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The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'

– Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

The #occupywallstreet demonstrations began on September 17, 2011. According to Adbusters, the magazine that is credited with having sparked the occupy movement, 5,000 people assembled in the financial district of Lower Manhattan on this day, held a people's assembly and set up an encampment in Zuccotti Park on Liberty Street.1 Modeled on the assemblies of the Spanish indignados, a people's assembly was to be held at 3 pm at One Chase Manhattan Plaza and was to continue, Adbusters declared, "until our one demand is agreed upon by all."2 Previous to this, in the July issue, Adbusters printed a double-paged poster that became the initial call to occupy Wall Street. Almost immediately, activists began to organize general assemblies in New York City. A video was also put out by the hacktivist group Anonymous, which was viewed by as many as 100,000 people before You Tube removed it. It was expected that as many as 20,000 people would show up on the 17th and the Department of Homeland Security went so far as to warn the banks of potential mayhem. The National Lawyers Guild was prepared to aid protesters with legal advice and a telephone support system was established. The revolutionary organization of the masses in Tahrir Square and the acampades of Spain provided the model of a leaderless, nonviolent movement that, like the Arab Spring, could pose a challenge to Wall Street bankers, Senators and Congressmen, wealthy campaign donors, lobbyists, overpaid CEOs, and Forbes 500 billionaires, by simply setting up tents, peaceful barricades and kitchens, and by organizing people's assemblies that could focus on popular demands. Echoing an articled by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Adbusters declared that the 99% will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.3 From the outset, #occupywallstreet (#ows) would seem to be concerned primarily with politics. However, writing for the Adbusters Blog, Nathan Schneider cited Alexa O'Brien, founder of the US Days of Rage, who argued that #ows has no distinct ideological platform, something, she added, that is typical of the internet generation. What is going to save us, she argued, is more of a process than an ideology. Schneider, for his part, recognized in #ows something of Adbusters' anti-consumer culture jamming aesthetic: "What's drawing people to Wall Street on Saturday sometimes seems to be an aesthetic more than anything, a longing to see Wall Street full of the people whose concerns its operations have been blind to, and who are ready to get their due. But it's an aesthetic with teeth."4 Indeed, #ows is a cultural movement as well as a political one. The overall concern of the movement is with the loss and re-creation of the commons, with values, places, and ideas that are outside the market and where people can relate to each other as non-consumers. The encampments and their various forms signal a rage that needs no other justification than the perspective of alienation that they bring into view. Occupywallstreet embodies a lived experience that acts as an immanent critique that punctures the continuum of the present. In these terms, the following examines the #ows movement as a critique of democratic institutions. As Jodi Dean argues, the movement's disruption of public space asserts a contradiction that "opens up cuts through democracy as the real of class antagonism, that is, as the division that necessarily exposes democracy under

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capitalism as a form of government for the sake of capitalism and that democratization seeks to repress, deny, displace, and conceal."5 Dean argues in a Lacanian/Žižekian manner that the occupy movement disrupts the capitalist fantasy that denies the antagonism on which it is built, the division, she says, "between those who have to sell their labor power to survive and those who do not, between those who not only have no choice but to sell their labor power but nonetheless cannot (...) and those who command, steer, and gamble upon the resources, fortunes, and futures of the rest of us".6 Simultaneously, I would say, the movement asserts an alternative in the form of a critique of specialized ways of understanding and investigating society, a critique of the separation of society into the realms of the political, the aesthetic, the economic, labor and love. Theorizing #ows therefore calls for an interdisciplinarity of investigation that understands the politicized commons as the object of a permanent revolution. Based on these few preliminary remarks, initially written only a few weeks after the emergence of the movement, it is fair to say and to reflect on that fact that #ows is an unfinished and unfinishable project. The observations I make in the following are not an effort at the intellectual capture of #ows but a salute to those who have begun to undertake the immense task of disalienating our everyday lives from the maleficent planning of our servitude and suffering.

Class Polarization In the mid-1970s Nicos Poulantzas argued that so-called "third way" capitalism was characterized by the augmentation of banking services, commerce and bureaucracy and that the growth of such non-productive services was related politically to the refutation of Marx's labor theory of value.7 The growth of an intermediary petty bourgeois class accompanied the replacement of the struggle against exploitation with the anarchistic and counter-cultural struggle against institutions. The class struggle was ostensibly over and in its place emerged class polarization, a process in which a new intermediary class and its political offshoots – new social movements – transformed the modes of class reproduction. A social hierarchy and a division of labor would continue to exist, however, since social classes only exist in terms of class struggle. As Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1920s, "the proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human culture.”8 While today's salaried petty bourgeois bureaucracy identifies with the bourgeoisie it does not necessarily belong to it. This is why New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg could claim that the occupy protesters were interfering with people's livelihoods on Wall Street.9 He forgot to add that these same financial service providers, even if they themselves are being exploited, are nevertheless engaged in a class war against the rest of the population. The theme of class war has been given a great deal of lip service recently in the form of the conservative red baiting of the Obama administration. The use of the phrase peaked for a short while after billionaire Warren Buffett wrote his August 14 article for the New York Times.10 In this piece, Buffett warns that too much poverty is not good for the economy. Legislators in Washington nevertheless feel compelled to protect us millionaires and billionaires, he says. While 80% of U.S. government revenue comes from personal income taxes, the wealthy pay only 15% on earnings and almost nothing on payroll. In comparison, the working majority pay as much as 33 to 41% on payroll. Lower tax rates for the rich have over the last three decades resulted directly in lower job creation. On September 19, 2011, Obama announced that he would work to bring forward what he calls the "Buffett tax," a tax hike on those who earn more than $1 million per year. Almost as soon as he made this announcement, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House of Representatives budget committee reported to Fox News: "Class

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warfare may make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics."11 The proposal for the Buffett tax was to be made to the special joint Congressional super committee, which is stacked with Republicans who want to impose deep cuts to social services at all costs. The Buffett tax is presented by the Obama administration as one way to offset the $3 trillion that the government wants to cut from the deficit over the next 10 years. While $1 trillion could be saved by ending the war in Afghanistan, both parties prefer to watch Americans fight amongst themselves to see who will shoulder the debt burden – the working majority or the power elite. Given that the U.S. economy is currently in recession, placing the burden on the poor plays into prejudicial stereotypes of the unemployed as being undeserving and possessing an undue sense of entitlement, of university students being too lazy to get real jobs, of immigrants stealing badly needed jobs, and of environmental and other protections being job killers. The Buffett Rule is part of the American Jobs Act, a plan designed to make Obama seem like he is concerned with economic fairness and created in anticipation of the 2012 elections. Even if implemented, the Buffett Tax does almost nothing to shift the burden off of the middle and working class. According to Patrick Martin, the Rule is nothing more than a suggestion to the Congressional committee, where it has no chance of being implemented.12 Martin mentions that in the last three decades, the income gap between the top 1% and the bottom 40% has tripled. The wealthiest 10% controls two thirds of the national wealth in the U.S. Regardless, Republicans complain of class warfare. Just what is the class project in the United States and how can a radical redistribution of wealth be combined with a new social project that would eliminate the problems of class society? The background to the slogan "We are the 99%" consists of countless studies that have analyzed and verified the growth of income gaps worldwide. One particular reference for the slogan is Joseph Stiglitz's article "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%," which was published in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair. A former chief economist with the World Bank, Stiglitz anticipated the connection between the Arab Spring and the American Autumn: "Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrated massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income – an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."13 Stiglitz states that over the last three decades, the working class has seen its incomes fall by 12% and go directly to those at the top of ladder. All of this is justified according to "marginal-productivity theory," which holds that higher incomes at the top are linked to greater productivity. Despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that this theory is false, those who continue to bring the global economy to ruin are rewarded. Stiglitz argues that because of growing inequality, the U.S. economy will continue to worsen, and he warns that the protests that have erupted in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Bahrain will eventually come to America.14 In the past few years, we've heard more detailed explanations of how and why we got here. The noted economist David Harvey wrote in 2009 that the neoliberal class project has been fairly successful insofar as its goal has been the restoration of class power.15 The ruling elites decided in the mid-1970s that the burden of the financial crisis at that time was going to be shouldered by the working population and not the capitalist class. Workers have not seen any real gains for the past 50 years, Harvey says, yet they haven't risen in revolt. By the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entry of China into the global economy added 2 billion workers into the world economy. The resulting wage repression led to household debt, which grew from an average of $40,000 in 1980 to $130,000 in 2009. Financial institutions supported working-class debt, allowing sub-prime mortgages to spawn a new market in financial

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services. Growing this debt in turn spawned construction and stabilized the entire economy, that is, until the housing market crashed. What is to be done? The problem with the inflation of asset values, Harvey says, is absorption. How is surplus to be reinvested when less is going into real production and more is going into financial speculation? Bailing out banks does little to help the economy and contributes mainly to greater class inequality. Harvey argues that rather than bail out the system again and again, we need to rethink the cozy relationship between government and financial institutions. He anticipates Stiglitz when he writes: "The only thing they would care about is if we rose up in revolt. And until we rise up in revolt they are going to redesign the system according to their own class interests."16 Sustainable development first means realizing that it will not be possible in the future to sustain 2% and 3% rates of accumulation. Our demand, according to Harvey, should be to insist on popular control of the surplus, of production and distribution, through the building of schools, hospitals, clean energy, working cities and neighborhoods, housing and social infrastructure and through the disentangling of government, financial interests and the big corporations. The system of exploitation is breaking down and unless we take control of government, Harvey argues, the ruling classes will turn to more oppressive forms to legitimate their class war. The U.S. economy is more unequal than any other in the advanced industrialized economies. This is not a negligible accident of the free market. According to James Laxer, the neoliberal flexibilization of labor, the suppression of wages and the creation of a precarious work force directly benefits capitalists. Whereas corporations used to take their employees into account, neoliberal economists argued that job security is bad for the economy. Starting in the late 70s, high unemployment accompanied the transition to a deregulated, globalized economy, destroying the balance between capital and labor.17 The result has not been a healthier economy but wealth concentration at the top. In unequal societies and in societies with less union control and fewer social programs, people have to work more to make ends meet, their standard of living goes down and corporate investment declines at the same time. Such economies, in which tax cuts are presented as a panacea, are in the end less competitive and less innovative. The resulting social insecurity undermines democracy, leading to health problems, reduced life expectancy, higher infant mortality, and less equity all around. Governments that attempt to improve this situation by raising tax revenues are threatened by corporations, their high-paid CEOs, think tanks and lobbies. Consequently, neoliberal governments do the bidding of the wealthy, focusing on money managers' goal of debt reduction. Meanwhile people like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner claim that the government must go ahead and destroy social programs. Enter stage left, the movement known as #occupywallstreet. The first item of order for the movement is not to come to a consensus on specific demands, but to create the seeds of a political alternative to the two major parties and the neoliberal consensus.

We Are the 99% On Saturday September 17, people arrived in New York City's financial district with banners, cardboard signs, sleeping bags, Guy Fawkes masks, tents and mattresses. Their plan was to march around the bronze Charging Bull statue but police deterred them. The protests eventually moved to Zuccotti Park, which was renamed Liberty Square. The news media reported on the first day that no one demand had be decided upon, setting up the expectation

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that demands were soon to follow.18 Fittingly, those who created this expectation gave some of the first media reports. Kalle Lasn, the co-founder of Adbusters, told CNN:

There's a feeling that we need a revolution in the way that our economy is run, the way that Washington is run. (...) What we are hoping for is to have a very large number of people turn up in Lower Manhattan and start walking toward Wall Street peacefully, sings in hand. If we have peaceful assemblies and debates about what our demands to President Obama should be, then bit by bit we can create a situation that will rival what happened in Egypt."19

Micah White, the senior editor of Adbusters, for his part called on Obama to come to Wall Street to talk to the demonstrators. Of course Obama never did but the encampment did receive emails, tweets and phoned-in food donations from around the world. Given the fact that the form of the assemblies and the assertion of the right to assemble and organize took precedence over the delivery of one or even many demands, the mainstream media very early on sought to discredit the occupation by suggesting that the people there did not know what they wanted. The anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber helped to give the movement a media presence and established that the 5,000 who first came to Wall Street were not there to riot, as Michael Bloomberg had led on to the media, but to signal that the political system, as he put it, "is not even trying to propose solutions to our problems."20

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Occupy Wall Street, September 17 to October 6, 2011. Images courtesy of David Shankbone and The Occupy Wall Street Creative Commons Project. Roughly one week after the encampments were established protests began to attract global attention and received the support of other prominent activists and intellectuals. All of the messages of support, including this essay, would of course not have been possible without the determination of those who camped out, set up committees and resisted the various efforts at police intimidation. On Monday, September 26, a message from Noam Chomsky was read out to the assembly. It stated: "The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity [of concentrated wealth] to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course."21 The same day, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore visited #ows and told the crowd: "Whatever you do, don't despair because this is the hard part. You are in the hard part right now. But, everyone will remember, three months from now, six months from now, that you came down to this Plaza, and you started this movement." Later in the day, on the Keith Olbermann television show, Moore made the point that had the Tea Parties held such assemblies, the mainstream news would have given them top coverage. He promised the "kleptocracy" in Washington and Wall Street that the movement would grow. "They're holding two trillion dollars of cash in their bank accounts," he said. "They've never done this before. Never held on to that much money. They've taken that money out of circulation, and they know the other shoe's gonna drop."22 In anticipation of a union solidarity event on Wednesday September 28, statements of solidarity were put out by the Transport Workers Union Local 100, by the AFL-CIO, Moveon.org, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Alliance for Quality Education, the Service

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Employees International Union, and the Teamsters and United Federation of Teachers. The fact that many of these unions are backers of the Obama administration made their politics somewhat antithetical to the "no politics" and "no leadership" ethos of #ows. On the day of the actual event, Moore spoke again, this time on the news show Democracy Now. He noted that it was highly ironic that 100 of the protesters had been arrested while not a single banker or CEO from Wall Street had so far been held responsible.23 Moore was joined by Cornel West, who also visited the #ows encampment and spoke to the general assembly through the amplification of the people's microphone:

"There is a sweet spirit in this place. I hope you can feel the love and inspiration of those Sly Stone called every day people... You got me spiritually break-dancing on the way here because when you bring folks together, of all colors, and all cultures, and all genders, and all sexual orientations, the elite will tremble in their boots. And we will send a message that this is the U.S. Fall – responding to the Arab Spring, and it's going to hit Chicago and Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, and A-Town itself, moving on to Detroit. We going to hit Appalachia, we going to hit the reservations with our red brothers and sisters and Martin Luther King Jr. will smile from the grave and say, we moving step by step for what he called a revolution."

The following weekend, as many as 700 #ows protesters were arrested while on the Brooklyn Bridge. The arrests were supported by Bloomberg, a man whose personal assets are valued at over $19 billion. Fifty percent of the income that is generated in the city of New York goes to the top 1%, approximately 35,000 wealthy households. By the week of October 3, protests had been anticipated for the cities of Los Angeles, Boston, Austin, San Francisco, Chicago, Hartford, Seattle, Washington D.C., Detroit, Portland, Philadelphia, San Diego, Norfolk, Nashville, Ithaca, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, St Louis, Minneapolis, San Antonio, Anchorage, New Orleans and Santa Fe. A video that was put out by Anonymous on October 1 declared the spread of the movement as a "wave of resistance" that that had sprung up in over 30 U.S. cities and that was part of a global movement. By October 15, the New York demonstrations were joined by more that 1300 cities in more than 27 countries. During the week of October 3 a number of Democrats began to voice their support for the #ows protests, sentimentalizing people's "frustration" rather than acknowledging their anger and their complete disapproval of the Party.24 The demonstrators know that the Democrats have helped to facilitate cuts is social services, delivering them to insurance companies, have helped to roll back union rights, wages and pensions, have increased unemployment, and have no plan to deal with the recession. Obama's statement on October 6 that he "feels the pain" and the "frustration" of the "folks" he's "seen on TV" is a refusal to acknowledge the #ows movement as a political movement.25 Giving a speech at #ows on October 5, activist journalist Naomi Klein asserted the immensity of what the movement represents and called for solidarity, stating: "We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. (...) Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets – like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting."26 A few days later, on October 9, Slavoj Žižek gave a speech in support of the movement, warning:

Don't fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal time. Will there be any changes then? (...) We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don't be afraid to really want what you desire.27

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After the weekend of October 8, news media reported on the dangers of cooptation. The movement has been clearly ware of this from the start and the significance of #ows for the left, in my view, is that it has encouraged a "non-denominational" unification of all those who feel oppressed by existing forms of neoliberal governance. This is not to say that the usual tensions among groupuscules, between anarchist, socialist, social democratic and left liberal tendencies are not present, but that there has been an effort to avoid giving precedence to any one ideological viewpoint. Regardless, the horizontalism and decentralization that characterizes the movement also has its problems. In a short essay, Mark Read questions the effectiveness of consensus process for large gatherings, where it tends to yield pernicious hierarchies and favors those who feel comfortable arguing indefinitely for their point of view.28 According to Barbara Adams, some feel like the main actors while other feel like supporters.29 As well, the consequence of factional scuffles is that the assemblies have been supplemented by separate sensibilities.30 Read breaks the movement down into three groups: those who were looking for one demand, the poetic types, those who want to put forward many demands, the technocratic policy types, and those who argue that no specific demands should be put forward, those who want a "permanent revolution" that could ultimately reform the system. For others still, the constituent power of the 99% is not so categorically progressive, in particular as it ignores the processes of capitalist domination and eradicates class consciousness. Aidan Rowe, for example, argues that the movement's aversion to politics and demands is the very definition of liberal capitalist consensus. Were it to identify as a working class movement, it's opposition to corporate capitalism would take on a more strongly defined ideological character and revolutionary strategies could be proposed. The working class, he says, is not a group of people, but a social relation between people that is derived from the organization of labor. Oppression is therefore not directly produced by Wall Street, but in the workplaces that are being restructured, as well as in the courts, prisons and militaries. 31 The fact that the movement does not have a clear political message is both a strength and a weakness. Its amorphousness leaves it open to opportunistic cooptation by different forces, including the Democratic Party, the unions and the media. The unity of the movement grows, however, with various attempts to shut it down. As it grows internationally, with occupations in Europe, Canada, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Africa and South America, the slogan "We Are the 99%" gives the movement a popular character that both confirms and challenges the mandates of representative groups and institutions. For sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, the #ows movement has passed through three crucial stages: the initial demonstrations, the publicity and police repression, and the legitimation by academics and media. The next step he says is the danger of counter-demonstrations and dissolution.32 The movement seems poised to potentially do two things: first, encourage the short-term minimization of austerity, and second, change the way that large segments of American society think about the crises of capitalism. With regard to the latter, he says, it has already succeeded. In New York City polls from late October, two third of voters supported the protesters' criticism of the banks and 87% supported their right to demonstrate and remain in Liberty Square. These reports contradicted mainstream media news coverage of the negligible effects of the encampments on local businesses. Polls by the New York Times and CBS also indicated that as of October 25, as many 43% of Americans agreed with the basic aims of #ows and only 25% disagreed – with the remaining 30% unsure. Polls also showed that 89% of Americans distrust their government to do the right thing, 84% disapprove of Congress, and 74% say the U.S. is on the wrong track.33

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Politicizing #OWS I would like to propose in this concluding section that the dangers of counter-demonstrations and dissolution, as Wallerstein has it, are not only external threats but are a feature of the movement's own internal contradictions, and more to the point, are part of the contradictions and unevenness of contemporary biocapitalism. Aidan Rowe's argument that the post-political character of today's university educated multitude works against the possibility of #ows becoming a genuine leftist opposition has been echoed by Patrick Martin who writes:

The centrality of class cuts across the efforts of the middle class 'left' organizations that have for decades promoted various forms of identity politics, focusing on race, gender and sexual orientation, as a means of blocking the development of an independent political movement of the working class and bolstering the parties of the bourgeois political establishment. (...) The growth of understanding of the international character of the struggle of the working class is the political hallmark of 2011.34

Martin says that this macro-political class conflict is more deeply rooted in the U.S. than anywhere else. Of course there are far greater threats to the dissipation of the occupy movement than the internal dissensus represented by culture wars and identity politics but I want to raise this issue here as it has emerged in various instances.35

Angela Davis at Occupy Wall Street, October 30, 2011. Image courtesy of Winnie Wong at Seismologik.

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To my knowledge, the most direct statement on the relevance of difference politics to #ows came from Angela Davis, who spoke on October 30 at Washington Square Park in New York City. In response to some questions from those assembled, Davis stated:

We have to learn to be together in a complex unity; in a unity that does not erase our differences; in a unity that allows those whose voices have been historically marginalized to speak out on behalf of the entire community. I am sure that as the days and months go by we all learn more about this process than we know now. It is important that this movement expresses the will of the majority from the outset. But that majority must be respected in terms of all the differences within it. (...) We have to become fluent in each other's stories. (...) It is important to insist on the involvement of people of color, of women, of people with marginalized sexualities, of immigrants, and especially undocumented immigrants. Everyone has to be willing to listen to their voices. Those who have traditionally exercised privilege have to become conscious of the way that privilege can continue to be marginalizing. So this is work we must all do.36

To be sure, there have been many reports of violence and discrimination in the encampments and these have to be judged according the degree of seriousness. Davis' culpabilization of privilege, however, ignores many things, least of all the political limits of difference politics as it relates to macro-political change. Difference politics does not only reinforce the role and identity of the privileged; it also undermines the strengths of the kind of revolutionary politics that Davis once endorsed. Davis is now perhaps all too knowingly post-structuralist in her politics. Difference politics, in contrast to emancipatory politics, and especially when it is thought of in terms of identity, attempts to find a unified field of emergence and a unified theory between reality and psyche. Efforts to localize the antagonisms of social difference become a means to have politics without paying the price for politics. Culture wars, in particular, become a means through which to disavow the logic of political antagonism.37 A more promising direction in recent political philosophy has been to assert the commons and values like love and solidarity. Solidarity implies that I do not need to be like you, or do as you do, in order to live alongside you. Neither relativism nor absolutism are the correct answer to the impossible real that mobilizes and dissolves social conflicts. Freedom lies in the choice of how one will be determined. The wager of Marxism, Žižek says, is that class struggle is the "ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles," an overdetermination that "allows us to account for the 'inconsistent' plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into 'chains of equivalences.'"38 A further difficulty, Žižek says, is that very often the proponents of micro-political identity struggles accept 'end of ideology' capitalism as "the only game in town."39 If #ows causes postmodern academia to take notice that a class politics can still be waged then let's hope that the movement will be resolute and not repress class politics in a retreat from the economic causes of racism, sexism and homophobia. As Ken Knabb argues, the slogan "We Are the 99%" is not precise class analysis, but it's good enough as it puts the focus on economic institutions and lackey politicians.40 A different dimension of difference politics is the anarcho-Deleuzianism that has become immensely popular in the last decade. One proponent of autonomist marxism or post-operaismo is Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, who wrote along with Geert Lovink in mid-October that #ows is a consequence of the growing precarity of labor.41 Our intelligence, they say, is submitted to processes of exchange that benefit the wealthy. Our life becomes their money.

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Our enemies are not human beings, they suggest, they are machines, an automated process of predatory power, or FINAZISM. The solution is to awaken from the software that captures our labor and take to the streets where the erotic social body breaks its chains. Nevermind the sustainability of the movement, they argue, everything is transient and besides, we are here to stay. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also put out the statement that #ows gives voice to "indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality."42 The issue for them is the extent to which the movement will understand itself as a constituent power, or whether it will mistakenly appeal to the established representational political system. "This protest movement could, and perhaps must," they write, "transform itself into a genuine, democratic constituent process."43 The banks, the political parties and the financial industries do not represent the multitudes of Tahrir Square, Wisconsin, Syntagma Square and the Israeli encampments. The multitude is characterized by the new democratic practices it is experimenting with: the general assemblies, the participatory decision-making, the social networking and the leaderless horizontal structures. They conclude with the question: Is the form of democracy obsolete? As a final remark, I would observe that while the schizo-anarchists do not accept capitalism as it exists, they also do not propose the classic marxist overcoming of the contradictions. The characteristic of autonomist marxism is that it lacks the traditional view of the Communist Manifesto that understands the proletariat as the "gravedigger" of capitalism. Because of this, it does not believe in the theory of the communist transition in which the proletariat has to take possession of the "representative" institutions of state power. Žižek argues that the dogma of today's petty bourgeois left has the features of the "humorous superego" which bombards us with impossible demands – for example the demand for constant resistance – and then mocks us for failing to meet them.44 This indeterminacy is paradoxically consistent with the technological and labor determinism that anarchists associate with the key functions of communicative capitalism. The productive aspect of this superego is that is constantly compels us to enjoy life, to love, to go out into the streets, to stop working and to live a little. The excessive, traumatic character of this reformist injunction is that one has always to move beyond one's comfort zone, that pleasure should bring more pain than pleasure. It turns politics, Žižek says, into a "weird and twisted ethical duty."45 In the case of #ows, one is asked to camp out for weeks and months but one has no idea what this burdensome duty will lead to. One is expected to listen to endless deliberations, but one cannot rely on established channels, experts and leaders. The new forms of organization are consequently thought to be in themselves better forms. What matters in such political movements is therefore not the end of capitalist exploitation but the formation of new subjectivities. Žižek argues that the liberal-democratic state and anarchist micro-politics exist in a relation of interpassive and mutual interdependency. In the end, he gives us more or less the same advice that David Harvey had for us, which is that we should not bombard those in power with infinite demands but rather with "strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands" that they cannot absorb as easily as they can the perennially resistant counter-cultural attitude. However, almost contradicting himself in light of the potential opened up by #ows, Žižek stated on October 26, at a lecture in New York City,

We should maintain this openness [of no demands] in all its ominous directions. We don't need dialogue with those in power. We need a critical dialogue with ourselves.

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We need time to think. (...) The system is in crisis, the important thing is precisely that a vacuum is open.46

In a later interview with Harper's magazine, Žižek then brought these two points together. To the question "So what should the protesters be asking for?" he replied:

Just two things. On the one hand, at this point more important than asking is to think, to organize, to lay down the foundations for some kind of a network so that this will not just be some kind of magic explosion that disappears. And point two, the way to start to think about doing something is to select some very specific issues ... which in a way are very realistic. One of the strategies for doing something concrete is to pick very carefully issues for which you fight, and then you try to organize a popular movement – which has two features. First, they are realistic; but at the same time, they have dramatic points which are extremely penetrated by ideology. So things that are possible but that are unacceptable within the ideological frame – like universal healthcare – this is, I think, maybe the thing to do at this point, apart from laying the foundations, getting ready.47

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! LONG LIVE OCCUPY WALL STREET!

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1 See Ben Davis, "How a Canadian Culture Magazine Helped Spark Occupy Wall Street," Artinfo (October 5, 2011), available at: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/38786/how-a-canadian-culture-magazine-helped-spark-occupy-wall-street?comment_sort=desc; Rod Mickleburgh, "Anti-Wall Street protests take off thanks to a Canadian idea," The Globe and Mail (October 4, 2011), available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/americas/anti-wall-street-protests-take-off-thanks-to-a-canadian-idea/article2191364/. 2 See "Occupywallstreet Orientation Guide," Adbusters (September 16, 2011), available at: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet-orientation-guide.html." 3 Paul B. Farrell, "America's Tahrir Moment: Does the American Left have the guts to pull this off?" Adbusters Blog (September 6, 2011), available at: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupy-wall-street-will-lay-siege-us-greed.html. 4 Nathan Schneider, "Who Will Occupy Wall Street on September 17?" Adbusters Blog (September 14, 2011), available at: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/who-will-occupy-wall-street-september-17.html. 5 Jodi Dean, "Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong," Theory & Event (online supplement) 14:4 (2011), available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4S.dean01.html.

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6 Dean, "Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong." 7 Nicos Poulantzas, Les classes sociales dans le capitalisme aujourd'hui (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974) 195. 8 Leon Trotsky cited in William Keach, "Introduction," Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005) 11. 9 On October 1, after the arrest of 700 protesters, Bloomberg stated on the radio: "The protesters are protesting people who make $40,000 to $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That's the bottom line. Those are people that work on Wall Street or in the finance sector... We need the banks, if the banks don't go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encouraging them to do that, is what we need. I think we spend too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward." See Bill Van Auken, "Mayor Bloomberg Backs Mass Arrests of Wall Street Protesters," World Socialist Web Site (October 4, 2011), available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/wall-o04.shtml. See also "Michael Bloomberg: Occupy Wall Street is trying to destroy jobs," The Guardian (October 8, 2011), available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/08/bloomberg-occupy-wall-street-jobs. 10 Warren Buffett, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich," New York Times (August 14, 2011), available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html. 11 Cited in Dominic Rushe, "Obama's millionaire tax is class war, say Republicans," The Guardian (September 18, 2011), available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/18/obama-millionaire-tax-war. 12 Patrick Martin, "The many frauds of the 'Buffett Rule'," World Socialist Web Site (September 26, 2011), available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/pers-s26.shtml. 13 Joseph E. Stiglitz, "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%," Vanity Fair (May 2011), available at: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105. 14 Stiglitz, "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%." 15 David Harvey, "Their Crisis, Our Challenge," Red Pepper (March 2009), available at: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Their-crisis-our-challenge/. 16 Harvey, "Their Crisis, Our Challenge." 17 James Laxer, "Income and wealth inequality: An underlying cause of the crash," rabble.ca (December 23, 2009), available at: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/james-laxer/2009/12/income-and-wealth-inequality-underlying-cause-crash. 18 See for example, Ari Lipsitz and Rebecca Nathanson, "Is This What Democracy Looks Like? Observing the Launch of Occupy Wall Street," The Village Voice (September 19, 2011), available at: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/09/this_is_what_de.php. 19 Cited in Michael Saba, "Wall Street protesters inspired by Arab Spring movement," CNN (September 17, 2011), available at: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/17-1.

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20 David Graeber cited in "Wall Street protesters: over-educated, under-employed and angry," The Guardian News Blog (September 20, 2011), available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/19/wall-street-protesters-angry. 21 Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky cited in Velcrow Ripper, "The Revolution will be Tweeted," rabble.ca (September 26, 2011), available at: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/velcrow-ripper/2011/09/revolution-will-be-tweeted. 22 "Michael Moore: Occupy Wall Street will only get bigger," rabble.ca (September 28, 2011), video available at: http://rabble.ca/rabbletv/program-guide/2011/09/best-net/michael-moore-occupy-wall-street-will-only-get-bigger. 23 "'Something Has Started': Michael Moore on the Occupy Wall Street Protest That Could Spark a Movement," Democracy Now (September 28, 2011), available at: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/28/something_has_started_michael_moore_on. 24 Suzy Khimm, "Congressional Democrats Embrace Occupy Wall Street," The Washington Post – Wonkblog (October 5, 2011), available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/congressional-democrats-embrace-occupy-wall-street/2011/10/05/gIQAEvNIOL_blog.html. 25 See Andy Kroll, "Obama: Occupy Wall St. 'Expresses the Frustrations the American People Feel," Mother Jones (October 6, 2011), available at: http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/obama-biden-occupy-wall-street. 26 Naomi Klein, "Naomi Klein speaks at Occupy Wall Street," rabble.ca (October 7, 2011), available at: http://rabble.ca/columnists/2011/10/naomi-klein-speaks-occupy-wall-street. 27 Žižek's speech is available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4S.zizek.html. 28 Mark Read, "Mic Check! Notes on How the Mo(ve)ment talks and learns from itself during the American Autumn," Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (October 2011), available at: http://joaap.org/webspecials/read.html. 29 See also Barbara Adams, "Notes from the Periphery," Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (October 2011), available at: http://joaap.org/webspecials/Adams_periphery.html. 30 See McKenzie Wark's distinction between "drum circle" ambiences and "chanters" in "Zuccotti Park, a psychogeography," Verso Books Blog (October 6, 2011), available at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/735. 31 Aidan Rowe, "Politics Averted: Thoughts on the 'Occupy X' Movement," Workers Solidarity Movement (October 12, 2011), available at: http://www.wsm.ie/c/politics-averted-occupy-movement. 32 Immanuel Wallerstein, "Occupy Wall Street is the most important political happening in America since 1968," Verso Books Blog (October 18, 2011), available at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/752. 33 Joseph Kishore, "Amidst police crackdowns, widespread public support for Occupy movement," World Socialist Web Site (October 27, 2011), available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/occu-o27.shtml. 34 See Patrick Martin, "A day of international action against Wall Street," World Socialist Web Site (October 17, 2011), available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/pers-o17.shtml.

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35 One could take as typical in this regard then entry by Manissa Maharawal, "Standing Up," in Astra Taylor and Keith Gessen, eds. Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso, 2011) 34-40. 36 "Occupying Washington Square Park With Angela Davis," posted November 1, 2011, at http://www.seismologik.com. 37 See Slavoj Žižek, "A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism," in The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume 1, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 183-208. See also Žižek, "Tolerance as an Ideological Category," Critical Inquiry #34 (Summer 2008) 660-82. 38 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) 361. 39 See also Slavoj Žižek, "Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!" in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000) 94. 40 Ken Knabb, "The Awakening in America," Interactivist Info Exchange (October 16, 2011), available at: http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/32866. 41 Franco 'Bifo' Berardi and Geert Lovink, "A Call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software," Interactivist Info Exchange (October 12, 2011), available at: http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/32852. 42 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street," Foreign Affairs (October 11, 2011), available at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136399/michael-hardt-and-antonio-negri/the-fight-for-real-democracy-at-the-heart-of-occupy-wall-street. 43 Hardt and Negri, "The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street." 44 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 342. 45 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 343. 46 See Slavoj Žižek, "Thinking the Occupation," lecture delivered at St. Mark's Bookshop, NYC, October 26, 2011, available at: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/videos/thinking-the-occupation/. 47 See J. Nicole Jones, "Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek," Harper's Magazine (November 11, 2011), available at: http://harpers.org/archive/2011/11/hbc-90008306.