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Aug 22, 2013 Turkey
[Image via occupy.com] [Image via occupy.com]

Speaking of Resistance

By : Saygun Gökarıksel

“Everywhere is Taksim, everywhere resistance” is one of the most famous slogans of the popular uprising that emerged out of the Taksim Gezi park protests in Istanbul in May and June. Ironically, the 15 June police crackdown that violently pushed the protesters out of Gezi Park has given occasion to organize more elaborate “forums” and “people’s assemblies” in different public parks of Istanbul and other, predominantly western cities of Turkey.

Today many of these parks offer the much-needed space to speak, discuss, criticize, and organize cultural events (such as film screenings and photography exhibitions) around social issues to build a common political vocabulary and a sense of solidarity for thousands of protesters from all walks of life. However, the questions that often confront uprisings of such massive scale—where millions have taken to the streets for systemic changes, not for a cosmetic makeover—remain to be engaged. They are questions of political strategy and organization, such as how to sustain and expand the popular force of the uprising and transform it into a movement that will produce lasting revolutionary effects, and what is the role of the forums in this regard.

Today these questions are of particular relevance, as the Gezi Resistance currently continues largely in the shape of forums and yet draws much less attention from the domestic or international media. No spectacular police brutality, no media coverage.

Henri Lefebvre, in his brilliant analysis on Paris ’68 in The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval, observed that the protests prompted an ecstatic proliferation of words: words that had never been spoken before. It was a moment of joyful creativity, of thinking the unthinkable. It was an eruption, which no one really expected or knew how to handle (which is not to say that the protests had not been the culmination of concrete historical struggles). Yet the protests were also marked by the problem of lack of communication between different neighborhoods of the city, especially between its core and peripheries.

Certainly, Istanbul ’13, if we can call it this way for the moment, is not Paris ’68, but likewise, it is an eruption of the unforeseen and has been facing a similar problem of communication. In fact, forums were formed exactly to tackle this problem.

Even if each forum gradually has developed its own agenda and rhythm, forums also share a number of topics of discussion and come up with a similar organizational framework. If the uprising has been inspired by the recent student or youth movements of Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Egypt, and to some extent the US, it is no coincidence that horizontalist organization and direct democracy ideas have also enjoyed much currency in the forums.

After the police occupation of Gezi Park to restore “public order,” decentralization of the protests in the form of forums seemed inevitable. But even when the protesters occupied Gezi Park for fifteen days in early June, there were attempts at self-management through forming collectives and volunteer groups. Among other groups, “Müşterekler” (Commons) played a notable role in organizing a free medical center, food center, and library, as well as workshops and activities that aimed to produce a database of oral testimonies and visual records of the protests and police violence.

Different groups set up tents that specialized in specific activities. For instance, film industry workers collected footage of protests and held meetings with well known actors for publicity; “socialist feminists” erased sexist slogans from walls; those associated with the Kurdish movement held discussions about the future of the “peace process” with the Turkish government; and some others held discussions that focused on the social costs of urban redevelopment plans driven by the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) government, as well as the commodification of the environment, the financialization of the economy, precarious labor, and enclosures.

Thousands of people—anarchists, socialists, communists, trade unionists, feminists, members of the LGBT community, “anti-capitalist Muslims,” Kurdish movement representatives, soccer fans, and nationalist-secularists—stood up together almost miraculously against the increasingly authoritarian, populist, conservative neoliberalism represented by the AKP.

And for a moment, the divisions and conflicts seemed to be transcended in Gezi Park against the common enemy. However, this does not mean that they had been erased or condoned peacefully. Indeed, the government has been doing its best to exploit the divisions along the familiar line of “Turkish vs. Kurdish” and “Muslim vs. secular.” In order to isolate the protesters, the government called them “vandals” (çapulcu), “marginals,” or agents of an international conspiracy. Many liberal or neoliberal analysts and armchair sociologists highlighted the “middle class character” of the protests to say that they lacked and will never have any popular appeal or potential or that they are friendly products of the so-called economic boom—as if the protests were simply about some cosmopolitan demands of the “rich," i.e. white-collar workers, who had no worries about their precarious life “indebted” to the speculative credit economy and foreign capital-driven financialization promoted by the neoliberal policies of the AKP. This middle class characterization conveniently neglected the fact that the protests have drawn many people from different low-income neighborhoods (such as Tarlabaşı and Gazi), from the peripheries that have been politically very engaged over many years.  

It is against this background that the forums are organized. While it is not possible to know precisely the number of forums or the content of all discussions, one may estimate that there are about seventy forums across different cities of Turkey—with more than thirty happening in Istanbul alone. The fact that no single individual, organization, or institution (including the state) can say what is happening has been the strength of the protests.

This explains the hundreds of arbitrary, and targeted, arrests and detentions made by the police during the heat of the protests and their aftermath until today. Organized in public parks, most forums were initially preoccupied with police violence. They provided a platform for people to share their personal experiences of violence and incidents of police attack; organize marches to demonstrate against illegal detentions and unaccountable police murders; suggest self-defense strategies against possible attacks; and inform about what has been happening in other forums or urban fronts of the struggle.

At least, this is what I observed in some of the Istanbul forums I attended, two of the most popular forums being organized in Abbasağa Park (Beşiktaş) and Yoğurtçu Park (Kadıköy). Here, people formed a huge circle, in the center of which those who wanted to speak lined up for two- to five-minute talking slots. The forum participants listened and gave feedback (their approval, reservations, etc.) through a sign language that is familiar to anyone who saw the Occupy Wall Street assemblies in New York City.

In some forums, more specialized speakers (lawyers, doctors, journalists) were invited to give presentations focusing on different situations, such as what to do when arrested or detained by the police, especially in cases of sexual harassment, or how to form alternative media that could work outside the hegemonic capital-state alliance—which, as we have seen, caused the unbreakable silence of the Turkish media about the protests.

During Ramadan, “anti-capitalist Muslims” organized “Iftar of the Earth” (a fast-breaking dinner) in different forums, which strongly contrasted with the extravagant dinners sponsored by the government. The 28 July iftar organized in Taksim, which brought together anti-capitalist muslims and leftist groups (especially Halkların Demokratik Kongresi [People’s Democratic Congress]), was attacked by the police with tear gas and water cannons, as Gezi Park was once again closed to the public.

Increasingly, the forums also have engaged with questions such as how to develop counter-strategies against the government’s systemic and ruthless denunciation of the protesters, and how to spread the word of resistance to more conservative neighborhoods that did not support the uprising, and which were provoked by the government to oppose the protests. Is it a good idea to invite the AKP’s grassroots or other religious-conservative groups to the forums? If so, how to do it? And how to “form a dialogue” with those people if they ever show up?

These questions have demanded a certain urgency, as a few Istanbul forums had already been attacked by “civilians” (it is still not clear if they were undercover police officers) with long knives and machetes. However, there are also other urgent questions concerning the divisions among the protesters, such as how to prevent the seizing of the protests by rightwing secularist-nationalists, or their political utilization by the already-existing nationalist People’s Republican Party (CHP), the main opposition party in the parliament. What are the chances of forming a genuine collective will, which could operate beyond the political field dominated by the existing political parties, and would aim to transform the existing political-economic system? How to think of the political movement or the space of political action beyond the urgencies dictated by “electoral democracy,” without becoming a system-friendly “civil society” organization?

Currently, there is no major political party that corresponds to the eruption caused by the uprising. Almost all political parties deeply absorbed by the rules of parliamentary democracy have lagged behind the courage and creativity of the popular protests, in which millions took the streets.

The AKP has been constantly claiming to represent the people by invoking its recent electoral successes—in an election system where the threshold to enter the parliament is ten percent of the national vote, eliminating the chances for minority parties—as if democracy ends with the ballot box. With local elections looming in March 2014, the pressure to reduce political action to electoral campaigning—and arresting it within the existing system—will continue to be felt. This has also started to instigate alienating competition and conflict between the CHP and the leftist groups, which have constituted the main thrust of the protests (coloring its anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian vision) in spite of their small numbers.

Yet my recent experience in Istanbul forums, including the recently emerged Gezi Park forum, suggests that many protesters are well aware of these problems. Devising local committees and working groups, they have been searching for ways to develop a new political language and engage creatively in social problems, especially those of the urban poor under the threat of eviction by redevelopment projects. Focusing on concrete problems in particular neighborhoods seems to help bypass a top-down understanding of politics while enabling people to deal more effectively with the relevant systemic problems. This then would be combined with constructive engagement with issues of particular historical importance at this conjuncture, such as the “peace process” between the Kurdish movement and Turkish government (including the Roboski massacre and the war in Rojava) and perhaps more important, the socialization of peace beyond the “negotiations” that take place behind the doors.

The aim is more than “winning an election” in the next two years under the sign of one existing party or another. It is no less than planting the seeds of a future people’s democracy, which will require a thorough transformation of the existing class relations of power and hierarchies constituted by a patriarchal homophobic neoliberal capitalism. “This is just a beginning, we keep struggling,” as the powerful slogan of the Gezi Resistance says.

[An earlier version of this article was published on occupy.com on 12 August 2013; the original version can be found here. It was published in collaboration with Res Publica Nowa in Warsaw.]
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]