#Occupy is best understood as a political form of the incompatibility between the capitalism of a fascist/oligarchic regime and the people. Capitalism itself is no longer the problem or issue but rather Fascism/Oligarchy as an imperialistic ideology and mode of governance.
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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.
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