Well burrowed, old mole!

Written shortly after attending the events described below.

On September 17^th 2011 it became apparent that something had changed in the United States. On that date, about 1,000 people arrived at the Bowling Green in lower Manhattan under the slogan “Occupy Wall Street.”  The call had been put out months before by Adbusters magazine, and had called forth an action that defied the logic of the typical permitted, pre-contained march.  In the park one could hear an open economics forum featuring speakers advocating the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, denouncing the second law of thermodynamics as a fabrication of British Imperialism, calling for the global forgiveness of all debts, among other things.  Alongside the forum one could hear calls to shut down the Stock Exchange, to abolish debt-money and so on.  Here debates were reopened that had been shut down for a century at least.  A depoliticized society began to stir…

     Perhaps this is a first mass awakening of the population from the “lost decade” that began ten years six days before.  Many retrospectives have been written under the ‘10 years later’ rubric, but this gathering seems to be something of a performative retrospective on the type of society that has been imposed during that decade. Here people are acting out their rejection of the type of society that has been constructed out of the bones of those who perished in the towers. The world of torture and financialization, the world of austerity and drone attacks, the world of layoffs and stage-managed promises of change and prosperity, has come to a sort of limit.

     This is not to say that the atmosphere of the lost decade has been cleansed in one bold stroke. This is not to say that here we have a group of idealists who do not see the world’s violent hierarchies.  Instead, there is a sense, one felt likewise on another level this week as Palestine put forward its bid for statehood at the United Nations, that we should stop making it easy for these people to grind us into the dirt by silently calculating in advance that their triumph is inevitable.  Go out on a wildcat strike. Put forward your demand. Make them squirm and sweat. Challenge what everyone knows. These sorts of actions create space for all people under oppression, making the oppressor scramble to put out so many fires that the probability of success for oppressed peoples rises on the global scale.  It seems that here a global revolutionary situation is making its first incursion into the American national consciousness.  People are breaking out of pre-resignation to an unlivable world.

      Convalescence in the United States is also beginning in another sense.  For many decades now, Americans have been content to disavow the actions of Wall Street, to allow the ‘financial industry’ to operate outside of public scrutiny, a state within a state in a certain sense.  Americans were content to accept dividend checks, to see their 401Ks grow and so on without asking too many questions.  Wall Street was the disavowed self that permitted American good conscience.  Today this sort of mentality is falling apart.  People are beginning to take responsibility for Wall Street; they are beginning to occupy Wall Street in this other sense because they can no longer ignore the actions of the banks.  These banks are literally stealing the food from the popular table.  Americans are admitting they have a problem in a concrete sense; this is not just a march to assuage the conscience, this is another type of action. People are determined to stay, to sacrifice, to alter the way that they live. 

      Though the numbers this time are not what one might have wished, things hardly ever begin like that.  What we are seeing is a beginning and the numbers will come. As Pham Binh has noted:

The biggest challenge is that they have not been able to mobilize larger numbers of people. Their diffuse demands give them no concrete, specific, immediate, and tangible goal to fight for that rally large numbers of people. In Egypt, the demand that emerged was simple – Mubarak must go. Any half-measure, such as early elections and promises to step down, enraged the crowds and caused the organizers to redouble their efforts. (Occupying Wall Street Executioners in the Suites)

 This occupation is wildcat and invites the workers as such. This occupation is not an ideological occupation it is ecumenical, all are welcome.  It is a chance for a popular force to compose itself. No issues are off the table. The political force of the occupation is the tactic, the formation of what Foucault might call a heterotopia—the socialization of privatized space coupled with the determination to stay and keep the discussion open.  What was once privatized from Liberty Park to Zucotti Park in ‘honor’ of the banker who bought it, has now been socially appropriated once again. This Park is open as a space where people can allow their own grievances against the system to take them, a place where they can come, led by their own demands for a form of life they desire.  This  is a politics of hospitality, where everybody gets a meaningful chance to think and speak and participate: this is the slogan; this is the demand. I hesitate to even call it democracy.