Recently I responded to a dewy-eyed op-ed piece on a liberal website with this post:
Oh dear, how sweetly naïve you all are!
You know as well as I what will happen to the ‘Occupiers.’
They will be allowed to camp-out, to cook-out, to make speeches, to sing and dance and have street-theatre — for a while. ‘Left’ liberals like yourself will be able to call this a ‘great upsurge of public opinion’ while right-wing commentators will have a field day raving about ‘lunatics, thugs and paid agitators.’
Then the capitalists will decide that it’s time to get back to ‘business as usual.’ They will tell the Occupiers that they have made their point and that they should now go home. “Public Order must be restored,” the capitalists will cry.
The capitalists will be supported by a lapdog media, some of who will admit that the Occupiers are right to be angry but that “this is not the time or the way,” while others will decide that the Soccer Moms and Nascar Dads of Middle America (and their counterparts in other countries) have had enough Spectacle and that it’s “time to move along.”
If the Occupiers don’t ‘move along,’ they will be dispersed with the full force of the bourgeois state — courts, cops and army — and their movement will be drowned in blood. If they do ‘move along,’ they will have gained nothing, except to have “upheld their democratic right to express their opinion.” Either way, it *will* be ‘business as usual’ for capitalism — even if the Occupiers manage to squeeze some ‘concessions’ from the bourgeoisie, such concessions will quickly be undermined not only by the ‘lobbyists’ who influence capitalist legislatures but by the legislators themselves who have their own salaries and stock portfolios to guard — and in five or ten years, the Occupiers will be back where they started.
For, girls and boys, these problems are *systemic* (endemic to capitalism). Boom-and-bust cycles — ‘bubbles’ — have occurred for as long as the capitalist mode of production has existed, and will go on occurring as long as more goods are being produced than can be consumed and as long as they are being produced for private profit rather than for genuine public need (not ‘need’ created by advertising).
The only way out of this cycle is to change the *system* — but for that, one must be prepared to fight, for the likes of the Koch Brothers will not give up their power without a struggle.
Predictably, the repression I envisaged is now materializing, with arrests and police assaults on the Occupiers in many countries.
There is a chance for a positive outcome — if the Occupiers learn to fight back! They will certainly be denigrated by the bourgeois state and its mouthpieces and will probably be defeated this time, but hopefully lesson will be learned that will one day assist in the destruction of the capitalist system and its replacement by a socialist one.
Of course for this to happen, the class character of the ‘Occupy’ movement needs a shake-out. At present it is a petty-bourgeois movement, limiting itself to the desire to ‘reform’ capitalist system in order to better accommodate the aspirations of an upwardly-mobile ‘middle class’ — in some respects it is openly hostile to the proletariat.
Yet there are indications that at least some of the protestors are developing a class-oriented analysis — young black workers in New York particularly are saying that their concerns are being swamped in a sea of sentimental class-collaborationist ‘unity’ that will ensure that power remains in the hands of those who cause these crises to begin with.
Only working people have the social power to end forever the cycle of boom-and-bust and its associated misery that characterizes the rotten system of capitalism. To do so they must take on board the concerns of all the Occupiers — especially women and immigrants, but also the disabled, veterans who are being pepper-sprayed, those who have lost homes, gays and people of colour —filter them through the lens of class and keep explaining, over the inane reformist illusions of the liberal media, that the problem is systemic and that the solution involves overthrowing the system of capitalism.
