J.A. Myerson

I know. I already did a Zizek quotation today. But here’s one from Lenin.

Finance capital took over as the typical “lord” of the world; it is particularly mobile and flexible, particularly interknit at home and internationally, and particularly impersonal and divorced from production proper; it lends itself to concentration with particular ease, and has been concentrated to an unusual degree already, so that literally a few hundred multimillionaires and millionaires control the destiny of the world.

1927.

From a speech he gave at my alma mater, before I went there.

It is a well known fact that the close-the-door button in most elevators is a totally dysfunctional placebo which is placed there just to give individuals the impression that they are somehow participating, contributing to the speed of the elevator journey. When we push this button the door closes in exactly the same time as when we just press the floor button without speeding up the process by pressing also the close-the-door button. This extreme and clear case of fake participation is, I claim, an appropriate metaphor [for] the participation of individuals in our post-modern political process.

Happy Monday, everyone. Now go slobber over the latest Romney v. Obama headlines!

There was an elephant in the room that I think is really worth exposing for practical reasons. When we talk about the hey-day of the labor movement — during the 1930′s, especially, but also before then, in the sort of radical construction that led to Haymarket Square and Lawrence, MA, &c. — we are talking about a specifically anti-capitalist movement. Labor leaders and self-organizing (mainly immigrant) workers adhered to ideologies that affirmed in their every supposition the primacy of labor over capital. These people regarded capitalism as an illegitimate vacuum, whose design was to extract our — the workers’ — excess labor value for the capture and indefinite accumulation of management and the ownership class. The alternative they proposed was essentially antithetical to the capitalist system: workers should own our own labor power, should control the means of production.

After the Second World War — that is to say, after the golden age of trade unionism, which is further to say, during the age of McCarthyism and the Cold War — that essential supposition was criminalized (literally, by the Smith and McCarran Acts, and socially, by the massive Red Scare effort undertaken by the forces of reaction), so that today’s labor leaders don’t look like Mother Jones; they look like Randi Weingarten. Now, I’m saying this as the son of a public school teacher. Weingarten was a labor leader during a really difficult time for teachers who are everywhere on the defensive as the forces of neo-liberal capitalism conspire to remove education from the commons. But she’s a Democrat, not a Wobblie, and that makes all the difference.

The Democrats are a capitalist party. There is a sense among more liberal Democrats, like Jerry Nadler, that the most ruthless excesses of capitalism have to be mitigated by government regulation and a social safety net. But this concedes the question about labor’s superiority to capital and, in so doing, bankrupts the theoretical, political, emotional and — if I may — spiritual basis for the types of class solidarity that we associate with the golden age of labor. The anti-capitalist locus, such as exists, is no longer the labor movement but the activist and academic classes, which is why the latter, not the former, are calling for a General Strike.

It is also worth noting that concomitant with the breakdown of the labor movement (most starkly under Reagan, but actually forecast by the McCarthy age) was the de-industrialization of the American economy. Today, what this country produces — complex financial products and tons of disgusting chickens — pales in comparison to the American consumer economy (fueled in large part by the Chinese production economy), which is why OWS’s version of May Day, as articulated by Marina Sitrin, is not focused exclusively on labor but also on consumption, education, &c. The American economic system is large and complex, which is essentially the reason Saul Alinsky (who is all of a sudden mysteriously infamous on the right) and others shifted the focus of their organizing from the factory floor to the communities where workers and the poor lived. This also helps to account for public-sector workers like those Weingarten represented, who haven’t got a parasitic ownership class to which to sell their labor (their essential species-being, if you ask Marx), but rather sell their labor to the state.

We need to revive the idea that labor exists for other than the benefit of capital, and we need to incorporate that idea into every facet of whatever ideologies come to define the American left in post-crash America. These will not look like the old left, which is why Liberty Plaza Park didn’t seem Communistic — just communal. Luckily, even the Republicans have an formulation of this idea embedded deep (too deep, perhaps) within their DNA. Their greatest president, Lincoln, a contemporary and reader of Marx, articulated it in his 1861 State of the Union: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Towards a more Lincolnian Republican party and a more Bill Fletcher-heavy commentariat.

Most Occupiers I’ve asked (and it’s not just one or two) agree that the 99% Spring is at best cool and at worst harmless, but you would never know it from the hue and cry clogging up my inbox.

Two examples:

AdBusters issued another exhilarating ”Tactical Briefing” (what an exquisitely self-congratulatory name) from “Culture Jammers HQ” (see previous parenthetical observation), issuing strict marching orders to take up the “battle” for the “soul” of OWS against the “cabal” not of Wall Street, K Street and the Pentagon but MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry’s. These are the forces of the “old left” which are out to destroy the “new, vibrant, horizontal left.” How a commitment to horizontalism squares with instructions handed down from “HQ” goes unexplained. We have to fight the “old left,” says AdBusters, or risk going the way of “Paris ’68.” The more skillful Wikipedia-users out there may discover that it was not the progressive French left that destroyed the workers’ and students’ commune, but General De Gaulle’s tanks. One level deeper, people will point out that the French Communist Party and liberal trade unions shepherded participants back to work. To them I say: MoveOn, The Nation and Ben & Jerry’s have not discouraged anyone from Occupying. To the contrary. Look: The Nation was founded by abolitionists and has published the work of, among many others, Bertrand Russell, Edward Said, James Baldwin, Naomi Klein and Mai68 supporter Jean-Paul Sartre. Hell, their OWS beat reporter is Allison Kilkenny, who is about as radical as any successful journalist in the United States. If that’s the dark side, sign me up. If Kalle Lasn and Micah White’s frenzied ravings (“Whatever you do, don’t allow our revolutionary struggle…”) are the new left, count me out.

CounterPunch valiantly calls our attention to the true villains: AlterNet, Truth Out, The Nation (again!) and the television shows of Bill Moyers, Thom Hartmann and Chris Hayes (Disclosure: I have appeared on or in all but Moyers’ show). Never mind that CP is the outfit of Alexander Cockburn, a longtime columnist at The Nation (where he heroically dismisses the evidence of climate crisis on a regular basis). Forget the fact that Hayes’ show has done the most in-depth investigation of a whole slew of third rail topics (e.g. atheism, Palestine, the racist criminal justice system, and American imperialism, which he discussed, by name, with four Arab guests) probably in the history of American television. The 99% Spring, we are told, is “merely a front group” for the Democratic Party, though it remains unclear how the 7-hour milquetoast direct action training is supposed to coerce participants into campaigning for President Obama. The article is so breathless in its rapid-fire associations (Bank of America! ALEC! President Obama! Mother Jones!) that it proclaims the whole affair “A Shakespearean tragedy, to say the least.” Well, in Titus Andronicus, Lavinia, who has been raped and her hands and tongue severed, picks up the freshly severed hand of her father in her still-bleeding mouth. In the 99% Spring, people watch a clip from a movie and meet other activists. Parity?

How does this make more sense than pounding away at the corporate state? Why isn’t the battle with bankers, polluters and warmongers but instead the United States’ finest publications and broadcasts? A revolution is a massive social consensus that sweeps aside the institutions of power. Mubarak only fell after more than 10% of the Egyptian population took to the streets, and that wasn’t even enough to get rid of the Egyptian social order. For something like that, you need an absolutely overwhelming show of people power. Deliberately alienating supporters is exactly the wrong way of going about generating such a thing — how is this not obvious? Without recruiting liberals and progressives, attempting to radicalize them and train them in the skills necessary for successful protest, Occupy Wall Street becomes what the corporate media want us to be: a bunch of hippies and anarchists, whining and drumming, talking to one another self-righteously, without analysis or tactical sophistication.

As someone who has been madly in love with Occupy Wall Street since its earliest moments, I decline CounterPunch and AdBusters’ offer of protection from the “old left.” Right now is the time to build the movement, to engineer solidarity, to teach and share and radicalize and do what is done at general assemblies everywhere: enlist democratic support for a series of proposals. No working group has ever gotten a GA to consent to a measure by vilifying and fear-mongering about other working groups.

We have a really big job ahead of us, confronting global neo-liberal corporate capital and the disastrous effects it has wrought on everything in its path. Can we please get serious about organizing our defense?

Based on this headline…

…it is reasonable to suspect that the “Community,” as quoted in the article will have been shown to “[Blame] Occupy For Tragic Murder.” Reasonable, but wrong.

The meat of the Berkeley, CA story:

On Saturday night, Peter and Andrea Cukor called Berkeley police on a nonemergency line to report a trespasser outside their garage. However, police did not immediately respond, claiming they were busy with an Occupy protest. Soon after, 67-year-old Peter Cukor was beaten to death by the trespasser, allegedly 23-year-old Daniel DeWitt.

Sure sounds to me like this was not the fault of the “Occupy protest” but the “police” who “did not immediately respond.” Still, the “Community” can have blamed Occupy. Except it didn’t! Who blamed Occupy? The cops whose lethal fuck-up is in question!

“At that time, available officers were being reconfigured in order to monitor a protest which was to come into Berkeley from Oakland in the next hour,” said Berkeley Police Spokesman Lt. Andrew Greenwood in a statement. “Only criminal, in-progress emergency calls were to be dispatched, due to the reduction in officers available to handle calls for service.”

The “Community” members quoted in the piece — Occupy Oakland folks — agree with me. One example:

“This is not the first time this has happened, with or without Occupy Oakland,” Occupy Oakland Activist Boots Riley told HuffPost. “Information is available about the average response times in Berkeley to non-emergency numbers; there is an incredibly long wait time. This has nothing to do with Occupy Oakland and they are using it as a scapegoat.”

Another:

“The police fear that protesters are going to break windows,” said Yassin. “If police choose to make sure windows don’t get broken instead of responding to life-threatening crimes, that is the Police Department’s fault for having those kinds of priorities. And the community should be furious.”

As it happens, the protesters appear NOT to have broken any windows anyway. You need cops elsewhere? Call off the cops supervising peaceful dissidents!

HuffPo’s OWS landing page rewrites the headline as a question. (h/t @rosefox for pointing out the variation):

No. Occupy Is Not To Blame.

…And you guys are assholes. Shame on you.

UPDATE: This just in. The cops appear to have lied in the first place! Check it out:

UPDATE II: Here is @sparrowmedia’s photo of the police-less march. And here‘s the endpoint at UC, where “there was a handful of police inside the international house but no interaction w/ protestors.”

UPDATE III: I just heard back from Huff.

Hi Jesse, thank you so much for your email about this. We have corrected the headline to read “Police Blame” as opposed to “Community Blames.” Thanks so much again for bringing this to my attention.

This now appears at the bottom:

CORRECTION: A previous headline elsewhere on the site inaccurately stated that the “community,” rather than the police department, had attributed Cukor’s death to the fact that the police were busy with the protest.

No mention of doubts of the accuracy of the police’s assessment, no change to the “Is Occupy To Blame?” headline, no apology for contributing to the Breitbart/Santorum effort to insinuate that Occupy is dangerous. Let’s file this one under COLD COMFORT.

I can imagine good results coming from electoral campaigns voluntarily funded by private donations, as long as everyone had about the same amount of money. So if the important thing to conservatives is that electoral campaigns be voluntarily funded by private donations, then I am willing to meet them half way, so long as they accept my demand that we make everyone have about the same amount of money.

Those are the two philosophies in competition here, and it would be really good for everyone to figure out which side they are on. As we see demonstrated before us, it is unworkable to have both expansive economic freedom *and* privately funded political campaigns. The result is necessarily the rapid acceleration of a) extreme amounts of wealth in the hands of minute few and b) very meager means on a widespread basis.

The movement for publicly funded elections really had better get its ass in gear, because I somehow don’t see conservatives relenting on the economic equality question.

I post this with great anxiety that I’m just being bombastic, but the lawsuit Scheiderman announced the other day bodes very well for the future and gives me some confidence that the bravado and gumption the AG displayed on Chris Hayes’ show indicates accurately the spirit with which he means to pursue this charge of his.

Now: I am still absolutely certain that the most grave matter before us is the climate crisis. This and a million other things besides lead me to tremendous dissatisfaction of Obama’s presidential performance. And I won’t drop any of my objections to Obama’s presidency, which I have written about often and all over the place. But if Schneiderman can put some of these guys in jail and achieve an impressive amount of restitution to underwater homeowners and taxpayers and especially if the might of litigation inspires some really tough financial reform, I will reward President Obama for having commissioned this thing with my vote.

I will not stop harassing him and the Democrats and the political system with whatever little platform I have, but credit where it’s due. I think it would probably be irresponsible to speculate that Obama all along envisioned such a result and was just biding his time or proving to everyone the inability of the legislative process to redress popular grievances, all the while planning to drop this card at exactly the right moment, so I won’t. I’ll just say that ends are important, and Schneiderman appears in possession of the means to achieve a formidable end, courtesy President Obama.

Everything Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey and others with their perspective say is true: Rep. Paul’s positions on drone attacks, the security state, American aid to Israel, &c. are all admirable and courageous and valuable, and Obama and the Democrats should feel ashamed for adopting such a revolting posture on these matters. But Ron Paul doesn’t have a good foreign policy as much as a wholesale aversion to foreign policy.

The whole nuttiness of right-wing libertarian provincialism (the same philosophical bent that leads Paul and the GOP field he has influenced to adopt such reactionary domestic policies) is centered around an aggrandizement of the self and a hatred and mistrust of scaled decision-making. I can figure it out, and if I can’t, my family can help. Local government should butt out of my family’s life and mine, but I’d take it over the dreadful state government, and the state government, a thousand curses on its ugly head, is nothing like as horrific as the federal government, which, though I will stop short of nothing but its abolition, is orders of magnitude better than super-national organizations. (Walter Russell Meadwrites well about this.) Humanitarian aid (as pathetic and awful as the situation in that field is and has been) is absolutely critical, and if Ron Paul thinks that government-funded food stamps in Houston abridge liberty, imagine what he thinks of government-funded medicine in Botswana.

This much is true: the most important thing in the world is the fact that, if we don’t radically restrict the business practices of heavy industrial polluters through some really hefty government intervention at the federal and global level, and that in the next ten years, the Earth stands every chance of being inhospitable to human life in the next hundred. (I’m being generous). For starters, Ron Paul doesn’t believe that, because he’s a religious fundamentalist crackpot – “The greatest hoax I think,” the good doctor proclaimed, “that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on… global warming.” But even if he did, there is no way to solve the climate crisis without tremendously strong global governance. Period.

Yes, Ron Paul’s aversion to foreign policy leads him to adopt a host of positions that are very attractive, but they don’t come from a humane or sophisticated ideology. They come from the same nutty madness that infects his domestic policy, and that, in 2012, is not something that the world can abide.

We are allowed to want a good foreign policy.

UPDATE: In a comment thread on facebook, while discussing Ron Paul, I wrote an explanation that helps solidify some of the arguments above.  This is in response to, among other comments, one friend’s confession that, “When I read through Ron Paul’s positions it generally goes like this ‘Hey, that’s good. Oh god, that’s bad. Hey, that’s good. Oh god, that’s bad.’ Repeat until you get to the end of the list.” My response:

I mean, I can definitely see how the “Hey, that’s good” positions are really, really central ones, and that, if he weren’t saying them, nobody in politics or the media would be — no one with Ron Paul’s stature critiques the racism of the criminal justice system and police state, for instance, or questions the entire premise of the global war on terror or objects with his every vote to the method by which America funds its imperial wars, by releasing currency on debt. In fact, there are some times when I almost don’t object to a single thing he says in a debate. My point isn’t that the “Hey that’s good” positions are not important — they really, really are. My point is that the “Hey that’s good” positions all stem from exactly the same consistent ideology whence come the “Oh god, that’s bad” ones. And when looking at presidential candidates, it’s way more important to examine their ideologies than their positions. For one, it gives you clues to how they’ll face unforeseen challenges or issues that aren’t currently in the limelight but, due to a shift in political circumstances or a big news story, soon will be. And an ideology as batshit as Ron Paul’s is (however incisive and courageous and important and good many of the positions he takes as a result) games out to a really fucked up government. This should create huge problems for people who fall for him because of those positions.

For the heck of it, know that the comment thread sits under this Ron Paul ad, which I’d posted.

I made a point on RT America last night that I think bears repeating.

When the countries of Europe get together to try and rescue their sovereign budgets from the vice-like grip of international finance, there is bickering and gridlock, and the people suffer. When American politicians try to create solutions to the health care crisis, there is bickering and gridlock, and the people suffer. When world leaders meet to figure out a response to the climate crisis, there is bickering and gridlock, and the people suffer. There is frequently bickering and gridlock when people would benefit from passage.

But when it comes to bailing out banks, there is never bickering and gridlock — 74 Senators voted for TARP — and the people suffer. When it comes to handing crucial civil liberties over to unaccountable, arbitrary executive discretion, there is never bickering and gridlock — 86 Senators voted for the NDAA — and the people suffer. There is seldom bickering and gridlock when people would suffer from passage.

Let’s drop this myth that there is partisan bickering and congressional gridlock. Instead let’s be honest: the powers that be hold the people in contempt. I say it’s a good thing we’ve begun to respond in kind.

Change is… keeping Robert Gates at the Pentagon.

Change is… keeping Guantanamo open.

Change is… protecting war criminals from prosecution.

Change is… hiring bankers to run your economic policy.

Change is… surrounding yourself with aides to the previous Democratic President.

Change is… a health care overhaul that maintains the private insurance industry’s primacy.

Change is… a financial regulation reform bill that reifies Graham-Leech-Blyly.

Change is… bringing a bank executive on board after your previous chief of staff leaves.

Add yours in the comments section! I’ll tweet my favorites.