"I wonder what Occupy Wall Street is going to do next..."
So goes the refrain that punctuates many conversations about Occupy Wall Street today. The refrain marks a quiet, barely acknowledged shift in the Occupy movement's place within the national imagination. On the one hand, there have been very few headlines to emerge under the OWS. label in the last month or so. Occupy Our Homes and Ports, the fight over Duarte Park, the short-lived re-occupation over New Year's, and Occupy Iowa have all gotten some attention, but they have failed to recapture the energy of late October/early November.
On the other hand, we've come a long way since the days when people crowed about the lack of "demands" from the Occupy Wall Street activists. Now they're a known entity -- identified not by policy positions but by a general political attitude and a collection of images and phrases. Some people believe "they" are simply hibernating for the spring, while others expect that the presidential campaign will spark new protests, most likely over the summer.
OWS, in other words, has become a character in a reality television show for which many Americans cannot wait for the next episode.
Put differently, Occupy Wall Street, and its companion "the 99%," have become something like brands. I don't mean to say that the occupation has been corporatized; rather, OWS has become like a brand in a more fundamental sense. A brand is a fact that can be consumed, or that can be used to motivate consumption, because it is not up for debate. A good brand doesn't raise questions, it simply is. Nike is that shoe company that makes sneakers for athletes and puts a swoosh on everything it sells. Starbucks is that coffee place you can find anywhere with the caffé mochas you love so much. Bank of America is that dependable bank with ATMs all over the city that is (allegedly) way too powerful to go bankrupt. One can have all kinds of arguments over whether Nike, Starbucks, or Bank of America are good or bad, or do good or bad things, but no one is arguing about what they are, exactly.
Occupy Wall Street is the people who are fighting the good fight. It is that left-wing activist thing that puts up tents, sponsors rallies, makes YouTube videos, uses the human mic, holds general assemblies, and gets Michael Moore excited. And 'the 99%' is the have-nots, the disadvantaged masses, the not-elites, the protagonist in the class war; 'the 1%' is the elite, the powerful, the villain.
There's another word for the transformation from an abstract and indefinable collection of facts and interpretations into a concrete and not-up-for-debate "thing" -- the process is called reification. Marxists love the word, which is why most people have never heard of it these days, but it's the key principle behind the making of a brand. And whatever you want to call the brandlike concretization of OWS, it must be acknowledged before engaging in any more serious discussion of politics in 2012.
The first step to recapturing the potential of Occupy Wall Street is to resist its reification, and we can do that by remembering that the power of the Zuccotti occupation was in how much it didn't make sense. A month and a half after the end of the New York encampment, let's try thinking of Occupy Wall Street not as an organization but as a claim: that private interest is a public problem.
It worked like this: Wall Street is a private space that pretends to be a public space (just like Zuccotti Park -- the poetry was in the homology). On Wall Street, meaning the stock market, any adult can become a part-owner of a private company, so that the corporate world seems to offer itself to the democratic masses to be carved up according to its whims. But the truth is that the stock market solidifies power for the wealthy few, who, alone, can afford enough shares to hold sway in boardroom meetings -- and, by extension, in the halls of Congress via lobbyists and corporate donations. For the rest of us, the stock market is both the lottery and the illusion of influence (assuming we can afford to "play" at all). Still, the health of the stock market is taken to be an indicator of the health of the nation as a whole.
Occupying Wall Street means calling the stock market's bluff: It means shaming the private sector for pretending to be public, and demonstrating that the public good cannot be served by private interest. The reason "demands" were hard to come by in the early days was that Occupy Wall Street's claim delegitimized the stock market and corporate power altogether. If that were to be taken seriously, the means by which our nation conducts its business would be in jeopardy, and something else -- something unknowable in advance -- would have to take its place. The immensity of that change might feel like a revolution, but it is necessary for the well-being of America and the globalized world.
So Occupying Wall Street was not a crazy scheme that a group of activists did for attention. They did it for us. If the stock market is really going to be a seat of power in contemporary society, then we all have a stake in what happens there. If Wall Street is king, then Wall Street is ours, and the activists were holding our spot. The state knew this, so it dispatched some of its employees to arrest a few of us, to pepper spray a few others, and then, finally, on a cold November night, to throw all of us out.
Today, the distribution of power -- you could call it the state, the oligarchy, the 1%, the "system," or whatever -- has got what it wanted. Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street comfortably co-exist. Everyone is happy that the good guys are still fighting, regardless of where they are or how many of them there are left. The stock market bell rings every morning, and both state and federal legislators continue to claim the low market numbers and the rising debt as excuses to gut public programs. Occupy Wall Street is another label everyone can wear to a New Year's Eve party or talk about with their left-leaning friends. And journalists can do their due diligence by covering new Occupy actions as footnotes to the main event: election season.
Instead of asking what Occupy Wall Street is going to do next, we should be asking what kinds of public claims can yet be made that will challenge the status quo, that will confuse people by baldly suggesting that private is public, and that everyone, not just those who can buy into the system, matter. We will know that we have succeeded in cracking the brand-status of Occupy Wall Street when we are no longer speaking about "it" and waiting for "them" to do something new. Instead, we will be talking once again about "us."
Jason Fitzgerald is earning a doctorate in Theater and English at Columbia University. This is his second essay on the meaning of Occupy Wall Street, for Off the Bus.
Have the Super-Rich Seceded From the United States?
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout
At the end of the cold war, many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation state.
There have been books about globalization and how it would break down borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.
I do not mean secession in terms of physical withdrawal from the territory of the state. It means a withdrawal into enclaves, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension - and viable public transportation doesn't even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?
A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie's is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
Link to full story: http://www.truth-out.org/have-super-rich-seceded-united-states/1326127151
We have so far declined to bluntly use the "C" word: "Crime." We somehow do not like to think about our elected officials in terms such as "Felony," especially as those officials lodge themselves higher and higher up in the pecking order. Of course, as they rise in the echelons, their powers of self-defense grow disproportionately, but the fact remains that no group of about 700 people can resist the force of 312 million others if that force is properly, lawfully, but inexorably arrayed against them. If the kitchen lights are turned on, the rats will scatter, seeking once again the comfortable darkness.
We decline to speak of "crime" even though we are so obviously Plaintiffs. Our laws are not enforced, and we are told that True is False and that False is True. Our nation fights more than half a dozen undeclared wars simultaneously and amasses "debts" to pay for them which now exceed the net worth of the entire country. Who bears the "actual damages" of this treatment? We do.
Nothing in our future is inevitable, to be received with contrite passivity. America is what W-E make it to be. Nothing more, nothing less.
The had their pal Bloomberg broom OWS off the streets in NYC while simultaneously slashing prices on flat screen TVs.
They will watch again in bemusement when the "American Spring" flowers than have their buddy Obama wag the dog with some Foreign Policy "crisis".
They own the government and the media.
They got the Supreme Court to declare their multi-national corporations American "persons."
Unless OWS somehow finds a way to become more popular than the Kardashians we are all doomed.
False.
If you take the number of public protestors...multiply that by millions and you will arrive at an approximation of the number of actual customers who have rethought or are rethinking the way and with whom they manage their financial affairs. A public trust has been broken and may never mend. One of the saddest things is: it could have been avoided. In many ways,they brought it upon themselves.
That is change for the better. Are you saying that your parents never gave you an allowance? You never partied with friends? Your friends never let you crash at their place? You never left a mess anywhere for someone else to clean-up? You never expressed an unsolicited contraversial opinion in public? Wow! I'm sorry you missed all that growing-up.
Have they helped anyone? Not one person.
Millions of dollars in donations - where did it go?
The proof none of these have worked, look at where we are. More proof. Look at who's running. All but one are establishment supporters and worshippers, to include Obama. All are against the onley one that is not, Ron Paul.
If we are not brave enough to elect the very brave Ron Paul, there is only one other sure way to end the status quo (the establishment). The 160 million workers must be brave enough to unite nationally to peacefully stay home from work, stopping the money (taxes, profits, union dues).
OCCUPY YOUR HOUSE is the only thing that will make the establishment fear the people, as our government was designed. Trust me, nothing else will work, or it would have worked by now. They will quickly return the fearcard before they let us stay home from work and OCCUPY OUR HOUSE.
Not very often do i read this factual statement when attributed to the Occupy movement, much more refreshing than the usual flip-floppery that inhabits most statements about its base.
WORKING FOLKS INCOME THAN THE RICH. TAXES SUPPORT ALL OUR LOCAL, STATE AND
FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS AND SHOULD BE BASED ON INCOME TO BE FAIR!
But you really aren't interested in fairness.
But if you make $100,000. a year and spend $1000. for point of sales taxes you are only spending 1% of your income!
The person making $10,000. a year is paying 10 times more of their yearly income than the person earning $100,000.to support the government services of ALL of US!
Do u think that is fair???????
If I go out and create more value with the time and freedoms we both have, why do you assume I owe you something because I was more creative, harder working, smarter or more industrious?
wealth is largely owned by those who did not create it, while many people are poor in spite of their positive contributions to society, economic and otherwise.
creativity, hard work, intelligence and industry exist just as much among the poor and middle class as the rich. their opposites exist just as much among the rich as the poor and middle class.
for every steve jobs there's a paris hilton.
Does this wealth exist in a vacuum?
Is it not possible that while others were doing the mundane-- like teaching kids, saving lives, fixing roads, producing food-- they were allowing others to concentrate on bringing the hottest new video game to market and so become wealthy?
You seem to confuse worth with wealth -- and only find value in occupations that lead to financial rewards.
Is person on Wall St. a harder worker than a you?
Is Paris Hilton smarter than a researcher trying to cure cancer?
Is the kid that went to the "right" school, from the "right" family guaranteed to be better than others? ---If not, why does he always get the most opportunities to achieve?