P Happy 2nd Birthday OWS! Far from a mere call for attention, Occupy was a truth-teller in the vein of today’s whistleblowers. It was the boy who broke the political spell of the Emperor’s new clothes; a movement that revealed the “democratic” façade of the capitalist state to be naked and full of pretense. The obvious and predictable reaction on the part of the establishment was to point its finger back at the “naïveté” and “inexperience” of the little newcomer who had just revealed the utter vacuity of its own democratic pretensions. But despite the obvious growing pains of the country’s first serious anti-capitalist movement in a generation, it nevertheless managed to get the truth out — and now no one can deny it any more. The mask of democracy has fallen. We do not live in a democratic state. We live under a thinly veiled imperial bankocracy that systematically benefits the interests of the 1% over those of everyone else. In this sense, Occupy’s most immediate victim was not the capitalist system per se, but rather the ideological illusion that this capitalist state of affairs is somehow the only way to organize society, and — much more perniciously — that it should therefore be considered the only appropriate basis for the struggle for social change. In this sense, Occupy’s critique of representation and its reinvention of the democratic narrative virtually killed off the last remnants of party and state fetishism within the grassroots movements of the anti-capitalist left. Occupy’s horizontalism did not so much smash the vertical structures of the institutional left — reformist and revolutionary alike — but simply dissolved them through its emphasis on radical equality and open-ended inclusiveness, and its revolutionary vision of the directly democratic urban commune. By occupying Wall Street instead of making demands on Capitol Hill, the movement propeled a new diagnosis of power into the public discourse. In today’s Empire, sovereignty does not reside with public officials but with private capitalists — and with investment bankers most of all. Vying for state power or even making demands upon the thoroughly co-opted political class is pointless when the state itself is so utterly symbiotic with finance and so structurally dependent on capital for its own survival. What Occupy taught America and the world through the sheer force of example was that for the 99% to become wound up in a political game whose rules were fixed by the 1% a long time ago, would imply becoming involved in the active process of defeating itself. The main challenge, then, still lies ahead: the 99% now needs to figure out ways to harness its own constituent power and to transform the democratic impulse of the squares into lasting forms of autonomous and horizontal self-organization. Of course Occupy was not without its problems in this respect. Those who actively participated in the movement are often more aware of the fundamental flaws, pitfalls and challenges of direct democracy than the movement’s ignorant institutional critics seem to realize. But two years hence, there is no doubt that Occupy has provided us with a new political grammar and a radical vocabulary with which to reinvent our critique of global capitalism and from which to begin constructing our own revolutionary alternative to bankocracy. Occupy taught millions of people the language of autonomy and horizontalism, of direct action and prefigurative politics, of consensus decision-making and participation — and, most important of all, it helped reinvigorate that long-lost hope that there is an alternative, that another world is possible.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 23:51:49 +0000
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