What do you do when a society socializes losses and privatizes gains? You say no.This system, whose description I’m taking from a speech Joseph Stiglitz recently gave to the people of Zuccotti Park, is complex, multivalent, pervasive. There is no single solution. There is no tyrant to topple, no proposition to defeat. Occupy Wall Street and its expanding set of subsidiaries can best be understood as a collective no. If it were happening in Germany, it would be a “doch!” accompanied by a stomped foot. We do not agree. You do not have our consent. We will not co-operate. This legalized, institutionalized, calcified inequity must change.
The breadth of the protest has been represented by its opponents as incoherence. With the exception of those who are willfully trying to misrepresent it, I’d say it’s closer to the truth to say it’s their understanding of the issue that lacks cohesion. It’s a mistake to assume that things are too complicated to understand, that because many of these protestors and their allies are not familiar with collateralized debt obligations, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Constituent parts of things often are abstruse, but the bigger things, the things that ultimately matter, are mostly either apparent, or instinctually comprehensible.
Like the current economic situation in the U.S. It’s not naïve to point to the graph of employee-to-CEO pay gaps over the last forty years and say something’s going wrong. Those numbers and their divergent paths are basic and concrete. Sure, they reflect the changing values of a society, but when values and value overlap so literally and completely, there is little room left for subjectivity.
The amplitude of this protest is its strength, not its weakness, a feature, not a bug. It’s part of its DNA, a DNA it shares with Adbusters, the Vancouver magazine and foundation that sparked the protests with some email and one of its famous posters, this one of a ballerina on the Wall Street bull backed up by a marauding horde (see top). The only words were “What is our one demand? #OccupyWallStreet September 17th. Bring Tent.”
Adbusters hasn’t been on the mainstream media’s radar for a while now. Its heyday—or shall we say its first heyday—was the mid-90s, when it was the nexus of the culture jamming movement. That, too, was seen as inchoate. The idea behind culture jamming was, and remains, essentially media-age sabotage. It sees corporate media as a juggernaut, and realizes that if one negotiates with a juggernaut, one tends to get run over. So, like the 15th-century Dutch textile workers who gave rise to the term, and the 19th-century Luddites who elevated it into a basic philosophy, culture jammers have decided that sabotage is the only logical answer to machinery with the kind of inertia things like advertising have.
Ditto Wall Street, only more so. Culture jamming is like trying to disable a battleship’s guns. Occupy Wall Street is more akin to attempting to capture the thing whole.
There may be some irony in the fact that the Arab Spring momentum Adbusters and the occupiers have taken advantage of was communicated to us mostly through corporate media who were piggybacking on the possibly more insidious authoritarian-state-controlled media (Al Jazeera). But perhaps that just makes it even more subversive.
Adbusters has been lurking in the background for the last decade, so it was a surprise, when they hit the news again, to hear that they have 120,000 subscribers in 60 countries, with a network of 93,060 people who have signed up to get action alerts. We probably shouldn’t still need reminders that background is a relative term.
It’ll be interesting to see how the movement does when it occupies Bay Street tomorrow. Canada is different. Where the anger that fuels OWS in the U.S. is personal, with millions of foreclosures and sucked-dry retirement plans as tinder, the protest in Canada, with our more reasonable banking system and an economy that chiefly suffered on account of the sins of others, will have to be more fundamentally anti-capitalist. In the U.S., you can head down to Wall Street because you think Goldman Sachs is too greedy, that they should have taken 80 cents on the dollar from their notorious AIG insurance rather than the 100 cents the government allowed them. But in Canada, you’ll be camping out on Bay either because you’re protesting the American situation because of its global repercussions (and fair enough), or because you figure the entire global system is corrupt, that capitalism as a whole does not work, the bits that benefit you as much as the bits that don’t. There are cogent arguments in this direction, entire philosophies, even, but they’re a good deal more radical.
In the States, I think Bill Maher may have hit pretty close to the heart of the Zeitgeist back in March with his piñata metaphor.
“We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same, like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they’ll explode, and the candy will rain down on the rest of us, like there’s some kin of piñata of benevolence. But here’s the thing about a piñata: it doesn’t open on its own. You have to beat it with a stick.”
There’s talk that gets at the more profound underpinnings of a Canadian protest in the States already, of course. Like the Slavoj Zizek joke, delivered to the same crowds Stiglitz was talking to.
“A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.’ This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.”
Kalle Lasn, who co-founded Adbusters in 1989, tells a story about when he saw the light. It was in a grocery store parking lot in the 1970s, he says, where he was confronted by one of those shopping carts that needs a quarter to unlock it. He didn’t like the fact that he had to put down a deposit for the privilege of spending money, so he jammed a quarter into the slot so hard he broke the thing. It’ll be interesting to see, tomorrow here, and in the coming weeks everywhere, whether his latest quarter will stick.
Origin
Source: Toronto Standard
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