Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) doubled down on his anti-Wall Street rhetoric over the weekend, encouraging protesters to withdraw money from the major banks and calling the financial industry “the most powerful, dangerous and secretive” institution in the United States.
“Global 99 Percent Rally Worldwide in Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street”
by: Cara Buckley and Rachel Donadio, The New York Times News Service
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Buoyed by the longevity of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in
In
At least 88 people were arrested in
More than 1,000 people filled
Other than Rome’s, the demonstrations across Europe were largely peaceful, with thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Similar scenes unfolded across cities on several continents, including in Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; Hong Kong; Toronto; Chicago; and Los Angeles, where several thousand people marched to City Hall as passing drivers honked their support.
But just as the rallies in
Yet despite the difference in language, landscape and scale, the protests were united in frustration with the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
“I have no problem with capitalism,” Herbert Haberl, 51, said in
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Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:
“So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not ‘
http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428/
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"The People's Library" in
"I really am amazed for the respect they have for the word," Eric Seligson, the librarian at the protest site on Wall Street, told Esquire. "There's a real reverence for what has been written that has surprised me, since they eschew whatever came before, all the thought that came before."
The defining aspect of Occupy Wall Street, its emphasis on direct action and leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, is most clearly embodied by its General Assembly, in which participants in the protest make group decisions both large and small, like adopting principles of solidarity and deciding how best to stay warm at night.
This intensive and egalitarian process is important both procedurally and substantively, Mr. Graeber says. "One of the things that revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that the idea of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic," he says. "You can't create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can't establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same."
When 2,000 people make a decision jointly, it is an example of direct action, or direct democracy, Mr. Graeber says. "It makes you feel different to go to a meeting where your opinions are really respected."
Or, as an editorial in the protest's house publication, Occupied Wall Street Journal, put it, "This occupation is first about participation."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/16/slavoj-zizek-perverts-guide-ideology?newsfeed=true
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"We all accept liberal democratic capitalism, even during this current pan-European disaster," Žižek says. "We timidly ask, 'Oh, can we have a few more rights for minorities? A little more healthcare?' But nobody questions the frame. And that is the real triumph of ideology."
Cinema remains the vehicle, though. The last few days have seen reconstructions of Full Metal Jacket, Taxi Driver, Stalinist propaganda piece The Fall of Berlin, cult sci-fi movie They Live – and The Sound of Music, in which the star skewers commodity fetishism while dressed in a cassock. But whatever the costume, whatever the scenario, the constant is Žižek, his analysis and context for all this delivered at a breakneck pace, spilling out in a torrent of lisps, mispronunciations and frantic hand gestures. This is the same cartoonish, brilliant Žižek who has reached vast audiences with his writing (more than 50 books) and his live shows. Žižek, clearly, is not your average Slovenian philosophy professor.
As Fiennes watches our scene replayed on a monitor, Žižek shambles up, still in his pyjamas. "Sophie, we must have time today for me to re-enter the tank." I notice, off in a corner, a high-sided water tank. It was used yesterday to recreate Titanic, with Žižek in a lifeboat. The water has acquired a scum overnight, but Žižek is adamant: "Today I must be in the water."
Fiennes, tall and unflappable, explains that her star has decided the movie must have an underwater finale. "He's desperate for it to be a proper film with a proper happy ending," she smiles. "He's just not sure what it is yet."
Satisfied there will be time to take a dip, Žižek resumes the monologue he keeps up when in company. To be around him is to be privy to a gregarious, open-ended address on, well, take your pick: Shostakovich, cloud computing, industrial rock band Rammstein, Malian cotton production, Icelandic crime fiction, the 1,200-page opus on Hegel he's just finished writing, all punctuated by a supply of dirty jokes involving married couples in the former Yugoslavia.
"I have two questions for you," he says to me. "Do you ever receive bribes from film producers to favourably review their films, and did you ever interview the American actress Liv Tyler?" As anyone who's read Žižek's madly interwoven works of theory will know, film is his prism: rare is the argument he can't illustrate with a reference to Hitchcock. But then it may be the perfect art form for a thinker who treasures contradiction, a medium of simple surfaces and hidden depths that can be both trashy and transcendental.
A recent visit to
Unsurprisingly, Žižek's soliloquies to camera, while based on passages from his books, leap off in all directions. But today the clock is ticking. Apart from Seconds and Titanic, the schedule also requires a re-creation of The Dark Knight, with Žižek addressing Batman in a
With his gaze fixed on a stand-in caped crusader, he begins: "In psychoanalytic treatment, it is crucial the analyst and his patient are not confronted face to face – because psychoanalysis knows the face is a lie." Then he's off, citing George Bush's notorious glimpse of Putin's "soul" and critiquing The Omen, before dissecting the use of white lies among colleagues.
The connections keep coming. He reviews the brutal logic of the Iraq war, the silence of economists before the financial collapse – and then glides back to Christopher Nolan's movie. "The gravest implication about The Dark Knight is that it elevates the lie into the principle of society, as if for society to operate at all, there has to be a lie, as if to tell the truth must automatically mean chaos –" At this point, Batman stumbles forward. There will have to be another take.
Žižek smiles resignedly. At 15 he wanted to direct films; at no point did he long to be an actor. Despite his geniality, he insists he's no natural performer. "Never in my life did I dance, and never did I sing. It is too obscene for me psychologically. Even in private, I am unable. And yet here I am, singing and dancing."
Leftwing multiple orgasms
Fiennes compares Žižek's thought process to a musician unable to stop playing. The film-maker has documented many mercurial subjects: dancer Michael Clark, artist Anselm Kiefer, fellow director Lars von Trier. But with Žižek, beneath his near-constant teasing, there's clearly mutual respect. He's the star, but the film is hers: before shooting, she combs his work for possible scenarios; afterwards, she edits hours of footage; in between, she wrangles him. "It's always collaborative. He needs to know I won't bully him. Making The Pervert's Guide to Cinema was a huge controlled experiment, and so is this."
At 62, Žižek does tire. But even as he takes a rest, he stares at the water tank. You might think the demise of global capitalism would have already given this Marxist his perfect closing scene, He says not: "I am a communist, but I am not an idiot. What to me is tragic in all these events – that give old-fashioned leftists multiple orgasms – is where is any concrete principle of reorganisation? What is new? Because that is what is needed. But I do not see it. Liberal democratic capitalism is approaching its limit, and in its place we need large, coordinated social actions. Otherwise the future will resemble one of my favourite films, Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Not the old fascism, but a fascism of buffoons. I am not a catastrophist, but also I am not a Marxist who thinks history is on our side. No!"
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The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.
A man of that type will never lay the world under any obligation to him, but will be a moral pauper, a drag on the wheels of society, and if he too be identified with a peculiar variety of the race he will entail disgrace upon his race as well as upon himself. The world in which we live is very accommodating to all sorts of people. It will cooperate with them in any measure which they propose; it will help those who earnestly help themselves, and will hinder those who hinder themselves. It is very polite, and never offers its services unasked. Its favors to individuals are measured by an unerring principle in this—viz., respect those who respect themselves, and despise those who despise themselves. It is not within the power of unaided human nature to persevere in pitying a people who are insensible to their own wrongs and indifferent to the attainment of their own rights. The poet was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said,
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.
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Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
Hence, my friends, every mother who, like Margaret Garner, plunges a knife into the bosom of her infant to save it from the hell of our Christian slavery, should be held and honored as a benefactress. Every fugitive from slavery who, like the noble William Thomas at Wilkes Barre, prefers to perish in a river made red by his own blood to submission to the hell hounds who were hunting and shooting him should be esteemed as a glorious martyr, worthy to be held in grateful memory by our people.
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Sources: Frederick Douglass, Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass… (Rochester, 1857).
