Occupy Wall St

So is it just a case of white people problems? Is the "other 99%" composed of Frappuccino-sipping hipsters whining about their student loan debt?

The truth is, yes and no. As a starter, I refer you to Pierre Bourdieu, and particularly his concept of symbolic violence.

Then ingest a good deal of Michel Foucault, maybe watch some Adam Curtis documentaries.

Then read Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Marx, Rand, Gramsci, Marcuse, and Fukuyama, while doing your Masters degree in International Political Theory. As a starter, mind.

Or just read a bunch of articles confirming your preconceptions and feel smug...

Look, I'll say that in my view the outcry is utterly legitimate. I'd be a hypocrite if I said that those "occupying" Wall Street were just making an empty symbolic gesture, since on some level I defended the meaningfulness of the impotent outbursts of the London rioters this Summer, which by comparison clearly made little political impact and were completely devoid of ideological thrust.

It's vital to express the frustration and upset caused by a system that has resulted in so many being metaphorically sodomised (by the invisible hand no doubt...).

On the flip-side, there appears to be very little in the way of consistent and structured policy demand-making. There is a lot of vitriol around dodgy financial practices, as well as general economic inequality. Incidentally, there also seems to be some confusion about the true locus of perceived wrong-doing; some protesters claiming "the real villains are in the White House!", shudder.

I'm also irritated by the incessant accusations of greed and moral bankruptcy lodged against Wall Street traders. I'm certainly not saying that this isn't the case, there clearly is legitimised corruption en masse within the market-place, but by localising the problem to a few bad eggs with personality flaws we abstract the financial crash from its ideological and structural roots. In the same way that identifying our own complicity in the Holocaust is more effective in making fascism unpalatable than simply blaming Hitler, it's important for us to identify the ways in which we are complicit in perpetuating a system that rewards competitive, selfish behaviour.

Blaming the fat cats simply creates an Us vs Them mentality.

I do have a bank account after all...

“What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

― Bertolt Brecht

But back to my point: I made a crack at the beginning about people whining about student loans. The truth is that student loans are a massive problem in America, and have been one of several major themes in the protests:

Last year, Americans began to owe more on their student loans then their credit cards, with student debt reaching the $1 trillion mark. Many have flocked to higher education during the down economy, only to find themselves still unemployed or underemployed.

Perhaps a taste of things to come in the UK by the way... ;)

While this is indeed a crippling problem for an entire generation, it's hard to say what direct link there is between the rate of student loan debt in America and the perceived discrepancy in wealth between the top 1% and the rest...

As the relationship is indirect, the implication is thus that the protest is an attack not on individual greedy bankers, but on neo-liberal capitalist ideology itself. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but if this is the case, and the protests are intended to show neo-liberal policy to be fundamentally egregious, an alternative needs to be proposed. Otherwise it's easy for capitalist realists to portray the protesters as sore losers complaining about how unfair the game of life is and not taking individual responsibility for their problems. Even worse are the implications that the protesters are un-American (apologies for low-quality image):

To be fair, one might say that demands are not necessary at this point in time.

But I think that if you don't qualify your political stance early on, you leave yourself open to those motivated enough to swoop in and hijack your movement for their own ideological ends. Truth never speaks directly for itself; interpretation is always required.

Israel recently had mass protests of a similar nature during the Summer. Much of the economic inequality was being blamed on the high proportion of family-owned monopolies run on nepotism mutual back-scratching within these elites. According to a close Israeli friend, a major theme of the protests that emerged was a call to dismantle said monopolies in order to establish a truly free market.

This is exactly what happened in the 1970s in America and the UK and has essentially contributed to the common practice of CEOs stripping failing companies of their assets, selling them off and moving on to the next company, leaving employees to hang, as it were.

Here's a documentary on the whole thing: The Mayfair Set.

So here you have a movement led primarily by idealistic 20-somethings, like the Occupy Wall Street lot, confusedly allowing their protest to be used to push good ol' neo-liberal economic ideology.

SUMMARY

It's no small secret that I have an admiration for the works of Slavoj Zizek, partly because he's good, and partly because he tends to summarise a lot of current theory very well so I don't have to go out and read any of it.

I thought that I'd re-post the transcript of his speech at Sunday's protest taken from Occupy Wall Street. It's not complete as only so much was recorded. Here come the block quotes:

Part One

…2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans…

Part Two

….Starbucks cappuccino. Where 1% goes to the world’s starving children. It is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture. After the marriage agencies are now outsourcing even our love life, daily.

Mic check

We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over.

The change is possible. So, what do we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand in technology and sexuality everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon. You can become immortal by biogenetics. You can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the fields of society and economy. There almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible, we lose competitivitiy. You want more money for healthcare: they tell you impossible, this means a totalitarian state. There is something wrong in the world where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for health care. Maybe that ??? set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.

We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!

You can also watch the videos of his speech, but unfortunately due to a lack of a PA system he has to say small chunks of text at a time, then wait as the crowd around him repeat the words loudly for the rest to here. While it ruins the speech, it ironically forces Zizek's delivery into a weird religious ritual, as though the baying crowd were mindlessly reciting the dogmatic teachings of their holy leader! Perish the thought...

Check it oowwt:

Evenin' all.