Occupy Wall
Street: what is to be done next?
How a protest
movement without a programme can confront a capitalist system that defies
reform
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next
[…]
In a kind of
Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the
so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of
anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, "capitalism" is now clearly
re-emerging as the name of the problem.
The first two
things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the
critique of financial capitalism. First, let us 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 neither Main Street nor Wall
Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall
Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to
fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting
spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was
one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated
into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the
theologians close to the pope put it: "The present crisis is not crisis of
capitalism but the crisis of morality."
Let us recall
the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch's Ninotchka: the hero visits a
cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:
"Sorry,
but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without
milk?"
Was not a
similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes
in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without
corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy
without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope
is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice,
greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of
Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by
definition cannot be controlled.
One should
avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the
sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should
replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising
is over? It is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of
the protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform
itself into a minimal positive program of socio-political change. They express
a spirit of revolt without revolution.
Reacting to
the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan said: "What you aspire to as
revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one."
It seems that
Lacan's remark found its target (not only) in the indignados of Spain. Insofar
as their protest remains at the level of a hysterical provocation of
the master, without a positive program for the new order to replace the old
one, it effectively functions as a call for a new master, albeit disavowed.
We got the
first glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy, and Spain will probably
follow. As if ironically answering the lack of expert programs of the
protesters, the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with a
"neutral" government of depoliticized technocrats (mostly bankers, as
in Greece and Italy). Colorful "politicians" are out, grey experts
are in. This trend is clearly moving towards a permanent emergency state and
the suspension of political democracy.
So we should
see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough to reject the
depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should
also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant
economic organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of
organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or
predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a
halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline,
hard work.
The
protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who
pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In
the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream
without fat, they will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic
gesture. In boxing, to "clinch" means to hold the opponent's body
with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's
reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching;
Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing",
but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the
protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would
create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half". What one
should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy
of the protest into a set of "concrete" pragmatic demands. Yes, the
protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and
time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant
vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason protesters went out is that
they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple
of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the
third world troubles is enough to make them feel good.
Economic
globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western
democracies. Due to their international character, large economic processes
cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms which are, by definition, limited
to nation states. In this way, people more and more experience institutional
democratic forms as unable to capture their vital interests.
It is here
that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever: for Marx,
the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political
sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather resides in the
"apolitical" network of social relations, from the market to the
family, where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a
political reform, but a change in the "apolitical" social relations
of production. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a
factory, etc – all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the
political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by
"extending" democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing
"democratic" banks under people's control. In such
"democratic" procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role
to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is sought
in applying the democratic mechanisms – which, one should never forget, are
part of the state apparatuses of the "bourgeois" state that
guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction.
The emergence
of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore
not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution.
The situation is like that of psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the
answer (his symptoms are such answers) but doesn't know to what they are
answers, and the analyst has to formulate a question. Only through such a
patient work a program will emerge.
[…]
