Co-opting the Protest

The Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t become a happening even if it’s reminiscent of hippies in the 1960s. It has to take on political dimensions.

Even if nearly every journalist in Europe is transfixed by the ongoing attempts to rescue the Euro, the global anti-banker protests are continuing. In the United States, local politicians have been so stressed out by the protesters that in many locations they have forcibly cleared their camps. In Oakland, meanwhile, scenarios reminiscent of the massive confrontations of the anti-Vietnam war protests have been playing out.

The discussions currently going on are about whether the occupy movement shouldn’t really being focusing on what it wants. Slavoj Žižek makes the worried observation in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the demonstrators run the risk of falling in love with themselves and with the wonderful days spent in the “beleaguered” campsites. He cites one instance in San Francisco last Sunday where someone urged the crowd to join in as if it were all a sixties-style “happening” put on by hippies. He quotes one anonymous demonstrator as saying “They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”

But Žižek isn’t content with that, saying “The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work — they are the beginning, not the end.” Then continues, saying, “In a kind of Hegelian triad, the Western left has come full circle: After abandoning the so-called ‘class struggle essentialism’ for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt.”

Joseph Kishore of the World Socialist Web Site is less abstract in his assessment, especially in view of police reaction in the USA: “The increasing repression poses all the more directly the fundamental political issues raised by the protests, above all the necessity for a political struggle against the Obama administration, the Democratic Party and the capitalist state. Even as it carries out mass arrests, the Democratic Party and its adjuncts — from the trade unions to a variety of middle-class ‘left’ organizations and academic celebrities — are continuing their attempts to channel opposition behind the Democrats and Obama’s reelection campaign.”

Kishore goes on to say, “The unconscious historical process that is bringing millions of people into struggle against capitalism must be transformed into a conscious socialist political movement of the international working class. . . The Socialist Equality Party in the United States and its sister parties around the world are spearheading this struggle,” and adds that their aim is certainly not to “co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement’s goals.”