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. A great many of the OWS protesters likely have pretty clear ideas of concrete changes to the system that they’d like to see: a college education should be more affordable, student loans shouldn’t absolutely cripple people’s future choices, and one should leave college with the feeling that it’s possible to find gainful employment; preventative health care should be available to everyone; homelessness is a problem we can solve; we need better and smarter regulation of banks and corporations because we’ve seen pretty clearly what happens when regulation gets stripped away by politicians who take a lot of money from banks and corporations.

We can surely add things to this list, but I think it’s a pretty safe starting point. The problem, of course, is that the movement continues to adhere to the notion that its lack of goals is a virtue so these ideas remain ones that are simply floated by individual protesters. The arguments that have been floated for the lack of a single, coherent list of demands or ends are wide-ranging: it’s too soon to demand that the young movement develop a set of goals; the non-hierarchical nature of the movement purposely resists a single, coherent list; any set of goals might allow for the movement to be co-opted; that one set of goals would violate the spirit of openness that pervades the protest; or that the real (and obvious) goal of the occupation is to be seen and heard.

But these aren’t Dean’s arguments. For her, the very idea of a set of goals would negatively impact the OWS movement because there is only one goal: the overthrow of capitalism and the sham democracy supporting the system of exploitation of the 99% by the 1%.

At an expensive dinner I attended after the event, I specifically asked her about goals that might bring me around to support the movement; Dean’s response was instructive: I’m just not someone who will ever support the movement because I like capitalism. This struck me as odd, as I’m someone who recognizes the problems identified by the OWS movement as critically important and who sympathizes with the sort of actionable goals that I mentioned above. 

I’m guessing that not everyone involved in the Occupy movement feels the way that she does, that this is a pretty extreme position not espoused by the vast majority of occupiers. But if the other people who are very involved don’t believe in Marxist-Leninist revolution, why not move beyond the idea of raising awareness of the problems, especially since this has — by all accounts — been accomplished already?

If it’s a Marxist revolution you have in mind, just tell me that’s your goal. Don’t tell me you don’t have goals or you resist the idea of goals at all. I’m trying to figure out if what we’re talking about here is the (likely violent) overthrow of the current order and its replacement with a socialist paradise.

If so, I’m just not going to be able to get on board with this movement, no matter how much I agree with its premises — and with Marx’s too — about inequality and justice. And neither, I think, will the vast majority of the 99%.

But since I’m guessing that only a tiny handful want what Dean wants, I would argue that a whole lot more people would be ready to put their shoulders to the wheel if there are other goals, ones that attempt to work within the current system, that maintain all of our human rights, and that have policy proposals attached to them.[2]