Occupation as Political Form

Occupation as Political Form

by Jodi Dean

Thursday, April 12th, 2012 at 5:11 pm.

Top: Transmediale 2012 programme image; Bottom: Transmediale 2012 programme image (processed); Credit: Rosa Menkman

Editor’s Note: Jodi Dean presented the following text as a keynote lecture for the 2012 iteration of Transmediale, an annual new media festival in Berlin. The theme of the 2012 festival was “In/compatibility…the condition that arises when things do not work together.” The section of the festival at which the author presented was titled “Incompatible Publics.” ¹ The discussion that followed Dean’s lecture was moderated by Krystian Woznicki² —the text of the discussion is included below. –MW

 

I’m going to talk today about Occupy Wall Street in light of our theme of incompatible publics. I claim that the occupation is best understood as a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people. To call it a political form is to say that it is configured within a particular social-historical setting. To call it a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people is to say that it has a fundamental content and that this content consists in the failure of capitalism to provide an economic system adequate to the capacities, needs, demands, and general will of the people. More bluntly put, to think about the Occupy movement in light of the idea of incompatible publics is to locate the truth of the movement in class struggle (and thus reject interpretations of the movement that highlight multiplicity, democracy, and anarchism—autonomism). So that’s what I hope to convince you of today.

Occupation is best understood as a political form of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people.

The movement opened up by Occupy Wall Street is the most exciting event on the US political left since 1968—it’s like, my god, finally we can breathe, finally there is an opening, a possibility of organized mass political action. As in 1968, the current movement extends globally, encompasses multiple grievances, and is being met by violent police responses. From Egypt to New York, Spain to Oakland, hundreds of thousands of people have responded to capitalist dispossession by taking space, occupying sites that, ostensibly open and public, the process of occupation reveals to be closed to the many and belonging to the few.  Also as in 1968, an economic wrong, the wrong of capitalism, is at the core of the political rupture. Recall that in May ‘68, a general strike shut down the French economy. Students occupied the Sorbonne and workers occupied factories. In September 2011, protesters in New York occupied Wall Street. They were inspired by revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the February occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol, and the 15 May movement of the squares in Spain (as well as by the occupation movements that in recent years have accompanied protests over cutbacks in education and increases in university tuition in California, New York, and the UK).

 

What mattered, and what opened up a new space of political possibility in the US, was that people were finally waking up to the ultimate incompatibility between capitalism and the people.

That Wall Street was actually the nearby privately owned Zuccotti Park didn’t really matter. What mattered, and what opened up a new space of political possibility in the US, was that people were finally waking up to the ultimate incompatibility between capitalism and the people—after forty years of neoliberalism’s assault on the working and middle class and after a decade of rapacious class warfare in which the top one percent saw an income increase of 275% (their share of the national income more than doubling) while most of the rest of the country saw an income increase of roughly 1% a year. Instead of continuing in the fantasy that “what’s good for Wall Street, is good for Main Street,” the occupation claimed the division between Wall Street and Main Street and named this division as a fundamental wrong, the wrong of inequality, exploitation, and theft.

 

The daily activities of occupiers strove to bring into being new practices of sociality, new ways of living together, ways no longer coordinated by the capital but by discussion, mutuality, and consensus.

Occupy Wall Street’s staging of the incompatibility between capitalism and the people was visible, material, and practical. Visibly, urban camping brought to the heart of New York’s financial district the reality of dispossession. It forced Wall Street to look homelessness in the face, both the homelessness of the New Yorkers that the city had been trying to repress, hide, and disperse and that of those across the country who had been evicted in the foreclosure crisis and left to dwell in make shift tent cities reminiscent of shanty towns and Hoovervilles of the Depression. Materially, the presence of people crowded into places where capitalism has determined they don’t belong was manifest in the array of physical needs impressing and expressing themselves in Zuccotti park—the absence of public toilets and showers, the impermissibility of gas-run generators, open flames for cooking, and the illegality of tents resulted in a series of issues encapsulated in the media under the headings public health, filth, and disease. Practically, Occupy Wall Street—and the police reaction to it—led to the proliferation of police barriers all over downtown Manhattan. Even more important, the daily activities of occupiers strove to bring into being new practices of sociality, new ways of living together, ways no longer coordinated by the capital but by discussion, mutuality, and consensus. Not surprisingly, in the course of these practical engagements, new incompatibilities emerged and were only beginning to be addressed when Zuccotti Park was evicted.

 

The movement’s early slogan, “We are the 99 Percent,” quickly went viral. It spread in part because of the Tumblr collection of images and testimonials to the hardships of debt, foreclosure, and unemployment, a “coming out” of the closet imposed by the conceit that everyone is middle class, everyone is successful. Conservative politicians bristled with indignation at what they depicted as the unfairness of the many who were now refusing to accept the one percent’s seizure of an outrageously unfair portion of the common product. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney scolded what he called the “politics of envy.” These privileged carriers of the 99 versus the 1 percent meme couldn’t quite grasp the change in the situation, the shift in the status quo whereby people no longer believed the myths that “greed is good” and “inequality benefits everyone.” They attempted to turn the issue around, making themselves into victims of exclusion and invective, as if the 99% were the criminals, as if our primary condition had been mutually compatible until some malcontents started to cause trouble, as if class war were a new rather than constitutive incompatibility between those who need to work to live and those who have enough capital not to. A fortunate effect of this tactic was the continued accentuation of class division—as a recent poll from the Pew Foundation found, 66% of Americans think that divisions between rich and poor are strong or very strong, an increase of 19% since 2009. Not only is this view held in every demographic category but more people think that class division is the principle social division than they do any other division.

In the setting of an occupied Wall Street, this “we” is a class, one of two opposed and hostile classes, those who have and control wealth, and those who do not.

The slogan “We are the 99%” highlights the division between the wealth of the top 1% and the rest of us. Mobilizing the gap between the 1% with nearly half the country’s wealth and the other 99% with the rest of it, the slogan asserts a collectivity. It does not unify this collectivity under a substantial identity—race, ethnicity, religion, nationality. Nor does it proceed as if there were some kind of generic and unified public. It rejects the fantasy of a unified, non-antagonistic public to assert the “we” of a divided people, the people divided between expropriators and expropriated. In the setting of an occupied Wall Street, this “we” is a class, one of two opposed and hostile classes, those who have and control wealth, and those who do not.

 

The assertion of a numerical difference as a political difference, that is to say, the politicization of a statistic, expresses capitalism’s reliance on fundamental inequality—“we” can never all be counted as the top 1%. Thus, the announcement that “We are the 99%” names an appropriation, a wrong. In so doing, it voices as well a collective desire for equality and justice, for a change in the conditions through which one percent seizes the bulk of collective wealth for themselves, leaving 99% with the remainder.

“We are the 99%” also effaces the multiplicity of individuated, partial, and divided interests that fragment and weaken the people as the rest of us. The count dis-individualizes interest and desire, reconfiguring both into a common form. Against capital’s constant attempts to pulverize and decompose the collective people, the claim of the 99% responds with the force of a belonging that not only cannot be erased but that capital’s own methods of accounting produce: as capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging. Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectivation of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as a divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.

“Tactics as brand” neglects the way occupation is a form that organizes the incompatibility of capitalism with the people and emphasizes instead a flexibility and adaptability already fully compatible with capitalism.

Admittedly, the occupiers of Wall Street, and the thousand other cities around the world with occupations of their own, have not reached a consensus around communism (as if communism could even name a consensus). The movement brings together a variety of groups and tendencies—not all of them compatible. Many in the movement see that as Occupy’s strength. They see Occupy as an umbrella movement capable of including a multiplicity of interests and tendencies. For them, “occupy” serves as a kind of political or even post-political open source brand that anyone can use. Because occupation is a tactic that galvanizes enthusiasm, they suggest, it can affectively connect a range of incompatible political positions, basically working around fundamental gaps, divisions, and differences. The mistake here is not only in the effort to ignore multiple incompatibilities; it is also, and more importantly in the evasion of the real antagonism that matters, the one that connects the movement to its setting—class struggle. “Tactics as brand” neglects the way occupation is a form that organizes the incompatibility of capitalism with the people and emphasizes instead a flexibility and adaptability already fully compatible with capitalism. I’ll say a little more about this.

 

Reduced to “tactic as brand” or “tactic as generator of affective attachment,” occupation responds in terms of communicative capitalism’s ideology of publicity.  Communicative capitalism announces the convergence of democracy and capitalism in networked communication technologies that promise access and equality, enjoin participation, and celebrate creative engagement.  Occupation understood as a tactic of political branding accepts that promise and demonstrates its failure. Communicative capitalism promises access? To whom and where? It promises access to everyone everywhere but really means to enhance and enable capital’s access to everything everywhere. The Occupy movement demonstrates this by occupying spaces that are ostensibly public but practically open only to capital; the 99% don’t really belong. Similarly, communicative capitalism promises participation—but that really means personalization; better to do as an individual before a screen and not a mass behind a barricade. And, communicative capitalism promises creative engagement—but that really means user-generated spectacular content that can be monetized and marketed, not collective political appropriation in a project of resistance. So the Occupy movement accepts the promises of communicative capitalism and demonstrates the contradictory truth underlying then. The resulting disturbance—pepper spray, riot gear, eviction—reveals the incompatibility at communicative capitalism’s heart.

At this point, the tactic of occupation is compatible with the system it ostensibly rejects.

Yet these demonstrations of contradiction rest uneasily against the acceptance of the promises of communicative capitalism. Like communicative capitalism, the movement also valorizes participation, creative engagement, and accessibility. One of the ideological features of “tactics as brand” is the idea that Occupy is an idea, practice, term accessible to anyone. And then there is equality. In the circuits of communicative capitalism, the only equality is that of any utterance, any contribution to the flow, whether it’s a critique of economic austerity of a video of baby kittens. Here, too, the movement can get reabsorbed as ever more informational and affective content, something which may appear on one’s screen, and be felt as good or bad before an image of the next thing pops up. At this point, the tactic of occupation is compatible with the system it ostensibly rejects. The same holds for the movement’s rhetorical and ideological emphases on plurality and inclusivity. They merge seamlessly into communicative capitalism and thereby efface the economic crisis at the movement’s heart. It’s already the case that there are multiple ideas and opportunities circulating on the internet. It’s already the case that people can hold events, form digital groups, and carry out discussions. People can even assemble in tents on the sidewalks—as long as they are in line for event tickets or a big sale at Wal-Mart. Communicative capitalism is an open, mutable field. That aspect of the movement—inclusivity—isn’t new or different. It’s a component of Occupy that is fully compatible with the movement’s setting in communicative capitalism. What’s new (at least in the last thirty years) is the organized collective opposition to the capitalist expropriation. Particularly in the face of the multiple evictions and massive police response to the occupations, the movement faces the challenge of keeping present and real the gap, the incompatibility, between occupation and the ordinary media practices and individualized acts of resistance that already comprise the faux-opposition encouraged in everyday life.

Occupation installs practical unity where there was fragmentation, collectivity where there was individualism, and division where there was the amorphous imaginary of the public.

Thus, it is necessary to consider the gap between occupation and its politicization, that is to say, between occupation as a tactic and occupation as a form operating in a determined setting.  The political form of occupation for us depends on its fundamental, substantial component of class struggle as what connects it to its social setting. In this setting, occupation installs practical unity where there was fragmentation, collectivity where there was individualism, and division where there was the amorphous imaginary of the public.

 

As the occupation movement unfolded in the US during the fall of 2011, it was clear that the occupiers were a self-selected vanguard, establishing and maintaining a continuity that enabled broader numbers of people to join in the work of the movement. Into a field more generally configured around convenience, ease of use, and individual preference—a field noted more for “clictivism” than any more strenuous or exacting kind of politics, occupation installs demanding processes through which protesters select and discipline themselves—not everyone can devote all their time to the revolution. Most activists affiliated with a specific occupation didn’t occupy all the time. Some would sleep at the site and then go to their day jobs or schools. Others would sleep elsewhere and occupy during the day and evening. Still others would come for the frequent, multiple hour-long General Assemblies. Nonetheless, occupation involved people completely, as Lukacs would say “with the whole of their personality.” As the occupations persisted over weeks and months, people joined in different capacities—facilitation, legal, technology, media, medical, food, community relations, education, direct action—participating in time-intensive working groups and support activities that involved them in the movement even as they weren’t occupying a space directly.

Providing a common form that no one could ignore, it drew a line: are you with or against occupation?

The continuity of occupation has been a potent remedy to the fragmentation, localism, and transitoriness of contemporary left politics. Occupation unites and disciplines via local, self-organized, assemblies. This “unity” has not meant accord with a “party line” or set of shared demands or common principles. Rather, it’s “practical unity” as an effect of the conscious sharing of an organizational form. Unity, then, is an affiliation around and in terms of the practice of occupation. One of the most significant achievements of Occupy Wall Street in its first two months was the change in the shape of the left. Providing a common form that no one could ignore, it drew a line: are you with or against occupation?

 

Protest requires living bodies in the streets.

Given the collapse of the institutional space of left politics in the wake of the decline of unions and the left’s fragmentation into issues and identities, occupation asserts a much needed and heretofore absent common ground from which to join in struggle. In dramatic contrast to communicative capitalism’s promise of easy action, of a politics of pointing and clicking and linking and forwarding, Occupy Wall Street says No! It’s not so easy. You can’t change the world isolated behind your screen. You have to show up, work together, and collectively confront the capitalist class. Protest requires living bodies in the streets.

 

Virtually any place can be occupied. Part of the affective pleasure of the movement in its initial weeks was the blooming of ever more occupations. The spread of the form spoke to the salience of its issues. Without any coordination from the top, without a national organization of any kind, people asserted themselves politically by adopting occupation as the form for political protest, occupying parks, sidewalks, corners, and squares (although not a state capitol as had been done during the Wisconsin protests at the beginning of 2011). Yet more than political symbolism, the fact that occupation could be adopted in myriad, disparate settings meant that multiple groups of people quickly trained themselves in a variety of aspects of political work. They learned specific local legal codes and shared tactical knowledge of how to manage media and police. Occupation let them develop and share new capacities.

So, duration and adoptability are key benefits of the occupation form. In contrast with the event-oriented alter-globalization movement, occupation establishes a fixed political site as a base for operations. A more durable politics emerges as the claiming of a space for an indeterminate amount of time breaks with the transience of contemporary media culture. People have the opportunity to be more than spectators. After learning of an occupation, they can join. The event isn’t over; it hasn’t gone away. Implying a kind of permanence, occupation is ongoing. People are in it till “this thing is done”—until the basic practices of society, of the world, have been remade. This benefit, however, is also a drawback. Since occupations are neither economically self-sustaining nor chosen tactically as sites from which to expand on the ground (block by block, say, until a city is taken), built into their form is a problem of scale.

Duration and adoptability are key benefits of the occupation form.

In addition to these two attributes of occupation as a form, some of the decisions taken in the initial weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement added to its ability to establish and maintain continuity. Prior to the September 17, 2011 action, activists from New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts and the artist group 16 Beaver met together to plan the event. The consensus-based approach to collective decisions in meetings called “General Assemblies” was adopted at this time (it had already been a component of the 15 May movement in Spain). Subsequent occupations followed New York’s lead, calling their meetings “General Assemblies” and basing decisions on consensus. Consensus let the movement claim an inclusivity missing from mainstream politics in that everything had to be agreed to by everyone. Participants were doing more than giving money or signing petitions—they were making decisions on the most fundamental concerns of the movement. The emphasis on consensus also meant that no group or position was excluded from the outset. Breaking with tendencies toward the specification of issues and identities, the movement worked to combine voices so as to amplify their oppositional political force. More superficially, but no less importantly, the hand-signals used to guide discussions toward consensus—upturned hands with twinkling fingers to signal assent; cross-arms to block—became a marker and practice of belonging to the movement. Common slogans, especially “We are the 99%”, also linked disparate occupations together into a common movement.

 

Three primary efforts to eliminate the incompatibility of Occupy with the status quo: democratization, moralization, and individualization.

Maintaining and extending this collectivity, this practical unity incompatible with communicative capitalism, has been and remains a challenge, perhaps the biggest challenge the movement faces. Counter-revolutionary tendencies work with all their might to close or conceal the gap of collective desire for collectivity, for collective approaches to common concerns with production, distribution, and stewardship of common resources. In the first days of Occupy Wall Street, the mainstream media tried to ignore the movement. After the movement was impossible to ignore, after the protesters had demonstrated determination and the police had reacted with orange containment nets and pepper spray, other efforts to efface the fundamental division opened up by Occupy Wall Street emerged. These continue to try to make the movement fully compatible with politics as usual and thus un-threatening to business as usual. They work to reabsorb the movement into familiar functionality and convenient dis-functionality, and thereby fill-in or occlude the gap the movement installs. I’ll mention three primary efforts to eliminate the incompatibility of Occupy with the status quo: democratization, moralization, and individualization.

 

I use “democratization” to designate attempts to frame the movement in terms of American electoral politics. One of the most common democratizing moves has been to treat Occupy Wall Street as the Tea Party of the left. So construed, the movement isn’t something radically new; it’s derivative. The Tea Party has already been there and done that. Of course, this analogy fails to acknowledge that the Tea Party is astro-turf, organized by Dick Armey and funded by the Koch brothers. A further democratizing move immediately reduces the significance of the movement to elections: what does Occupy Wall Street mean for Obama? Does it strengthen the Democratic Party? Will it pull it back toward the center? This democratizing move omits the obvious question: if it were about Obama and the Democratic Party, it would be about Obama and the Democratic Party—not marches, strikes, occupations, and arrests.

A related democratization advises the movement to pursue any number of legislative paths, suggesting that it seek a Constitutional Amendment denying corporations personhood, change campaign finance laws, abolish the electoral college and the Federal Reserve. The oddness of these suggestions, the way they attempt to make the movement something it is not, to make it functional for the system we have, appears as soon as one recalls the primary tactic of struggle: occupying, that is, sleeping out of doors, in tents, in urban spaces. In New York, protesters were sleeping in the inhospitable financial district, outside in a privately owned park, attempting to reach consensus on a wide range of issues affecting their daily life together: what sort of coffee to serve, how to keep the park clean, how to keep people warm and dry, what to do about the drummers, how to spend the money that comes in to support the movement, what the best ways to organize discussions are, and so on. The language of democratization skips the actual fact of occupation, reformatting the movement in terms of a functional political system and then adapting the movement so that it fits this system. The problem with this way of thinking is that if the system were functional, people wouldn’t be occupying all over the country—not to mention the world for, indeed, an additional effect of the democratic reduction is to reduce a global practice and movement against capitalism into US-specific concerns with some dysfunction in our electoral system.

Occupation is not a democratic strategy; it is a militant, divisive tactic that expresses the fundamental division on which capitalism depends.

Finally, an additional democratization begins from the assumption that the movement is essentially a democratic one, that its tactics and concerns are focused on the democratic process. From this assumption democratization raises a critique of the movement: occupation actually isn’t democratic and so the protesters are in some sort of performative contradiction; they are incompatible with the democratic public because they are actively rejecting democratic institutions, breaking the law, disrupting public space, squandering public resources (police overtime can get expensive) and attempting to assert the will of a minority of vocal protesters outside of and in contradiction to democratic procedures. This line of argument has the benefit of exposing the incoherence in the more general democratization argument: occupation is not a democratic strategy; it is a militant, divisive tactic that expresses the fundamental division on which capitalism depends.

 

The second mode of division’s erasure, the second attempt to eliminate incompatibility between Occupy and the generic politics of a generic public, is moralization. Myriad politicians and commentators seek and have sought to treat the success of Occupy Wall Street in exclusively moral terms. For these commentators, the true contribution of the movement is moral, a transformation of the common sense of what is just and what is unjust. This line of commentary emphasizes greed and corruption, commending the movement for opening our eyes to the need to get things in order, to clean house.

Moralization…proceeds as if the division Occupy Wall Street reveals and claims were a kind of infection to be cured rather than a fundamental antagonism that has been repressed.

What’s the problem here? The problem is that moralization occludes division as it remains stuck in a depoliticizing liberal formula of ethics and economics. It presumes that it can work around the incompatibility of the movement with capitalist democracy by ignoring the fundamental antagonism of class struggle. Rather than acknowledging the failure of the capitalist system, the contemporary collapse of its neoliberal form and the contradictions that are demolishing capitalism from within (global debt crises, unsustainable patterns of consumption, climate change, the impossibility of continued accumulation at the rate necessary for capitalist growth, mass unemployment and unrest), moralization proceeds as if a couple of bad apples—a Bernie Madoff here, a rogue trader there—let their greed get out of control. It then extends this idea of corruption (rather than systemic failure), blaming the “culture of Wall Street” or even the consumerism of the entire country, as if the United States were a whole and as a whole needed some kind of spiritual cleansing and renewal. In short, moralization treats Occupy Wall Street as a populist movement, mediating it in populist terms of a whole people engaging in the ritual of repentance, renewal, and reform. It proceeds as if the division Occupy Wall Street reveals and claims were a kind of infection to be cured rather than a fundamental antagonism that has been repressed.

An emphasis on individual choice denies the movement’s collectivity.

The third attempt to eliminate the gap of incompatibility comes from individualization. Here an emphasis on individual choice denies the movement’s collectivity. So on the one hand there is an eclectic, menu-like presentation of multiple issues. Occupiers, protesters, and supporters are rendered as non-partisan individuals cherry-picking their concerns and exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. On the other hand there are the practices and tenets of the movement itself, particularly as it has been enacted in New York: decisions must be reached by consensus, no one can speak for another, each person has to be affirmed as freely and autonomously supporting whatever the GA undertakes. In each case, individualism not only supercedes collectivity, but it also effaces the rupture between the occupation and US culture more generally, a culture that celebrates and cultivates individuality and personalization. Given that the strength of Occupy Wall Street draws from collectivity, from the experience of groups coming together to occupy and protest, an experience amplified by the People’s Mic (the practice of collectively repeating the words of a speaker so that everyone can hear them), to emphasize individuality is to disavow the common at the heart of the movement. It reinserts the movement within the dominant culture, as if occupation were a choice like any other, as if choices weren’t themselves fantasies that individuals actually could determine their own lives or make a political difference in the context of the capitalist system and the class power of the top one percent.

Democratization, moralization, and individualization attempt to restore a fantastic unity or cohesive public where Occupy Wall Street asserts a fundamental division, the incompatibility between capitalism and the people. Whether as a democratic political system, a moral community, or the multiplicity of individuals, this fantasy is one that denies the antagonism on which capitalism relies: between those who have to sell their labor power to survive and those who do not, between those who not only have no choice but to sell their labor power but nonetheless cannot, because there are no buyers, or who cannot for wages capable of sustaining them, because there’s no such opportunity, and those who command, steer, and gamble upon the resources, fortunes, and futures of the rest of us for their own enjoyment.

The three modes of disavowing division miss the power of occupation as a form that asserts a gap by forcing a presence.

The three modes of disavowing division miss the power of occupation as a form that asserts a gap by forcing a presence. This forcing is more than simply of people into places where they do not belong (even when they may ostensibly have a right). It’s a forcing of collectivity over individualism, the combined power of a group that disrupts a space readily accommodating of individuals. Such a forcing thereby puts in stark relief the conceit of a political arrangement that claims to represent a people that cannot be present, a divided people who, when present, instill such fear and insecurity that they have to be met by armed police and miles of barricades. It asserts the class division prior to and unremedied by democracy under capitalism. The incompatibility is fundamental, constitutive.

 

Instead of locating the crime of capitalism, its excesses and exploitation, primarily in the factory, it highlights the pervasive, intensive and extensive range of capitalist expropriation of lives and futures.

For all its talk, then, of horizontality, autonomy, and decentralized process, the Occupy movement is re-centering the economy, engaging in class warfare without naming the working class as one of two great hostile forces but instead by presenting capitalism as a wrong against the people. Instead of locating the crime of capitalism, its excesses and exploitation, primarily in the factory, it highlights the pervasive, intensive and extensive range of capitalist expropriation of lives and futures. As David Harvey notes (244) “the city is as a locus of class movement as the factory.” Occupy is putting capitalism back at center of left politics—no wonder, then, that it has opened up a new sense of possibility for so many of us: it has reignited political will and reactivated Marx’s insight that class struggle is a political struggle. As I mentioned before, a new Pew poll finds a nineteen percentage point increase since 2009 of the number of Americans who believe there are strong or very strong conflicts between the rich and poor. Two thirds perceive this conflict—and perceive it as more intense than divisions of race and immigration status (African Americans see class conflict as more significant than white people do).

 

How Occupy Wall Street is re-centering the economy is an open, fluid, changing, and intensely debated question. It’s not a traditional movement of the working class organized in trade unions or targeting work places, although it is a movement of class struggle (especially when we recognize with Marx and Engels that the working class is not a fixed, empirical class but a fluid, changing class of those who have to sell their labor power in order to survive). Occupy’s use of strikes and occupations targets the capitalist system more broadly, from interrupting moves to privatize public schools to shutting down ports and stock exchanges (I think of the initial shut downs in Oakland and on Wall Street as proof of concepts, proof that it can be done). People aren’t being mobilized as workers; they are being mobilized as people, as everybody else, as the rest of us, as the majority—99%–who are being thoroughly screwed by the top one percent in education, health, food, the environment, housing, and work. People are mobilized as those who are proletarianized and exploited in every aspect of our lives—at risk of foreclosure and unemployment, diminishing futures, increasing debts, shrunken space of freedom, accelerated dependence on a system that is rapidly failing Capitalism in the US has sold itself as freedom—but increasing numbers of us feel trapped, practically enslaved.

I want to close with the slogan “Occupy Everything.” The slogan seems at first absurd: we already occupy everything, so how can we occupy everything? What matters is the minimal difference, the shift in perspective the injunction to occupy effects. It’s a shift crucial to occupation as a political form that organizes the incompatibility between the people and capitalism. It enjoins us to occupy in a different mode, to assert our presence in and for itself, for the common, not for the few, the one percent. “Occupy Everything’s” shift in perspective highlights and amplifies the gap between what has been and what can be, between what “capitalist realism” told us was the only alternative and what the actuality of movement forced us to wake up to. The gap it names is the gap of communist desire, a collective desire for collectivity: we occupy everything because it is already ours in common.

Occupy Your Own Soul: “Dismiss Whatever Insults Your Own Soul”: A Crucible of Political Disenchantment

“Dismiss Whatever Insults Your Own Soul”

A Crucible of Political Disenchantment

by Phil Rockstroh / September 25th, 2012

Weltschmerz (from German; from Welt (world) + Schmerz (pain) delineates the type of sadness experienced when the world revealed does not reflect the image of the world that one believes, or has been led to believe, should exist. The corporate/consumer state (as well as, its scion, the present day presidential election cycle) has brought us, as a people, into a wilderness of Weltschmerz.

Confronting the stark contrast between life imagined and life revealed can prove to be a daunting task. It is an endeavor that has proven particularly difficult for political partisans, both professional and rank and file, who seem unwilling or unable to grasp the sense of futility experienced by significant numbers of their fellow citizens regarding political participation, on any level, including the act of voting under the corrupted to the core structure of the current system.

Such reactions are understandable. Exercises in futility prove enervating.

Disenchanted, sizable and increasing numbers of voters have tuned out and walked away from the process, due to the abject refusal of the political class to be responsive to the needs of the populace beyond the elitist-ridden New York/DC nexus of privilege and power.

Yet, rank and file political partisans, all too often, resist gaining awareness of the extent of their powerlessness. This is understandable as well. Feelings of powerlessness can engender despair. To avoid despair, one feels as though one must remain active in order to avoid sinking into the muck and mire borne of chronic hopelessness. True enough. But activity towards what end? Does the activity, such as voting along partisan lines, reinforce states of powerlessness by serving the forces of one’s oppression?

Despite all the cultural cues that we have internalized, one cannot consume, medicate, buy on credit, receive a promotion, vacation, vote, hope, affect a pose of hipster irony, tithe to the church of your choice, receive a hundred FaceBook friendship requests, hit the winning lottery number, support the troops, nor be the recipient of a VIP swag bag in order to stumble your way back to possessing a sense of control and power.

All too often, we incarcerate ourselves in a prison of expectation — expectation forged and constructed by the material of past events, both traumatic and triumphant. We mistake this prison for the whole of ourselves and for the sweep and detail of the world. We go through life convinced our agendas are our own, rarely pondering what circumstances and experiences formed our perceptions. Are my goals and convictions my own, or have those notions been foisted on me by forces of dehumanizing power?

Daily, power kicks us in the gut, and demands our gratitude for having done so, even terms us deviant when we cry out in pain or we rage from within the confines of our powerlessness.

There exist billions of us who feel this way. Multitudes feeling alone among lonely multitudes.

What keeps us from grasping our common plight?

Often, the obsession for gaining and possessing happiness itself, as marketed to us by the propagandist of the consumer state, leads us away from the realm of common communion.

Paradoxically, most unhappy people are simply striving to be happy. Their days are comprised of wrongheaded, self-perpetuating actions in the desperate pursuit of chimerical goals towards that end. They lie, self-medicate, exploit, steamroll over others. They merely hold notions of what life should be — as opposed to having a life.

Rarely, do our agendas reflect our true nature. Yet, such pursuits devour our days. The same phenomenon comes into play between the monstrous acts of an empire and its people in the homeland. After a time, tragically, the two forces merge. One cannot honestly claim one’s life as being one’s own. Where does my complicity with the actions of the state end and where do I begin? How do I sort things out? Making a start of it is imperative, for devoid of the inclination, I have lost my soul.

No one can maintain a lie over an extended length of time — not even empires are that powerful. Empires are maintained by illusions; the noxious fiction that the greater good is served by codes of dominance and plunder. Towards empire’s end the populace suffers escalating levels of unease, as the fabric of the collaboratively woven lie begins to unravel.

Embrace, hold close, and dance to the exquisite music of grief that arrives at the end of things. This is an honest, piercing sound. The pain that grief brings to the heart can serve as a compass, set to aid in navigating a wasteland of weltschmerz.

Because we mourn the loss of those things we love, we should never stop grieving over the follies of humankind and the sorrows of the earth. To cease grieving is too give up on love.

By a refusal to grieve, by lapsing into a host of manic evasions, one risks becoming a monster — a being devoid of empathy that, in an attempt to avoid experiencing suffering, will wound, demean, and exploit the things of the world.

In collective terms, we know this state as the agendas of empire. Conversely, to embrace one’s humanity, one must accept being shattered by grief, yet restored by love, simultaneously. Being in unashamed possession of a heart, both broken and whole, serves to mitigate the compulsion to act in the manner of a monster.

The price of self-deception (e.g., political partisanship, monomaniacal careerist striving, compulsive consumerist distractions) is not worth the palliative relief provided. To endure the undoing of illusion, one is tempted to retreat from life into a bubble of isolation or partisan group-think.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, one can become convinced the life that, as imagined in one’s entitlement-addicted mind not the byproduct of an ongoing, humility-shepherding dialog with the world, must be made manifest by relentless deed and actions, no matter how dishonest and ruthless. In this way, an individual is prone to becoming an exploitation maintained empire of one, a walking analog of the state that sired, weaned, and socialized him. How could it not be so?

Of course, by his callous disregard of the humanity of others, he makes miserable all that he touches. By his hollow ambitions, he demeans himself, and the happiness that he seeks becomes ever more elusive, and, caught in a self-resonating circuitry of self-defeating actions, he will eventually bring to ruin all near him.

This is how empires fall, and this is the means, on an individual basis, how its citizens move it along towards the precipice.

Conversely, it proves propitious to face the twilight of treasured convictions, to survive the collapse of the empire within, a decision that can provide practice in surviving the collapse of its collectively constructed, outward analog.

Often, events in life can play out badly. Painful as it is, we must not flee from reality. When one becomes prone to acts of habitual evasion, there is little chance to exist with one’s dignity intact; it becomes impossible to live with a sense of grace.

Rationalizations are by nature ugly: They are the disingenuous face of desperate souls who have come to fear others and hold a contemptuous dread of life itself. In this way, you can mistake your defense mechanisms deployed against grief and dread as comprising a large portion of your personality.

Take a moment to contemplate what an awful circumstance it is to incessantly pass by your true self, sans recognition, in a similar fashion to the manner one regards an anonymous stranger passed on a teeming boulevard.

The dilemma involves, to paraphrase Rilke, how will you spend the days of this finite life? Will you give into the compulsion to build a construction of ghostly artifice — life lived as a self-perpetuating lie that you are in control, that the caprice you conjure to ward off feelings of despair, regarding your powerlessness over the coursing flow of events, is an accurate description of your true nature? Will you create a bristling fortification of convenient cynicism, allowing you to remain ensconced within a dead womb of bile and ashes?
Or will you risk being the midwife of your own tale, grasping that there exist forces within you, when in dialog with the soul of existence, that are greater than the sum of your assumptions, that exist deeper and beyond life-negating banalities, such as winner and loser, shame and pride, and grief and happiness?

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

Slightly more than eleven years ago, on September 11, 2001, my wife and I awoke to the blaring of sirens, one following the next. Our air conditioning unit was broken and our windows were open. The air carried an acrid odor.

I checked my email and stacked in my inbox was an avalanche of messages, all inquiries bearing a unifying theme: “Are you alright?”

I called out to my wife to plug in an old black and white television set, because something terrible, it seems, was happening here in New York.

The television roused itself to life just at the moment of the collapse of the North Tower.

This was before the image was fetishized in the American imagination, was exploited by two U.S. presidential administrations to justify thousands of acts of military aggression on people of distant lands who only share one trait in common — they were born of the Islamic faith.

This was before George W. Bush played dress-up in military costumes and pranced about at military bases and the decks of naval vessels. This was before President Obama’s brandishing of kill lists, his normalization and codification into law of Bush era war crimes and constitutional and human rights violations.

This was when the archetypal image of a collapsing tower seized the mind, engendering an analogous collapse of one’s mooring and verities. The quotidian touchstones of daily life had vanished, as did alienation.

We needed each other. Empathy and generosity replaced self-absorption and the illusionary urgency of urban life… vanished were, monomaniacal commercial agendas and compulsive distractions. The streets were gauzy with veils of smoke; the veils had been removed from our hearts.

A feeling akin to love allowed us to face horror and take ambulatory refuge in compassion and beauty.

Cell phones and bottled water were proffered to strangers. As night fell, candles flickered in public squares; there was the sound of sobbing and impromptu singing. The scene seemed like a cross between the London Blitz and Woodstock. One was fully alive in the realm of death.

It would have been lovely if that had been the lesson we carried forth from that day, a decade and a year ago. Alas, the political agendas of militarist imperium carried the day. Tribalism trumped the universal exigencies of our common humanity.

Our leaders behaved despicably, and continue to, and we allow it to happen e.g., Democrats boast of Obama “getting Bin Laden” in a reprehensible attempt to gain political leverage from the tragedy, actions that Democratic partisans would have, rightly, shamed a Republican president for attempting to exploit.

Yet the sublime of that day is available to us still. Providentially, there is no need for actual towers to fall…only one forlorn, interior tower to which we have exiled our humanity. No one needs to die…other than the entity within who induces us into habitual denial and exclusively self-serving pursuit.

“[R]eexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency […]” — Walt Whitman, from the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at phil@philrockstroh.com and FaceBook. Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under 9-11, Democrats, Elections, Empire, GWB, Military/Militarism, Obama.

What is Occupy morphing into?

Adbusters Blog

What is Occupy morphing into?

Tactical Briefing #38.

15 comments Adbusters , 19 Sep 2012

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Kim Komenich, SF Examiner, 1986 © Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Hey all you redeemers, reckless dreamers and radicals out there,

Look!… look! … look! Regimes are being toppled, leaders thrashed, embassies stormed, movements and masses are rising. One by one all the old paradigms, power structures and civilizational norms are biting the dust … Capitalism, infinite growth based economics, the sacred morality of Western leadership, the invincibility of totalitarian and corporate driven regimes, the cult of individualism — all the sacred touchstones of our civilization are reeling under attack like never before.

As our first anniversary passes we can see that our indignation, the nascent revolution, the calls for new ways of being, are just one part of the global insurrectionary jam. Tunisia, Tahrir, Indignados, Casseroles, Pussy Rioters, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Russia, Chile, China, Spain, Greece, Quebec, Indonesia and beyond … the world political compass hasn’t wobbled like this since 1968. The ecstatic confusion points to global seismic shift … a new point of collective reference is appearing on the horizon.

So what can we make of all this? Yes, we here in North America gave birth to something weird and wonderful that swept the world last year, but now as the global heartbeat thumps ever louder, the fire in our bellies is smoldering and we are just one of a myriad of revolutionary forces pulsing through the world. We must get over our obsession with ourselves, our neurotic micromanaging of our GAs and encampments and learn to rumble anew.

This is a delicious moment … the world is morphing into something new … don’t miss it! Get in there and do what you’ve always wanted to do.
for the wild,

CJHQ

#Occupy Wall Street / #Occupy Everywhere: Where do we stand?

 

Adbusters Blog

S17 anniversary

Where do we stand?

18 comments Adbusters , 12 Sep 2012

This article is available in:

• English
• Spanish

Hey all you hacktivists, cypherpunks, mystical anarchists and global revolutionaries out there,

As the one year anniversary of OWS approaches, where do we stand?
To put it in a nutshell: the Zuccotti encampment model might have passed its heyday, but the spirit of Occupy is still very much alive ... evolving and inspiring, expanding our understanding of the possible, exploding our political imagination. Before S17 we relied on the same dinosaur paradigm of the dusty old left. We looked backward for inspiration instead of forward. With Occupy we jumped over that old dead goat. Now it's time to leap fresh again.

Look at what's happening in Quebec ... the boldness of the media democracy movement in Mexico ... the teenagers leading an education revolt in Chile ... the Pussy Riot inspired art war unnerving Putin in Russia ... and the new post-capitalist ways of living being forged in Greece and Spain. Witness the growing tempo of green riots across China, the South African miner strikes, the corruption protests of India, the freedom fight in Bahrain, the tremors of dissent in Saudi Arabia, the total loss of confidence in America's corporate-funded Coke-Pepsi election show. Then, add to that the crippling droughts, looming food scarcity, the end of easy oil and the tipping points hovering ominously on the horizon ...

Occupy began as a primal scream against the monied corruption of our democracy ... but after a year of struggling against an unrepentant corporatocracy, our goals are now deeper, our dreams wilder. We see a common thread emerging — a blue-green-black hybrid politics — that unites and elevates our movement:

On the blue front, we eradicate the commercial virus infecting our culture – we liberate the flow of information, champion the leakers, protect anonymity, and break up the corporate media monopolies with outrageous creative hacks.
On the deep green front, we push towards a decisive victory in the forty-year environmentalist struggle – we institute a binding international accord on climate change, pursue a worldwide de-growth economic agenda funded by a Robin Hood Tax and establish an across the board true cost market regime in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth.

On the black front, we restore the dominion of people over corporations by all nonviolent means necessary – we unleash a visceral wave of jams, meme wars and cultural interventions against the monied elite, the financial fraudsters, paid-for politicians and megacorporate outposts in our cities. We kill off criminal corporations like Goldman Sachs, Exxon, Pfizer, Monsanto, Philip Morris and others that have broken the public trust.

A radical blue-green-black transformation of the current global system might sound hopefully idealistic, foolishly utopian, even radically impossible, but remember that on July 13 2011, when the first call for occupying the iconic center of global capitalism went out, it sounded all too naively absurd as well.

#PIRATEPARTYUSA
#PIRATEPARTYUK
#PIRATEPARTYCANADA
#PIRATEPARTYAUSTRALIA

If you are in America, vote strategically but keep your eyes on the horizon. Our civilization remains steadfast on its economic, ecological and psychological crash course and sometime over the next few months, maybe in the new year, a galvanizing global moment of truth will happen ... be ready for it ... prepare yourself ... stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith, wake up every morning ready to live without dead time ... Capitalism is heaving and our movement has just begun.

On September 17, meet at dawn ready to rumble on Wall Street:

http://s17nyc.org/schedule/s17/

for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

Occupywallstreet.org

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Occupy Wall Street's Dream: a Third Party

Adbusters Blog

#PIRATEPARTYUSA

The birth of a new Blue-Green-Black hybrid party.

5 comments Adbusters , 06 Sep 2012

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• Barack Obama
• Coke Pepsi Election
• Mitt Romney

Art Department

The RNC was dominated by flat speeches and ghost furniture, and Ann Coulter can't seem to tweet about anything #DNC2012-related other than Bill Clinton's dating history – as we head towards the November election, it becomes clearer and clearer that the system is farcical, and that it's failing us.

Adbusters' publisher and editor-in-chief, Kalle Lasn, recently spoke to Angelo Aquaro of la Repubblica about Romney, Obama, and the promise of a new, third party option:

The truth is the two-party system doesn't work. It is the first time in American history that people seem to be becoming aware of this. I call them the Coca Cola-Pepsi Elections: everything you drink has the same flavor.

I'm imagining a real third party. In Europe they formed the Pirate Party and it's going strong. But I'm thinking of something different. I'm thinking of a Blue, Green, Black Party. Blue for transparency and the Internet, Green because it would take care of the environment, and Black because of the anger towards the corporations.

Read the rest of the interview at la Repubblica.

Elezioni Usa

USA

Occupy Wall Street's Dream: a Party

Interview with Kalle Lasn, the father and ideologue of Occupy Wall Street

by ANGELO AQUARO

Lo leggo dopo

 Kelly Lagan 

CHARLOTTE - "I want to see Barack Obama get up and say: Okay, these first four years were difficult, I've had to go back on some promises I had made and, at times, I've even had to compromise my principles in order to move forward. But if you give me four more years, you'll see: this time I won't disappoint you."

The President of the United States is about to step onto the stage in Charlotte for the speech that could cost him his reelection, and the last person you would imagine giving him advice is the man that from Canada launched the movement that besieged this and other ten, hundred, thousand conventions in the whole world. Kalle Lasn, 70 years old, is the father of Occupy Wall Street, the inventor of the slogan created on the pages of the alternative magazine, Adbusters. The man that from Vancouver got millions of people around the world to take to the streets, and now, despite the lukewarm support for the African-American president, is ready for the next step: the launch of a real political party. The Occupy Party.

Between the two conventions Occupy has started yelling a new slogan: voting is useless, corporations decide everything, Left and Right are the same. Is that really true?

"The truth is the two-party system doesn't work. It is the first time in American history that people seem to be becoming aware of this. I call them the Coca Cola-Pepsi Elections: everything you drink has the
same flavor."

Should we add another type of can?

"It's not like with Ralph Nader or Ross Perot. I'm imagining a real third party. In Europe they formed the Pirate Party and it's going strong. But I'm thinking of something different. I'm thinking of a Blue, Green, Black Party. Blue for transparency and the Internet, Green because it would take care of the environment, and Black because of the anger towards the corporations."

The Occupy Wall Street Party?

"Not just Occupy, not just the young people. People can't take it anymore: too much Coke, too much Pepsi. In four years we will have our very own convention".

Speaking of decline: isn't that the same language of the Right?

"I never felt, emotionally speaking, a great difference between the Tea Party and Occupy. They are both movements borne of disaster: it is the system that doesn't work."

So a party that goes from Occupy to Ron Paul.

"Maybe not him, but a lot of people that would have voted for him. There will be a big battle, a battle of ideas. And the best one will win."

Don't you worry about an explosion of violence? Charlotte has been besieged by Occupy.

"The possibility is always there: but I don't think so. In the past year it has been the police that have lost control of the situation. The brutality that Mike Bloomberg displayed at Zuccotti Park was a lesson that was followed elsewhere: they tried to crush the movement with intimidation."

Has the season passed?

"We have talked a lot about Occupy Wall Street but now it's time for Occupy Main Street. Yes, there's still more battling to be done on Wall Street, September 17th is the first anniversary. But careful, the season might have come and gone, but look at what is happening globally: the young people fighting in Mexico and Greece, Pussy Riot in Russia".

In America, though, the four years of Obama risk being erased by Mitt Romney.

"He walks like a robot... On the contrary: if he loses it will be a huge failure for the Republicans. At least Barack is smart, he works well on television: and you'll see that he will demolish Romney in the debates."

Romney had a Hollywood star by his side, libertarian Clint Eastwood.

"I have to admit that was great. Politics has become so scripted, everything controlled, and to see this old guy on stage improvising, without a teleprompter: it was the only true moment."

You seem more attracted by the show than the content.

"Imagine the young people of Occupy walking into the conventions of the whole world as a sign of protest, taking away the teleprompter, the prompt-box, right before Obama, Romney or another bigwig starts to read... There, now tell us what you really think, now tell us what you are really made of."

In the meantime do we help Barack or no? Are you ready to vote for him or no?

"If he gave that speech, if he admitted that in these first four years he went back on everything... But coming back to reality: most people in Occupy will vote for him anyway: but not with any enthusiasm."

 

(06 settembre 2012) © Riproduzione riservata

A Blow Against an Icon of Capitalism

A Blow Against an Icon of Capitalism
 

Wouldn't that be lovely? 

 

 Adbusters , 03 Aug 2012

• boycott capitalism

A hint of a stunning global jam against capitalism came last month when Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez urged his citizens to boycott Coca-Cola and drink local fruit juice instead. Bolivia’s Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca then chipped in saying his nation might kick Coca-Cola out the country to celebrate the start of the new Mayan calendar cycle on December 21:

“The twenty-first of December 2012 is the end of selfishness, of division. The twenty-first of December has to be the end of Coca-Cola and the beginning of mocochinche (a local peach-flavored soft drink).”

Choquehuanca’s comments have triggered a storm of rebuttals and rumors fueling the tantalizing possibility of huge numbers of people all over world suddenly going local with their drinking habits.

Hmmm … could this meme gather momentum over the next few months and culminate in a joyous #NOCOKEDAY global boycott of capitalism’s most iconic brand?

Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Spread the meme!

for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

The Strategic Pincer. (a new operational model)

• 

Adbusters Blog

Tactical Briefing #36

The Strategic Pincer.

Adbusters , 23 Jul 2012

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• #occupywallstreeet
• Bank of America
• banks
• capitalism
• Robin Hood Tax

NICK WHALEN / KEN ILIO

Alright all you existential diggers and expectant souls out there,

Defying all cynicism, the passion on the streets keeps burning … with the crisis of capitalism intensifying people’s rage only grows, erupting in unexpected places like Quebec, Moscow, Mexico, Tel Aviv, Khartoum, Addis Ababa … meanwhile we keep learning new tricks in Madrid, Los Angeles, Greece, Palestine, Manhattan and Hong Kong.

The Zuccotti encampment model may have had its day, but the spirit of our movement lives on in the hearts and minds of hundreds of million of people around the world who know in their gut that the future does not compute.

Now a new operational model is emerging: the strategic pincer —> We attack the global financial system from above with big bang protests, uprisings and revolts —> concurrently we attack the global financial system from below with hundreds of daily move-your-money actions at the 35,000 branches of megabanks worldwide.

The Bank of America has 6,200 branches, Wells Fargo 6,600, JPMorgan Chase 5,500, Citigroup 1,300; Barclays has 4,700 branches in 50 countries, Deutsche Bank 3,100 in 72 countries, HSBC 7,200 in 85 and Goldman Sachs has over 70 offices worldwide … in front of these outposts of global capital we pitch our tents, bang our pots and pans, hold our credit card cut ups … we hand out pamphlets to the customers going in and out … we engage them in passionate conversation and convince them to move their money … we trigger a chain reaction and move $1-trillion away from the megabanks before yearend, changing global banking for good.

With our strategic pincer we beat the shit out of global capitalism over the next few months — metaphorically speaking of course — and then we escalate towards a series of global solutions: a Robin Hood Tax, pushing through a binding accord on climate change and launching hybrid Blue/Green Pirate political parties in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the UK, Japan …

Stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith … Capitalism is heaving and our movement has just begun.
for the wild,

Culture Jammers HQ

OccupyWallStreet.org

What Integrity to the Occupy Movement Demands of Us

What Integrity to the Occupy Movement Demands of Us

by Joseph G. Ramsey / July 18th, 2012

That we work to defeat and to overthrow the rule of the 1% (and the 0.1%) over our lives, our society, and our world;

That we devote our lives to ending the oppression, domination, and exploitation of people both near and far;

That we defend what remains of public space and the public sector against neoliberal attempts to privatize or destroy it;

That we stand up for the freedom of speech and assembly, of dissent and public protest, as rights which no law-maker can revoke;

That we work for social equality: the radical redistribution of wealth, the transformation and/or abolition of oppressive institutions, the dismantling of unaccountable hierarchies, and the thorough democratization of society;

That we aspire towards egalitarianism in our own movement and in our own lives, seeking to build others up as equals, not to subordinate them as tools or inferiors;

That we seek to unite the many against the few, behind an inspiring vision of global human emancipation;

That we work to expose, to challenge, and to shut down wars abroad and militarism at home, along with the imperial and fascistic apparatus that makes them possible;

That we devote ourselves to exposing, and to resisting the ravages of a toxic ecocidal capitalism before it poisons the climate to the point of rendering wide swaths of our planet unlivable;

That we work to expose, oppose, and defeat racism, homophobia, sexism and other reactionary and oppressive ideologies and practices wherever they rear their ugly heads;

That we seek to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless across our world;

That we help to inspire courage, trust, and solidarity amongst those who have been beaten down by the current system, to turn our collective weakness into strength;

That we work to expose the farcical nature of our 1%-dominated, so-called “democracy,” even as we may utilize what is left of this state apparatus to tactically leverage the needs of our movement;

That we hold accountable those individuals and institutions that have produced and profited from the current crisis, at the expense of the people.

That we reject all 1%-er attempts to scapegoat the vulnerable and to blame the victims for their oppression;

That we approach with suspicion and skepticism those representatives of existing 1% power structures that seek to co-opt our movement, even as we are constantly on the lookout for friends and allies in unexpected places;

That we put the greater good of the people and the movement ahead of our personal interests, even as we recognize that only through such a movement can our individual talents be fully realized, and vice versa;

That we keep our commitments and promises to one another;

That we are honest and accountable in our interactions whenever we are representing the movement;

That we work each day to help raise consciousness (inside and outside the movement) about the world situation–for this is a global struggle;

That we inform ourselves about the current dangers and crises facing our society and our planet, and that we seek to understand not only the news and the facts, but the fundamental forces driving the situation forward, and the future trajectories these forces imply;

That we seek to cultivate a tactical flexibility and creativity that can adapt to the shifting situation;

That we develop a long-term, nationally coordinated strategy for actually building the movement that we want to create, for actually achieving the changes we want to see;

That we cultivate an honest and humble self-critical attitude in evaluating the successes and failures, the strengths and weaknesses of our movement, its theories and its practices; that we are willing to alter our theories and practices in light of evidence and reflections we gather;

That we seek to become citizens of the world, not just of any single city or nation;

That we sink roots in our local communities, in our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, families, and other institutions, becoming attentive students of others’ lives, as well as supportive allies, and where appropriate, leaders of local struggles;

That we are kind and patient with one another in the movement, working to understand deeply even those with whom we disagree, knowing that those who may be wrong on nine issues may teach us something valuable concerning the tenth;

That we demonstrate courage as well as wisdom in the face of threats we face;

That we seek to cultivate the fullest humanity in ourselves and in others alike;

That we work creatively and tirelessly to bring into being a society that is worthy of human beings;

That we commit to the long haul, as the fight ahead is sure to be as extended as its outcome remains uncertain.

That we sustain one another in this great collective endeavor, cherishing each thinking, fighting spirit in these dark times.

Joseph G. Ramsey is a writer, scholar, critic, educator, and activist in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is co-editor of Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of marxist theory and practice, and a participant in the Kasama Project. He can be reached at: jgramsey@gmail.com. Read other articles by Joseph, or visit Joseph's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2012 at 8:00am and is filed under Anti-war, Civil Liberties, Classism, Freedom of Speech, Occupy movement, Solidarity.

Capitalism in Crisis: In the end, the people in the streets will decide.

• 

Adbusters Blog

Capitalism in Crisis

In the end, the people in the streets will decide.

Robert Hunziker , 12 Jul 2012

 

The streets of the world’s capital cities are war zones of hopelessness, but as people gather together, this despair transforms into a fierce determination, underlain by great expectations, like in 1848, when the only European-wide collapse of the status quo occurred in the Revolutions of 1848 also popularly known at the time as: The Spring of Nations. Similar to that challenge of authority over 150 years ago, as of today, an epic battle, an undeclared war, rages around the world, erupting every week in one capital city after another, challenging the legitimacy and credibility of capitalism. For example, July 9th, 2012, Qatif, Saudi Arabia, one of the country’s largest-ever demonstrations left two dead and 12 injured when security forces confronted street protestors after the shooting of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent anti-government activist and Shia cleric.

The Revolutions of 1848 ultimately involved 50 countries throughout Europe and Latin America. At the time, there was no coordination among dissenters, but widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership was infectious across borders and beyond ethnic differences. Citizens of the world wanted more participation in how their lives were determined, i.e., democracy. Tens of thousands lost their lives in a futile effort, a bloody affaire that ended as abruptly as it began, within one year, forever memorialized by the words of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French philosopher and economic theorist, 1809-1865), “We have been beaten and humiliated… scattered, imprisoned, disarmed and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands.”

Dissatisfaction with political leadership (and, by inference, the capitalist state) today is more ubiquitous than in 1848 because instantaneous communication knows no barriers. Furthermore, what is known is this: Capitalism has failed as an economic system for society at large. By disproportionately favoring an elite minority who have gamed their own system, thus, sealing their own fate, capitalism has become as pejorative a term today as aristocrat was in 1848. And, because history has demonstrated, time and again, that no socio-economic system is static, this brings to the forefront questions about the likely life cycle for modern-day capitalism. Is it an economic system that has outlived its usefulness? And, if so, then, where are the various impulses of dissent headed, pointed in what direction, if not capitalism? These are questions that would otherwise be deemed inappropriate, if not for the current state of world affaires, but the answers are yet to be formulated.

This grandiose worldwide dissatisfaction with the status quo is not business as usual like a normal business cycle, which ends with renewal of prosperity. No, by all appearances, this is a deep-seated disintegration of economic relationships, which have existed in a delicate balance of competing interests for 200 years.

Every war has a catalyst, and the capitalists themselves have brought on this one by depriving the bourgeoisie and proletariat a fair share of the bounty on a worldwide basis in places like the United States, Indonesia, South Korea, Chile and throughout Europe. Now that capitalism is universal, the population of the world sees its effects in unison rather than individually by nation-state, but the problem is not capitalism per se. The problem is abuse of the capitalist system by capitalists. What is the evidence of this abuse?

The evidence is tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the streets chanting, sloganeering, “End the Oligarchy” in NYC, “Democracy Not Corporatization” in Paris “Fraude Pobreza” or “Fraud and Poverty” in Madrid, “Hands Off Our Pensions” in Athens, tens of thousands demonstrating in front of Indonesia’s presidential palace in Jakarta demanding a decent living wage, tens of thousands of students in Santiago protesting the profiteering in the state educational system, hundreds of Malaysian lawyers staging street protests opposed to governmental plans to ban street rallies, and uppermost in the consciousness of this worldwide sloganeering is a profound repugnance of corporate greed, or crony capitalism, and a deep-seated hostility towards the chicanery behind Wall Street/banking practices as well as the ‘perceived’ embezzlement of valuable nation-state resources by the wealthy elite via political influence and subterfuge within taxation policies that favor only the rich. We know this is true because the sloganeering and the placards held up high within the masses of tens of thousands of people tell this story for the whole world to see.

The elites of capitalism have only themselves to blame for igniting the flames of dissent… for bringing on the “perfect storm” of protests from Montreal-to-Beijing-to-Mumbai-to-Moscow-to-Paris-to-Santiago-to-NYC.

Seeing the truth of capitalism became much easier with the Granddaddy of All Financial Ineptitude and Corruption, the biggest-ever corporate heist, resulting in the 2007-08 worldwide financial meltdown, connecting huge dots for all to see, glaringly exposing the whole enchilada, other than the mystery of why nobody has gone to jail (Google: Coup of the Elites or The Elite Coup is Complete, June 26-27, 2012.) Arguably, this monumental debacle has served as the catalyst for capitalism’s boundless war. At the end of the day, this brutal take down of the entire world economy may be the demise of capitalism because it is breaking down the financial/economic system like never before. Otherwise, the final arbiters of financial order and stability, the world’s Central Bankers, would not be scrambling month-after-month, injecting trillions into banking liquidity, buying sovereign debt, propping up this monstrous on-going disaster, like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology, as soon as one head is lopped off, another two appears, as one country is poisoned by insolvency followed by another. And, it is the average taxpayer who supports, and pays for, the errors and malfeasance of the elite who profited so handsomely on the backs of innocent citizenry from Sydney westward to Fairbanks.

The Great Heist of 2007-08 is the culmination of corporate hubris, previewed a decade earlier, when Enron, a company with significant ties to George Bush’s political career and few tangible assets, learned how to ‘cook the books’ because of political liberalization (and contacts in the right places). The deregulation gospel allowed companies to operate in countries previously forbidden thus adding to the complexity of their operations, and they were able to use financial derivatives to manage risk and to obscure corrupted financial results. This is a continuing problem to this day. For example, JPMorgan Chase recently reported loses of $2 billion, but oops… no wait a minute, maybe it’s $30 billion. Even the bankers are not sure of their true gains or losses with the complexity of modern-day financial instruments. Isn’t it obvious that incalculable financial manias should not be part of commercial banking, the reservoirs of public savings? Unfortunately, these are only a portion of the games elites play with the public’s money. What is the hapless public to think when a former governor and a former U.S. Senator, a figure of public trust, like Jon Corzine of MF Global testifies before Congress, Dec. 2011, he does not know where the hundreds of millions of customer’s money in MF Global disappeared to… huh… he was the CEO?

One after another, whenever or wherever an opening occurs to ‘game the system’ the elite have jumped at the opportunity, including paid-for political influence to skew tax laws in favor of the rich at the expense of average taxpayers who shoulder the burden of a national debt that is overly inflated because of fancy tax laws the allow leading figureheads in society, like Mitt Romney, to pay a tax of only 15%, a lower rate than paid by his garbage collector.

It is always the average person, the average taxpayer who shoulders the burden whenever corporate malfeasance surfaces to trash national economies, as in Europe today where public employee and general worker benefits have been crucified by austerity measures (dictated by the IMF, World Bank, and EU) to heal battered national treasuries as if an epidemic of old, like the Black Death, swept across the countryside, ravaging lives. It is no wonder people of all stripes, like doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, and teachers take to the streets. They are being sacrificed on an altar of corporate malfeasance and corruption whilst accumulation of wealth is seen as an exclusive club reserved for only those who are already rich, similar to Louis XVI’s reign in 18th century France.
The world is getting a taste of history, of what it was like in the late 18th century, a few years before the French Revolution burst lose, beheading one aristocrat after another, as quickly as they could gather them up, simply because they were rich… but there were obviously deeper meanings behind this slaughter. For example, France’s national treasury was empty as a result of empire building and foreign wars, and this was aggravated by nasty disagreement over reform of the taxation system, which was grossly inequitable, leading to paralysis, and an agrarian crisis with food shortages, an ambitious bourgeoisie allied with aggrieved peasants and wage-earners influenced by enlightenment ideals, and years of pent-up resentment of a dying seigniorial system.

In the end, it was the people in the streets of Paris that served as the spark that led to outright rebellion and death at the hand of dreadful black-hooded executioners in the public square, the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine was most active during the “Reign of Terror”, in the summer of 1794, when, in a single month, more than 1,300 people (over 40 daily) were executed.
The lesson of history, which bewilderingly continues to repeat itself, is: The people in the streets ultimately determine the fate of incorrigible governments that are embedded with unscrupulous sources of financial power. These scenarios never end on a sanguine note but often times end in a sanguinary manner.

Robert Hunziker earned an MA in economic history at DePaul University. He lives in Los Angeles.