without clear leadership, it is hard to know who actually speaks for the new “new social movements” and what their goals are. Those who live by the sword of new media may die by it. This is a primary challenge for the movements as they have attempted to go beyond their initial successes. Brown led us in our discussion of this issue.

It is one thing to observe that OWS changed the conversation. It is quite another to know what its enduring impact might be and to work for this.  For activists such as Brown, the challenge is to figure out what is to be done once major media attention is no longer there. She has been very engaged on the issue of student debt, a major American problem, and she is part of a group of OWS activists who believe that the debt issue is the one that will bring the movement forward, to make sure that OWS activists address the concerns of the 99% as  they speak in its name. She suggested that the group read a piece on a recent demonstration in N.Y. on this theme.  The article includes a link to an important article by Brown explaining the dimensions of the crisis: no less than the end of the American dream of upward social mobility.

I think this direction is quite promising. Deep debt is the tie that holds much of the 99% together, from usurious payday advances, to credit card debt, to mortgage foreclosures, to impossible student loans. I think this is a theme that can carry OWS forward. Our seminar participants were quite intrigued by the details, especially concerning the prohibitive costs of American higher education and the consequences of this. They found it particularly surprising when I revealed that I, as a full professor, was not at all confident that my children would be able to attend the universities of their own choosing because of the threat of deep debt. Somehow, we managed, but that was because of some good luck, including the good fortune of timing. It was ten years ago when things were bad, but not quite as bad as they are now.

Yet, there has been sharp criticism within OWS of the recent moves to focus on debt as the central issue of OWS. Tomorrow I will report on this and its implications for the public in the movement and for the broader public, and how both work on the broader task of reinventing American political culture. The challenge is that the mediated capacity that first led to the formation of the movement may be an obstacle to future concerted action.

Angry young Poles are protesting online and on the streets  in the biggest demonstrations since 1989. The pretext is the government’s signing of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which jeopardizes Internet freedom. But there are more reasons for our fury: a transition which has strengthened economic inequalities and lack of perspectives for the younger generation. As sociologist Adam Ostolski writes, “Life in Poland is getting harder, the privatization-by-stealth of health services and education is going on, the prices of municipal services and staple foods are rising. Poland is now the leading country in Europe in terms of non-permanent job contracts.” Hence social anger today. Are the protests changing into a civil society movement, a Solidarity 2.0? We hope that this defiant and militant mobilization will not exclude migrants and minorities. An optimistic sign is that alternative collectives (Rozbrat in Poznan and Tektura in Lublin) are at the forefront of these events where ordinary people in Poland are demanding their rights – at last.

Poland has transitioned from fake Communism (the unrealized Marxist ideal) to turbo capitalism-cum-fake Christianity, as a religion has been instrumentalized into political anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-foreigner hatred. The economic transformation is sold as a success story, but, in fact, the situation of many groups of the population has worsened. Social justice, an empty concept under East European “socialism,” has become a dirty phrase. It’s a taboo to pronounce it, let alone practice it. Poles have been Foucault’s docile bodies of commercialization and corporatization. Until today’s wrath.

Still, the political class here believes in discipline and profit – and prejudices.  The ACTA treaty was signed by the Polish government without social consultations. When the protests broke out, the first reaction of the leaders was to deny them. Later, head of the National Security Bureau, General Koziej, claimed that he wouldn’t exclude introducing emergency measures if the cyber attacks continued. When the Parliamentary Committee on Innovation was meeting to discuss ACTA, a Law and Justice (the rightist opposition party) lawmaker, Michal Suski, referred to black MP John Godson as a “little Negro” in another example of ugly racism in this country. Transphobia also occurred when MP Jan Dziedziczak called transgender parliamentarian Anna Grodzka “Pan”/“Mr”, a direct insult because she is a woman after having undergone transsexual surgery.

But some leading figures of public life have supported the protests. The legend of the Helsinki Foundation, Halina Bortnowska, and Poland’s first ombudsman, Ewa Letowska, said on Tok fm Radio that the government should listen to the protests. All across the country, in fifty cities and towns, mass demonstrations have taken place. In Cracow, 15,000, and in Poznan, 5,000 people took to the streets, convening in the medieval market square where anarchists were very active – Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper ran a lead article about the demo titled: “There hasn’t been such a demonstration in Poznan for years.”

At a rally in Lublin, an anarchist drum circle was attacked by the far righters with roots in Poland’s interwar anti-Semitism. Such extremist factions want to capitalize on the protests, but they are not at the heart of the events. Rather, it is Anonymous hacktivists and various leftist organizations who have taken hold. Originally, the Social Democratic Alliance was the only political party against ACTA, but now the self-styled “moral majority” Law and Justice party of Jaroslaw Kaczynski has attempted to co-opt this movement for its own designs. The MPs of the progressive Palikot Movement have now supported the protests, wearing the Guy Fawkes V masks in parliament, an international sign of dissent that is finally catching on in this country.

In fact, it is a popular movement – from below. A placard designed as a tombstone, “Liberty. Died Young 1989-2012,” attests to a failure of post-communist Poland. The determination of the protesters is evidenced in the strong language that has been used online and on the streets. In a demonstration in front of the newly-opened Warsaw’s National Stadium, a banner read: “Jestesmy wkurwieni”/“We’re fucking cross”/“We’re pissed off.”

Is this more than a fit of aggression? This is an open revolt, an expansion of action which had been at the margins of public life. Until now, Polish young people have expressed their social discontent in art as activism, the feminist and LGBT movement, and the Greens’ and Krytyka Polityczna milieu. Today, it is a societal protest against ACTA, but also against joblessness, low wages and rising costs. We also demand participation in democracy when the young feel powerless. Active civil society is awakening. Journalist Jacek Zakowski may have hyperbolized, “We are dealing with a historical change on a scale similar to the United States when slavery was abolished. Access to culture requires a similar emancipation.” Free expression in the Internet is indeed the young’s participation in culture – and in politics. The lack of debate on ACTA in Poland revealed an enormous gap between leadership and populace and what we called back then under real “socialism:” the arrogance of the authorities.

After 1989, the ideals of the dissident Workers’ Defense Committee and of the oppositionist theater movement were abandoned. What we want is broad social justice, self-organization of society (as in the anarchist streak in the pre-1989 opposition, diagnosed by David Ost). The aims in the anti-establishment alternative were participatory democracy, student movement, worker self-management, mutiny against marketization. Let’s continue this post-1968 pre-1989 anti-authoritarian project, as defined by Adam Michnik. As a transfer of power and wealth was made with the fall of “communism,” we lost social protection. Privatisation and commodification have alienated students and workers. The former Solidarity unionists have betrayed the labor issues and joined the economically liberal agenda and the morally illiberal one: an abortion ban and homophobia.

Solidarity has been destroyed by ultranationalism and, all in all, a majoritaritarian spirit. It has ignored or even denigrated minorities. This is where a dangerous concept was coined: “true Poles.”  A commentator has called the current protests “the most authentic citizens’ movement.” Citizens? Are minorities and migrants excluded again? The rising far right must not be part of the movement. We’ve had enough of business-suited skinheads in the leadership when the chauvinist League of Polish Families was in government.

The protests in Poland are a call to action. We all have a responsibility now. ACTA can restrict Internet openness, endanger generic pharmaceuticals and strengthen corporations – the unfair banality of post-modernism. And today’s outrage in Eastern Europe protests the brutality of post-communism.

I leave the party, and wander through the casinos. These hackers, they’re mostly Millenials. As I walk through the various game rooms, I see faces, gaunt, pale, and bleary-eyed, but excited, some old, but most as young, or even younger than “the kid” at the Xerobank party. They’re here, living like kings temporarily in Vegas, but few actually gamble anything — we all saw the news about the stock market today.

How many of these Millennials really have jobs? When they were still in school, they lived up to their moniker, and watched the world in which they grew up come to an end. For some, their coming-of-age came when they watched more than three-thousand people die, on live television, on September 11^th, 2001. Some fought the war. Others went to college. They saw their society torn apart by irrational ideologies on all sides. Whichever path they took, many Millenials found themselves, highly trained, with years of college or military service behind them, living back home with their parents, out of work, enjoying a far lower standard of living.

Is a mass technological movement like Anonymous really that surprising then, given the circumstances? Most of these hackers, who can afford to go to Vegas, seem to be successful. Most of them have managed to stay afloat by wits alone, riding the tech industry, or government service, which both continue to grow in defiance of the turbulence in other sectors of the economy. Despite this, more than a few of the down-and-out have managed to get to Vegas somehow, by road trip, or by spending months scraping together whatever they have. They sleep in cars, or on the conference floor, or in other people’s rooms, and share an identity based on hardship and civic engagement, however strange and threatening the mode of that civic engagement may appear.

For those Millenials less technically, and more violently inclined, there exist more extreme means of protest, the London Riots, or perhaps even the Arab Spring being a case in point. Can anyone really blame them, ripped from youth and into war and recession by what seem like indifferent older generations who have led the world astray?

As the turbines throttle up to one-hundred percent, the flaps retract, and I feel the G-forces push me into my seat. I watch Vegas disappear from the window of the plane. The perfect quadrangular geometry of the boulevards, and surrounding suburbs, artificially sustained squares of lush green, contrasting sharply the orange dust of the surrounding Mojave desert.

Have I found Anonymous? Lulsec? I mull the question over and over in my mind, as most of the other passengers click off their reading lights and attempt to sleep. I watch the canyons of Arizona, and the Rockies, and then the vast flat plains of the Midwest pass below. The kid was right. Anonymous is a faceless mass. I had gone looking for Anonymous in all the wrong places. I, like Siddartha, had journeyed to the ends of the earth, to find that I had been asking the wrong questions. On some level, we are all Anonymous. Whence goes the faceless mob, the stranger, the vague, and the poorly understood, there also goes Anonymous. The kid had been right, all along.