Occupy
Wall Street: They Cannot Destroy The Idea Nor The Ideal
-by
Tontongi
Jean-Paul Sartre said he held Gustave Flaubert
responsible for the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 because he didn’t
lift a finger to defend it. The same would be said of many intellos of the US
intellectual Establishment, both inside and outside Academia, if they continue
to be mute in the face of the mounting police repression of a peaceful protest that
seeks socioeconomic equality and a better quality of life for the people.
Indeed, to judge from the brutal
repression of the Occupy Wall Street movement unleashed by many US
municipalities, one can deduce that the powers that be take very seriously the
potential threat that it represents to the continuation of the status quo— that
is the continuation of inequality, of exploitation of others’ work, of racial
discrimination, of domination of Wall Street’s greed and ethos. While it has not totally articulated
its liberational ideas, to judge from the likes of Michael Moore, Cornel West,
and Naom Chomsky who have embraced it, the OWS demands imply also the end of reification
of life, of alienation of labor, and of materialization of work’s gratification
and finality.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is the
single, latest good thing that happens to this country, the United States, a
country that has spent the last 30 years in the embrace of cynicism and
soulless robotification of the mind. The writer Naomi Klein, in a recent essay
in the journal The Nation, has called the OWS movement “the best thing in the
world right now,” observing that “today everyone
can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control.
Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural
world as well.”
It has been painful to see a dynamic
country such as the United States operate on itself the putrefying process of
sterilization and idioticization. To watch the debates among the Republican
presidential candidates, one comes out frustrated that such a great country
would have so many illuminated morons — or calculating cynics playing
illuminated morons — aspiring to lead it. Many commentators think this
epistemological trend started since Ronald Reagan. Or, is it the necessary sign of decline of all imperial and
imperialist powers as many others conjecture?
Historical antecedence
The Occupy Wall Street movement — along with the Arab
Spring despite the interference of the imperialist powers in the latter — is
the embodiment of human vitality and consciousness; it is a welcoming evolution in a country accustomed to the
glorification of capitalism’s wisdom and success, and to self-interested myopia
that created a functioning malaise, sometimes political dead-end and
existential confusion, some inspired idiots even calling it the “end of
history.”
The main threat posed by the OWS movement,
and the Altermondialist movement in general — that is the collective engagement
for alternative, revolutionary change — is their radical repudiation of
capitalism’s dogma of transcendental necessity, making the financial
speculators of Wall Street and the complicity of class privilege and government
corruption and intellectual cowardice, the main culprit — the 1 percent of the
population — responsible for the politico-economic crisis, thus the calamity of
the 99 percent others.
The OWS movement has certainly not
invented protest against malfeasance — that has existed throughout
history. Nor has it pioneered the
struggle against the New World Order. The distinction of main inspirer of the Occupy Wall Street
movement can be fairly attributed to the international anti-globalization,
alternative movement that took shape in Western Europe in the 1990’s and
culminated in the United States in the valorous demonstrations in Seattle,
Washington, in November 1999. But
not everyone agrees with that antecedence, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson
who, in a January 13, 2012, essay in Huffington Post to commemorate Martin Luther
King Day, has linked the OWS movement to the civil rights movement of the
1960’s: “Dr. King understood that the civil rights movement, having ended
segregation and gained the right to vote, had to challenge poverty and economic
inequality. In his final days, he was building a poor people's campaign,
planning to bring people to the nation's capital across lines of race, religion
and region to create a Resurrection City and demand economic justice. He was
the true precursor of Occupy Wall Street.”
However, given the potential radicality of
the Occupy Wall Street movement and the all-encompassing, liberation objectives
of the Altermondialist, anti-globalization movement, which, Foucaultian,
rejects all relations of power and oppression, the most plausible ancestry of the
Occupy Wall Street could be traced to the Haitian Revolution, started in August
1791. This revolution has not only
rejected oppression and defeated the military forces sent by Napoleon Bonaparte
to restore slavery, it also, more defiantly, affirmed the notion of the
universality of the human being, therefore the inherent inalienability of
his/her rights.
Anti-slavery and Haitian revolutionaries such as Dutty Boukman,
Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines etc., made it impossible for the
colonialist powers (and their imitators, as was the United States at the time,
especially in the question of slavery) to legitimize their rule while they
engaged in anti-human-universality policies, like keeping human beings in
bondage.
Suffice to say that the Occupy Wall Street
movement is inspired and nourished by multiple sources and energies.
A new model of social contract : Attention to
others’ voices and concerns
The greatest contribution of the OWS movement is its
breaking of the torpor, fatalism and defeatism that permeated the US-American people’s
reaction to the economic crisis and to the government’s timid, if not complicit
response. Apart from being an idea to revamp the ossified
discourse of normalization that accepts as divine dogma the objective
conditions of oppression and inequality, the OWS movement is also an ideal that puts in evidence, through
its participatory democratic practices and attention to others’ voices and
concerns, the exemplar of a humanistically oriented society that considers the
Other as not only an equal but also as a companion in life, an alter ego with
whom one faces the tumults and uncertainties of both the instant and the
future.
The ideas that inspire the Occupy Wall
Street movement, and the ideals they emanate should be supported by all
concerned citizens and residents.
That’s bad enough to lick the hand of the oppressor, it’s doubly
condemnable to help nullify or destroy the means by which you can attain your
liberation. The OWS movement
represents those means. At least
potentially.
In summoning the
people to the public space to denounce the injustice that is being done to them
and in their names, the OWS movement has shifted the responsibility from
private shame for supposed personal failure, as the capitalist’s infallible
axiom implies, to public criminality that calls for redress. The pain and the hardship that have fallen
on the people are no longer seen as fortuitous or accidental occurrence, but
rather as ineluctable consequence of a systemic, sociopolitical order where
economic interests of a small minority take precedence over human needs and
perils.
Therefore, the solution to the current
socioeconomic calamity must involve a reevaluation together of the economic
rapport of production and exchange, of the financial transaction and wealth
distribution — essentially the old problematic Marx has so well analyzed —, and
the foundation of a new model of social contract and living together.
Another aspect of the OWS movement that is
encouraging — beside its carnival of colors, lyrical songs and poetic emotions
that it comes to symbolize — is the important proportion of young people that
composes its leadership.
Naturally, young is not necessarily good, and any progressive movement
needs the wisdom of old militants to help anchor the adverse instances and
channel past lessons; but the grand plurality of young people in the OWS movement
is a good thing, if only for investing so overwhelmingly in the everyday functioning
of the movement, and for helping articulate the ontological meaning of its
being and finality, that is both its essence and raison d’être.
The cumulative effect of the multitude
Reality is already too stark and painful for us to want
to sweeten it with bullshit reductionism that only perpetuates the status quo,
but I cannot gloss over the historical importance of the Occupy Wall Street
movement, especially in light of the so-called Arab Spring and other protest
movements that topple governments around the world.
Just like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have demonstrated in their
recent book, Commonwealth, how the cumulative effect of the multitude, that is the ultimate power of
the assembling plurality of people, can help establish revolutionary change and
democratic practices and policies, the OWS movement has shown its potential in
building up a mass movement capable of channeling people’s suffering and anger
and hope towards a different and better life (especially when they’re willing
to occupy the public sphere and space with all their bio-political
energy).
That was the idea behind the beginning of
the first Paris Commune on July 14th, 1789, when the multitude
marched on the Bastille Prison and “occupied” it; they more precisely stormed
the state prison, killed the warden, freed the prisoners, and demolished it for
good effect. Three years later, they occupied the whole city, and ultimately
the entire country.
The multitude’s bio-political power was
also operative in the establishment of the government of the Soviets in Russia
in 1917, where class privileges and power of the 1 percent trumped the rights
and the well-being of 99 percent of the population; it was equally in full
blown fashion during the March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King
and hundreds of thousands others challenged the nation to end its Jim Crow,
Apartheid system and respect the civil rights of all citizens or else.
The power of the multitude was furthermore
in evidence when the Haitian people, after days of mass protest in January-February
1986, deposed the 29-year old long
dictatorship of the cruelly powerful Duvaliers, defying all expectations.
The OWS occupiers are heroes
I always ask myself, in the face of so much injustice and
horrible conditions of living in the world, how is it we don’t have a
revolution everyday. Interestingly, the deployment of the power of the
multitude in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, in the spring of 2011 followed the
same script as that of the Philippines and Haiti in 1986, where both countries
were transitioning to democracy after decades of autocratic rules whose end was
brought about by mass oppositional protest.
There’s no reason for this scenario not to
repeat more often. Louis Farrakhan
assembled about one million men in Washington DC on October 16, 1995. This was a powerful manifestation of
political reach and influence.
Unfortunately, instead of asking the multitude to demand specific redresses
and power-sharing, or to storm the White House as his enemies insinuated he
might do (and some more radical supporters had hoped for), Farrakhan asked
them, the assembled black men, to “atone” for their supposed sins. But the powers that be didn’t
underestimate the trouble-making potential of the Million-Man March. That’s why they made certain that its
reach and objective didn’t reach beyond the acceptable limits (lines of the Establishment’s
attack dogs denounced the Million-Man-March as being anti-women, anti-Semitic
and racially inspired, and Farrakhan failed to sufficiently counteract these
false allegations of his critics with an inclusive, revolutionary discourse not
racially tainted).
In brief, the idea and reality of the
multitude — or the commons — are well alive as attested by the so-called Arab
Spring and the worldwide resonance of the Occupy Wall Street initiative. All it would take for the OWS movement
to turn to an Arab Spring-type upheaval is for the multitude to join it and
make it clear that they intend to stay there as long as it takes, and die for it
if necessary.
The OWS occupiers are heroes and leaders
who set examples for creative, revolutionary actions that are necessary to
break the politico-existential apathy.
To be fair, not everyone can afford the sacrifice they consented to
endure, many for legitimate familial and social obligations. The rude fact, however, is that change
can come only if the multitude joins the protest and demands qualitative
socio-political change.
The Occupy Wall Street movement doesn’t
have to confine its ambition to narrow political goals within the two-party
system. Indeed, unlike this
system, it has a great potential capability to help change the way we’ve been,
meaning change the current status quo of inequality, oppression, exclusion, and
alienation.
Naturally, the road to political
conscientization and revolutionary action is paved with obstacles and
self-doubt, especially in the context of the atomization of the individual and
the multiple ambient, everyday life’s difficulties that discourage action, and unrelenting
State and media propaganda that disqualify critical thinking.
Still, it’s been a great pleasure to see that the human spirit and
political conscience are alive and well.
-Tontongi, Boston, January 2012
Tontongi is the Editor of the trilingual, politico-literary journal Tanbou. He is the author of the most recent book Poetica Agwe and co-author of the newly released Anthology of Liberation Poetry.
Tontongi is the Editor of the trilingual, politico-literary journal Tanbou. He is the author of the most recent book Poetica Agwe and co-author of the newly released Anthology of Liberation Poetry.