Occupy Wall Street Campaign: Reliving Marx and moving beyond
By now the Occupy Wall Street Campaign has already passed more than two and half months of its turbulent but strident journey since it commenced in Zoccotti Park aka Liberty Plaza, New York on 17th September 2011. Amidst the barrage of arrest and intimidation, baton charge and pepper spray unleashed by the Police and administration on countless OWS volunteers, the campaign has not only galvanized millions of Americans and Europeans into a collective action on a gigantic scale but also its revolutionary appeal fanned out all across the globe. As for its viral spread, observes a recently published book 'This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99%', "The Occupy movement, as it has come to be called, named the source of the crises of our time: Wall Street banks, big corporations, and others among the 1% are claiming the world's wealth for themselves at the expense of the 99% and having their way with our governments. This is a truth that political insiders and the media had avoided, even while the assets of the top 1% reached levels not seen since the 1920s. But now that this genie is out of the bottle, it can't easily be put back in. Without offices, paid staff, or a bank account, Occupy Wall Street quickly spread beyond New York. People gathered in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta, San Diego, and hundreds of other cities around the United States and claimed the right of 'we the people' to create a world that works for the 99%. In a matter of weeks, the occupations and protests had spread worldwide, to over 1,500 cities, from Madrid to Cape Town and from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, involving hundreds of thousands of people".
As if by a 'leap forward', the OWS stepped into a new phase in its non-stoppable journey, when on 6th Dec last a foreclosed home was reclaimed by a local homeless family in East New York, with the local neighbors and community groups supporting and pledging to defend them from eviction. Homeless Kendal Jacklman on occupying the vacant house declared with a clear conscience, "There is enough housing in this city to shut down the Department of Homeless Services and offer everyone decent, affordable housing based on our real wages." No wonder, the OWS issued soon a general call for 'Homeless families to occupy family-less Homes', which is being acted out with a great gusto by the beleaguered families in different cities all across USA.
The above scenario typically resonates with what Karl Marx (1818-1883) prophesied in his magnum opus 'Capital (1867). He was describing the new stage that unfolds as soon as 'the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet'. "One capitalist always kills many. …. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder". [Capital, Vol-1, Ch-32, Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation]
Ironical sound it may, Marx further prophesied in the said work that the second transformation i.e. re-appropriation by the workers of the wealth created by them from a few mega-magnates of capital would be far smoother than the previous one i.e. transformation of scattered private property into centralized capital, which was "a process, incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult". Because, the capitalistic private property which already rested on socialized production carried with it all the ready-made potential for transformation into socialized property. Further clarifying the point says Marx in the said work, "In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people." Does it not sound similar to OWS' call upon 99% to reclaim all that which has been occupied by only 1% and to more or less smooth, ever-growing OWS campaign and its infectious impact all over with an unprecedented rapidity?
The OWS irrespective of what it eventually achieves or fails to, is destined to go down in world history as the mankind's new venture to script its own narrative. As the above book inter alia says, "The Occupy Wall Street movement is not just demanding change. It is also transforming how we, the 99%, see ourselves. The shame many of us felt when we couldn't find a job, pay down our debts, or keep our home is being replaced by a political awakening. Millions now recognize that we are not to blame for a weak economy, for a subprime mortgage meltdown, or for a tax system that favors the wealthy but bankrupts the government. The 99% are coming to see that we are collateral damage in an all-out effort by the super-rich to get even richer. Now that we see the issue clearly—and now that we see how many others are in the same boat—we can envision a new role for ourselves. We will no longer be isolated and powerless. We can hold vigils all night when necessary and nonviolently face down police. We are the vast majority of the population and, once we get active, we cannot be ignored. Our leaders will not fix things for us; we'll have to do that ourselves. …. And we'll have to take care of one another- provide the food, shelter, protection, and support needed to make it through long occupations, bad weather, and the hard work of finding consensus when we disagree". Is this self-portrayal of OWS not a reverberation of Marx's famous dictum in the Preamble to the General Rules of the First International, October 1864, "That the emancipation of the workers must be accomplished by the workers themselves"?
Like every genuine people's revolution such as Paris Commune of 1871, the OWS not only demands a refashioning of the existing social order which has outlived its rationale for 99%, but also lays down, learns and internalizes the grammar of new, alternative codes of associated living and working, which would obviate the remotest possibility of a miniscule 1% ever usurping the social space at the expense of the 99%. Each Occupy site presents at one go the intense agitation of the 99% accumulated against the corporate greed propped up by a subservient state, and a great rehearsal of alternative praxis of togetherness, the key mantra of which is the sharing in common by all the members both weal and woes of the collective. One therefore comes across in such sites not only instruments of agitation like placards and people's mike, but also such bare wherewithal of civilized living as food stalls, medical camps, helpdesk for the disabled, schooling for kids, Yoga classes, library of books, video shows, internet cafes, performance of fine arts, music sessions, lectures by experts and the like, depending upon the resources available, all shared in common. Add to that the new art of consensus evolving that is daily practiced in a General Assembly, the inclusive, autonomous collective, which serves as the highest decision making forum for the concerned locality and therefore the self-sustaining microcosm of the ever-expanding and ever-deepening spectrum of the OWS campaign. Above all, every member young or elder, male or female greets the other with the words 'I love you', which at once messages a familial bond between them. What a spectacle! It takes us back again to Marx who had seen a similar kind of joyous celebration of solidarity among the struggling French workers- "When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society- and what appears as a means becomes an end ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies" vide Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 1844. It also recalls Marx's emphasis on self-change of the workers as a condition for them to change the world around- ". . . there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society" vide German Ideology 1845 by Marx & Engels.
However, in two fundamental respects, the OWS seems to break a new ground, and therefore necessitates a revisit to Marx's quintessential theses on revolution. The first one is the oft-quoted line from last passage of Communist Manifesto 1848, "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution". Much later, he reiterates a similar refrain in Chapter-31, Capital Vol-1, "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one." Not denying the theoretical validity of 'Force' as a lever of revolutionary transformation of society, 'force' shouldn't necessarily mean 'seizure' or 'capture' of state power by one set of people from another, rather it may mean non-violent, peaceful 'occupation' of all the organs and institutions of state structure by the masses of people as it has been decisively demonstrated in case of Tunisia and Egypt and is right now unfolding across USA and Europe through Occupy Wall Street Campaign.
The next thesis of Marx that deserves a revisit in the light of the OWS experience is the one which he succinctly put in Critique of Gotha Programme 1875- "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing, but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". V.I.Lenin (1870-1924) who is so to say the all-weather model before all the Communist Parties even today, made no bones in explaining the concept thus, "The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won, and maintained, by the use of violence, by the proletariat, against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws", vide 'Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky 1918'. By definition, the Dictatorship of Proletariat being the antithesis of the Bourgeois Democracy shall be a foolproof state structure based upon rigid hierarchy, in which power flows from top downwards. In sharp contrast to this hierarchical/vertical or top-down model, the OWS campaign religiously follows what they call Horizontal or Bottom-up model, which is explained thus by Hardt and Negri in the website of Foreign Affairs on 6th Dec last, "No Martin Luther King, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of Wall Street and beyond. For better or worse … this emerging cycle of movements will express itself through horizontal participatory structures, without representatives. Such small-scale experiments in democratic organizing would have to be developed much further, of course, before they could articulate effective models for a social alternative, but they are already powerfully expressing the aspiration for a real democracy".
(Chitta Behera, 4A Jubilee Tower, Choudhury Bazar, Cuttack-753009, Odisha, India, Email: chittabehera1@yahoo,co.in, Mobile: 09437577546, Dated 10th December 2011)
__._,_.___
MARKETPLACE
.
__,_._,___
No comments:
Post a Comment