Is Occupy Wall Street progressive?

We got a good debate going in Earl’s last post on the limitations and possibilities of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A lot of attention rightly focused on the inadequacy of the critique embodied by the protesters, I won’t take issue there. The question I want to raise is whether this is a force we should work with or not, which is a very different question.

We can get a better feel for the occupiers’ position by reading the “Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street”, which was passed by consensus at the occupation. Contrary to the impression left by slogans like “the 99 percent against the 1 percent” or the symbolism of occupying Wall Street, the targets here are not restricted to bankers or finance capital or rich people. It’s the power of large corporations in general, over all aspects of life, that is opposed.

In some sense the statement represents the grab-bag of left causes – mortgage abuse! gender discrimination! animal torture! death penalty! alternative energy! – that critics always ridicule. But the notorious single-issue parochialism that has hobbled the left for two decades comes together in the Declaration (if not always at the occupation) much more organically than it has in the past. There actually is one issue, which actually does unite all these problems, and that’s corporate power.

The protesters’ position still doesn’t really grasp the nature of capitalism, as everyone quickly pointed out, or even the nature of the crisis, as I’ve argued (here, here, here). But it should allay some of the particular fears that the occupiers are primarily attacking finance and glorifying productive capital.

Frank’s preferred opposition rather than “the 99 percent against the 1 percent” is “workers against capitalists”. He’s certainly right that this opposition gets to the nature of capitalism in a way that demonizing “the 1 percent” never can. “The 1 percent” is a category of distribution: who controls the wealth. “The capitalists”, on the other hand, is a category of production. This crisis and capitalism itself are fundamentally about the control and appropriation of labor, and there’s no way to overcome either one until this recognition can be achieved.

But as we’ve discussed at length, the basis for a “workers identity politics” like that which thrived in the late 19th century and during the Depression, and which took capitalists as its target, has collapsed. Along with it, I would argue, has disappeared the social foundations for the particular kind of reactionary populism that proved so horrific in the 1930s (see Moishe Postone’s “Anti‑Semitism and National Socialism” for an analysis of the nature of that foundation). That doesn’t mean that the danger of exclusionary forms of populism that scapegoat particular groups for the dysfunctions of the entire social system has disappeared. But the sinews of the occupation movement emerged from anarchism, identity politics, unions, and community organizing groups. There is absolutely no danger of anti-Semitism coming out of this.

The collapse of a workers identity politics has certainly crippled the capacity of the left to defend itself, much less mount an offensive against corporations. But there may also be a liberatory moment here. The category of “workers” is one that emerges from capitalism, which is what allowed the drive to secure dignity and decent conditions for workers to be so easily translated into the basis of a new regime of capitalist accumulation, Stalinist Fordism, in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. In contrast, “the human race”, which the protesters invoke, is a category that could point beyond capitalism.

The opposition structured by capitalism is not, however, between “the human race” and corporations, or even capitalists. It is between the human race and capital – not a group of greedy executives but an abstract force constituted by modern society itself. We can leave the specific process for another time. For now the question is whether Occupy Wall Street and its fellow travelers – who clearly understand capital not as an abstract force but as a group of power-hungry individuals or, at best, as a class – harbor a progressive potential.

The first issue is whether the occupation movement will even have a significant impact. As doubters in the comments noted, participation so far has been fairly limited, not even reaching that of the unsuccessful anti-corporate globalization protests of 1999-2001 or the anti-Iraq War protests of 2003. I’m still doubtful myself. But I think we have to admit that, at least for the moment, the occupations have captured the public imagination like no other popular response to the crisis, with the (thus far, far more) significant exception of the Tea Party.

I suspect this is mainly because it has finally given outlet to very widespread feelings that up to now have failed to find expression in the dysfunctional and intellectually paralyzed Democratic Party. But can the occupation movement mobilize these sentiments behind a political project? This has been the difficulty up till now – there has been no shortage of attempts by the established unions and community groups to shift the national debate from antigovernment slogans and post-partisan fantasies to the inequities of the economy, all of which up to this point have failed to gain any traction. Are the supporters of the occupation movement ready to move beyond posting on Facebook to actually taking part in the unfamiliar and often uncomfortable experience of a mass movement? If so, then Earl’s agenda of seeking to understand the significance of the occupations will become extremely important.

We won’t know the answer for some time. But even if Occupy Wall Street marks the emergence of a new political actor, are its intentions actually progressive? Despite the overwrought criticisms that the occupation movement has not enunciated any demands or an actionable political program, it seems clear what sort of changes most of its supporters have in mind: real restrictions on the financial sector, an end to corporate influence over the government, greater equality of wealth, and increased regulation of corporations to protect consumers, workers, and the environment.

I will leave for later a discussion of why this approach produces a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the problems we face. The immediate issue is whether this particular misunderstanding isn’t also capable of generating action that could push us in the right direction. I think it is.

Blaming inequality and corporate abuses on the individuals who fill social roles constituted by capitalist society, as the protesters generally do, is a misrecognition of theproblem. These actually follow structurally from neoliberal social forms rather than from the psychological monstrosity of corporate executives. But modern society generates no end of misrecognitions, and some of them are more reactionary than others, deepening the crisis rather than paving the way out of it. To this point in the crisis of neoliberalism, the misrecognition that has taken pride of place is that the government is to blame for the social dysfunctions we face, and the solution is to unleash the shackles on the “job creators” in the private sector.

Even a naïve recognition that the problem does not reside in the state but in the economy is a welcome advance. The occupiers understand that what is needed is not the freeing of impersonal market forces but an imposition of greater conscious control over economic processes. Most participants may be clueless about what form this would have to take – after all, merely redistributing wealth would only produce new dysfunctions; only a fundamental reorganization of the economy will be adequate. But there’s no way to bring this argument to prominence until the debate has finally been shifted to the economic realm.

Second, the occupiers believe that society exists, and they support inclusive forms of sociality. Sad to say, this is in marked contrast to the other popular political current in the US. It should go without saying that even if the protesters don’t understand the subtleties of a Hegelian subject, they are at least decent people. Even if only to slow the accelerating scapegoating of the poor and immigrants and the general weakening of humanism in the culture, they deserve our support.

But beyond that, a desirable end to the crisis will require a cultural repudiation of the inequality of the neoliberal era and a return to forms of egalitarianism that at least superficially resemble those of the Fordist period. This is necessary, first, to solve the difficulties in realizing value (that is, in order to revive consumer demand) that emerged with the repression of wages under neoliberalism. But it would also be a key part of any project to draw currently marginalized groups, which by subsisting in the informal economy are a drag on growth, into the formal economy as workers and consumers. (This anticipates an argument I haven’t developed yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to return to it in more detail in coming weeks.)

Even the much ballyhooed bias in favor of productive capital (“actually making something”) over finance capital (“making money off of having money”) could have its uses. Frank is absolutely right that this misunderstands the nature of finance under capitalism. But there is also a valid insight here: under late neoliberal conditions, finance has become completely dysfunctional and actually is mainly making money off of money – that is, speculation – rather than coordinating the distribution of capital among producers (I made the argument in detail here). To address the crisis, the excesses of finance will have to be choked off – preferably, I think, by nationalizing the banks – and the anti-finance sentiment of the occupations could be a powerful force helping to achieve this.

Hurling critiques at the protesters, most of which they don’t even have the theoretical background to understand (abstract labor, eg, is a non-starter), is not a productive political response to the possibilities presented by Occupy Wall Street. If the occupations actually do amount to something, there’s still plenty of time to raise awareness within the movement of the complex nature of the crisis. But there’s a long way to go and many battles to be won before that will even become an issue. If we want to be involved in politics, we have to work with the forces that are available (even Marx did so!), and I think Occupy Wall Street gives us something that, for the first time in the crisis, we can work with.