6 October 2011

OWS Is a Kick in the Ass to Intellectuals

Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:17:33 -0500
From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift[at]gmail.com>
To: nettime-l[at]mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> more on Wall St (and Wisconsin)

Hey Dan, thanks for a great text and a reminder of one of the most important struggles in the US in recent years. Occupy Wisconsin!

http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/wang/en

From One Moment to the Next, Wisconsin to Wall Street

Dan S. Wang

[Excerpt] Of the many differences, what strikes me now as probably the most consequential in terms of movement character and future evolution, is the comparatively abstract target: "Wall Street," or "the banksters" or the 1%. In Wisconsin we have a central figure, Governor Scott Walker, and a host of background players (the Fitzgeralds, the Kochs, Paul Ryan, Alberta Darling, JB Van Hollen, etc), each of whom is a real person who can be personally targeted. Most of them being public figures, their career trajectories, at least, offer activists something by which we can measure our strength. With OWS, the monster before us‹the banking structure, the corporate political system, and financialized capital in its entirety is so huge, global, faceless, out of control, and fundamentally rotten, that it is difficult even for informed people to identify and prioritize specific aims, much less individual targets.

I would take this as an opportunity rather than a disadvantage. When the system, in its faceless abstraction, presents you with a bill you cannot pay, then there is an existential interest in confronting the abstraction itself. We have good names for that, ones that everyone can recognize: greed, dehumanization, capitalism. Since there is no single face to these abstractions, ultimately you have to look around and say, those concepts are in operation right here, where we live, in our town. They are what is faceless in the faces that we see. The abstractions are concrete. We must struggle with them in our own everyday relation to society.

The Wisconsin protests inspired people all over the United States. They showed us that a broad-based social movement on the left is possible. The movement that began on Wall Street is a kick in the ass to intellectuals: it shows us that people are ready to resist the faceless abstraction, and it challenges everyone - the organic intellectuals, ourselves - to develop ways of talking and understanding that can resist and transform "the great decentered multinational communications network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects." I fully agree that to do this, the struggles must be articulated in their particularities. But they also must be articulated to what is entirely new: the readiness of a broad-spectrum American social movement to confront the very heart of our society, which is a hierarchy, a rank order defined by the control over money.

"We are the 99%" has a lot of meanings. Such as: "We have to abolish the system of measurement that gives the faceless faces control of the world." It's really time to stop business as usual.

Occupy Wall Street, occupy Chicago, occupy everything -

Brian

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