The Occupy Wall Street movement (dare we call it that?) enters its second month with mixed results but with some cause for hope. The protesters' message has been unclear--deliberately so, I am assured; the movement's lack of a clearly established politics has enabled it to attract a broad base of support. Yet there has been a consistent danger that the fledgling movement with radical potential could be co-opted by any number of liberal organizations and made to serve politics as usual. Populist anger is a notoriously unstable political force, admissible of being canalized and harnessed by any number of agendas.
The movement's message of "we are the 99%" is especially salutary at a moment when, as Roger D. Hodge writes, "by 2007 the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans (families earning more than $109,630) were taking in 50 percent of the national income. In 1980 the top 1 percent of Americans received 10 percent of the national income; by 2007 the super- rich (those with income above $398,900) had increased their share to 23.5 percent. The average increase in real income for the bottom 99 percent of American families between 1973 and 2006 was a mere 8.5 percent, whereas the richest 1 percent saw a 190 percent rise in real income" (Harper's). People should be outraged by numbers like this. This, added to the Supreme Court's decision last winter to grant corporations the status of persons in making campaign donations in the Citizens United case, not to mention the major banks' seemingly coordinated decision to implement extensive fees on customers, added to the privatization of any public institution or service within grasp, makes the moment for action all the more urgent.
Mitt Romney's characterization of the occupation of Wall Street as "class warfare" is entirely accurate and should be embraced by those who identify themselves with the movement (the New York Times). As Obama's efforts to work across party lines in coming to an agreement regarding the debt ceiling in August demonstrate, the liberal, rationalist ideal of consensus politics quickly breaks down when one is confronted with an adversary who is anything but rational. Instead, a movement worthy of the name should embrace the rhetoric of class (a "no-no" for far too long in U.S. politics) and welcome its role as an antagonist in a class war that everyone knows has been going on for decades, waged not by the people camping out in Zuccotti Park but by Romney and his cohort.
The movement has received some welcome encouragement from Slavoj Zizek and other figures on the left (Zizek). Zizek echoes the point he makes in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce that we have "privatized profit and socialized risk"; that financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" and therefore worthy of public bailout are the cause of, not the solution to the woes of post-2008 social and economic life.
What should become clear at this point is the sense in which the Occupy Wall Street movement, the protesters against Scott Walker's attempts to break Wisconsin public sector workers' unions, and the SUNY students' walkout, to name just a few instances, are all in league against a common adversary: the trail of disenfranchisement, dispossession, and debt left in the wake of global capitalism's consumption of resources and consolidation of wealth.
The 99 percenters should be clear in their message: what we want is not a correction to the free market logic that organizes our lives but an outright rejection of this logic. A heavily regulated financial sector, a new tax code, or a decoupling of corporate money and the democratic process would merely be welcome first steps against an adversary too obvious to name.
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