Comments on Unemployed Negativity: The Politics of Composition: A Few Thoughts on Occ...

To break capitalism you need to break what is oppo...

2011-10-13T23:00:48.731-04:00

To break capitalism you need to break what is opposed to it, i.e. labor. That means you need to break what ties them together, i.e. work as a source of income coming from capital. We need to talk about the right to income, not the right to work. And income can come from other sources, like a redistribution of funds representing the use of the common resources. In short, social mechanisms like the basic income guarantee can truly change society, making work really free - and hence people free to chose the life they want to live.

I agree with most of the critiques, and there are ...

2011-10-13T10:03:16.730-04:00

I agree with most of the critiques, and there are definitely strong reformist elements to the OccupyWallStreet movement, ideas of capitalism without corporation, regulatory reform, etc. However, the unprecedented has already happened, people in the USA are criticizing the economic structure, and putting themselves on the line to do so. What happens next depends on many factors, but I think it is important to get involved and to make such critiques respectfully and patiently.

One of the most glaring problems with the supporte...

2011-10-12T08:29:27.307-04:00

One of the most glaring problems with the supporters of Occupy Wall Street and its copycat successors is that they suffer from a woefully inadequate understanding of the capitalist social formation — its dynamics, its (spatial) globality, its (temporal) modernity. They equate anti-capitalism with simple anti-Americanism, and ignore the international basis of the capitalist world economy. To some extent, they have even reified its spatial metonym in the NYSE on Wall Street. Capitalism is an inherently global phenomenon; it does not admit of localization to any single nation, city, or financial district.

Moreover, many of the more moderate protestors hold on to the erroneous belief that capitalism can be “controlled” or “corrected” through Keynesian-administrative measures: steeper taxes on the rich, more bureaucratic regulation and oversight of business practices, broader government social programs (welfare, Social Security), and projects of rebuilding infrastructure to create jobs. Moderate “progressives” dream of a return to the Clinton boom years, or better yet, a Rooseveltian new “New Deal.” All this amounts to petty reformism, which only serves to perpetuate the global capitalist order rather than to overcome it. They fail to see the same thing that the libertarians in the Tea Party are blind to: laissez-faire economics is not essential to capitalism. State-interventionist capitalism is just as capitalist as free-market capitalism.

Nevertheless, though Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy [insert location here] in general still contains many problematic aspects, it nevertheless presents an opportunity for the Left to engage with some of the nascent anti-capitalist sentiment taking shape there. So far it has been successful in enlisting the support of a number of leftish celebrities, prominent unions, and young activists, and has received a lot of media coverage. Hopefully, the demonstrations will lead to a general radicalization of the participants’ politics, and a commitment to the longer-term project of social emancipation.

To this end, I have written up a rather pointed Marxist analysis of the OWS movement so far that you might find interesting:

“Reflections on Occupy Wall Street: What It Represents, Its Prospects, and Its Deficiencies”

THE LEFT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE LEFT!

Interesting question about the revolutionary poten...

2011-10-12T02:17:30.316-04:00

Interesting question about the revolutionary potential of the current experiments in general assemblies and autonomous and non hierarchical groups. Check out the Zizek intervention posted on utube which aspiring asks about whther we currently have the means to write the next words ( his story of the red ink), I.e., whether we can actually practice new ways of living, and organizing--or not--our social relations in a system so adept at assimilating newness and spitting it out as another version of the old (new and improved). I think the question is not just about the inability to imagine movements that do not follow traditional models (leadership, message, goal, strategy, etc.) but the inability to "do" more than what will be subsumed. State centered politics have been the norm for 200 years; Hannah Arendt's on Revolution and Sorel's reflections on violence are so well aware of the revolutionary potential that is subsumed by party and state centered rationalities.... I wonder if the potentialities for transformations in social and cultural forms (meanings, values, affects, etc.) currently manifested in the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Spanish and other European "indignes" movements will not become subsumed, assimilated, or deflected by our habitual forms of fearing the new--accentuated by centuries of order-, stability-, safety-, happiness-, and etc.- centered dispositifs of subjectivization....