Occupy

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.

UK Riots

 
This week the UK exploded in rioting. It started over the shooting by police of a man in London, but it is now much more than that.

The UK government, handmaiden to British and international capitalism, is determined to force ‘austerity’ down the throats of the British people — more cuts in health, education and social welfare, not for them, of course, but for ‘ordinary people.’ Such measures, combined with job cuts and reduced accessibility to housing — and in the wake of over 30 years of Thatcherite ‘shock-and-awe’ economic policy that ground them down — have pushed these ‘ordinary people,’ the British proletariat, to the brink.

Added to the disgust that the ‘ordinary people’ are feeling while multi-millionaire businesspeople are making laws to ‘disappear’ the last remnants of the safety net that has kept their heads above water since the end of WWII, and billionaire bankers and CEOs are raking in the cash while they starve, is the disrespect for ‘British society’ inculcated by the knowledge that politicians, bureaucrats and police have been “in the pocket of” (“taking money from”) a rogue, right-wing paper-boy called Rupert Murdoch

Every capitalist politician — Conservative, Labour and Liberal and their analogues around the world — as well as bourgeois social scientists, media commentators and ‘comfortable’ members of the middle class (some of whom blame the ‘welfare state’ for “making people lazy”) have lined up to condemn the rioters as ‘unemployed thugs,’ lacking in ‘discipline’ and ‘respect,’ the result of ‘bad parenting’ and ‘the rise of gang psychology’ and motivated by “the politics of envy.”

Yes, there might be an element of this, but there is also a sound instinct that British society (and ours) is fundamentally insane in the patterns of wealth and ownership that it allows.

But the “politics of envy” argument (“*I* resent someone who is smarter than I and more energetic than I having more than I do.”) is how Adam Smith's concept of individualistic self-interest derails any movement for social change under capitalism.

By this same logic, anyone who says “I am shocked at the inequitable distribution of power and income in our society — I am going to form/join an organization to redress the balance,” has to be a cynical manipulator aiming for ‘power,’ or a gullible fool.

The capitalist ideologue is happy to embrace change, but only when it comes in the shape of gradual reform, and more importantly in a way that does not challenge the concept of private ownership of the means of production — capitalists will give away “a piece of the pie” (better social conditions) only when forced to by the fear that they will lose the lot.

British PM, David Cameron, waited for three days before returning from holiday to address the situation. He is now threatening to ‘punish’ the rioters (How? By denying them the right to take holidays in Tuscany?). Meanwhile, one commentator is telling the rioters that they should “learn their place in civil society”!

Hey, at least the Brits are honest about this! In the US (and to a lesser extent here) they still brainwash their citizens with the myth of ‘social mobility’[1]. Mind you, US capitalists have turned Smith’s argument into a religious axiom — wealth is a sign of divine favour, the result of the primary ‘Virtues’ of hard work and thrift, and those who are wealthy ‘deserve’ their wealth, while conversely the poor are not only responsible for their own plight but in breach of divine commandments.[2]

Meanwhile, back on the streets, the violence continues. Unless the rioters develop the grievances into a comprehensive critique of the capitalist system that is responsible for their plight, there is a real danger that fascist groups will rise to the leadership, splitting the rioters along racial and class lines.

 
PennyRed has posted an eyewitness report from London, http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html

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[1] “The Pursuit of Happyness” lulls USans (and the rest of us) into optimistic feel-good mode in spite of the fact that ‘social mobility’ has declined markedly in ‘capitalist democracies’ for at least the past 30 years.

[2] The British under good queen Vicky believed this too, but the ‘ordinary’ people had never been as immersed in the myth as their US counterparts. Luckily, the more enlightened sections of the British bourgeoisie recognized this and pressed for the dispossessed to receive at least some crumbs from the tables of the rich.