[Peace-discuss] Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Mon Sep 26 10:46:06 CDT 2011
[At last night's meeting, Ron pointed out the condescending and
dismissive account of 'Occupy Wall Street' in the NYT. Here's a
better account, naturally from a non-US newspaper. --CGE]
Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination | David Graeber
The young people protesting in Wall Street and beyond reject this vain
economic order. They have come to reclaim the future
• Police tactics attacked as officers pepper-spray women
• Occupy Wall Street: the protesters speak
David Graeber · 25/09/2011 · guardian.co.uk
People protest during the 'Occupy Wall Street' rally in New York, 17
September. Photograph: Steven Greaves/Demotix/Corbis
Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite
the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within
days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment
and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago,
OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the
defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation
who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no
future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I
found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who
did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into
college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated –
faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the
financial magnates who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social
failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with
ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve
life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to
bring the whole system down.
But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are
witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation
we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after
the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything
seemed possible.
Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie.
Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were
not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid –
in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument,
trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence
overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the
Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"
It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of
markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This
lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures
of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our
ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way
they'd been before.
Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that
the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades
has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather,
convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only
conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result,
we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never
really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and
massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world
debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-
globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been
driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being
driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come
home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same
approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral
technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the
name of "austerity".
The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to
the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-
fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the
same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's
different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the
power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF,
World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability,
which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital;
now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece,
Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why
protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that
might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom
they are ranged.
When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this
tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the
opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the
American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda
over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a
political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young
protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to
seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole
generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But
history is not on their side.
We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial
empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing
all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We
don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the
occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has
been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after
September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the
occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done
us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.
https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/25/occupy-wall-street-protest
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