Video Interview on Hurricane Katrina

Jennifer Martinez, who's affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, did a video interview with me prior to my talk there in December. In the interview I discuss the outlines of my Katrina paper, which on this occasion I put in the context of Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which I blogged about here and here.

Comments

[Chris]

Nice interview. I'm, of course, sympathetic with the general perspective you're working in. It's a perspective that many would associate with the Left side of the political spectrum. However, I wonder if a political perspective that emphasizes 'self-organizing forms of solidarity' (e.g. like the rescue efforts after Katrina you mention) and promotes opportunities for self-organization/experimentation might lead to some political conclusions that are not typically associated with the Left. I'm wondering about issues like security and gun control. What are the implications of this political point of view for issues like them?

It seems to me that it might imply a robust stance against gun control so as to promote or at least allow for what we might call 'self-organizing security.' I can certainly see how this kind of thing could go bad or every very, very bad and give rise to the sort of "microfascism" D&G warn about. Perhaps the xenophobia I always worry about in regard to things like the Minute Man Project would be an example of it turning out bad. But, I don't see how this perspective necessarily leads to the usual Lefty positions on things like gun control. If I recall correctly after Katrina some folks did their own security thing (i.e. the guarded their homes with their guns). It would be interesting if there were examples of groups of people organizing their own security just as we saw examples of self-organizing rescue operations instead of just individuals guarding their own homes.

[John Protevi]

Hi Chris, there are a lot of things to say here, about left anarchism and all sorts of things. I don't think I'm a left anarchist: the principle I'm working with is that government can be the organized expression of self-organizing collectivity (the "multitude" to use Hardt and Negri's term). The key is "can be." We'd have to then establish the principles of legitimacy for government to be such an expression (rather than being, say, the expression of class interest -- "class" here is shorthand for all sorts of New Left concerns: old fashioned class AND race, gender, etc.).

As for gun control, you couldn't predict, I don't think, what a people would do if it were self-governing. If we assume, which I think is safe to do, that the current US government is the expression of class interest rather than the organized expression of a self-organizing multitude, then the question of what to do about gun control now is complicated by questions of corporate power (the NRA as the arms manufacturers' lobby masquerading as a citizens group ("Astroturf" as opposed to "grassroots"), minority community resistance ("by any means necessary"), by questions of atomized predation ("black-on-black" violence), by interracial antagonism ("black vs brown" violence), and so on.

With regard to guns and Katrina, you'd have to first remember that the helicopter shooting was a completely unfounded rumor. You'd then have to add to the "gangsters taking over" narrative the possibility of some NOPD-initiated violence and resistance to that, as well as the ability of rich Uptown people to hire Blackwater mercs. A corporate army like Blackwater is pretty far away from self-organized community defense.

Then of course there is the allied question of the US role in the global arms trade, the arms used by all the sides in Iraq which tap into that global arms trade, and to complete the circle, the depletion of the LA National Guard by its deployment in Iraq: state vs federal as one scale in the central vs decentralized problematic.