Newsletter Numéro 47 10 November 2011
by David Harvey
The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in
the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to
partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four
decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have
been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via
the craven dependency of politicians in both parties upon its raw
money power and access to the mainstream media that it controls.
Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and
Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus
as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose
partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in
spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract
law.
The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that
there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to
rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one
objective. Those possessed of money power shall not only be privileged
to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right
to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not
only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that
reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or
indirectly, over the labor and creative potentialities of all those
others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable.
These principles and practices do not arise out of individual
greed, short-sightedness or mere malfeasance (although all of these
are plentifully to be found). These principles have been carved into the
body politic of our world through the collective will of a capitalist
class animated by the coercive laws of competition. If my lobbying
group spends less than yours then I will get less in the way of
favors. If this jurisdiction spends on people’s needs it shall be
deemed uncompetitive.
Many decent people are locked into the embrace of a system that is
rotten to the core. If they are to earn even a reasonable living they
have no other job option except to give the devil his due: they are
only “following orders,” as Adolf Eichmann famously claimed, or “doing
what the system demands” as others now put it, acceding to the
barbarous and immoral principles and practices of the Party of Wall
Street. The coercive laws of competition force us all, to some degree
or other, to obey the rules of this ruthless and uncaring system. The
problem is systemic, not individual.
The Party’s favored slogans of freedom and liberty to be
guaranteed by private property rights, free markets and free trade,
actually translate into the freedom to exploit the labor of others, to
dispossess the assets of the common people at will and the freedom to
pillage the environment for individual or class benefit.
Once in control of the state apparatus, the Party of Wall Street
typically privatizes all the juicy morsels at below market value to
open new terrains for their capital accumulation. They arrange
subcontracting (the military-industrial complex being a prime example)
and taxation practices (subsidies to agro-business and low capital
gains taxes) that permit them freely to ransack the public coffers.
They deliberately foster such complicated regulatory systems and such
astonishing administrative incompetence within the rest of the state
apparatus (remember the EPA under Reagan, and FEMA and “heck-of-a job”
Brown under Bush) as to convince an inherently skeptical public that
the state can never ever play a constructive or supportive role in
improving the daily life or the future prospects of anyone. And,
finally, they use the monopoly of violence that all sovereign states
claim, to exclude the public from much of what passes for public space
and to harass, put under surveillance and, if necessary, criminalize
and incarcerate all those who do not broadly accede to its dictates.
It excels in practices of repressive tolerance that perpetuate the
illusion of freedom of expression as long as that expression does not
ruthlessly expose the true nature of their project and the repressive
apparatus upon which it rests.
The Party of Wall Street ceaselessly wages class war. “Of course
there is class war,” says Warren Buffett, “and it is my class, the
rich, who are making it and we are winning.” Much of this war is waged
in secret, behind a series of masks and obfuscations through which the
aims and objectives of the Party of Wall Street are disguised.
The Party of Wall Street knows all too well that when profound
political and economic questions are transformed into cultural issues
they become unanswerable. It regularly calls up a huge range of
captive expert opinion, for the most part employed in the think tanks
and universities they fund and splattered throughout the media they
control, to create controversies out of all manner of issues that
simply do not matter and to propose solutions to questions that do not
exist. One minute they talk of nothing other than the austerity
necessary for everyone else to cure the deficit, and the next they are
proposing to reduce their own taxation no matter what impact this may
have on the deficit. The one thing that can never be openly debated
and discussed, is the true nature of the class war they have been so
ceaselessly and ruthlessly waging. To depict something as “class war”
is, in the current political climate and in their expert judgment, to
place it beyond the pale of serious consideration, even to be branded a
fool, if not seditious.
But now, for the first time, there is an explicit movement to
confront The Party of Wall Street and its unalloyed money power. The
“street” in Wall Street is being occupiedoh horror upon horrorsby
others! Spreading from city to city, the tactics of Occupy Wall Street
are to take a central public space, a park or a square, close to
where many of the levers of power are centered, and by putting human
bodies there convert public space into a political commons, a place
for open discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how
best to oppose its reach. This tactic, most conspicuously re-animated
in the noble and on-going struggles centered on Tahrir Square in
Cairo, has spread across the world (Plaza del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma
Square in Athens, now the steps of Saint Paul’s in London as well as
Wall Street itself). It shows us that the collective power of bodies
in public space is still the most effective instrument of opposition
when all other means of access are blocked. What Tahrir Square showed
to the world was an obvious truth: that it is bodies on the street and
in the squares not the babble of sentiments on Twitter or Facebook
that really matter.
The aim of this movement in the United States is simple. It says:
“We the people are determined to take back our country from the
moneyed powers that currently run it. Our aim is to prove Warren
Buffett wrong. His class, the rich, shall no longer rule unchallenged
nor automatically inherit the earth. Nor is his class, the rich,
always destined to win.”
It says “we are the 99 percent.” We have the majority and this
majority can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of
expression are closed to us by money power, we have no other option
except to occupy the parks, squares and streets of our cities until
our opinions are heard and our needs attended to.
To succeed, the movement has to reach out to the 99 percent. This
it can do and is doing step by step. First, there are all those being
plunged into immiseration by unemployment, and all those who have been
or are now being dispossessed of their houses and their assets by the
Wall Street phalanx. It must forge broad coalitions between students,
immigrants, the underemployed and all those threatened by the totally
unnecessary and draconian austerity politics being inflicted upon the
nation and the world, at the behest of the Party of Wall Street. It
must focus on the astonishing levels of exploitation in
workplacesfrom the immigrant domestic workers who the rich so
ruthlessly exploit in their homes, to the restaurant workers who slave
for almost nothing in the kitchens of the establishments in which the
rich so grandly eat. It must bring together the creative workers and
artists whose talents are so often turned into commercial products
under the control of big money power.
The movement must above all reach out to all the alienated, the
dissatisfied and the discontented, all those who recognize and deeply
feel in their gut that there is something profoundly wrong, that the
system the Party of Wall Street has devised is not only barbaric,
unethical and morally wrong, but also broken.
All this has to be democratically assembled into a coherent
opposition, which must also freely contemplate what an alternative
city, an alternative political system and, ultimately, an alternative
way of organizing production, distribution and consumption for the
benefit of the people, might look like. Otherwise, a future for the
young that points to spiraling private indebtedness and deepening
public austerity, all for the benefit of the one percent, is no future
at all.
In response to the Occupy Wall Street movement the state backed by
capitalist class power makes an astonishing claim: that they and only
they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public
space. The public has no common right to public space! By what right
do mayors, police chiefs, military officers and state officials tell
we, the people, that they have the right to determine what is public
about “our” public space, and who may occupy that space, and when?
When did they presume to evict us, the people, from any space we, the
people, decide collectively and peacefully to occupy? They claim they
are taking action in the public interest (and cite laws to prove it),
but it is we who are the public! Where is “our interest” in all of
this? And, by the way, is it not “our” money that the banks and
financiers so blatantly use to accumulate “their” bonuses?
In the face of the organized power of the Party of Wall Street to
divide and rule, the movement that is emerging must also take as one
of its founding principles that it will neither be divided nor
diverted until the Party of Wall Street is brought either to its
sensesto see that the common good must prevail over narrow venal
interestsor to its knees. Corporate privileges to have all of the
rights of individuals without the responsibiities of true citizens must
be rolled back. Public goods such as education and health care must be
publically provided and made freely available. The monopoly powers in
the media must be broken. The buying of elections must be ruled
unconstitutional. The privatization of knowledge and culture must be
prohibited. The freedom to exploit and dispossess others must be
severely curbed and ultimately outlawed.
Americans believe in equality. Polling data show they believe (no
matter what their general political allegiances might be) that the top
twenty percent of the population might be justified in claiming thirty
percent of the total wealth. That the top twenty percent now control
85 percent of the wealth is unacceptable. That most of that is
controlled by the top one percent is totally unacceptable. What the
Occupy Wall Street movement proposes is that we, the people of the
United States, commit to a reversal of that level of inequality, not
only of wealth and income, but even more importantly of the political
power that such a disparity confers. The people of the United States
are rightly proud of the their democracy, but it has always been
endangered by capital’s corruptive power. Now that it is dominated by
that power, the time is surely nigh, as Jefferson long ago suggested
would be necessary, to make another American revolution: one based on
social justice, equality and a caring and thoughtful approach to the
relation to nature.
The struggle that has broken outthe People versus the Party of
Wall Streetis crucial to our collective future. The struggle is
global as well as local in its nature. It brings together Chilean
students who are locked in a life-and-death struggle with political
power to create a free and quality education system for all, and so
begin dismantling the neoliberal model that Pinochet so brutally
imposed. It embraces the agitators in Tahrir Square who recognize that
the fall of Mubarak (like the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship) was but
the first step in an emancipatory struggle to break free from money
power. It includes the “indignados” in Spain, the striking workers in
Greece, the militant opposition emerging all around the world, from
London to Durban, Buenos Aires, Shenzhen and Mumbai. The brutal
dominations of big capital and sheer money power are everywhere on the
defensive.
Whose side will each of us as individuals come down on? Which
street will we occupy? Only time will tell. But what we do know is
that the time is now. The system is not only broken and exposed but
incapable of any response other than repression. So we, the people, have
no option but to struggle for the collective right to decide how that
system shall be reconstructed and in what image. The Party of Wall
Street has had its day and failed miserably. How to construct an
alternative on its ruins is both an inescapable opportunity and an
obligation that none of us can or would ever want to avoid.
___________
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