"Dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory? A journal that then proceeded to fill its pages with impenetrable essays seemingly written to demonstrate, one more time, the Arctic futility of theory-speak? Is this how you build a mass movement? By persistently choosing the opposite of plain speech?"He also approvingly cites Slavoj Žižek's essay on the dangers and opportunities of the carnival here.
There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beautiful.” Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?source
The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one another is because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism that suffuses our idea of protest these days, all the way from Disney Channel teens longing to be themselves to punk rock teens vandalizing a Starbucks. From Chris Hedges to Paul Ryan, every dissenter imagines that they are rising up against “the state.” It’s in the cultural DNA of our times, it seems; our rock ‘n’ roll rebels, our Hollywood heroes, even our FBI agents. They all hate the state—protesters in Zuccotti Park as well as the Zegna-wearing traders those protesters think they’re frightening. But here’s the rub: only the Right manages to profit from it.What I find interesting is that the Obama team is so great at infrastructure and logistics, while it seems like the broader left isn’t very good at it. It wasn't that long ago that many people in the media and elsewhere were recommending that Obama not even run for re-election. During his time in office, he’s already accomplished a lot by working slowly and deliberately. After his second term ends, I hope Obama devotes his time to help build a broad, liberal, and deep infrastructure.
As things developed, the Tea Party didn’t really mean any of its horizontalist talk; that was just there to make the movement attractive to potential joiners. The Tea Party had no poststructuralist thinkers contributing to theory magazines, but it did have money, organization, and a TV network at its back. It quickly developed leaders, and demands, and an alignment with a political party. Its main organizations eventually mutated into Super PACs, their antihierarchical populism apotheosized into money—which is, for free-market believers, the purest expression of the General Will available. And perhaps that was the plan of the movement’s masters all along. The vagueness and the leaderlessness were merely for show, it seems—gimmicks designed to give the product the widest possible appeal in the early days.
Occupy Wall Street never made that turn. It took its horizontality seriously. It grew explosively in the early days, as just about everyone with a beef rallied to its nonspecific standard. But after the crackdown came, there was almost nothing to show for it.
Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy.Frank's politics seem to be a version of: if only the sensible people made some sensible decisions then everything would be better. As far as I can tell, Frank's critique seems to be "OWS should have had demands" and some sort of reflexive self-loathing of the "urban" sophisticated intellectual:
Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters’ lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom!
But that’s no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over.
It would help if the movement wasn’t centered in New York City. And it is utterly essential that it not be called into existence out of a desire to reenact an activist’s fantasy about Paris ’68.It's a pretty weak set of criticisms and in particular, he seems to believe in some sort of natural leftist "majoritarianism" without any better sense than OWS of what the majority looks like.
Try Mississippi in the fifties instead. Reenact Flint, Michigan, circa 1937 and you could get somewhere. Look to Omaha, 1892, and things could work out differently.
What made it such powerful testimony, I thought, was the way it embodied the 99 percent slogan; one heard unmistakably here the voices of average people from every walk of life, each one of them done in by the same bank-industry urge to screw the world, one customer at a time. You couldn’t ask for a better expression of Depression-style majoritarianism.The 99% handwritten cards were instantly mockable because they betrayed the middle class "boho" ethos of the just those New York city grad students Frank is making fun of. Except, there is no solemn working class majority in the US because there isn't any work. Everyone is temping. He is posturing just as badly as he imagines OWS was without any engagement with any politics. At least OWS was something... Frank is just an entertainer for the Left.
The rhetoric in Zuccotti Park was also, of course, loudly majoritarian. But in practice, to judge by these books, OWS tasted overwhelmingly of one monotonous flavor: academia, with a subtle bouquet of career activism.
And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks’ agenda—how they intended to stop predatory lending, for example—you have truly come to the wrong place. Not because it’s hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building “communities” in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders.posted by notme at 3:06 PM on January 9 [3 favorites]
It is a mistake [...] to focus obsessively on the verbiage of Occupy’s theorists, to the exclusion of the inchoate sentiments of its rank and file. Frank briefly expresses his respect for the “We are the 99 Percent” Tumblr feed, before quickly turning back to his preoccupation with academia. His essay is, in fact, mostly not about Occupy at all, but about books about Occupy, some of them by aging academics who had little to do with it.Peter Frase responds in Jacobin with "Modify Your Dissent", an essay on what he calls Frank and the Baffler's "creeping irrelevance."
I remember a beautiful moment this spring. It was a Sunday night in Chicago, the weekend of the Occupy anti-NATO protests. Most everyone was tired after several days of meandering marching. Following a thousands-strong, permitted march earlier in the day, several hundred of us had tried and failed to break through a police line; our chimerical goal was to shut down the conference. Now it was night, and hundreds of us had headed north to the Art Institute, the site of a dinner for NATO leaders’ spouses. Police ringed the building. We could make some noise and mount a sit-in, but little else. Soon, it started pouring. The rain didn’t precipitate despair among the youthful throng, though, but euphoria. There was a street dance party, and then a group hug. A feeling of deep, visceral cohesiveness with my fellow occupiers overcame me. I felt fulfilled. This was, in many ways, Occupy encapsulated.posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:35 AM on January 18
It was marvelous. And, in retrospect, meaningless.
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"He also approvingly cites Slavoj Slavoj Žižek's essay"
Wait, what?
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 1:50 PM on January 9 [26 favorites]