We’re all so shocked at the respectables’ patronizing dismissal of the OWSers (Occupy Wall Streeters — can we get this abreve off the ground?) The main respectable criticism seems to be essentially that the OWSers are naive because they haven’t distilled/stripped their message down to a phony miracle-pill solution like the Tea Party has (had done for them by the FreedomWorks, Fox News, etc. that is) with the whole starve the government thing.
People making this argument over the last week that have particularly grated me: Andrew Sullivan (just track back using the links from his most recent post on the topic) and the Slaterinos in the most recent Political Gabfest (segment 3).
This may seem counter-intuitive, since any of Andrew Sullivan, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson or David Plotz — very smart, elite-educated people — would, I think, readily admit that there is no miracle pill, that the problems that have locked their country into what’s undeniably a pretty terrifying trajectory (destitution continuing to climb up the percentiles, the total capture and expansion of the state repressive apparatuses by plutocratic interests, environmental disaster, flashes of what many might label fascism in the political culture) are systemic and demand a broad and multifaceted response, but the logic is this: the wider public is too passive and unsophisticated to rally behind anything but a ready-packaged, easily sloganeered, snake-oil, miracle-pill solution.
Their logic, I think, is sound. But where does that leave us? In a position in which the only thing that can work rhetorically can’t work and will likely be destructive practically. Where anything that might work practically is doomed to fail to gain traction. In short: stuck on our current trajectory (along which the only variable is the velocity at which we’re traveling at a given moment).
Inchoate rage, English riots-style, seems like the perfectly logical response to such a situation from a generation of Americans that was promised (like every generation of Americans) that their quality of life would not be worse than that enjoyed by their parents (not that that promise hasn’t been broken before, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t and isn’t a big deal). Funnily enough, though, the OWSers’ overwhelming peacefulness hardly conforms to that model. But putting that aside for a minute….
Why are we so stuck on this trajectory that makes no sense when thought of in terms of the personal interests of the vast majority?
The consolidation of economic, state, and mass-cultural power (via the services of the most expensive and sophisticated — strategically and scientifically — marketing apparatus in the world) in the hands of a tiny plutocratic elite, themselves unified by the adherence to the ideology of personal acquisition implied by the perfect comparability of the empty signifiers of abstract value (dolla’ dolla’ bills yo). What REALLY matters to them is an abstract quantity, and they’re making tremendous progress in making it so that what has to REALLY matter to everyone is the same thing (the comprehensive strip-back of government social support in any form).
The most glaring problem with this is that in the end, what REALLY REALLY matters is going to reassert itself when global temperatures climb four degrees, crop yields plummet by 35+%, we run out of oil, and people turn the kind of nasty and brutish that desperate people turn, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road-style.
Energy and food aren’t abstraction and plutocratic individualism is going to fall short of being able to avert civilization-destroying crisis from their shortfalls, especially considering the degree to which the plutocrats have committed to a total denial of the problem (again, projecting their denial onto the culture via their unprecedentedly well-resourced and sophisticated marketing apparatus).
The only thing that might work is rationally coordinated international collective action that is totally impossible the way global capitalism is currently configured. So yes: the OWSers are opposed to capitalism as it exists. What’s naive about that? Or about what they’re trying to rally: a broader recognition of this systemic problem. And guess what: plenty of people recognize it. What I’ve found most unifies everyone across ideology is our pessimism.
They’re giving us an opportunity to organize into a peaceful movement in response. If it’s subverted, or ridiculed away, they won’t take the problems they’re responding to with them. What they will take with them, I predict, is the legitimacy of peaceful action. Look to England for what comes next.
But what does restructuring capitalism mean? I strongly suspect you would find overwhelming support among the OWSers for at least the following, any and all of which would either ease the degree to which money dominates or will come to dominate most peoples’ lives or head off the kind of non-abstract calamity we can all see coming:
- Independently enforced consumer-protection-oriented regulation of especially the financial industry
- Single-payer healthcare
- Strong public investment in clean energy and transportation technology research
- Intellectual property / patent reform designed to make information as free as possible
- Strong public investment and regulation of higher education (and the way students are financed).
- An end to corporate welfare (especially for the non-clean energy sector, including ethanol companies, and for high-input industrial agriculture)
- The legalization (or at least decriminalization) of at least marijuana and the end of the drug war
- A comprehensive reevaluation of the use of private contractors for services that could more economically and ethically be provided by public employees
- A withdrawal from Afghanistan
- A return to at least Clinton-era taxes / tax distribution
- A serious engagement with the problem that advancing technology means less productive work is out there (as productive work is traditionally defined — namely, low-skill labour)
I could go on, and I bet that most OWSers could too.
(PS – It should be granted that there are a lot of Ron Paul End Fiat Money libertarians there who would disagree with a bunch of the above. I’d like to point out that they’re only there because their shitty movement was totally subverted by corporate interests because, fundamentally, their ideology is extremely vulnerable to being subverted by corporate interests. I wish they would go away.)
