Tag: Occupy Wall Street

Zizek and the Occupy Movement, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 52 Comments

I’m incredibly busy this week (more on that later) but people keep clamoring for a post on Slavoj Zizek and his attitude towards the #Occupy movement. I can never deny anything to my readers, so I decided to read and analyze Zizek’s most recent article in the Guardian titled “Occupy First. Demands Come Later.”

Zizek’s article is, in my opinion, very symbolic of the entirety of his work. He offers a sentence or a paragraph that starts well but then fizzles out on a tremendous platitude. The article in the Guardian is full of  this kind of sentences. Here are a few examples:

So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed

I was very glad to see this statement. Every time, I see protesters hold placards denouncing greed I feel vicarious shame for people who don’t manage to realize that protesting a character flaw is not a legitimate political act. Then, however, Zizek continues this sentence:

the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt.

Even though the philosopher begins the article by being somewhat critical of the hippyish tint of the protests, he slips into the fully 60ies rhetoric of the bad system that causes all ills. The statement that “the” system pushed people into corruption is probably the most inane thing I have read for a while. Is anybody aware of any system that existed at any point in the history of humanity where corruption did not exist? Isn’t that proof that people don’t need to be pushed into being corrupt by systems?

A little later in the article, Zizek says the following:

 The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

I agree wholeheartedly that the Main St. vs Wall Street binary is simplistic and useless. However, the problem is not that Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. The real issue is that the White House cannot. In their zeal to blame the greedy banksters, protesters are forgetting to mention the real culprit: the politicians who have sold us all down the river. This is where real corruption is located. This is the true problem that needs to be addressed.

Zizek slips into sheer ridiculousness when he attempts to mimic the Christian rhetoric in order to make the #Occupy cause more attractive to the conservatives:

When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Zizek is forgetting that it is always a mistake to adopt a language of which you only have a smattering and hope to be convincing to the native speakers. A Christian can only feel compassion towards the ultra-rich who have even less chance of getting into heaven than. . .  well, I’m sure that even Zizek has to be aware of this. In his attempt to employ Christian terminology, Zizek sounds as silly as a Christian would who’d try to tell a Marxist that the fair distribution of the means of production awaits us all in the Kingdom of God.

(To be continued. . .)

Bankers Eager to Donate to Obama’s Campaign

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

Washington Post reports:

Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data. . . As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. . .

Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from employees in the industry, according to the Post analysis. Nearly $12 million of that went to the DNC, the analysis shows.

Romney has raised less than half that much from the industry, while Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought in about $2 million. No other Republican candidate has raised more than $402,000 from the finance sector, which also includes insurance and real estate interests.

The ultra-conservative Washington Post uses this information to paint Obama as pro-banks and pro-financial sector in order to make him less attractive to progressive voters. Of course, people who follow politics at least minimally will find this information to be very belated. We all remember how Obama appointed Summers and Geithner, of all people, to key positions two seconds after he was elected. This gave us all the information we could have possibly needed about the new President’s position on the economy. Today, we are reaping the results of those appointments.

In my opinion, the huge support that the financial sector offers Obama today has to do with Wall Street’s realization that Obama is the only candidate who might, if given enough reason to, listen to the #Occupy protesters and start bringing back some of the regulation measures on the financial industry that are the only way of saving us all from complete and utter economic collapse.

At this point, Obama is not listening to his erstwhile progressive supporters. However, he might. Especially, if the protests intensify as the election draws closer. This is why Wall Street is trying to buy him off as fast as possible. Overall, I’d say this is very good news because it demonstrates that the bankers are finally taking the #Occupy protesters seriously. President Obama will be well served to do the same.

Occupy Museums

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

The #Occupy movement is drowning in pleas for compassion and whiny personal stories on the one hand and pseudo-revolutionary insanity of kids who read too much Zizek and Baudrillard and never managed to digest their readings.

Via The Mahablog (that I highly recommend to everybody as a great source of balanced and insightful discussions of politics and economy), I discovered an initiative called Occupy Museums and apparently launched by the Occupy Wall Street’s Art and Culture group.

Here is what the initiative’s organizer had to say:

We see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite. For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art. We recognize that art is for everyone, across all classes and cultures and communities. We believe that the Occupy Wall Street Movement will awaken a consciousness that art can bring people together rather than divide them apart as the art world does in our current time.

Let’s be clear. Recently, we have witnessed the absolute equation of art with capital. The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt.

I sometimes complain about my students’ writing. None of them, however, could have ever managed to write something as egregiously bad as the above-quoted passage. So this is good news already.

Jokes aside, the real question now is whether the #Occupy movement can offer anything more than pleas for compassion, stories of the intense anxieties of the well-off, and the pseudo-revolutionary proclamations from a bunch of overpampered kids.

Anxiety

~ Clarissa ~ 84 Comments

One’s capacity to live without fear and expectation of fear has nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with individual psychology. This professor should refresh his knowledge of Freud.

Even a very dramatic improvement of the economy will do nothing to reduce his unhealthy anxiety.

My Position on Occupy Wall Street Protests

~ Clarissa ~ 39 Comments

Is complex.

One the one hand, I’m glad that people are waking up, protesting, making themselves heard. This is definitely a positive development. I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen in the US, and finally it has.

However, there are a few things that bother me about the protests. One is the “1% vs 99%” slogan. As Spanish Prof brilliantly puts it,

I’ve seen a comment this weekend from somebody who is supposedly a progressive where class is divided between “those who rule the country and those who are fucked”. So if you are not among the 1% of the wealthiest, you are supposed to be oppressed like the remaining 99% of the population. Sorry, but that is absurd, and a good way of overlooking poverty rates in the United States.

I understand that every movement needs a catchy populist slogan, but does it have to be so reductive? The provocative “We are the 1%” statement folks at the Chicago Board of Trade placed in their windows resonates with me. Not because I will ever have any access to the kind of wealth the richest people have (nor do I want to), but because the idea of being lumped in with a very vaguely defined majority is not something I am likely to respond well to.

Another problem I have with the movement is that it’s taking the protest to Wall Street, Chicago Board of Trade, financial districts, etc. Can anybody tell me what the point of that is? Isn’t it clear that Wall Street is not the problem? Yes, the traders and the hedge fund people want to enrich themselves. That’s their job, that’s what they do. It isn’t their job to have a social conscience. And said conscience will not be awakened, no matter how much you scream and shout under their windows.

Is the movement hoping that touching stories of personal suffering, debt and illness will convince Wall Street employees to share the wealth with them? I sincerely hope not because that would be too pathetic. What’s the point of standing under the windows of a hedge fund with posters saying, “I’m 22, $50,000 in debt, no medical insurance”? Why should a hedge fund manager care about another private citizen’s debt or insurance? That’s the duty of our government, so maybe it makes more sense to take the grievances where they belong.

Seriously, how would everybody feel if I wrote a similar poster about my personal issues and went to wave it under the windows of a local farmer-millionaire?

Or take this slogan, for example:

Greed is a sin in the Christian worldview and a personal failure in many people’s system of morality. Walking down the streets denouncing other folks’ faulty morals seems kind of useless. Is anybody going to stop being greedy the second they see this placard? Obviously not.

People should feel free to be as greedy (lustful, angry, proud, gluttonous, etc.) as their individual value systems allow them to be. What matters is how far our political system allows these personal failings of some to influence the collective governmental policies affecting us all.

The problem is not located in the financial districts. It’s located in the centers of political power. Politicians do not render accounts to people but to their lobbyists. The US government is distributing bailouts to banks and cutting down on social programs. Washington and state Capitols should be marched on. People on Wall Street are just folks who act in their own interest. Just like the protesters are. The trouble begins when politicians become intimately involved in promoting personal interests of a small group of people and want to pay for that from our collective pocket.

I really want the movement to be successful. This is why I fear it will degenerate into a series of protests by private citizens bemoaning the bad moral values of another group of private citizens. If we get into a debate on who’s more greedy than the other guy, we’ll never get out of it and never achieve anything useful.

Let’s stop making politics be all about personalities already. Let’s make it only and exclusively about political issues.