Die Neue Zeit
21st October 2011, 04:21
http://cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004580
Jim Creegan reports on the occupiers who aim to take on Wall Street and examines the implications for left politics
Some things are predictably unpredictable. Marxists were right to assert, in the face of end-of-history gloating, that the class struggle will not disappear as long as capitalism exists. We are also better equipped than most to discern the gradual build-up of tensions between classes that are bound at some point to break out into the open, no matter how placid things may appear on the surface. When, where and by whom the spark will be lit, however, is virtually impossible to know in advance.
For three years the United States sank deeper into an economic morass, as a president, on whom millions had naively pinned their hopes for deliverance, betrayed the expectations for change he cynically exploited to enter the White House. The only challenge to business-as-usual came not from leftwingers or unemployed workers, but from elements of the petty bourgeoisie grouped around the Tea Party, financed by rightwing capitalists and determined to protect their increasingly perilous status and income at the expense of those beneath them. The hopes that surrounded the struggle of public workers in Wisconsin were temporarily dashed when the governor succeeded in ramming his union-busting bill through the state legislature, and resistance died down. But Wisconsin, it seems, was merely a prologue.
Now, amid the combustible international atmosphere of rebellion from Cairo and Tunis, to Athens and London, a spark has been lit that is already giving rise to numerous incendiary incidents at the centre of the capitalist world order, long considered fireproof. On September 17, Occupy Wall Street, a hastily convened band of young people from all over the country, originally about a hundred in number, occupied a half-acre private square named Zuccotti Park, a few blocks from the stock exchange. Though politically amorphous and without specific demands, OWS is clearly an expression of gathering resentment against the crimes and vaulting arrogance of the American ruling class. Its main slogan, ‘We are the 99%!’, expresses its intention of giving a voice to a majority it perceives as increasingly disenfranchised by a tiny financial and corporate elite. It aims to fight back against the latter’s looting of the public purse and accumulation of fantastic wealth at the expense of a population more and more debt-burdened and without prospects of decent work.
In the four weeks since the occupation began, OWS has captured the attention of the national media, drawn thousands to its impromptu marches, attracted the (often hesitant) support of major unions, featured left celebrities such as Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek on its speakers’ platform, issued two numbers of its own broadsheet, Occupied Wall Street, and inspired similar actions in just about every one of the country’s major cities, and many medium-sized cities and small towns besides. There are sizeable Occupy movements in normally serene places from Des Moines, Iowa to Portland, Maine. It is still too early to tell, but speculation abounds in the media, and fear grows in high places, that OWS may mark the beginning of a leftwing ‘populist rebellion’, the likes of which has not been seen in the US since the 1930s.
Origins
Occupy Wall Street is of indistinct origins. Its convenors included no organisation or political figure of national reputation. Like the rebellions taking place on other continents, it was promoted through informal social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. The original call came from outside the US. In July, a self-described ‘situationist’ magazine named AdBusters, published in Vancouver, fantasised in print about the possibility of 20,000 people descending on Wall Street to protest corporate domination and initiate a return to genuine democracy. They gave their fantasy a specific date: September 17. The Canadian magazine, dedicated to combating commercialism in the media with media-savvy techniques known as ‘culture jamming’, claimed inspiration from Tahrir Square and the popular assemblies in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.
Thousands, it seems, were awaiting their summons. As word spread over the internet, committees sprang up in various cities to promote the idea. A group of anarchist-inclined activists calling itself the General Assembly began to hold outdoor planning sessions during the summer in Manhattan’s East Village. The General Assembly was open to all comers.
On the appointed day, a group of about a hundred assembled a few blocks from Wall Street at a famous statue of a charging bull, meant to symbolise the (now-abated) dynamism of the stock exchange. From there they marched to the famous street itself. Turned away by the police, they ultimately settled in their present venue around the corner.
At first, the encampment appeared to differ little from other mini-protests by activists in recent years. This changed as a result of the protestors’ decision not to let themselves be ignored. On September 24, they marched uptown to Union Square, blocking traffic along the way. The police arrested over 80 people, freely swinging their batons. Widely televised images of a police commander indiscriminately dousing four unresisting and already corralled female marchers with pepper spray shocked many television viewers and created wider sympathy for the protest. The men and women in blue were slightly more restrained the following Saturday, when they nevertheless arrested at least 700 protestors who were marching over the Brooklyn Bridge. Many thought the cops had falsely led demonstrators to believe they had permission to march in the bridge’s traffic lane in order to trap and handcuff them there.
New features
The Brooklyn Bridge arrests also backfired. On October 5, major New York unions - transport workers, schoolteachers and municipal employees - joined OWS for the biggest march to date. The tens of thousands of workers who swelled the route did so with the endorsement not only of their local branches, but of the national leadership of the AFL-CIO.
Endorsements at the local level were not proffered without misgivings. Some bureaucrats voiced their congenital aversion to anything not completely under their control, in addition to their fears that association with a movement containing radicals might estrange them from the Democratic politicians whose favours they habitually seek (but seldom get). Yet such considerations were apparently outweighed by the desperation of a labour movement so moribund that its leaders feel compelled to seek support and energy even from sources they are wary of. That wariness, however, was evident from the fact that some bureaucrats stopped short of a full mobilisation of the rank and file for the event.
Zuccotti Park presents an aspect that is in marked contrast to leftwing gatherings of recent years. Conspicuously absent are the familiar pre-printed placards and newspaper hawkers from what remains of the organised far left. There is rather a proliferation of signs, some quite professional-looking, but most crudely hand-lettered and containing highly individual messages, running the gamut from more to less radical. “Feed the people, eat the rich!” exclaimed one placard; “Our tax code could be fairer,” ventured another. Drum circles are a constant feature. Especially on weekends, the park is surrounded by a crush of photo-snapping and largely friendly tourists.
Absent also is the feeling of doing one’s political duty before supper that till now pervaded many leftwing demonstrations. Zuccotti campers, of a far lower average age than the usual marchers, are convinced they have started something momentous, and intend to see it through to the end. They also evince an eagerness to talk politics and exchange ideas not witnessed since the 1960s. They appear to have shaken off the resignation and ennui of intervening decades.
Forbidden by city authorities to pitch tents, the campers sleep in the open. Electronic amplification equipment of any kind being also prohibited, the participants have taken to repeating the words of each speaker, phrase by short phrase, in chorus so that everyone can hear. This ‘people’s mic’ expedient quickly grew into a kind of incantatory ritual, forcing the audience to listen closely to the speaker’s every word, and binding it together through group repetition. ‘General assemblies’, in which problems are discussed and decisions made, are held twice a day. Participants have developed their own set of hand signals: wriggling fingers pointed upward signify approval, downward-pointing ones, disapproval; holding fingers level with the ground indicates neutrality. The assemblies are proud of the fact that they operate not by majority rule, but by consensus.
Caught off guard
Student radicals of the 60s (of which I was one) enjoyed an advantage that allowed them to seize the initiative: the confusion of the ruling powers in the face of their ever-bolder actions. The authorities had long coped with labour radicalism and leftwing parties, but were totally unprepared for militancy amongst white, middle class students. They oscillated for a long time between repression and conciliation before coming up with a coherent counter-strategy.
The authorities are repeating the same pattern now. After having clubbed, arrested and pepper-sprayed protestors, the police pulled in their horns and allowed OWS to march unhindered through the city’s ultra-posh Upper East Side, home to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, among other leading CEOs. The day before, New York’s billionaire businessman mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said that OWSers would be allowed to camp out and “express themselves” as long as they like, within the limits of the law, of course. A few days later, Bloomberg made an attempt to evict the campers, this time under the pretext of cleaning up the park. When the campers themselves showed up brandishing mops and brooms, and were joined at 7am by thousands, including many trade unionists, pledging to resist eviction and confront the police, Bloomberg backed down again, to the exhilaration of the park.
During the week of this writing, police invaded a similar encampment in Boston in the middle of the night, knocking down several members of Veterans for Peace and detaining about 100 people. Boston’s mayor, while defending the police, was making conciliatory noises similar to Bloomberg’s the next day. The same kind of vacillation is evident on the national political stage, onto which the issue of OWS has been unceremoniously thrust. Leading Republicans were quick to condemn. Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the House of Representatives and Tea Party mouthpiece, at first voiced his concern over “growing mobs”. Herman Cain, a black pizza-parlour magnate seeking the Republican presidential nomination, called OWS “un-American” for being “anti-capitalist” and “anti-market”. The Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, taxed the protesters with the pro-forma Republican accusation of “class warfare”, a phrase they trot out when non-millionaires show signs of fighting back. But within a week Cantor had backtracked, saying the protestors were “justifiably frustrated”. And in a televised debate among Republican candidates, Romney also called OWS anger “understandable”.
Republican toing and froing is a measure of the extent to which the OWS intervention has changed the tenor of national politics. So long as the Republicans could convince people that the source of their woes was “big government”, as opposed to the class power it serves, politicians like Cantor and Romney could conceal the true servility of their actions. But, once the “one percent”, as OWS refers to the richest Americans, were explicitly targeted, denouncing the protestors too stridently placed Republican bigwigs in the unenviable position of open defenders of wealth. Such a stance seems particularly untenable after a recent Washington Post/Bloomberg News poll revealed that over half of the “self-identified Republicans” surveyed favoured raising taxes on families earning over $250,000 a year.
For their part, the Democrats have reacted with what the New York Times described as a “wary embrace”. The left fringe of the party, the Progressive Caucus, gushed predictably. But an even more mainstream Democrat like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said “God bless them”, and continued: “The message of the protestors is a message for the establishment everyplace. No longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street” (The Weekly Standard October 6). The pro-Democratic New York Times published a ringing endorsement of OWS on its editorial page. True to form, Barack Obama was more equivocal, saying he understood OWS’s anger at many of the abuses committed by the banks, but added that he also believed in a “strong financial sector”.
Analogue
OWS puts the Democrats in a bigger bind than the Republicans. With presidential approval ratings at all-time lows, the party in power has few flints left for kindling popular enthusiasm for the 2012 presidential election. Growing anger at the oligarchy is the one key crying out to be played. Yet to do so would cause serious problems with the ‘one percenters’ of the party’s donor base. Hence, the leadership’s preference for a few mild jabs at ‘fat cats’, followed by a wink and nod to the corpulent.
Now, however, OWS is independently modelling the most plausible strategy by which the Democrats can hope to save themselves. This has led some among them to ponder avoidance of the collective suicide that shunning OWS might lead to next November. Given the movement’s shapelessness, some hope that it can be made to serve the Democrats as a sort of leftwing analogue to the Tea Party. But the left-Keynesian Robert Reich, secretary of labour to Bill Clinton in the 90s, resists such facile symmetries:
“… if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it than the GOP [‘grand old party’] has had with the Tea Party.
“After all, a big share of both parties’ campaign funds comes from the Street and corporate boardrooms. The Street and corporate America also have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do their bidding - not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey’s and Karl Rove’s SuperPACs. Even if the occupiers have access to some union money, it’s hardly a match.”
After pointing out that the Democrats had long ago abandoned any pretence to leftwing populism, and that Obama is about as far from a populist Democrat as it is possible to be, Reich concludes: “This is not to say that the occupiers can have no impact on the Democrats. Nothing good happens in Washington - regardless of how good our president or representatives may be - unless good people join together outside Washington to make it happen. Pressure from the left is critically important.
“But the modern Democratic Party is not likely to embrace leftwing populism the way the GOP has embraced - or, more accurately, been forced to embrace - rightwing populism. Just follow the money, and remember history” (‘The Wall Street occupiers and the Democratic Party’ Common Dreams October 9).
Radical impulse
Yet OWS’s lack of political definition could prove to be a weakness vis-à-vis the Democrats, whose main value to the ruling class is their ability to channel the energies of incipient rebellions into harmless electoral campaigns. The movement’s attitude toward Obama is less than sharply defined. Neither his name, nor that of the Democrats, is often mentioned in their paper or on their placards. By taking to the streets, the movement is indeed stating that normal electoral politics have not worked, and that change will only come about as a result of actions like their own.
Their radical impulse is only implicit at this point, however. The occupiers’ weakness is evident in the marked contrast between their élan and militant spirit, on the one hand, and the uninspired nature of the demands many come up with when pressed. Although the OWS general assembly has not yet arrived at a set of concrete proposals, many will mention such things as the Tobin tax (a proposed assessment on financial transactions), or the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act (which once forbade financial speculation on the part of banks), as if such minor legal tinkerings would be sufficient to rein in the power of the corporate leviathan, whose toes they are beginning to tweak. Even more serious demands to address the urgent needs of the millions they aim to speak for - sharing out existing work with no loss in pay, a massive programme of useful government jobs for the unemployed, debt and mortgage relief for ordinary people - are rarely mentioned.
Such omissions bespeak a political naivety also reminiscent of the 60s. OWS seems to suffer from the underestimation of the power of its enemies, combined with a correlative overestimation of their own potential. Too ready with easy analogies, some think that the corporate stranglehold on politics can be undone by means of a single, sustained mobilisation, like those that brought down Mubarak or Ben Ali, and vow to stay assembled until their goals are met.
Such a conflation of the political power of an individual dictator with the deeply entrenched, multifaceted dominance of an entire class reinforces the movement’s tendency to substitute spectacle for durable organisation. If, indeed, corporate power is as easily conquered as many in the movement seem to think, then it is not unreasonable to believe it can be dealt a major defeat in a single, spontaneous outpouring of popular anger, which has no need of hierarchies or permanent organisation, and which can remain leaderless and arrive at all its decisions by consensus.
If, on the other hand, present corporate arrogance is viewed not as some sort of political dérapage, but merely a more blatant manifestation of the power of history’s most formidable ruling class, then the struggle to break its power must be conceived as a protracted effort, as opposed to a single event. Then consensus decision-making cannot be used to settle the differences between the factions that inevitably arise in the course of a more drawn-out combat, but whose existence cannot be allowed to stand in the way of action, either. Then the need will be acknowledged to sustain the movement after the tumult and the shouting of the ecstatic moment dies - as it must - and for an organisation to guide such a movement through the partial victories and defeats that define the arc of any serious struggle.
Whatever one may think of the Slovenian intellectual superstar, Slavoj Žižek, his October 9 address to the encampment was, at least in part, an attempt to bring some of the wisdom of the past to the fledgling militants of a country said to be trapped in an eternal present. Lacing his speech with the wise saws and modern instances that have become his trademark, Žižek said that the movement now being born must be more than a carnival, about which participants will reminisce over a pint in middle age; that the enemy was not greed, but the system; that one does nothing to oppose the system by refusing to shop at Wal-Mart or becoming a vegan; that the movement had a long and difficult path ahead; that its participants must get over their aversion to taking orders, so long as they agree with the purpose for which the orders are given.
Past and present
Comparisons with the 1960s having been duly made, it is also important to note the essential differences, especially in the respective political and social environments of the two eras. There is, in fact, an ironic dissonance in the movements of both periods between ideology and social content.
The 60s hardly conformed to a classical Marxist, class-struggle scenario. In western countries, at least, most of the malcontents were educated youth in rebellion against an imperialist war and a conformist society they felt they had no place in. In the US, they were joined by radicalising blacks, Latinos and other minorities, in arms against their relegation to society’s lowest rungs. The main agents of radicalism were those either too educated - or too poor - to be part of the consumer society. It was said at the time that, if earlier revolutionaries aimed to set up a workers’ and peasants’ republic, a seizure of power by the ‘new left’ would result in a republic of lumpenproletarians and PhDs.
Conspicuously absent from the brew of discontent was the white working class. There were, to be sure, significant episodes of worker unrest, especially in the early 70s, when the rebellious mood of the time spread, if only briefly, to the industrial and union arenas. It was also mainly working class youth of all hues who turned against - and sometimes dispatched - their officers in Vietnam, beginning in the late 60s. But the class as a whole enjoyed a higher standard of living than ever before, and saw their rising wages as a ticket into the middle class. They therefore tended to regard the boys and girls already at university, and on their way to middle class careers, as pampered and contemptuous of the goals for which their parents had sacrificed. They saw no percentage in rocking the imperial boat. What emerged into the 70s was a highly petty-bourgeoisified society, in which workers were largely quiescent and yesterday’s firebrands went on to respectable, middle class careers, mollifying their radical consciences with organic gardening and postmodernist identity politics.
The irony, however, is that the most conscious middle class rebels of the time ultimately came to consider themselves Marxists of one variety or another. This identification derived less from their own situation than from the fact that Marxism, even if in some vulgarised or distorted form, remained the dominant leftwing discourse - a result of its centrality to previous struggles, the existence of the USSR and China, and its adoption (at least in name) by the more radical anti-colonial revolutions of the day. Especially after the principal ‘new left’ organisation, Students for a Democratic Society, fell apart in factional discord in 1969, Maoist and Trotskyist groups could appeal to ‘new left’ refugees by presenting themselves as the genuine Marxists that many were then trying to be.
Today, as the American-centred world order wanes, the film of petty-bourgeoisification is being played backwards. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent specialising in coverage of revolts the world over, has commented on the prominence among the discontented of the ‘unemployed PhD’. Mason notes that, whereas a university education used to be thought of as the guarantee of a comfortable middle class existence, university graduates now finish their education under mountains of debt and in intense competition for a shrinking number of jobs.
This situation puts them increasingly in the same boat as workers, whose income has also been on the decline for many a year. In 1970, Richard Nixon’s venom-spewing vice-president, Spiro Agnew, incited construction workers (‘hard hats’) to assault anti-war demonstrators in lower Manhattan. Today, in the same neighbourhood, construction workers are regularly visiting Zuccotti Park with words of encouragement - one of many signs that old resentments between the educated and the less educated, tirelessly exploited by Republican demagogues to whip up resentment against ‘elitists’, is becoming a thing of the past, as the common enemy of both comes more clearly into view.
The emerging configuration of rebellion, then, seems much closer to the classical Marxist image. Professionals-in-training are, in fact, becoming something like the ‘new working class’ that Ernest Mandel and others wrote about in the 70s, instead of the new petty bourgeoisie they actually became in that period.
But hereby hangs the second irony. At the very time when it would seem most apposite, the discourse of Marxism - genuine or bogus - has little currency among today’s leftward-inclining young. They flounder in a theoretical void; their outlook consists of a hodgepodge of confused and half-formed ideas, ranging from liberal to anarcho-libertarian, that have multiplied in the gap left by the ‘death of communism’. It is the task of Marxists to re-infuse this movement with the only outlook capable of explaining contemporary reality; to counter the notion, still widespread, that Marxism is Stalinism. But we must approach this task in all humility, without expectations that anyone will bow to our superior wisdom, and unburdened by the formula-mongering pedantry that has substituted itself for political thought among the few sects that have survived a 40-year hiatus in social struggle.
There is yet a third irony here. It is in the land of historically low class-consciousness - America, the backward - that a newly arisen movement is, even more clearly than Arabs or Europeans, penetrating the often mystifying veil of politics to point its finger squarely at the class enemy, the “one percent”. The illusions of protestors notwithstanding, Zuccotti Park will fade as winter sets in. But it probably will not fade so fast from the public mind, and similar eruptions are likely to follow. It could very well be the beginning of the sea-change in consciousness that the Socialist Workers Party incorrectly read into the ‘battle of Seattle’ in 1999.
The difference consists in prevailing economic conditions. No Marxist can possibly accept the amorphous politics of the occupiers as the end-point of the movement’s consciousness. Only a fossil, on the other hand, can fail to perceive the occupations as a potential new beginning.
Jim Creegan reports on the occupiers who aim to take on Wall Street and examines the implications for left politics
Some things are predictably unpredictable. Marxists were right to assert, in the face of end-of-history gloating, that the class struggle will not disappear as long as capitalism exists. We are also better equipped than most to discern the gradual build-up of tensions between classes that are bound at some point to break out into the open, no matter how placid things may appear on the surface. When, where and by whom the spark will be lit, however, is virtually impossible to know in advance.
For three years the United States sank deeper into an economic morass, as a president, on whom millions had naively pinned their hopes for deliverance, betrayed the expectations for change he cynically exploited to enter the White House. The only challenge to business-as-usual came not from leftwingers or unemployed workers, but from elements of the petty bourgeoisie grouped around the Tea Party, financed by rightwing capitalists and determined to protect their increasingly perilous status and income at the expense of those beneath them. The hopes that surrounded the struggle of public workers in Wisconsin were temporarily dashed when the governor succeeded in ramming his union-busting bill through the state legislature, and resistance died down. But Wisconsin, it seems, was merely a prologue.
Now, amid the combustible international atmosphere of rebellion from Cairo and Tunis, to Athens and London, a spark has been lit that is already giving rise to numerous incendiary incidents at the centre of the capitalist world order, long considered fireproof. On September 17, Occupy Wall Street, a hastily convened band of young people from all over the country, originally about a hundred in number, occupied a half-acre private square named Zuccotti Park, a few blocks from the stock exchange. Though politically amorphous and without specific demands, OWS is clearly an expression of gathering resentment against the crimes and vaulting arrogance of the American ruling class. Its main slogan, ‘We are the 99%!’, expresses its intention of giving a voice to a majority it perceives as increasingly disenfranchised by a tiny financial and corporate elite. It aims to fight back against the latter’s looting of the public purse and accumulation of fantastic wealth at the expense of a population more and more debt-burdened and without prospects of decent work.
In the four weeks since the occupation began, OWS has captured the attention of the national media, drawn thousands to its impromptu marches, attracted the (often hesitant) support of major unions, featured left celebrities such as Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek on its speakers’ platform, issued two numbers of its own broadsheet, Occupied Wall Street, and inspired similar actions in just about every one of the country’s major cities, and many medium-sized cities and small towns besides. There are sizeable Occupy movements in normally serene places from Des Moines, Iowa to Portland, Maine. It is still too early to tell, but speculation abounds in the media, and fear grows in high places, that OWS may mark the beginning of a leftwing ‘populist rebellion’, the likes of which has not been seen in the US since the 1930s.
Origins
Occupy Wall Street is of indistinct origins. Its convenors included no organisation or political figure of national reputation. Like the rebellions taking place on other continents, it was promoted through informal social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. The original call came from outside the US. In July, a self-described ‘situationist’ magazine named AdBusters, published in Vancouver, fantasised in print about the possibility of 20,000 people descending on Wall Street to protest corporate domination and initiate a return to genuine democracy. They gave their fantasy a specific date: September 17. The Canadian magazine, dedicated to combating commercialism in the media with media-savvy techniques known as ‘culture jamming’, claimed inspiration from Tahrir Square and the popular assemblies in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.
Thousands, it seems, were awaiting their summons. As word spread over the internet, committees sprang up in various cities to promote the idea. A group of anarchist-inclined activists calling itself the General Assembly began to hold outdoor planning sessions during the summer in Manhattan’s East Village. The General Assembly was open to all comers.
On the appointed day, a group of about a hundred assembled a few blocks from Wall Street at a famous statue of a charging bull, meant to symbolise the (now-abated) dynamism of the stock exchange. From there they marched to the famous street itself. Turned away by the police, they ultimately settled in their present venue around the corner.
At first, the encampment appeared to differ little from other mini-protests by activists in recent years. This changed as a result of the protestors’ decision not to let themselves be ignored. On September 24, they marched uptown to Union Square, blocking traffic along the way. The police arrested over 80 people, freely swinging their batons. Widely televised images of a police commander indiscriminately dousing four unresisting and already corralled female marchers with pepper spray shocked many television viewers and created wider sympathy for the protest. The men and women in blue were slightly more restrained the following Saturday, when they nevertheless arrested at least 700 protestors who were marching over the Brooklyn Bridge. Many thought the cops had falsely led demonstrators to believe they had permission to march in the bridge’s traffic lane in order to trap and handcuff them there.
New features
The Brooklyn Bridge arrests also backfired. On October 5, major New York unions - transport workers, schoolteachers and municipal employees - joined OWS for the biggest march to date. The tens of thousands of workers who swelled the route did so with the endorsement not only of their local branches, but of the national leadership of the AFL-CIO.
Endorsements at the local level were not proffered without misgivings. Some bureaucrats voiced their congenital aversion to anything not completely under their control, in addition to their fears that association with a movement containing radicals might estrange them from the Democratic politicians whose favours they habitually seek (but seldom get). Yet such considerations were apparently outweighed by the desperation of a labour movement so moribund that its leaders feel compelled to seek support and energy even from sources they are wary of. That wariness, however, was evident from the fact that some bureaucrats stopped short of a full mobilisation of the rank and file for the event.
Zuccotti Park presents an aspect that is in marked contrast to leftwing gatherings of recent years. Conspicuously absent are the familiar pre-printed placards and newspaper hawkers from what remains of the organised far left. There is rather a proliferation of signs, some quite professional-looking, but most crudely hand-lettered and containing highly individual messages, running the gamut from more to less radical. “Feed the people, eat the rich!” exclaimed one placard; “Our tax code could be fairer,” ventured another. Drum circles are a constant feature. Especially on weekends, the park is surrounded by a crush of photo-snapping and largely friendly tourists.
Absent also is the feeling of doing one’s political duty before supper that till now pervaded many leftwing demonstrations. Zuccotti campers, of a far lower average age than the usual marchers, are convinced they have started something momentous, and intend to see it through to the end. They also evince an eagerness to talk politics and exchange ideas not witnessed since the 1960s. They appear to have shaken off the resignation and ennui of intervening decades.
Forbidden by city authorities to pitch tents, the campers sleep in the open. Electronic amplification equipment of any kind being also prohibited, the participants have taken to repeating the words of each speaker, phrase by short phrase, in chorus so that everyone can hear. This ‘people’s mic’ expedient quickly grew into a kind of incantatory ritual, forcing the audience to listen closely to the speaker’s every word, and binding it together through group repetition. ‘General assemblies’, in which problems are discussed and decisions made, are held twice a day. Participants have developed their own set of hand signals: wriggling fingers pointed upward signify approval, downward-pointing ones, disapproval; holding fingers level with the ground indicates neutrality. The assemblies are proud of the fact that they operate not by majority rule, but by consensus.
Caught off guard
Student radicals of the 60s (of which I was one) enjoyed an advantage that allowed them to seize the initiative: the confusion of the ruling powers in the face of their ever-bolder actions. The authorities had long coped with labour radicalism and leftwing parties, but were totally unprepared for militancy amongst white, middle class students. They oscillated for a long time between repression and conciliation before coming up with a coherent counter-strategy.
The authorities are repeating the same pattern now. After having clubbed, arrested and pepper-sprayed protestors, the police pulled in their horns and allowed OWS to march unhindered through the city’s ultra-posh Upper East Side, home to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, among other leading CEOs. The day before, New York’s billionaire businessman mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said that OWSers would be allowed to camp out and “express themselves” as long as they like, within the limits of the law, of course. A few days later, Bloomberg made an attempt to evict the campers, this time under the pretext of cleaning up the park. When the campers themselves showed up brandishing mops and brooms, and were joined at 7am by thousands, including many trade unionists, pledging to resist eviction and confront the police, Bloomberg backed down again, to the exhilaration of the park.
During the week of this writing, police invaded a similar encampment in Boston in the middle of the night, knocking down several members of Veterans for Peace and detaining about 100 people. Boston’s mayor, while defending the police, was making conciliatory noises similar to Bloomberg’s the next day. The same kind of vacillation is evident on the national political stage, onto which the issue of OWS has been unceremoniously thrust. Leading Republicans were quick to condemn. Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the House of Representatives and Tea Party mouthpiece, at first voiced his concern over “growing mobs”. Herman Cain, a black pizza-parlour magnate seeking the Republican presidential nomination, called OWS “un-American” for being “anti-capitalist” and “anti-market”. The Republican frontrunner, Mitt Romney, taxed the protesters with the pro-forma Republican accusation of “class warfare”, a phrase they trot out when non-millionaires show signs of fighting back. But within a week Cantor had backtracked, saying the protestors were “justifiably frustrated”. And in a televised debate among Republican candidates, Romney also called OWS anger “understandable”.
Republican toing and froing is a measure of the extent to which the OWS intervention has changed the tenor of national politics. So long as the Republicans could convince people that the source of their woes was “big government”, as opposed to the class power it serves, politicians like Cantor and Romney could conceal the true servility of their actions. But, once the “one percent”, as OWS refers to the richest Americans, were explicitly targeted, denouncing the protestors too stridently placed Republican bigwigs in the unenviable position of open defenders of wealth. Such a stance seems particularly untenable after a recent Washington Post/Bloomberg News poll revealed that over half of the “self-identified Republicans” surveyed favoured raising taxes on families earning over $250,000 a year.
For their part, the Democrats have reacted with what the New York Times described as a “wary embrace”. The left fringe of the party, the Progressive Caucus, gushed predictably. But an even more mainstream Democrat like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said “God bless them”, and continued: “The message of the protestors is a message for the establishment everyplace. No longer will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street” (The Weekly Standard October 6). The pro-Democratic New York Times published a ringing endorsement of OWS on its editorial page. True to form, Barack Obama was more equivocal, saying he understood OWS’s anger at many of the abuses committed by the banks, but added that he also believed in a “strong financial sector”.
Analogue
OWS puts the Democrats in a bigger bind than the Republicans. With presidential approval ratings at all-time lows, the party in power has few flints left for kindling popular enthusiasm for the 2012 presidential election. Growing anger at the oligarchy is the one key crying out to be played. Yet to do so would cause serious problems with the ‘one percenters’ of the party’s donor base. Hence, the leadership’s preference for a few mild jabs at ‘fat cats’, followed by a wink and nod to the corpulent.
Now, however, OWS is independently modelling the most plausible strategy by which the Democrats can hope to save themselves. This has led some among them to ponder avoidance of the collective suicide that shunning OWS might lead to next November. Given the movement’s shapelessness, some hope that it can be made to serve the Democrats as a sort of leftwing analogue to the Tea Party. But the left-Keynesian Robert Reich, secretary of labour to Bill Clinton in the 90s, resists such facile symmetries:
“… if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it than the GOP [‘grand old party’] has had with the Tea Party.
“After all, a big share of both parties’ campaign funds comes from the Street and corporate boardrooms. The Street and corporate America also have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do their bidding - not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey’s and Karl Rove’s SuperPACs. Even if the occupiers have access to some union money, it’s hardly a match.”
After pointing out that the Democrats had long ago abandoned any pretence to leftwing populism, and that Obama is about as far from a populist Democrat as it is possible to be, Reich concludes: “This is not to say that the occupiers can have no impact on the Democrats. Nothing good happens in Washington - regardless of how good our president or representatives may be - unless good people join together outside Washington to make it happen. Pressure from the left is critically important.
“But the modern Democratic Party is not likely to embrace leftwing populism the way the GOP has embraced - or, more accurately, been forced to embrace - rightwing populism. Just follow the money, and remember history” (‘The Wall Street occupiers and the Democratic Party’ Common Dreams October 9).
Radical impulse
Yet OWS’s lack of political definition could prove to be a weakness vis-à-vis the Democrats, whose main value to the ruling class is their ability to channel the energies of incipient rebellions into harmless electoral campaigns. The movement’s attitude toward Obama is less than sharply defined. Neither his name, nor that of the Democrats, is often mentioned in their paper or on their placards. By taking to the streets, the movement is indeed stating that normal electoral politics have not worked, and that change will only come about as a result of actions like their own.
Their radical impulse is only implicit at this point, however. The occupiers’ weakness is evident in the marked contrast between their élan and militant spirit, on the one hand, and the uninspired nature of the demands many come up with when pressed. Although the OWS general assembly has not yet arrived at a set of concrete proposals, many will mention such things as the Tobin tax (a proposed assessment on financial transactions), or the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act (which once forbade financial speculation on the part of banks), as if such minor legal tinkerings would be sufficient to rein in the power of the corporate leviathan, whose toes they are beginning to tweak. Even more serious demands to address the urgent needs of the millions they aim to speak for - sharing out existing work with no loss in pay, a massive programme of useful government jobs for the unemployed, debt and mortgage relief for ordinary people - are rarely mentioned.
Such omissions bespeak a political naivety also reminiscent of the 60s. OWS seems to suffer from the underestimation of the power of its enemies, combined with a correlative overestimation of their own potential. Too ready with easy analogies, some think that the corporate stranglehold on politics can be undone by means of a single, sustained mobilisation, like those that brought down Mubarak or Ben Ali, and vow to stay assembled until their goals are met.
Such a conflation of the political power of an individual dictator with the deeply entrenched, multifaceted dominance of an entire class reinforces the movement’s tendency to substitute spectacle for durable organisation. If, indeed, corporate power is as easily conquered as many in the movement seem to think, then it is not unreasonable to believe it can be dealt a major defeat in a single, spontaneous outpouring of popular anger, which has no need of hierarchies or permanent organisation, and which can remain leaderless and arrive at all its decisions by consensus.
If, on the other hand, present corporate arrogance is viewed not as some sort of political dérapage, but merely a more blatant manifestation of the power of history’s most formidable ruling class, then the struggle to break its power must be conceived as a protracted effort, as opposed to a single event. Then consensus decision-making cannot be used to settle the differences between the factions that inevitably arise in the course of a more drawn-out combat, but whose existence cannot be allowed to stand in the way of action, either. Then the need will be acknowledged to sustain the movement after the tumult and the shouting of the ecstatic moment dies - as it must - and for an organisation to guide such a movement through the partial victories and defeats that define the arc of any serious struggle.
Whatever one may think of the Slovenian intellectual superstar, Slavoj Žižek, his October 9 address to the encampment was, at least in part, an attempt to bring some of the wisdom of the past to the fledgling militants of a country said to be trapped in an eternal present. Lacing his speech with the wise saws and modern instances that have become his trademark, Žižek said that the movement now being born must be more than a carnival, about which participants will reminisce over a pint in middle age; that the enemy was not greed, but the system; that one does nothing to oppose the system by refusing to shop at Wal-Mart or becoming a vegan; that the movement had a long and difficult path ahead; that its participants must get over their aversion to taking orders, so long as they agree with the purpose for which the orders are given.
Past and present
Comparisons with the 1960s having been duly made, it is also important to note the essential differences, especially in the respective political and social environments of the two eras. There is, in fact, an ironic dissonance in the movements of both periods between ideology and social content.
The 60s hardly conformed to a classical Marxist, class-struggle scenario. In western countries, at least, most of the malcontents were educated youth in rebellion against an imperialist war and a conformist society they felt they had no place in. In the US, they were joined by radicalising blacks, Latinos and other minorities, in arms against their relegation to society’s lowest rungs. The main agents of radicalism were those either too educated - or too poor - to be part of the consumer society. It was said at the time that, if earlier revolutionaries aimed to set up a workers’ and peasants’ republic, a seizure of power by the ‘new left’ would result in a republic of lumpenproletarians and PhDs.
Conspicuously absent from the brew of discontent was the white working class. There were, to be sure, significant episodes of worker unrest, especially in the early 70s, when the rebellious mood of the time spread, if only briefly, to the industrial and union arenas. It was also mainly working class youth of all hues who turned against - and sometimes dispatched - their officers in Vietnam, beginning in the late 60s. But the class as a whole enjoyed a higher standard of living than ever before, and saw their rising wages as a ticket into the middle class. They therefore tended to regard the boys and girls already at university, and on their way to middle class careers, as pampered and contemptuous of the goals for which their parents had sacrificed. They saw no percentage in rocking the imperial boat. What emerged into the 70s was a highly petty-bourgeoisified society, in which workers were largely quiescent and yesterday’s firebrands went on to respectable, middle class careers, mollifying their radical consciences with organic gardening and postmodernist identity politics.
The irony, however, is that the most conscious middle class rebels of the time ultimately came to consider themselves Marxists of one variety or another. This identification derived less from their own situation than from the fact that Marxism, even if in some vulgarised or distorted form, remained the dominant leftwing discourse - a result of its centrality to previous struggles, the existence of the USSR and China, and its adoption (at least in name) by the more radical anti-colonial revolutions of the day. Especially after the principal ‘new left’ organisation, Students for a Democratic Society, fell apart in factional discord in 1969, Maoist and Trotskyist groups could appeal to ‘new left’ refugees by presenting themselves as the genuine Marxists that many were then trying to be.
Today, as the American-centred world order wanes, the film of petty-bourgeoisification is being played backwards. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent specialising in coverage of revolts the world over, has commented on the prominence among the discontented of the ‘unemployed PhD’. Mason notes that, whereas a university education used to be thought of as the guarantee of a comfortable middle class existence, university graduates now finish their education under mountains of debt and in intense competition for a shrinking number of jobs.
This situation puts them increasingly in the same boat as workers, whose income has also been on the decline for many a year. In 1970, Richard Nixon’s venom-spewing vice-president, Spiro Agnew, incited construction workers (‘hard hats’) to assault anti-war demonstrators in lower Manhattan. Today, in the same neighbourhood, construction workers are regularly visiting Zuccotti Park with words of encouragement - one of many signs that old resentments between the educated and the less educated, tirelessly exploited by Republican demagogues to whip up resentment against ‘elitists’, is becoming a thing of the past, as the common enemy of both comes more clearly into view.
The emerging configuration of rebellion, then, seems much closer to the classical Marxist image. Professionals-in-training are, in fact, becoming something like the ‘new working class’ that Ernest Mandel and others wrote about in the 70s, instead of the new petty bourgeoisie they actually became in that period.
But hereby hangs the second irony. At the very time when it would seem most apposite, the discourse of Marxism - genuine or bogus - has little currency among today’s leftward-inclining young. They flounder in a theoretical void; their outlook consists of a hodgepodge of confused and half-formed ideas, ranging from liberal to anarcho-libertarian, that have multiplied in the gap left by the ‘death of communism’. It is the task of Marxists to re-infuse this movement with the only outlook capable of explaining contemporary reality; to counter the notion, still widespread, that Marxism is Stalinism. But we must approach this task in all humility, without expectations that anyone will bow to our superior wisdom, and unburdened by the formula-mongering pedantry that has substituted itself for political thought among the few sects that have survived a 40-year hiatus in social struggle.
There is yet a third irony here. It is in the land of historically low class-consciousness - America, the backward - that a newly arisen movement is, even more clearly than Arabs or Europeans, penetrating the often mystifying veil of politics to point its finger squarely at the class enemy, the “one percent”. The illusions of protestors notwithstanding, Zuccotti Park will fade as winter sets in. But it probably will not fade so fast from the public mind, and similar eruptions are likely to follow. It could very well be the beginning of the sea-change in consciousness that the Socialist Workers Party incorrectly read into the ‘battle of Seattle’ in 1999.
The difference consists in prevailing economic conditions. No Marxist can possibly accept the amorphous politics of the occupiers as the end-point of the movement’s consciousness. Only a fossil, on the other hand, can fail to perceive the occupations as a potential new beginning.