This essay from the Slovenian political philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which ran today in the Guardian and on Common Dreams (where I saw it), fairly sums up the failed readings of the #OccupyWallStreet protests by the traditional media and political classes.
The expectation among the power elite is that the challenge to power will coalesce into a traditional reform agenda, one that tunes up the system and makes it a bit more fair without challenging its core assumptions.
But there is something else going on here, a desire not for nominal reform but for reformation. As Žižek makes clear:
The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.
The ultimate solution is not a half-measure jobs bill, like the one being pushed by President Obama — or even a much more robust, New Deal-like bill such as the one being proposed by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (which I support in the interim) — but a dismantling of our failed economic system.
Capitalism, as it now exists, commodifies everything and makes it subservient to profit. Consider health care. Rather than focus on health, our system is focused on cost; the power is held corporate health firms (insurers, drug companies, hospital chains) and all decisions are viewed through the lens of minimizing costs — even if it means denying legitimately needed care. And rather than overthrow the system, our elected representatives — who get their campaign money from the industry — opted to leave it in place with some minor tweaks.
The same dynamic holds when dealing with the financial system, the manufacturing sector, the provision of gas and electric — and the use of the commons. Visit a mall — our new main streets — or a planned community like Twin Rivers in East Windsor, where homeowner rules supersede decisionsof the general voting public.
What is important about the protests is the protesters’ sense of “the commons,” the sense that there is something that binds us all together and something that we all hold as important.
They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.
So forget the calls from people like Bill Clinton and Barney Frank to come up with some kind of detailed plan (or in the case of Franks, the odd accusations that the protesters were somehow to blame for the failure of the political classes to do the right thing). Clinton and Frank — and Obama and most of the Democrats — have no interest in revolution. Minor changes that might ameliorate the pain of capitalism while leaving the financial classes whole are what they are after.
The protesters know that even if the politicians and pundits don’t.
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