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Title: The Occupy Movement
Author: Burn Shit
Date: November 5, 2011
Language: en
Topics: Occupy, critique
Source: Retrieved on 1st June 2021 from https://kpbsfs.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/three-problems-with-the-occupy-movement/

Burn Shit

The Occupy Movement

1. A Growing Obsession With Demands

The New York Times quotes one occupier; ‘We absolutely need demands…

power concedes nothing without a demand.’ The Occupy Seattle website has

a number of policy polls for demands ranging from, ‘universal education’

to ‘end corporate personhood.’ Astonishingly, many of the NYC protesters

see fit to work towards a set of ultimatums for the politicians in

Washington to consider. With unparalleled political naivety, some think

it best for their representatives in Congress to take final

responsibility for ‘fixing’ capitalism. It seems many protesters cannot

shake their attachment to existing power structures.

2. The American Dream and ‘Nice’ Capitalism

Picture it now: The mind-numbing, six-hour general assembly of earnest

campers wrangling over the pros and cons of reforming the banking

system. Searching for a consensus to draw a plan for a nice new

capitalism ‘with a human face’, one regulated more effectively by the

state. Underlying much (not all) of the Occupy Movement is a strange

sort of American Dream narrative and the idealised notion of a pure,

moral and non-parastitic capitalism. The idea that a once-fair and

equitable meritocracy has been corrupted by a tiny few who’ve taken

things too far. Still wedded to the basic tenets of capitalism and

representative democracy, many of the Occupy protesters aren’t demanding

anything that’s particularly radical. ‘NOT AGAINST CAPITALISM, JUST

AGAINST GREED!’ – as if the whole machine didn’t thrive on an avaricious

drive to make a profit by any means, masked by useful euphemisms like

‘ambition’ and ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. In a Huffington Post article

entitled, ‘The Occupy Movement: Not Anti-Capitalist but

Anti-Fundamentalist’ Richard Stacy writes, ‘There is not a problem with

capitalism, per se, and very few protesters are claiming as such. The

problem is the variant of capitalism we have been pursuing for most of

the last 30 years.’ Oh yes. How can we forget those rosy days of Wilson

and Callaghan, when the Labour Party actually meant the party of labour

and actually represented the interests of the working masses (or is that

the 99%)? Do people actually have such a misplaced fetish for that era

of big government social democracy? Do they think back to those days as

if the liberal West was the land of milk, honey and stable class

relations?

This liberal-welfarist-social-democratic sycophancy is based on a total

misreading of capitalism’s historical evolution. At the risk of talking

some Marxist dialectical bilge, the Keynesian post-war consensus was a

political-economic model that suited one particular stage of capitalist

development. New conditions (not least a long period of stagnation and

the beginning of the process of globalisation) gave rise to the

neo-liberal, monetarist model, which allowed unregulated capital to move

across borders freely and expanded credit to stimulate a stifled demand

and flat-lining real wages. All these systems are just different

variations on the same putrid and debased theme, just stages in the

evolution of a morally bankrupt system that has an unfortunate

self-adjusting mechanism guaranteeing its survival through countless

crises thus far.

3. A Shit Slogan

We Are The 99%. All our grievances and frustrations watered down into a

vacuous, simplistic, twitter-friendly slogan. Just as vapid as ‘Yes We

Can’ or ‘Keep Hope Alive’. Is this an attempt to quantify the class

struggle? A handy little formula to explain inequality and income

disparities? Unfortunately, our problems have surpassed, ‘the 1% versus

everybody else’. Power is more entrenched and it cannot be delineated or

reduced into a neat little mantra or pyramid diagram of societies’

‘power structure’.

During France’s Red Terror, Marat drew up an exact list of around 36,000

names, claiming that all the problems of the French people could be

solved virtually overnight if the 36,000 were guillotined. This claim at

least would have made more sense in his era of autocratic leviathans and

the absolute omnipotency of Church and State. At least then there was a

definite, discernable line of authority heading steeply down a feudal

pyramid, but I’m not so sure that this is the case now (or even if it

was then). It’s not so black and white between the powerful and

powerless; the monolithic institution/elite vs. the rest of the world.

Power is more diffuse. It manages to worm its way into all relationships

and practical endeavors, a crisscrossing web of coercive and

manipulative connections that reproduce themselves through individuals –

our job is to grasp this and minimise its hold over us. If I’m wrong

then fuck it, lets just hang the 1% and be done with it, and enjoy the

rest of our lives without these parasites.

4. What are they Occupying?

Looks to me like they’re sleeping in a park or on a bit of concrete

outside a church. A protest can either be a media-spectacle that ‘raises

awareness’, or it can actually pose a real threat to the State if it

challenges it directly. Are these occupations about establishing

‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ or ‘Spaces of Hope’, self-governing and

independent of traditional power structures and the State, that could

potentially lead to a situation of ‘dual power’ that negates the State’s

hegemony, or begins to construct ‘the new in the shell of the old’? Or

are they oppositional attempts to disrupt (or just question) the status

quo without establishing a positive alternative? Both would be fine, but

I’m not sure that Occupy is doing either, or if they are, their attempts

seem a little watered-down. In fairness, Occupy Oakland has made the

most progress towards actually turning the occupation into a real Event,

and this is partly due to the wildly disproportionate repression the

(initially) peaceful encampment received from the police.

The practical/organisational forms of the occupy movement (radically

democratic, horizontally-structured) seem to be more radical than the

content (reformist ‘demands’, social-democratic leanings). The

non-hierarchical, organic structure is laudable, with general assemblies

as the sole decision-making bodies, but to be effective, the occupations

need to become more than just political campsites.

Apologies for not being completely overjoyed at the prospect of new

generation of activists demanding (in the main) a return to some sort of

pre-cuts-pre-monetarist-pre-Thatcher-pre-Reagan-pre-deregulation-capitalism,

and imagining a kind of socially responsible, welfarist free market to

replace the rapacious capitalism of late. Perhaps I’m jealous not being

in the place where it’s all apparently ‘happening’, but my sympathy is

stretched with a movement that has consistently tried to appeal to both,

‘left and right, liberal and conservative’, de-politicising class

warfare and shouting, ‘Forget your politics, YOU ARE THE

99%!!!!!!!!!!11!! #OWS’