Running Chicken: Occupation and Revolution

The Occupy Wall Street protest movement has succeeded in capturing a significant amount of our collective attention over the past month or two. Personally, I find its premises to be very compelling.

I’ve taught Marx for many years and it’s not at all difficult to explain his ideas about justice and economic inequality to my students or to find examples from our daily lives that highlight points raised in, for example, the Communist Manifesto. I’m very sympathetic to those who want to shrink the gap between rich and poor, reduce the influence of corporations on democratic politics, and limit the ability of those at the top to generally run roughshod over everyone else. In short, the Marxist diagnosis of conditions in an unregulated capitalist society should rally people to the Occupy Wall Street banner.

Or, that diagnosis should rally people if the Occupy movement could separate Marxist premises from Marxist conclusions. This is difficult, though, because of the revolutionary spirit of some of the organizers of the OWS movement. While not all of the organizers are Marxists — and while most of the protesters don’t have revolution as their motivation at all — it seems fairly clear that a number of key organizers have in mind some sort of revolution as an ultimate end goal of the movement.[1]

A recent lecture by political theorist Jodi Dean made clear the relationship between OWS and Marxism. Her lecture was well-attended, including by a fair number of the protesters who have set up their tents on the Lincoln Mall.

Mostly, Dean was interested in discussing the Occupy movement and what she understood to be its philosophical underpinnings, which was also what the audience really wanted to hear about. Along the way, she repeatedly referenced the work of Hardt and Negri, Lenin, and Žižek, the theorists whose work she clearly believes is speaking to the concerns of OWS.

What Dean wants — what she deeply believes will happen — is for capitalism to be brought to its knees by this protest movement; she intimated that we will thereafter live in a Marxist-Leninist paradise. To that end, she specifically discussed her opposition to the idea that the OWS movement should put forward goals or demands. Indeed, as a member of the committee tasked with creating just such a list, she was particularly pleased to convey to the audience that she opposed the idea of demanding job creation until the proposed number of jobs was set at 25,000,000. She liked this number, she said, because it was impossible to achieve.

The problem for Dean — and other revolutionaries who see the OWS movement as their vehicle — is that the 99% they claim to represent don’t share their revolutionary fervor.

via kohenari.net

Comments

[Robert Allen]

you know you're doing something right when you're damned with this faint of praise- at least you "made clear" the connection between OWS and Marxism!

[Foreignersview.wordpress.com]

Reminds me of Lenin's "opportunists" from The State and Revolution:

"They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of his teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie."

People never change, I guess.

[Alain]

Hi Jodi, long time no speak. I wonder what you think of the author's conclusion - that the 99% don't share your desire for revolution. I will say personally I am ambivalent about this: I don't particularly want revolution but my opinion has been evolving. I used to think the system could reform itself, a new form of Keynsian renewal. Now it appears the system is incapable of self correction, which begs the question of what is the alternative? I don't think most people in the United States are ready for what is coming, but if intellectuals are to have a role it must involve imagining what may come next. Thank you for embracing that role. Take care.