Unleash The Massive Power Of The People Against The Forces That Are Ravaging This Country

 
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Occupy Davis - We Are the 99%25 by Wikipedia

America , difficult as it may be for some to accept, is a house of cards, i.e., "a weakened structure that is in danger of collapsing or failing if its foundations continue to erode." This nation of ours remains in deep turmoil as our nation and our democracy are being ravaged by Corporatists and rogue politicians. There is only one way to combat this dangerous coalition and that is by unleashing the massive power of the American people against it.

What brought us to this sorry state and condition? To begin with, America has become a democracy in name only and government of the people, by the people and for the people of America has been cleverly transferred to the masters of Corporatism. Powerful corporations have now assumed control over this nation and rule it with an iron fist. The tentacles of this giant octopus are wrapped around and are suffocating every important institution in this country.

Far too many Americans are seemingly oblivious to the depth of this dilemma and the precarious state of this nation. For those who doubt and minimize these dangers because they have been conditioned to think that this nation is invincible, all they need do is listen to some of the respected economists who warn that our financial sector can, at any time, be devastated by a monumental collapse of mega-trillion dollars of toxic derivatives that could wreck this economy almost overnight. Congressional oversight and regulation has been so weakened over time that it makes such a catastrophe a real possibility. See this article by Richard Clark to receive an alarming, in-depth analysis of this issue.

Now let's further examine how this government and the Congress have become the antithesis of how a democracy should function. The principles of our democracy indicate that the passage of legislation should be based on majority rule but that's not how this Congress and, especially the Senate, functions. And it never will until the use of the poisonous filibuster, by which legislation is routinely obstructed, delayed and destroyed, is brought under control. Congress, as is often said, is the place where good ideas go to die. Try as I might I can think of absolutely nothing of real substance that this Congress has done since America entered the 21^st Century.

But it's more than just the deadly filibuster that is making this Congress dysfunctional. Another contentious issue involves how the people of this country are represented in the Senate. The Founding Fathers made a colossal mistake when they created the Senate and mandated that there would be two senators for every state instead of basing the number on states' individual populations. Time and again the votes of tiny states have proven to more powerful as those of massive states. For example, the eight least populous states in America have a combined population of 5,876,000 and 16 senators while California and New York with a combined population of almost 57 million have a total of only 4 senators. That condition limits and dilutes the overall power of the people.

Combine this political mistake by the Founding Fathers with the use of the filibuster by the Republicans and you know exactly why this Congress remains in gridlock and critical legislation never gets off the ground. This is concrete evidence of exactly why this country is so badly deteriorating. Both of these contributing factors to congressional incompetence could be altered if the power of the people is unleashed to begin the transformation of this government.
Therefore it's not difficult to conclude that this Congress, as currently constituted, is entirely incapable of effectively governing this nation and society. Then the really big question becomes: what exactly can be done about it? Well, that's where the massive power of the people of America comes in because this power represents the one and only way that this grave condition can be alleviated. It all comes down to the fact that the people must be energized and motivated to put an end to this political madness.

That massive power of which I speak is the voting power of nearly 210 million eligible voters in this country. Those who sincerely want to address this country's myriad of problems have to realize that voter turnout must be dramatically increased and that they must organize a massive movement to accomplish just that. They need to undertake this task at a time when the Republican Party is doing everything in its power to reduce the number of voters through all sorts of devious means because they know that their only chance to win elections is by low turnout.

Here is what must happen. The Center for the Study of the American Electorate, put 2012 voter turnout at 57.5% of all eligible voters in America, This study group estimated 126 million people voted in the 2008 election, meaning that 93 million eligible citizens did not cast ballots. How can this democracy function effectively when so many Americans who have been given the opportunity to vote choose not to? That is inexcusable; every American who could actually vote and does not is contributing directly to the gigantic mess this country is in. They are at the very center of this problem that is allowing our system of government to be corrupted by sleazy, greedy politicians. You would think that progressives and independents would recognize the great danger this poses and would be working tirelessly across America to substantially increase voter turnout.

Sure this could be a great thing for America but to many it's difficult to picture how that process would actually evolve. So, let's think of it this way; suppose you buy a house that needs a complete rehab. So where do you start? First, you have to address the rotting foundation, the sewage from leaking pipes and, of course, you will need to bring in the exterminators. You start where the worst damage is being done, spend a lot of time, money and effort to make the necessary repairs and then you move up to the higher levels of the house and finish the job.

So, let's proceed from that analogy back into the real world and see just how such a monumental endeavor could be progressed in order to cleanse and stabilize our currently corrupted political system:

*In the 2014 national elections: the objective must be to do everything possible to soundly defeat every GOP candidate. We need to get rid of every U.S. Representative and senator that has blocked critically needed gun safety controls, those who consistently obstruct job creation, those who support an agenda of perpetual war, and those who are working to restrict the Constitutional rights and freedoms of the people. In doing this certain Senate Democrats, Mark Begich, AK, Mary Landrieu, LA, Mark Pryor, AR, Heidi Heitkamp, ND and any other Democrats who too often vote against the best interests of the people must also be replaced.

The Republicans in Congress have now crossed the line, they have stabbed the people of America in the back time and again and as appropriate payback this party of control freaks must be dismantled. The voting power of the people, a power that, when ignited nothing can withstand, will do just that and turn this ideologically twisted party into a pile of smoldering ashes.

A very broad coalition of rational-thinking Democrats, progressives, independents, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans, and every other minority group in America, together with the majority of Caucasian Americans, must band together to flush these traitors, be they Republicans or rogue Democrats, out of the Congress and send them into political purgatory.

*If the people would send the Republican Party into political oblivion, it would naturally follow that for the first phase of this governmental transformation, the Democrats would take full control of both houses of the Congress. That could be another problem in the making and so it would be crucial to immediately initiate a movement to create and develop a Progressive Party that would, for all practical purposes, take the place of the defunct GOP and challenge the Democrats on all key issues and problems facing this nation. Such a movement could be formed through the collective efforts of progressives, independents, the Green Party and other similar groups.

*With a new style Congress it would pave the way for making campaign finance reform the #1 priority by enacting legislation that absolutely bans corporations and special interest lobbyists from having any contact with any member of this Congress or associated government agencies. This would completely remove Corporate America from any involvement of any kind with the election process.

*Let the Democratic and Progressive Parties compete for the support of the American people. If the Congress undergoes an overhaul, if the filibuster obstruction is stopped, if the Senate is reconstituted with more senators from populous states and no more than one senator for each of the smallest states, then we can, once again, see democracy in action.

*Open the door for honest, ethical, individuals with vision and passion to lead America out of its current deep morass; presidents who will never allow themselves to be controlled by the proliferators of war and the masters of Corporatism as has been the case since we entered the 21^st Century; those who, over a period of time, would transform the Supreme Court into a judicial body that rules on the basis of the constitutionality of issues instead of personal beliefs and ideology.

Without question, many out there may well react to this kind of a plan as far-fetched, naïve, and even deluded thinking because they just can't see how the mass of the people can be awakened from their lethargy and motivated to do something dramatically different. But that's what's been the problem; we keep telling ourselves what we can't or don't want to do instead of making up our minds that we can and must not allow our country to be further ravaged by those whose only objective is to advance their own interests at the expense of the people.

But even in the face of the expected opposition by those who embrace the status quo and passively accept and condone what is happening around them, this is a plan that, without a doubt, could be successful if the majority of people can be made to fully understand that they have no choice but to get involved; that time is running out and that it is critically important they concentrate on taking positive actions instead of merely criticizing and complaining. They need to wake up to the realization that they must do everything in their power to save their country. All they need do is to stop sitting on the sidelines and get out to vote.

This can happen and, in fact, it better happen or we are going to see this house of cards in which we live come crashing down upon us.

Michael Payne


Michael Payne is an independent progressive activist. His writings deal with social, economic, political and foreign policy issues. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois and a U.S. Army veteran. His primary objective is to (more...)


The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editor.

Waves of Anti-Greed Movements in the United States

Waves of Anti-Greed Movements in the United States

by Burkely Hermann / February 2nd, 2013

I was doing some research for the ‘origins’ section of the Occupy Wall Street page on Wikipedia which I have had free rein on for a while now. Doing that research gave me an idea. In my Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies class, a visiting professor came in and told us how the women’s right movement is viewed as three waves, one starting in 1920, another that included the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and the third one that has lasted since the 1980s. She cautioned us that this analysis is limiting. The protests against corporate greed in American history can be categorized similarly as waves up to the present day Occupy movements.

There have been intermittent protests throughout history against greed. These included when workers marched down Wall Street in 1857 shouting “We want work!,” when hundreds of people surrounded the house of speculator William Duer in 1792, when Hoovervilles were set up across the United States by the homeless in order to create homes for themselves, when ACT UP members chained themselves to the New York Stock Exchange, and when the AIDS Coalition demanded lower prices for AIDS drugs in 1980s. However, while these actions are honorable, they cannot be considered part of an organized movement against corporate greed.

You may be asking when the first wave of such an anti-greed movement occurred. Interestingly, the first wave began in the 1750s and 1790s, having an integral role in the nation’s founding. William Hoegland writes, “Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc.” Hoegland continues that while these people were “legally barred from voting and holding office… they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies” and had “high hopes for American independence” since they helped “enable[e]… the Declaration of Independence.” This wave included what was called Shay’s Rebellion by the elites, which took place in 1786 in “western Massachusetts [where farmers]… marched on the state’s armory in Springfield to reverse regressive finance policies that had again plunged ordinary people into debt peonage and foreclosure while bailing out rich creditors.”

Eventually this rebellion was crushed but resistance continued. In 1794 people were angry once again, so they “took over the militia and debt-court system throughout western Pennsylvania and western counties of neighboring states, flew their own flag, and tried to secede from the United States and form an economically egalitarian country”; they were eventually crushed by federal troops.

The second wave really began in the 1870s which went beyond isolated actions (since the 1830s) leading up to that point, especially concentrated in tenants. While the Grange was founded in the 1860s, it developed as a force when it helped push laws that would better the life of farmers, but unfortunately it wasn’t that radical and opposed what they called “the lawless, desperate attempts of communism…” As a result, their radical partner, the Farmers Alliance began to expand. This organization became what one could call the economic movement of American farmers. It was able to offer an alternative to the usual farm system in the south by allowing people to join them, form cooperatives, and as Howard Zinn notes “buy things together and get lower prices.” This movement coincided with the struggles of working people which at this time were thinking of living in different ways and engaging in mass direct action including parades and demonstrations. Zinn wrote that “what was astonishing in so many of these struggles was not that the strikers did not win all that they wanted, but that, against such great odds, they dared to resist, and were not destroyed.” Such struggles included a series of strikes spread across the country in 1877 with workers striking in solidarity but people like Eugene Debs at the time criticized them. Other actions included the protest in Haymarket Square in 1886 which a bomb exploded in the midst the police causing them to fire on the crowd. This event sparked an international solidarity, nationwide mourning and caused the radical labor movement to be crushed but kept alive class anger for future young revolutionaries. Still, some of this energy went into electoral struggles when labor candidates ran Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, and other cities in the Texas, Ohio, and Colorado. However, the farmers’ movement kept going and evolved into a populist movement.

In the 1890s, people began to rise again in what could be called the third wave. In 1891, the Populist Party was formed,  starting in Tennessee when mine workers took control of a mine in 1891. The next year it blossomed with strikes across the country in New Orleans, Idaho, Philadelphia, and Buffalo among others. The Depression in 1893, the first economic depression in US history, deeply influenced and caused an upwelling of energy in the movement against greed. People protested en masse in cities nationwide which, according to Zinn, “forced city governments to set up soup kitchens and give people work on streets or parks.” Even the radical feminist leader Emma Goldman told a massive group of unemployed workers in Union Square (New York City) to raid stores and take food. Eugene Debs, who had previously opposed the strike of 1877, became a socialist and led to one of the biggest strikes in American history.  In June of 1894, a strike of the employees of Pullman Palace Car Company began, and they appealed to the American Railway Union led by Debs to not handle Pullman cars which resulted in a nationwide strike. While cars were derailed, the power of the state militia and federal troops crushed the strike, resulting in Debs going to jail and denying he was a socialist in court.

Also this year, Coxey’s Army, made up unemployed workers, engaged in the first major popular march on Washington in 1894. Ideas of socialism began to influence those in the labor movement and radicalism spread. The farmers’ movement got even stronger, bringing in many from across the country and across races to create a huge rebellion of farmers surpassing past farmers’ activism. Even so, the poverty of farmers made it hard for them to support themselves, so they changed strategy.

Being part of the new populist movement, new ideas were thrown around including government-owned warehouses where farmers could store their produce, the pushing of greenbacks to make more currency available which would be based on how much farm produce one had, and in Dakota what Zinn calls a “great cooperative insurance plan for farmers [that] insured them against loss of their crops.” Different groups across the country were united in this new movement and despite the differing situation of blacks and whites, to some extent they were able to unite together while the establishment tried to keep them apart. This is an accomplishment in and of itself. There were attempts to create a separate farmers culture which included books, pamphlets, lectures, populist journals, poems and even songs! The class-based nature of their thinking caused Norman Pollack to draw parallels between the ideas of Marx and the populists.  Unfortunately, in 1896, the populist movement was sucked into political process, making alliances with the Democrats. When the Republican, William McKinley, won, in the first massive use of money during an electoral campaign, populism that had been absorbed into the Democratic Party began to disappear.

With the collapse of populism as a movement, a new movement developed. This was the socialist movement which still exists today, but it is kept marginalized through the influence of the corporatists. Herein began what can be considered the fourth wave. This movement began in the late 1890s with books like Edward Ballamy’s Looking Backward, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. What people forget is that The Jungle expressed the need for a socialist society where people worked together cooperatively. A number of people were involved in such a movement including radicals Emma Goldman and W.E.B. Du Bois, socialists Jack London and Helen Keller and muckraker journalists like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens. In this time of radicalism, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union was formed in 1909 which gained thousands of members every day and unionization of industries began to grow. However racism was rampant through the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and those at the top had huge salaries and were part of the ‘high society’ who had goons to protect them and intimidate opponents. Such a situation led to the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) which is still around, with its members famously called “Wobblies” that wanted to organize all of those in one industry into one big union instead of smaller craft unions that the AFL was doing. The IWW advocated militant direct action to put in place economic democracy in workplaces, what they called “industrial democracy,” and they saw that strikes were only parts of the overall class war, being training for a massive general strike to push out the employers. Around this time as well the leader of the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, and Mother Mary Jones, a United Mine Workers of America organizer drew up a constitution which stated in its preamble: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.” This radicalism was repressed by the state when it used all it could to stamp out IWW, but instead they continued to spread bit by bit. They organized parades and mass meetings, and groups began organize, but still the concentration of wealth remained.

Eugene Debs expressed what people felt at the time and used the resources of the Socialist Party to propel his message. As the party became more successful at the polls, they became critical of the tactics of the IWW, so they pushed Big “Bill” Haywood out of the Socialist Party. Some advocating for women’s rights began to tie their aims to socialism and radicalism, some even becoming skeptical of the push for suffrage saying it didn’t free women. Later some of this energy was channeled into the system to pass what is called by textbooks “progressive” legislation which really just helped maintain the capitalist system that favored big business, as the government was controlled by Wall Street. Additionally, politicians like progressivist Robert LaFollette fended off socialism (until the election of 1924) while others masqueraded as progressives like Theodore Roosevelt. Still, the Socialist Party began to grow and the IWW continued to agitate. Worker’s struggles continued.

When World War I came, the Socialist Party was weakened. Under the war effort, these radicals were repressed and their message was silenced by using the Committee for Public Information, the first government-created propaganda effort in American history. Much of the IWW was arrested and thrown in jail, and it didn’t recover for years. Toward the end of the war and afterwards, a Red scare began in America, and radicalism was suppressed.

In the 1930s there was a flicker of hope for radicalism. People looked more than ever to socialism and there were strikes that dotted the country as radical solutions were demanded. But such “madness” was weakened with the New Deal which while providing some jobs, didn’t do much to end the underlying conditions, rather it reshuffled the cards, and is basically saved capitalism. Radicalism continued, but there wasn’t any major movement other than the socialists, the communists, and other radicals which challenged corporate greed. In the 1940s such a movement was absorbed into the national mobilization as part of the war effort. When the Cold War began, those on the radical Left were persecuted by people in government, feelings which extended throughout the 1950s.

Then came the turbulent 1960s. These years led to a spurring of new knowledge and the blossoming of left once again. Mainly this was focused on opposition to the Vietnam War, but some connected this with other struggles. Martin Luther King was one of these people. In 1968 he helped organize along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) what could be considered the fifth wave. This was called the Poor People’s Campaign. King wrote that “civil disobedience has never been used on a mass scale in the North… If they are developed as weekly events at the same time that mass sit-ins are developed inside and at the gates of factories for jobs, and if simultaneously thousands of unemployed youth camp in Washington… without burning a match or firing a gun, the impact of the movement will have earthquake proportions.” King outlined specific demands and said that the campaign will be non-violent in all its regards. Sadly, he didn’t live through to this dream. Still, marchers descended on Washington D.C. and the SCLC came up with five demands including living wage jobs, popular involvement in government, capital for low-income people. Coretta Scott King expanded this, demanding what was called an Economic Bill of Rights along with others on the first day of protest (May 12, 1968),  which meant increased economic and human rights for numerous groups including whites, blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous peoples. On May 21, 1968, a shantytown called Resurrection City was set up, like the Occupy tent cities. It was under surveillance by the FBI just like the current occupy movement. However, this city barely lasted a month, as on June 24 police came in to remove the protesters after their permit expired the day before. As a result, this movement was criticized by the corporate media, and some involved regretted the occupation all together. This, basically, ended this movement after six weeks.

While activism continued into the following decades, the 1970s, the 1980s, and 1990s, there was little of an organized movement. The only movement that would be of note in opposing corporate greed would be the anti-corporate-globalization movement which began in the 1980s worldwide but did not come to America until 1999. From Oregon, it later culminated in what was called “the Battle for Seattle.” This constitutes the sixth wave. While this movement continues to this day, it has been partly absorbed into the Occupy movement.

In 2008 a new slew of protests occurred nationwide. This originated from large opposition to the 700 billion dollar bank bailout and other smaller bailouts of financial firms. Reporter Arun Gupta of the New York Indypendent started the call for protest by directing some of his activist friends to send out an email to tell people or organize actions against the bailout. Organizations like Democracy for America, the AFL-CIO, United Federation of Teachers and ACORN participated in the protests, among others. But, like Occupy, while the protest was organized by TrueMajority and USAction members, it had according to one CNN article “no agenda, no leaders, [and] no organizing group”; it just wanted to make the fat cats pay. This made people like Ralph Nader comment that they should develop some concrete demands or else they will collapse. Protests started on September 26 at 100 locations and by September 28 it has spread to over 251 places including Los Angeles and Rochester.  By October, the movement had spread to other cities with protests in Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Tampa Bay.  Protests were even planned for Washington D.C. to confront legislators. Of these protests, the largest was in New York City in front of Wall Street where people yelled, “The bailout is bullshit!,” “No more bail, send them [the bankers] to jail!,” and called the bailout a “class war crime” as the LA Times reported. Others carried signs calling for taxing of the rich, ending the blind transfer of wealth to Wall Street, and calling for the government to spend money to help people (education, healthcare, housing) like they were going to help Wall Street. As it turned out, the seventh wave died when the bailout was passed. However, people were still mad.

This is where the next movement came into being. Many on the Left dislike the Tea Party Movement — the eighth wave. As it turns out, popular anger about the bailout created this movement which protested Barack Obama’s bailouts, his huge stimulus package and other actions that benefited big banks. Unlike the protests against the bailout of 2008, they had a political wing and they began drafting candidates. Unfortunately for everyone, this movement was basically co-opted by Big Business and it devolved from its origins by focusing on the electoral struggle instead of direct action meaning that this wave came to an end.

In 2010 anger was still brewing. Investigative reporter David DeGraw tapped into this anger with videos in late 2009, and it culminated with a report in February of that year in which he criticized the economic elite saying it was time “for 99% of Americans to mobilize and aggressively move on common sense political reforms,” basically calling for a movement for the 99 percent, beginning the ninth wave. This movement had set goals which DeGraw proposed himself as “common sense reforms.” Over the next ten months DeGraw kept giving interviews calling for peaceful civil disobedience and it seemed that those in the elite were not happy so the site was repeatedly knocked offline. Eventually, as he puts it in a post on Washington’s Blog: “As AmpedStatus was pushing for a decentralized global rebellion against Wall Street and actively supporting the Egyptian uprising against the IMF and Federal Reserve, the attacks on the site escalated. In what appeared to be a fatal blow, the entire ISP network that the AmpedStatus.com site was hosted on was knocked offline… With a very limited budget, and in complete desperation, AmpedStatus put out a call for help… As AmpedStatus.com came under attack, Anonymous was playing a key role in supporting the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. When no one else with the needed technical expertise would help us and it became apparent that we would have to shut down our operation, several Anonymous members stepped up and offered to support and defend AmpedStatus.com from further attacks. They assisted in setting up a new hosting account and helped develop a new Independent social network for the 99% Movement.”

This was a turning point and showed that others wanted to organize together and create a mass movement against corporate greed. A new broad platform was proposed. In February 2011, Anonymous called for “an occupation of Wall Street… ‘The Empire State Rebellion’” and after which “A sub-group within Anonymous then joined with the AmpedStatus 99% Movement and we began a collaborative effort known as A99” which announced their “first operation by posting a video to the AmpedStatus YouTube page.” This was picked up by Zero Hedge, an economic news site and it quickly went viral. After this Anonymous called for a “Day of Rage” in the United States and “throughout April and May, members of A99 were organizing and debating possible future actions [and] they decided that Flag Day, June 14th, would be an appropriate time to launch actions.” On that day in Liberty Park, only 16 showed up and four planned to occupy it indefinitely, so they went back to the drawing board. It was the first stint at Occupy. However, nearby there were activists setting up Bloombergville to protest the budget cuts by New York City Mayor and Billionaire Michael Bloomberg which some from the Liberty Park protest joined. Then when Adbusters magazine made the call to Occupy Wall Street and bring a tent, a new chapter opened.

On September 17th, 2011 the world changed. A world revolution and the tenth wave had begun. It started with people angry as hell but over time it became more and more radical. The media will have you believe that the movement was crushed and “died” in December 2011. This is completely incorrect. The movement lives on. The tenth wave of the American anti-greed movement has been upon us and has spread worldwide as had the anti-corporate-globalization movement.

This rich history is an asset to the Occupy Wall Street movement. There is much more action than just these then “waves,” but this analysis makes known the history of challenging greed in this country. This analysis is confined to anti-greed and therefore does not discuss the peace movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and the movement to combat climate change. A Facebook event possibly by an Anonymous member is proposing an eleventh wave in later 2013. Adbusters has suggested making a whole new movement called the World Pirate Party. However, we should instead reinvigorate the base — the Occupy movement — by making it more powerful through forming new chapters and uniting with other movements.

Burkely Hermann, a Maryland activist, has been interested in politics since 2007, when he wrote an essay against the Iraq War. Now he runs numerous blogs across the internet to educate the public on international, local, and national topics. Read other articles by Burkely.

This article was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2013 at 7:59am and is filed under Activism, Civil Disobedience, Classism, Debt, Finance, History, Labor, Occupy movement, Poverty, Resistance, Socialism, Solidarity, Tea Party movement, Unions.

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