1AC

Our Contention is Occupy Marriott

American politics is dead the extreme right controls mainstream
discourse and an entirely depoliticized public is allowing the 1% to steer the
US toward fascism
Giroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies
at McMaster University, 1 June 2011, Zombie Politics, Democracy, and the Threat of
Authoritarianism - Part I, http://www.truth-out.org/zombie-politics-democracy-andthreat-authoritarianism-part-i/1306932037)
In the world of popular culture, zombies seem to be everywhere , as evidenced by the relentless slew of books, movies,
video games, and comics. From the haunting Night of the Living Dead to the comic movie Zombieland, the figure of the zombie has captured and touched something unique in the contemporary
imagination. But the dark and terrifying image of the zombie with missing body parts, oozing body fluids, and an appetite for fresh, living, human brains does more than feed the mass-marketing

There is more at work in this wave of fascination

with the grotesquely walking hyper-dead than a Hollywood appropriation of the dark recesses and
unrestrained urges of the human mind. The zombie phenomenon is now on display nightly on television
alongside endless examples of destruction unfolding in real-time. Such a cultural fascination with
proliferating images of the living hyper-dead and unrelenting human catastrophes that
extend from a global economic meltdown to the earthquake in Haiti to the ecological
disaster caused by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico signals a shift away from the
hope that accompanies the living to a politics of cynicism and despair. The
macabre double movement between the dead that walk[2] and those who are alive but
are dying and suffering cannot be understood outside of the casino capitalism that now
shapes every aspect of society in its own image. A casino capitalist zombie politics views
competition as a form of social combat, celebrates war as an extension of politics, and
legitimates a ruthless Social Darwinism in which particular individuals and groups are
considered simply redundant, disposablenothing more than human waste left to stew in their own misfortuneeasy prey for
the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for chaos and revel in apocalyptic visions
filled with destruction, decay, abandoned houses, burned-out cars, gutted landscapes,
and trashed gas stations. The twenty-first-century zombies no longer emerge from the
grave; they now inhabit the rich environs of Wall Street and roam the halls of the gilded monuments of greed
machines that prey on the spectacle of the violent, grotesque, and ethically comatose.

such as Goldman Sachs. As an editorial in The New York Times points out, the new zombies of free-market fundamentalism turned the financial system into a casino. Like gambling, the

they packed an enormous capacity for collective and

economic destructionhobbling banks that made bad bets, freezing credit and economic activity. Societynot the bankersbore
the cost.[3] In this way, the zombie the immoral, sub-Nietzschean, id-driven other who is
hyper-dead but still alive as an avatar of death and crueltyprovides an apt
metaphor for a new kind of authoritarianism that has a grip on
contemporary politics in the United States.[4] This is an authoritarianism in which
mindless self-gratification becomes the sanctioned norm and public issues collapse into
the realm of privatized anger and rage. The rule of the market offers the hyper-dead an opportunity to exercise unprecedented power in American
transactions mostly just shifted paper money around the globe. Unlike gambling,

society, reconstructing civic and political culture almost entirely in the service of a politics that fuels the friend/enemy divide, even as democracy becomes the scandal of casino capitalismits

the new zombies are not only wandering around in the banks, investment houses, and death chambers of high finance, they have an
ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches of government and in the
forefront of mainstream media. The growing numbers of zombies in the mainstream media have huge
financial backing from the corporate elite and represent the new face of the culture of
cruelty and hatred in the second Gilded Age. Any mention of the social state, putting limits on casino
capitalism, and regulating corporate zombies puts Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush
Limbaugh, and other talking heads into a state of high rage. They disparage any
discourse that embraces social justice, social responsibility, and human rights. Appealing to real American
values such as family, God, and Guns, they are in the forefront of a zombie politics that
opposes any legislation or policy designed to lessen human suffering and promote
ultimate humiliation. But

economic and social progress. As Arun Gupta points out, they are insistent in their opposition to civil rights, school desegregation, womens rights, labor
organizing, the minimum wage, Social Security, LGBT rights, welfare, immigrant rights, public education, reproductive rights, Medicare, [and] Medicaid.[5] The walking
hyper-dead even oppose providing the extension of unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who
are out of work, food, and hope. They spectacularize hatred and trade in lies and misinformation. They
make populist appeals to the people while legitimating the power of the rich. They appeal
to common sense as a way of devaluing a culture of questioning and critical exchange.
Unrelenting in their role as archetypes of the hyper-dead, they are misanthropes trading
in fear, hatred, and hyper-nationalism. The human suffering produced by the walking
hyper-dead can also be seen in the nativist apoplexy resulting in the racist antiimmigration laws passed in Arizona, the attempts to ban ethnic studies in public schools,
the rise of the punishing state, the social dumping of millions of people of color into
prisons, and the attempts of Tea Party fanatics and politicians who want to take back
America from President Barack Obamadescribed in the new lexicon of right-wing political illiteracy as
both an alleged socialist and the new Hitler. Newt Gingrich joins Glenn Beck and other members of the elite squad of the hyper-dead in arguing
that Obama is just another version of Joseph Stalin. For Gingrich and the rest of the zombie ideologues, any
discourse that advocates for social protections, easing human suffering, or imagining a
better future is dismissed by being compared to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.
Dystopian discourse and End Times morbidity rule the collective consciousness of this
group. The death panels envisaged by Sarah Palin are not going to emerge from Obamas health care
reform plan but from the toolkits the zombie politicians and talking heads open up every time they are given the
opportunity to speak. The death threats, vandalism, and crowds shouting homophobic slurs at openly gay
U.S. House Representative Barney Frank already speak to a fixation with images of death, violence, and
war that now grips the country. Sarah Palins infamous call to a gathering of her
followers to reload in opposition to President Obamas policiessoon followed in a nationally televised press conference with a request for the American people to
embrace Arizonas new xenophobic lawsmakes her one of the most prominent of the political zombies. Not only has she made less-than-vague endorsements of violence in many of her public
speeches, she has cheerfully embraced the new face of white supremacy in her recent unapologetic endorsement of racial profiling, stating in a widely reported speech that Its time for Americans

The current descent into racism, ignorance,

corruption, and mob idiocy makes clear the degree to which politics has
become a sport for zombies rather than engaged and thoughtful citizens.[7]
The hyper-dead celebrate talk radio haters such as Rush Limbaugh, whose fanaticism appears
to pass without criticism in the mainstream media. Limbaugh echoes the fanatics who
whipped up racial hatred in Weimar Germany, the ideological zombies who dissolved the
line between reason and distortion-laden propaganda. How else to explain his claim that environmentalist terrorists might have
caused the ecological disaster in the gulf?[8] The ethically frozen zombies that dominate screen culture believe
that only an appeal to self-interest motivates peoplea convenient counterpart to a culture of cruelty that rebukes, if not disdains, any
appeal to the virtues of a moral and just society. They smile at their audiences while collapsing the distinction
between opinions and reasoned arguments . They report on Tea Party rallies while feeding the misplaced ideological frenzy that motivates such
gatherings but then refuse to comment on rallies all over the country that do not trade in violence or spectacle. They report uncritically on Islam
bashers, such as the radical right-wing radio host Michael Savage, as if his ultraextremist racist views are a legitimate part of the American mainstream. In the age of
zombie politics, there is too little public outrage or informed public anger over the
pushing of millions of people out of their homes and jobs, the defunding of schools, and
the rising tide of homeless families and destitute communities. Instead of organized, massive protests
against casino capitalism, the American public is treated to an endless and arrogant
display of wealth, greed, and power. Armies of zombies tune in to gossip-laden
entertainment, game, and reality TV shows, transfixed by the empty lure of celebrity
culture. The roaming hordes of celebrity zombie intellectuals work hard to fuel a sense of misguided fear and indignation toward democratic politics, the social state, and immigrantsall
of which is spewed out in bitter words and comes terribly close to inciting violence. Zombies love death-dealing institutions , which
accounts for why they rarely criticize the bloated military budget and the rise of the punishing state and its expanding
prison system. They smile with patriotic glee, anxious to further the demands of empire as
automated drones kill innocent civiliansconveniently dismissed as collateral damage
and the torture state rolls inexorably along in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other hidden and
across this great country to stand up and say, Were all Arizonians now.[6]

unknown sites. The slaughter that inevitably follows catastrophe is not new, but the
current politics of death has reached new heights and threatens to
transform a weak democracy into a full-fledged authoritarian state . A Turn to the Dark
Side of Politics The American media, large segments of the public, and many educators widely believe that authoritarianism is alien to the political landscape of American society. Authoritarianism

A commonly held perception of the

American public is that authoritarianism is always elsewhere. It can be found in other allegedly less developed/civilized
is generally associated with tyranny and governments that exercise power in violation of the rule of law.

countries, such as contemporary China or Iran, or it belongs to a fixed moment in modern history, often associated with the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism in its different forms in

Even as the United States became more disposed to modes of

tyrannical power under the second Bush administratio ndemonstrated, for example, by the existence of secret CIA prisons,
warrantless spying on Americans, and state-sanctioned kidnaping mainstream liberals, intellectuals , journalists, and media pundits argued that
any suggestion that the United States was becoming an authoritarian society was simply
preposterous. For instance, the journalist James Traub repeated the dominant view that whatever problems the United States faced under the Bush administration had nothing to
Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

do with a growing authoritarianism or its more extreme form, totalitarianism.[9] On the contrary, according to this position, America was simply beholden to a temporary seizure of power by some
extremists, who represented a form of political exceptionalism and an annoying growth on the body politic. In other words, as repugnant as many of Bushs domestic and foreign policies might
have been, they neither threatened nor compromised in any substantial way Americas claim to being a democratic society. Against the notion that the Bush administration had pushed the United

some pundits have argued that this dark moment in Americas

history, while uncharacteristic of a substantive democracy, had to be understood as temporary perversion of
American law and democratic ideals that would end when George W. Bush concluded his second term in the White House. In this view, the regime of George W.
States close to the brink of authoritarianism,

Bush and its demonstrated contempt for democracy was explained away as the outgrowth of a random act of politics a corrupt election and the bad-faith act of a conservative court in 2000 or a
poorly run election campaign in 2004 by an uncinematic and boring Democratic candidate. According to this narrative, the Bush-Cheney regime exhibited such extreme modes of governance in its
embrace of an imperial presidency, its violation of domestic and international laws, and its disdain for human rights and democratic values that it was hard to view such antidemocratic policies as

It would be difficult to
label such a government other than as shockingly and uniquely extremist, given a
political legacy that included the rise of the security and torture state; the creation of legal illegalities in which
part of a pervasive shift toward a hidden order of authoritarian politics, which historically has existed at the margins of American society.

civil liberties were trampled; the launching of an unjust war in Iraq legitimated through official lies; the passing of legislative policies that drained the federal surplus by giving away more than a
trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich; the enactment of a shameful policy of preemptive war; the endorsement of an inflated military budget at the expense of much-needed social programs; the
selling off of as many government functions as possible to corporate interests; the resurrection of an imperial presidency; an incessant attack against unions; support for a muzzled and increasingly
corporate-controlled media; the government production of fake news reports to gain consent for regressive policies; the use of an Orwellian vocabulary for disguising monstrous acts such as
torture (enhanced interrogation techniques); the furtherance of a racist campaign of legal harassment and incarceration of Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants; the advancement of a prison binge
through a repressive policy of criminalization; the establishment of an unregulated and ultimately devastating form of casino capitalism; the arrogant celebration and support for the interests and

; and the dismantling of social services and social safety

nets as part of a larger campaign of ushering in the corporate state and the reign of
finance capital? Authoritarianism With a Friendly Face In the minds of the American public, the dominant media, and the accommodating pundits and intellectuals, there
is no sense of how authoritarianism in its soft and hard forms can manifest itself as
anything other than horrible images of concentration camps, goose-stepping storm
troopers, rigid modes of censorship, and chilling spectacles of extremist government
repression and violence. That is, there is little understanding of how new modes of
authoritarian ideology, policy, values, and social relations might manifest themselves in
degrees and gradations so as to create the conditions for a distinctly undemocratic and increasingly
cruel and oppressive social order. As the late Susan Sontag suggested in another context, there is a willful ignorance of how emerging registers of power and
values of big business at the expense of citizens and the common good

governance dissolve politics into pathology.[10] It is generally believed that in a constitutional democracy, power is in the hands of the people, and that the long legacy of democratic ideals in
America, however imperfect, is enough to prevent democracy from being subverted or lost. And yet the lessons of history provide clear examples of how the emergence of reactionary politics, the
increasing power of the military, and the power of big business subverted democracy in Argentina, Chile, Germany, and Italy. In spite of these histories, there is no room in the public imagination
to entertain what has become the unthinkablethat such an order in its contemporary form might be more nuanced, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control

Historical conjunctures
produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for
democracy, dissent, and civil liberties. It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country as either authoritarian or
democratic, which leaves no room for entertaining the possibility of a mixture of both systems. American politics today suggests a
more updated if not a different form of authoritarianism. In this context, it is worth remembering what
Huey Long said in response to the question of whether America could ever become fascist: Yes, but we will call it anti-fascist.[12] Longs reply suggests that fascism is not an
ideological apparatus frozen in a particular historical period but a complex and often
shifting theoretical and political register for understanding how democracy can be
subverted, if not destroyed, from within. This notion of soft or friendly fascism was articulated in 1985 in Bertram Grosss book Friendly Fascism, in
which he argued that if fascism came to the United States it would not embody the same
characteristics associated with fascist forms in the historical past. There would be no
Nuremberg rallies, doctrines of racial superiority , government-sanctioned book burnings, death camps, genocidal purges,
or the abrogation of the U.S. Constitution. In short, fascism would not take the form of an ideological grid from the
past simply downloaded onto another country under different historical conditions. Gross believed that fascism was an ongoing danger and
than with manipulative modes of consentwhat one might call a mode of authoritarianism with a distinctly American character. [11]

had the ability to become relevant under new conditions, taking on familiar forms of thought that resonate with nativist traditions, experiences, and political relations.[13] Similarly, in his

the texture of American fascism would not mimic traditional European forms but would be
rooted in the language, symbols, and culture of everyday life. He writes: No swastikas in an
American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist
Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton argued that

salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an
American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.[14] It is worth noting that Umberto Eco, in his discussion of eternal fascism, also argued
that any updated version of fascism would not openly assume the mantle of historical fascism; rather, new forms of authoritarianism would appropriate some of its elements, making it virtually
unrecognizable from its traditional forms. Like Gross and Paxton, Eco contended that fascism, if it comes to America, will have a different guise, although it will be no less destructive of democracy.
He wrote: Ur-Fascism [Eternal Fascism] is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, I want to reopen
Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares. Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to
point our finger at any of its new instancesevery day, in every part of the world.[15] The renowned political theorist Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, updates these views and argues

the United States has produced its own unique form of authoritarianism, which
he calls inverted totalitarianism.[16] Wolin claims that under traditional forms of totalitarianism, there are usually founding texts such as Mein Kampf,
persuasively that

rule by a personal demagogue such as Adolf Hitler, political change enacted by a revolutionary movement such as the Bolsheviks, the constitution rewritten or discarded, the political states firm
control over corporate interests, and an idealized and all-encompassing ideology used to create a unified and totalizing understanding of society. At the same time, the government uses all the
power of its cultural and repressive state apparatuses to fashion followers in its own ideological image and collective identity. In the United States, Wolin argues that an emerging authoritarianism

Instead of a charismatic leader, the government is now governed

through the anonymous and largely remote hand of corporate power and finance capital.
Political sovereignty is largely replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance.
The dire consequence, as David Harvey points out, is that raw money power wielded by the few undermines all
semblances of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical companies, health insurance and hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133
million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care reform in the United States.[18] The more money influences
politics the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is
largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at ones disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of
appears to take on a very different form.[17]

government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and commanding financial institutions. Moreover, as the politics of health care reform indicate, such
lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is not carried out in the open and displayed by insurance and drug companies as a badge of honora kind of open testimonial to the disrespect for
democratic governance and a celebration of their power. The subversion of democratic governance in the United States by corporate interests is captured succinctly by Chris Hedges in his

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out
corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for
observation that

donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influenc[e] peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted
in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America
spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called
health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the
drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state

Rather than being forced to adhere to a particular state ideology, the general
public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of
corporations over schools, higher education, and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public
values, civic consciousness, and critical citizenship is also the result of the work of antipublic intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests ,[20] dominant media
alive.[19]

that are largely center-right, and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of
social and political amnesia works through celebrity culture and its counterpart in corporate-driven news, television, radio, and entertainment to produce a culture of stupidity, censorship, and

Agency is now defined by a neoliberal concept of freedom , a

organized according to the narrow notions of individual self-interest and limited to the
freedom from constraints. Central to this concept is the freedom to pursue ones self-interests
independently of larger social concerns. For individuals in a consumer society, this often means the freedom to shop, own
guns, and define rights without regard to the consequences for others or the larger social order. When applied to
diversionary spectacles. Depoliticizing Freedom and Agency
notion that is largely

economic institutions, this notion of freedom often translates into a call for removing government regulation over the market and economic institutions. This notion of a deregulated and privatized

It is an unlimited notion of freedom

that both refuses to recognize the importance of social costs and social consequences and has
freedom is decoupled from the common good and any understanding of individual and social responsibility.

no language for an ethic that calls us beyond ourselves, that engages our responsibility to others. Within this discourse of hyper-individualized freedom, individuals are not only liberated from the
constraints imposed by the dense network of social bonds, but are also stripped of the protection which had been matter-of-factly offered in the past by that dense network of social bonds. [21]

Freedom exclusively tied to personal and political rights without also

enabling access to economic resources becomes morally empty and
politically dysfunctional. The much-heralded notion of choice associated with personal and political freedom is
hardly assured when individuals lack the economic resources, knowledge, and social
supports to make such choices and freedoms operative and meaningful . As Zygmunt Bauman points out, The
right to vote (and so, obliquely and at least in theory, the right to influence the composition of the ruler and the shape of the rules that bind the ruled) could be meaningfully exercised only by those
who possess sufficient economic and cultural resources to be safe from the voluntary or involuntary servitude that cuts off any possible autonomy of choice (and/or its delegation) at the root....
[Choice] stripped of economic resources and political power hardly assure[s] personal freedoms to the dispossessed, who have no claim on the resources without which personal freedom can
neither be won nor in practice enjoyed.[22] Paul Bigioni has argued that this flawed notion of freedom played a central role in the emerging fascist dictatorships of the early twentieth century. He
writes: It was the liberals of that era who clamored for unfettered personal and economic freedom, no matter what the cost to society. Such untrammeled freedom is not suitable to civilized
humans. It is the freedom of the jungle. In other words, the strong have more of it than the weak. It is a notion of freedom that is inherently violent, because it is enjoyed at the expense of others.
Such a notion of freedom legitimizes each and every increase in the wealth and power of those who are already powerful, regardless of the misery that will be suffered by others as a result. The use
of the state to limit such freedom was denounced by the laissez-faire liberals of the early 20th century. The use of the state to protect such freedom was fascism. Just as monopoly is the ruin of
the free market, fascism is the ultimate degradation of liberal capitalism.[23] This stripped-down notion of market-based freedom that now dominates American society cancels out any viable
notion of individual and social agency. This market-driven notion of freedom emphasizes choice as an economic function defined largely as the right to buy things while at the same time cancelling
out any active understanding of freedom and choice as the right to make rational choices concerning the very structure of power and governance in a society. In embracing a passive attitude toward

a conservative notion of freedom reduces politics to the empty

ritual of voting and is incapable of understanding freedom as a form of collective,
productive power that enables a notion of political agency and freedom that affirms the equal opportunity of all to exercise political power in order to participate in shaping
freedom in which power is viewed as a necessary evil,

the most important decisions affecting their lives.[24] This merging of the market-based understanding of freedom as the freedom to consume and the conservative-based view of freedom as a
restriction from all constraints refuses to recognize that the conditions for substantive freedom do not lie in personal and political rights alone; on the contrary, real choices and freedom include
the individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on everyday lifea notion of freedom that can only be viable
when social rights and economic resources are available to individuals. Of course, this notion of freedom and choice is often dismissed either as a vestige of socialism or simply drowned out in a
culture that collapses all social considerations and notions of solidarity into the often cruel and swindle-based discourse of instant gratification and individual gain. Under such conditions,
democracy is managed through the empty ritual of elections; citizens are largely rendered passive observers as a result of giving undue influence to corporate power in shaping all of the essential
elements of political governance and decision making; and manufactured appeals to fear and personal safety legitimate both the suspension of civil liberties and the expanding powers of an

the formative culture necessary to create

modes of education, thought, dialogue, critique, and critical agency the
necessary conditions of any aspiring democracyis largely destroyed through the
pacification of intellectuals and the elimination of public spheres capable of
creating such a culture. Elements of a depoliticizing and commodifying culture
become clear in the shameless propaganda produced by the so-called embedded
journalists, while a corporate-dominated popular culture largely operates through multiple technologies, screen cultures, and video games that trade endlessly in images of violence,
spectacles of consumption, and stultifying modes of (il)literacy. Funded by right-wing ideological, corporate, and
militaristic interests, an army of anti-public intellectuals groomed in right-wing think
tanks and foundations, such as the American Enterprise Institute and Manhattan Institute, dominate the traditional media,
police the universities for any vestige of critical thought and dissent, and endlessly spread their
message of privatization, deregulation, and commercialization, exercising a powerful influence in the dismantling of all
public spheres not dominated by private and commodifying interests. These experts in legitimation, to use Antonio Gramscis
prescient phrase, peddle civic ignorance just as they renounce any vestige of public
accountability for big business, giant media conglomerates, and financial mega corporations. How else to explain that nearly twenty percent of the American people believe
incorrectly that Obama is a Muslim! Under the new authoritarianism, the corporate state and the
punishing state merge as economics drives politics , and repression is
increasingly used to contain all those individuals and groups caught in an expanding web
of destabilizing inequality and powerlessness that touches everything from the need for basic health care, food,
imperial presidency and the policing functions of a militaristic state. I believe that

and shelter to the promise of a decent education. As the social state is hollowed out under pressure from free-market advocates, right-wing politicians, and conservative ideologues, the United
States has increasingly turned its back on any semblance of social justice, civic responsibility, and democracy itself. This might explain the influential journalist Thomas Friedmans shameless
endorsement of military adventurism in the New York Times article in which he argues that The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fistMcDonalds cannot flourish
without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valleys technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force,
Navy and Marine Corps.[25] Freedom in this discourse is inextricably wedded to state and military violence and is a far cry from any semblance of a claim to democracy.

We are the midst of a worldwide paradigm shift away from neoliberalism

the Occupy movement is the only hope to stop the extreme right from
controlling the aftermath
Schreiner 11 (Ben Schreiner, contributor to New Politics journal, freelance writer,
October 23, 2011, Occupy Wall Street in Context: Systemic Crisis and Rebellion,
http://newpol.org/node/540)
The main flaw of the Occupy Wall Street movement, according to the establishment media, has
been that the protesters themselves have only been able to articulate a "vague" sense of grievance. This, it is argued, is evidenced in the protesters'
disorganized and rather scattered complaints. What is it, the media bemoans, that all those demonstrators occupying city parks across the nation in an apparent protest of everything from the

the reason for the varied grievances of the Occupy participants

lies in the fact that the protests have spawned in response to a systemic crisis
afflicting the day's hegemonic economic orderi.e., neoliberal capitalism, or neoliberalism.
And as this crisis of neoliberalism has intensified, its internal contradictions have become
ever more pronounced. The crisis-stricken system thus churns out: mass unemployment
and swelling wealth inequality, state sanctioned violence and repression, and a privatized and gridlocked
political system. Is it any wonder, then, that assorted grievances abound in the Occupy
protests? The crisis of neoliberalism, and the revolt it has now set off, is not without precedents, though. The
current worldwide unrestfrom Cairo to London, from Santiago to New York
resembles that of forty-years ago. In fact, it has been since the late 1960s, particularly 1968, that such
wide scale unrest has occurred. And, lest we forget, it was in the wake of this latter revolt that the
capitalist model was made anew, as neoliberalism began its rise to dominance (about which more will
be said below). Clearly then, we are in the midst of a worldwide period of transition and
tumulta world revolution. The neoliberal era is at its end, and the formation of a
new economic paradigm to take its place has begun. This, needless to say, is not to imply that we
are on the precipice of a more equitable and just society . The experience of the 1960s, as that of 1848, demonstrates that crises
and popular uprisings can be suppressed or seized by the right. The parameters of the
neoliberal successor, in other words, are not preordained, but will be
determined through the course of struggle. Therefore, the question faced when
assessing Occupy Wall Street is whether the movement will be able to sustain itself, grow, and
death penalty to corporate greed really want? Of course,

eventually summon the power to function as a vehicle for resolving the current systemic
crisis in a way that can lead to a more equitable economic and political order. Or,
conversely, whether the promise and hope epitomized in the Occupy movement will be
beaten back by a reactionary counteroffensive.
[Schreiner continues]
In effect, we see, neoliberalism flipped the redistribution of the Keynesian welfare state on its
head, funneling wealth from the pocketbooks of the working classes to the portfolios of the economic elite. (The present
cries of the Occupy Wall Street movement against the 1-percent holding sway over the other 99-percent, we see, are not mere hyperbole.) And it's been with this vast
expansion of economic inequality that scores of accompanying social ills have arisen . As the
British researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket state in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level, "Inequality seems to make countries socially
dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes ." Wilkinson and Picket tirelessly document how inequality
negatively impacts everything from physical and mental health to levels of violence , and even
societal trust. Hence, the apparently "diffuse" grievances of Occupy protesters are in reality intertwined. The Collapse and the Political Crisis By 2008, neoliberalism
had run itself aground. The bursting of the U.S. housing bubble and the crash of the
speculative financial sector signified to the world the catastrophic folly of the neoliberal
model. The experiment to bring the self-regulating market of economic textbook lore into reality what the
economic historian Karl Polanyi deemed in his 1943 book, The Great Transformation, a "stark utopia" had failed. Even the most strident of
neoliberals acknowledged as much. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan painfully
acknowledged, "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting
shareholders and equity in the firms." In fact, it was neoliberal free market ideologues like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his Wall Street brethren
who immediately turned to the state for salvation . And with the salvation granted via TARP, neoliberalism became
little more than a farce. Yet, because both the Democratic and Republican parties had
moved toward building a neoliberal consensus over the past three decades (all were now neoliberals), the economic
crisis quickly morphed into a political and governing crisis as well. For neither could
offer a viable path out of the crisis, for neither was in possession of one. The Thatcher quip that "there is no alternative" to neoliberalism had become selffulfilling. Thus, facing an increasingly angry electorate and an economic system in disarray, both
political parties have since chosen to engage in seemingly petty and dangerous political
brinkmanship and crisis governing, as was seen most spectacularly in the debt ceiling debate of this past August. But with no ideological alternative to
neoliberalism, both are actually forced to engage in such political theatre, for if they don't, their
bankruptcy would be exposed for all to see. We can expect, then, the orchestrated political spectacle to continue until the economic crisis is
resolved. Expect ample reason to occupy and revolt. The Crisis of Ecology The crisis of neoliberal capitalism , it must be noted, has
coincided with a worldwide ecological crisis. The move toward the stark utopia of an
unencumbered market holds dire consequences for both society and nature .
As Polanyi wrote, "allowing the market mechanism to be the sole arbitrator of human beings and
their natural environment would result in the demolition of society. " Nonetheless, try and demolish we have. As a
July report from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs states, " Continuation along the previously trodden
economic growth pathways will further exacerbate the pressures exerted on the world's
resources and natural environment, which would approach limits where livelihoods were
no longer sustainable." To quell any doubts of such claims, the report goes on to note that, "The current species extinction rate
is about 1,000 times higher than the rates that prevailed over the planet's history." The
ecological crisisalthough no doubt exacerbated by the previous three decades of shrinking environmental protectionis more fundamentally a
crisis of capitalism. The underlying engine of capitalism, one must remember, is capital
accumulation. This accumulation, moreover, must never cease. As Marx wrote in Volume I of Capital, "The circulation of
money as capital is an end in itself, for the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless." However, there
exists a problem with this insatiable quest: we live in a finite world. Although the
movement of capital within a capitalist system is limitless, the system itself is not. One can open
only so many new markets and offshore production only so many times. Moreover, there exist only so many barrels of oil and so many
tons of coal to extract from the earth. In brief, capitalism, whether it is Keynesian or neoliberal in nature, is an unsustainable system.
It is not a matter of if it shall reach a terminal crisis, but when and if
humanity shall survive . So then, as we barrel toward ever-greater economic and
ecological ruin, what are our alternatives? Alternative Constructs At the present, there appears to be three

principal alternatives taking shape. The first alternative originates from the Tea Partybeholden Republican Party. It seeks a resolution to the present crisis by intensifying the class war,
wringing even greater concessions from the working class . Troublingly, this course has been able to gain significant traction.
Its advance can be seen in the attacks on organized labor levied in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere. It is also seen in the calls for drastic "entitlement reform" (code for cuts in Social Security and

it is nearly identical to the neoliberal capitalist model

authoritarian neoliberalism. The
ramification for democracy, ecology, immigrants, and working people if such a dark
alternative were to coalesce into the parameters of our successor economic system would
obviously be grave. The second alternative comes from the Democratic Party
establishment. With the party controlled by its corporate financiers, yet still choosing to don the cloak of the
Medicare/Medicaid) and the draconian anti-immigrant laws popping up in states across the nation (from Alabama to Arizona). In short,
of the last thirty years, only with a heightened level of working class and democratic suppressiona sort of

"peoples' party," this alternative seeks to resolve the crisis by splitting the difference between failed Keynesian and neoliberal prescriptions. While the New Deal Democrats turned to bold

the modern Democratic Party has turned to Keynesian-lite policies in

order to save the neoliberal ideology. This is seen in the effort President Obama and Congressional Democrats have placed in implementing tax cuts
Keynesian policies to save capitalism,

and modest infrastructure spending as a means with which to stimulate growth (Keynesian prescriptions), while also calling for "shared sacrifice" and "entitlement reforms" (neoliberal
prescriptions). Despite its obvious limitations, we may call this the more "responsible" of the establishment-sponsored alternatives, given that it merely throws us into the abyss, rather than

The third and final alternative comes from the ideals embodied in the Occupy
Wall Street movement. In short, we can say these ideals run counter to all those found in
the alternatives above. In other words, the movement composes the second half of what Polanyi
defined as society's double movement. As Polanyi argued, the movement toward a free
market utopia, and all this would entail, creates a counter movement to conserve both
people and nature. For the Occupy movement, the conservation of society is to be achieved via
the expansion of democracyeconomic and political . Yet, the protesters, to the alarm of
the establishment, have not sought democratic expression via recognized electoral means. There
will be no candidate endorsement from the Occupy movement, the protesters insist. Rather, the movement appears
set on expanding democracy outside of established channels, as it seeks a transformed
society that is somehow democratic in a new way. Well, what exactly does this, and can this, mean?
rocketing us there.

The hegemony of the 1% causes planetary extinction

Ketcham 11 (Christopher Ketcham, contributor to Orion Magazine, has written for
Vanity Fair, Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, November/December 2011, The Reign
of the One Percenters,
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6470/ AND a postscript,
Reign of the Ninety-nine Percenters?,
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/newsfrom187/entry/6518/)
One Percenters are a global threat, found in every city where the technocratic
managers of global capital seek to make money without being productive . They are in Moscow, London,
Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai. They threaten not merely the well-being of peoples but the very future of
Earth. The system of short-term profit by which the One Percenters enrich themselves
a system that they have every interest in maintaining and expandingimplies
everywhere and always the long-term plundering of the global commons that gives us
sustenance, the poisoning of seas and air and soil, the derangement of ecosystems. A tide of
effluent is the legacy of such a system. An immense planetwide inequality is its bequest, the everexpanding gap between the few rich and the many poor. Therefore, cry outthough the hour is late. What is
needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the One Percenter, a new civic
space in which he is openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at his every turning. What is needed is a revival of the language
of vigorous old progressivism, wherein the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new Resistance. We face, as Hessel describes, a system of social
control that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth, that
trumpets contempt for the least powerful in society, that offers only outrageous competition of all against all. To create is to
For the

resist, writes Hessel. To resist is to create. Such creativity, alas, is unlikely in New York. The city is regressing, and this sparks no protest from its people. Too many New Yorkers, it appears, want
to join the One Percenters, want the all-or-nothing billion dollars. New York City, once looked upon as a crowning achievement of our civilization, one of its most progressive cities, is now the
vanguard for the most corrosive tendencies in society. My daughter would probably do better to forget about this town. [To read the authors postscript, written since the occupation of Wall Street
began, see Orions blog.]

[Ketcham continues]
When I wrote the first draft of The Reign of the One Percenters in the autumn of 2010, I had little hope that the kids in New York would pull off anything like the growing revolt in Liberty Square
and beyond. I am delighted to be proved totally wrong. Some thoughts, then, for present and future Occupiers everywhere. Id suggest they take a page from the Populist movement of the 1890s.

Like Occupy Wall Street, Populism was a broad, economics-driven revolt that targeted a

predatory elite of corporate capitaliststhe Robber Barons of the Gilded Agewho had captured government and established monopoly power over
the political economy. The Populists were social visionaries, anticipating and driving the Progressive Era of reform of the early 1900s. They sought to dismantle
the centralized power of corporations in the economy and return economic liberty to
individuals and small business. Long before anyone else, they envisioned the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the regulation of banks, the right of
workers to set the terms of their labor. They transformed the political discourse of their time. In the midst of this our Second
Gilded Age, the Occupiers need to remember that the Populists also formed a political partythe Peoples Partyand they ran candidates who won office, and they formed real-world cooperatives

Theirs was not a platform of quixotic revolution, but

one of radical reform that took decades of hard labor to bear fruit. In the meantime: the
politics of radical protest; the politics of turmoil and disruption; the politics of ridicule
and shaming; the politics of the rhetorical rotten egg smashed in the eyes of the
criminal banking classthese are the orders of the day. The protest in Liberty
Square, the protest of the Ninety-nine Percenters, is currently driven by no mere
platform of demands, nor should it be. It is driven by moral outrage, as a challenge to the
authority of an immoral economic system.
between business and labor to challenge the hegemony of corporate capitalism.

As debaters and intellectuals, our only option is to occupy higher

education represents the last bastion of democratic dissent, but one
threatened by ongoing corporatization. Only Occupying can politicize the
debate-space and infuse the ballot with concrete political meaning
Giroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies
at McMaster University, 21 November 2011, Occupy Colleges Now: Students as the New
Public Intellectuals, http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-colleges-now-students-newpublic-intellectuals/1321891418)
Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics , a new set of values,
and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new
generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public
sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research,
teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and
what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public
spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators,
and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning,
imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique
and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to
address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life
and the common good. As people move or are pushed by authorities out of their makeshift
tent cities in Zuccotti Park and other public spaces in cities across the United States, the harsh registers and interests of the
punishing state become more visible. The corporate state cannot fight any longer with
ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt, fast
losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the
language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency,
resistance and collective struggle. In short, they have become the new public intellectuals,
using their bodies, social media, new digital technologies, and any other viable educational tool to raise new questions,
point to new possibilities, and register their criticisms of the various antidemocratic
elements of casino capitalism and the emerging punishing state. Increasingly, the
Occupy Wall Street protesters are occupying colleges and universities , setting up tents, and using the power of
ideas to engage other students, faculty, and anyone else who will listen to them. The call is going out from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Florida State University,

the time has come to connect knowledge not just to

power, but to the very meaning of what it means to be an engaged intellectual responsive
to the possibilities of individual and collective resistance and change. This poses a new
challenge not only for the brave students mobilizing these protests on college
campuses, but also to faculty who often relegate themselves to the secure and
Duke University, Rhode Island College, and over 120 other universities that

comfortable claim that scholarship should be disinterested, objective and

removed from politics. There is a great deal these students and young people can
learn from this turn away from the so-called professionalism of disinterested knowledge
and the disinterested intellectual by reading the works of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Elaine Scarry, Pierre
Bourdieu and others who offer a treasure trove of theoretical and political insights about what it means to assume the role of a public intellectual as both a matter of social responsibility and

In response to the political indifference and moral coma that embraced many
universities and scholars since the 1980s, the late Said argued for intellectuals to move beyond the narrow interests of professionalism and specialization as well as
the cheap seductions of celebrity culture being offered to a new breed of publicity and anti-public intellectuals. Said wanted to defend the necessity
indeed, keep open the possibility of the intellectual who does not consolidate power, but
questions it, connects his or her work to the alleviation of human suffering, enters the
public sphere in order to deflate the claims of triumphalism and recalls from exile those
dangerous memories that are often repressed or ignored. Of course, such a position is at odds with
those intellectuals who have retreated into arcane discourses that offer the cloistered
protection of the professional recluse. Making few connections with audiences outside of
the academy or to the myriad issues that bear down on everyday lives, many academics
became increasingly irrelevant, while humanistic inquiry suffers the aftershocks of
flagging public support. The Occupy Wall Street protesters have refused this notion of the
deracinated, if not increasingly irrelevant, notion of academics and students as disinterested intellectuals.
They are not alone. Refusing the rewards of apolitical professionalism or obscure specialization so rampant on
university campuses, Roy has pointed out that intellectuals need to ask themselves some very "uncomfortable
questions about our values and traditions, our vision for the future, our responsibilities
as citizens, the legitimacy of our 'democratic institutions,' the role of the state, the police,
the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual community."[1] Similarly, Scarry points to the difficulty of seeing an injury and
political urgency.

injustice, the sense of futility of one's own small efforts, and the special difficulty of lifting complex ideas into the public sphere.[2] Derrida has raised important questions about the relationship

The university without condition does not, in fact, exist, as we know only too
should remain an ultimate place of
critical resistance and more than critical to all the power of dogmatic and unjust
appropriation.[3] Chomsky and the late Zinn have spoken about and demonstrated for over 40 years what it means to think rigorously and act courageously in the face of human
between critique and the very nature of the university and the humanities, as when he writes:

well. Nevertheless, in principle and in conformity with its declared vocation, its professed essence, it

suffering and manufactured hardships. All of these theorists are concerned with what it means for intellectuals both within and outside of higher education to embrace the university as a
productive site of dialogue and contestation, to imagine it as a site that offers students the promise of a democracy to come, to help them understand that there is no genuine democracy without

But there is more at stake here than arguing for a

more engaged public role for academics and students, for demanding the urgent need to reconnect humanistic inquiry to important
social issues, or for insisting on the necessity for academics to reclaim a notion of ethical advocacy
and connective relationships. There is also the challenge of connecting the university with visions that have some hold on the
present, defending education as more than an investment opportunity or job credential,
students as more than customers, and faculty as more than technicians or a subaltern
army of casualized labor. At a time when higher education is increasingly being
dominated by a reductive corporate logic and technocratic rationality unable to
differentiate training from a critical education, we need a chorus of new voices to
emphasize that the humanities, in particular, and the university, in general, should play a central role in keeping
critical thought alive while fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the
further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning
itself and prevent that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished. Corporations and
the warfare state should not dictate the needs of public and higher education, or, for that matter, any other democratic public sphere. As the Occupy student
protesters have pointed out over the last few months, one of the great dangers
facing the 21st century is not the risk of illusory hopes, but those
undemocratic forces that promote and protect state terrorism, massive
inequality, render some populations utterly disposable, imagine the future
only in terms of immediate financial gains, and promote forms of selfserving historical reinvention in which power is measured by the degree to
which it evades any sense of actual truth and moral responsibility. Students, like
their youthful counterparts in the 1960s, are once again arguing that higher education , even in its imperfect state, still holds
the promise, if not the reality, of being able to offer them the complex knowledge and
interdisciplinary related skills that enable existing and future generations to break the
genuine opposing critical power and the social movements that can make it happen.

continuity of common sense, come to terms with their own power as critical agents, be
critical of the authority that speaks to them, translate private considerations into public
issues, and assume the responsibility of not only being governed but learning how to
govern. Inhabiting the role of public intellectuals, students can take on the difficult but
urgent task of reclaiming the ideal and the practice of what it means to reclaim higher
education in general and the humanities, more specifically, as a site of possibility that embraces the idea of
democracy not merely as a mode of governance but, most importantlyas journalist Bill Moyers points out as a means
of dignifying people so they can become fully free to claim their moral and political
agency. Students are starting to recognize that it is crucial to struggle for the university as a democratic public sphere and the need to use that sphere to educate a generation of new
students, faculty and others about the history of race, racism, politics, identity, power, the state and the struggle for justice. They are increasingly willing to
argue in theoretically insightful and profound ways about what it means to defend the
university as a site that opens up and sustains public connections through which people's
fragmented, uncertain, incomplete narratives of agency are valued , preserved, and made available for exchange
while being related analytically to wider contexts of politics and power. They are moving to reclaim , once again, the humanities as a
sphere that is crucial for grounding ethics, justice and morality across existing
disciplinary terrains, while raising both a sense of urgency and a set of relevant questions
about what kind of education would be suited to the 21st-century university and its
global arrangements as part of a larger project of addressing the most urgent issues that
face the social and political world. The punishing state can use violence with
impunity to eject young people from parks and other public sites, but it is far more
difficult to eject them from sites that are designed for their intellectual
growth and well-being, make a claim to educate them, and register society's investment and
commitment to their future. The police violence that has taken place at the University of California campuses
at Berkeley and Davis does more than border on pure thuggery; it also reveals a display of
force that is as unnecessary as it is brutal, and it is impossible to justify. These young people are being beaten
on their campuses for simply displaying the courage to protest a system that has robbed them of both a quality education and a viable future. But there is more. It is also crucial
not to allow casino capitalism to transform higher education into another extension of
the corporate and warfare state. If higher education loses its civic purpose and
becomes simply an adjunct of corporate and military power, there will be practically
no spaces left for dissent, dialogue, civic courage, and a spirit of thoughtfulness and critical engagement. This is
all the more reason to occupy colleges and use them as a launching pad to
both educate and to expand the very meaning of the public sphere.
Knowledge is about more than the truth; it is also a weapon of change. The
language of a radical politics needs more than hope and outrage; it needs
institutional spaces to produce ideas, values, and social relations capable of fighting off those
ideological and material forces of casino capitalism that are intent in sabotaging
any viable notion of human interaction, community, solidarity, friendship, and justice.
Space is not the ultimate prize here.[4] Politics and ideology are the essence
of what this movement should be about. But space becomes invaluable when it its
democratic functions and uses are restored. In an age when the media have become a means of mass distraction and entertainment, the
university offers a site of informed engagement, a place where theory and action inform
each other, and a space that refuses to divorce intellectual activities from matters of
politics, social responsibility and social justice. As students and faculty increasingly use the space of the
university as a megaphone for a new kind of critical education and politics, it will
hopefully reclaim the democratic function of higher education and demonstrate what it
means for students, faculty, and others to assume the role of public intellectuals
dedicated to creating a formative culture that can provide citizens and others with the
knowledge and skills necessary for a radical democracy. Rather than reducing learning to
a measurable quantity in the service of a narrow instrumental rationality, learning can
take on a new role, becoming central to developing and expanding the capacity for
critical modes of agency, new forms of solidarity, and an education in the service of the

public good, an expanded imagination, democratic values, and social change . The student intellectual as
a public figure merges rigor with civic courage, meaning with the struggle for eliminating injustice wherever it occurs and hope with a realistic notion of social change. Hopefully,
the Occupy Wall Street movements will expand their appropriation of public space to the university. And if so,
let's hope that higher education will be viewed as a crucial public good and democratic
public sphere. Under such circumstances, the university might be transformed into a
new and broad-based community of learning and resistance. This is a huge possibility,
but one worth struggling for. Unlike the youth movements of the past, such a
movement will not crystallize around specific movements, but will create ,
hopefully, a community of the broadest possible resistance and political clout . In
this way, the Occupy movement will connect to the larger world through a
conversation and politics that links the particular with broader notions of freedom and
justice. And against the pedagogical machine and political forces of casino capitalism,
this expanding movement will fight hopefully with renewed energy. It will be determined
in its mission to expand the capacities to think otherwise, and courageous in its attempts
to take risks. It will be brave in its willingness to change the nature of the questions
asked, fight to hold power accountable, and struggle to provide the formative culture for
students and others to fight for those economic, political, social, and cultural conditions
that are essential both to their future and to democracy itself.
The question is not Occupy vs. Policy proposals: single-issue politics is
broken Only by activating debates political capacity through holistic
critique can we break down casino capitalism
Giroux 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies
at McMaster University, 26 October 2011, Occupy Wall Street's Battle Against
American-Style Authoritarianism, http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-streetsbattle-against-american-style-authoritarianism/1319570241)
The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of
authoritarianism in the United States, one that threatens the collective survival of vast
numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the
meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno titled
"Education After Auschwitz," in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its

the demands and questions raised by Auschwitz

had barely penetrated the consciousness of peoples' minds such that the conditions that
made it possible continued, as he put it, "largely unchanged." Mindful that the societal pressures that produced the
Holocaust had far from receded in post-war Germany, and that under such circumstances this
act of barbarism could easily be repeated in the future, Adorno argued that "the mechanisms that
render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible.[2] For Adorno, the need for a general
public to come to grips with the challenges arising from the reality of Auschwitz was both
a political question and a crucial educational consideration . Realizing that education before and after Auschwitz in Germany
was separated by an unbridgeable chasm, Adorno wanted to invoke the promise of education through the moral
and political imperative of never allowing the genocide witnessed at Auschwitz to be
repeated. For such a goal to become meaningful and realizable, Adorno contended that education had to be addressed as both an
emancipatory promise and a democratic project. Adorno urged educators to teach students how to be critical so they could learn to resist
industrialization of death.[1] Adorno's essay, first published in 1967, asserted that

those ideologies, needs, social relations and discourses that lead back to a politics where authority is simply obeyed and the totally administered society reproduces itself through a mixture of state

education is at the center of any viable notion of

democratic politics, and that such education takes place in a variety of spheres both
within and outside of schools. Freedom means being able to think critically and act courageously, even
when confronted with the limits of one's knowledge. Without such thinking, critical debate and dialogue degenerates
into slogans, while politics, disassociated from the search for justice, becomes a power
grab, or simply hackneyed. What is partly evident in the Occupy Wall Street movement is not
just a cry of collective indignation over economic and social injustice that pose threats to
human kind, but a critical expression of how young people and others can use new technologies,
force and orchestrated consensus.[3] Adorno keenly understood that

social formations and forms of civil disobedience to reactivate both the collective
imagination and develop a new language for addressing the interrelated modes of
domination that have been poisoning democratic politics since the 1970s. At the same time, the movement
is using the dominant media to focus on injustices through a theoretical and political lens that counters the legitimation of casino capitalism in the major cultural apparatuses. The
rationality, values and power relations that inform hypercapitalism are now recognized
as a new and dangerous mode of authoritarianism. I am certainly not equating the genocidal acts that took place in Nazi Germany with
the increasingly antidemocratic tendencies evident in US foreign and domestic policies, but I do believe that Adorno's essay offers some important
theoretical insights about how to imagine a broader understanding of politics as a form
of public pedagogy. Its acute analysis of authoritarianism no doubt continues to resonate today, especially
in light of the emergence of antidemocratic forces in American society that propagate massive
human suffering, a disproportionate distribution of wealth and income, individual and collective despair, a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness, and multiple forms of
economic, political and racial exclusion. Adorno's essay raises fundamental questions about how acts of inhumanity are inextricably
connected to the pedagogical practices that produce formative cultures that
legitimate a culture of cruelty, a punishing state, the militarization of everyday life and
an assault on the welfare state, while transforming government into an adjunct of
corporate power. Adorno insisted that crimes against humanity by authoritarian regimes should not
be reduced to the behavior of a few individuals, but instead should be understood as speaking
in profound ways to the role of the state in propagating such abuses and the mechanisms employed in the realm of culture that attempt to silence the
public in the face of horrible acts. Adorno pointed to the dire need to issue a public
challenge that would name such acts as moral crimes against humankind and
translate that moral indignation into effective pedagogical and political
practices throughout society so that such events would never happen again. Adorno's
plea for education as a moral and political force is just as relevant today, given the
authoritarian practices used by the Bush and Obama administrations in conjunction with
powerful corporations and financial institutions . The political and economic forces
fueling such antidemocratic practices - whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture,
practiced indifference to chronic poverty, persistent racism , a war on youth and immigrants, massive economic inequality or
the killing of innocent civilians by drone attacks - are always mediated by widespread educational forces
and a host of anti-public intellectuals, institutions and cultural minions. Just as Adorno asserted following the revelations about Auschwitz after World
War II, effective resistance to such authoritarian acts cannot take place without a
degree of knowledge and self-reflection about how to name these acts and their accomplices and
transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from unfolding in the first place. Adorno's essay in many ways offers insight
into the concerns and collective opposition being raised by young people and others
through the Occupy Wall Street protests taking place all over the United States and in many other
parts of the globe. What we see happening in this surge of collective resistance is an attempt to
make visible the ideologies, values, social relations and relations of power that fuel a toxic form of casino
capitalism, one that assumes it owes no accountability to the American public and legitimates itself
through an appeal to the self-evident and the discourse of common sense. Injustices of various stripes are much more powerful when they
are normalized or hide behind the shadow of official power. The collective uproar we see among young people and others is, in part, an
attempt to make dominant power visible and accountable, while doing so through new
forms of solidarity that have been often marginalized, fractured, pathologized or punished. In fact, within a very short time, the
Occupy Wall Street protesters have changed the national conversation from the Republican
right-wing discourse about deficit reduction and taxing the poor to important issues that range from poverty and
joblessness to corporate corruption. They have all but usurped dominant media and cultural apparatuses that have been enormously successful in
normalizing the ideology, values and social practices of market fundamentalism for a number of decades. But most importantly, as writer Jonathan Schell has
argued, they have unleashed "a new spirit of action," an expression of outrage fueled less
by policy demands than by a cry of collective moral and political indignation whose
message, says Schell, is "'Enough!' to a corrupt political, economic and media establishment that is
hijacking the world's wealth for itself, immiserating ordinary people, sabotaging the rule
of law, waging interminable savage and futile wars, plundering the world's finite
resources, lying about all this to the public and threatening Earth's life forms into the

bargain."[4] The spirit of action that informs the current protest movement is not about providing recipes or
tossing around facile slogans - it is about using new pedagogical tools,
practices and social relations to educate the rest of the American public about the dangers of casino
capitalism as a new form of authoritarianism . The Occupy Wall Street protests offer a new language of
critique and hope, while inventing a mode of politics in which the claims to justice , morality, and
social responsibility prevail . In this first and important stage of the movement, young people and others are making visible how organized
violence works through a criminal culture and set of dominating power relations; they are expressing a sense of not just
individual but collective outrage that is as moral as it is concretely utopian. "Imagine the unimaginable" is more than an empty
slogan; it is a call for reactivating the potential of a radical imagination , one that rejects the tawdry
dreamworlds of a privatized, deregulated and commodified society. The protesters are making a claim for a sense of collective
agency in which their voices must be heard as part of a concerted effort to shape the future that they will inherit. This effort is part of what the philosopher Bernard
E. Harcourt has called a social movement in search of a new form of politics, one that not only rejects the inadequacy
of existing laws and institutions, but also offers resistance "to the very way in
which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for
policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated
the post-war period."[5] What young people and other protesters are making visible is that the frontal
assault being waged by casino capitalism against social protections, economic justice, immigrants, unions, worker rights, public servants,
democratic public spheres, the notion of the common good and human dignity itself represents not only an attack on
existing and future generations of young people, but also an alarming act of barbarism
and attack on democratic modes of governance and sovereignty. Democracy is always
an unfinished project. Yet, in its current state in America, it appears to be
terminal decay. If a democratic struggle is to be successfully mobilized
against the bankers, hedge fund managers, religious extremists, and other members of the ruling and corporate elite, then a critical and
democratic formative culture must be given life through the production of new
ways of thinking and speaking, new social organizations, and a new set of institutions
that collectively stake a claim to democracy, if not hope itself. What is promising about
the Occupy Wall Street protests is that young people and older Americans are delineating the contours, values, sensibilities and
hidden politics of the mode of authoritarianism that now shapes the commanding
institutions of power and everyday relations of the 99 percent, who are increasingly viewed as excess, disposable and unworthy of living a life of dignity, shared
responsibility and hope. This task of delineation is not easy : the conditions of domination are layered, complex and deeply flexible. Yet, while
the forms of oppression are diverse, there is a promising tendency within the Occupy
Wall Street movement to refocus these diverse struggles as part of a larger movement for
social transformation. And there is more. Such protests also embody the desire for new forms of
collective struggle and modes of solidarity built around social and shared, rather than
individualized and competitive, values. History is not without ample examples of how
new modes of resistance can develop, ranging from traditional acts of civil disobedience such as sit-down strikes and teach-in
campaigns to voter registration drives and the development of alternative modes of communication. But the Occupy Wall
Street protesters, while capable of using traditional and historically informed acts of resistance, are in large part rejecting
old ideological and political models. They are not calling for reform, but for
a massive rethinking and restructuring of the very meaning of politics - one that will
be not only against a casino capitalism, which through the chimera of free markets rewards the financial and political elites at great social and environmental costs, but also for a restructuring of

this is not - indeed,

cannot be - only a short-term project for reform, but a political and moral
movement that needs to intensify, accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the use of digital
technologies, the development of public spheres, new modes of education and the
safeguarding of places where democratic expression , new identities, and
collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. At the same time, there are some crucial short-term demands that are
the notion of governance, rule of law, power relations and the meaning of democratic participation. The current protests make clear that

worth pursuing, such as ending student debt, funding programs to eradicate the scourge of poverty that affects 22 percent of American children, developing much needed infrastructure, offering
mortgage relief for the 50 million people living with the "nightmare of foreclosures,"[6] increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations and putting into place a public works program for the 25
million unable to find jobs. These calls for change represent only a handful of the policy reforms that will surely continue to be articulated as part of a larger strategy of long-term structural change
and political transformation. It is important to recognize that what young people and many others are now doing is making a claim for a democratically informed politics that embraces the public
good, economic justice and social responsibility. Central to this struggle is the need to affirm the social in governing, while defining freedom not simply through the pursuit of individual needs and
the affirmation of self-interests but also as part of a social contract that couples individual and political rights with social rights. Political and individual freedoms are meaningless unless people are
free from hunger, poverty, needless suffering and other material deprivations that undercut any viable possibility of dignity, agency and justice. The capacity for individual and political freedom
has to take a detour through the social, which provides the economic foundation, public infrastructures and social supports for making private joys possible and individual dreams realizable. The
public good is the basis for any real understanding of freedom, at least one that believes in shared responsibilities, liberty, equality and justice. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, political
rights lose their viability without social rights. He writes: Little or no prospect of rescue from individual indolence or impotence can be expected to arrive from a political state that is not, and
refuses to be, asocial state. Without social rights for all, a large and in all probability growing number of people will find their political rights of little use and unworthy of their attention. If political

rights are necessary to set social rights in place, social rights are indispensable to make political rights "real" and keep them in operation. The two rights need each other for their survival; that
survival can only be their joint achievement.[7] The Occupy Wall Street protests are rejecting a notion of society which embraces a definition of agency in which people are viewed only as
commodities, bound together in a Darwinian nightmare by the logic of greed, unchecked individualism and a disdain for democratic values (as linguistic theorist and writer George Lakoff recently
pointed out in Truthout). The old idea of democracy, in which the few govern the many through the power of capital and ritualized elections, is being replaced with a new understanding of
democracy and politics in which power and resources are shared and economic justice and democratic values work in the interest of the common well-being and social responsibility. The Occupy
Wall Street protesters reject the propaganda they have been relentlessly fed by a market-driven culture: the notion that markets should take priority over governments, that market values are the
best means for ordering society and satisfying human needs, that material interests are more important than social needs and that self-interest is the driving force of freedom and the organizing
principle of society. Professor Fred Jameson once said, and I am paraphrasing here, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That no longer seems true. The
cracks in the capitalist edifice of greed and unchecked power have finally split open, and while there is no guarantee that new modes of social transformation will take place, there is a vibrant

In the spirit of Adorno's call after Auschwitz

for a politics that embraces education as both an emancipatory promise and a democratic project, the Occupy
Wall Street protesters are making clear that the values and practices of disposability and
social death promoted by casino capitalism have replaced important elements of a
democratic polity with a culture of violence in which democracy has become a pathology ,
and in which informed appeals to morality and justice are a cruel joke. They are arguing, forcefully and rightly with their
bodies, and through the new social media, that neoliberal economics and its cruel forms
of politics and public pedagogy, amply circulated in various platforms of the dominant media and in higher education, have become a register of how difficult
it is for American society to make any claim on the promise of a democracy to come. As the realm of democratic politics shrinks and is
turned over to market forces, social bonds crumble and any representation of communal cohesion is treated with disdain. As the realm
of the social disappears, public values and any consideration of the common good are erased from
politics, while the social state and responsible modes of governing are replaced by a corporatecontrolled punishing state and a winner-take-all notion of social relations. Within this form of casino capitalism, social problems are placed entirely on the
collective energy on the horizon that at least makes such a possibility imaginable once again.

shoulders of individuals, just as the forces of privatization, deregulation and commodification weaken public institutions and undermine the web of human bonds and modes of solidarity that

Americans are now saying, "We have

had enough," and their spirit of resistance is as educational as it is political. At this same moment, young
people all over the world are developing a new language of ethics, community, and
democracy in order to imagine a type of society and global world other than the one that
is currently on display. It is imperative for intellectuals, educators, social workers, organized labor, artists and other
cultural workers to join with them in order to put the question of radical democracy, solidarity,
and economic and racial justice on the political agenda. This suggests we need to forego the
fractured, single-issue politics of the past by refusing to argue for isolated
agendas. It suggests developing a social movement that rejects small enclaves in favor
of a broader social movement that can address how the current configuration of neoliberal
capitalism and other antidemocratic modes of authoritarianism work as part of a larger
totality. Such a globalized movement must offer to all people the tools of a politics that
embraces both a radical imagination and a radical democracy. This means making
evident not only how casino capitalism intensifies the pathologies of racism, student debt, war, inequality, sexism, xenophobia, poverty, unemployment and violence, but also how
we might take up the challenge of developing a politics and pedagogy that can serve and
actualize a democratic notion of the social - that is, how we might understand and collectively organize
for a politics whose hope lies with defending the shared values, spaces and public spheres
that enable an emergent radical democracy.
provide the foundations for a democratic politics and a political and economic democracy. Younger and older

Thus, in the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, Suo and I occupy debate in
solidarity with democratic protesters in Tahrir Square.
The assumption inherent to democracy assistance is that America, as the
great democratic educator, is capable and willing to assist Egypts political
revolution. The opposite is true only linking our Occupation of debate and
democracy assistance to the radical emancipatory potentials of Tahrir
Square through solidarity creates democracy at home and abroad.
Kennedy 11 (Michael D. Kennedy, Professor of Sociology and International Studies at
Brown University, Oct 11 2011, Arab Spring , Occupy Wall Street, and Historical
Frames: 2011, 1989, 1968, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2853/arab-springoccupy-wall-street-and-historical-fram)
Activists and analysts increasingly join the [Arab revolutions] Arab Spring with Occupy
Wall Street. And some now recognize this historical juncture to have more in common with the

transformative social movements of 1968 than with 1989, the year in which east
European dictatorships were overturned by democratically driven civil societies . Shifting
comparative frames for 2011 from 1989 to 1968 is helpful on a number of scores for thinking historically, theoretically, and strategically. It can help us reframe our
expectations for global transformations too: for now, it is not only a matter of
drafting constitutions, but of rearticulating solidarity across the world. From1989
to 2011 At the beginning of 2011, some analysts likened the Tunisian and Egyptian movements to what
happened in 1989. After all, in 1989, with a speed few anticipated, people in East Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and
East Germany) peacefully dismantled a system widely recognized as corrupt and unjust . Change came more
slowly in Bulgaria, and Romanias transformation was violent. A couple of years later, an attempted putsch ignited the movement to end the Soviet Union, while the wars of Yugoslav succession

1989, however, offered a

model to many, especially European elites, who wished to insert the [Arab Revolutions Arab Spring into
a world historical narrative. That story continues to guide many in the European Union foreign policy establishment. I heard the refrain over these last several
months in a number of meetings with EU officials: in order to be a better partner for the European Union, Middle
Eastern and Far East European emerging democracies (especially Ukraine and Moldova along with the Caucasus) need a better
organized civil society and a political elite that recognizes the power of the people and the value of democracy. With that, the European Union and
moved southeast European transformations with a legacy of immediate violence that continues to haunt. East Central Europes

its allies will reward good initiative with additional resources. And, truth be told, that basic formula worked well for the first wave of European Union enlargement completed in 2004. In 1999,
European Commission President Romano Prodi was tasked with bringing five postcommunist countries into the EU within ten years; in fact, he managed to enlarge the EU by ten within five years,

building on the story of what

began in 1989 to guide what will happen following 2011 is profoundly misleading. There are
because the EU and the acceding countries elites worked so effectively together to design and implement institutional change. But

important parallels between 1989 and 2011 to keep in mind. In both revolutionary moments, Western elites were unprepared, having developed dtentes and accommodations with Middle Eastern
and East European authoritarians in the spirit of realpolitik. When changes began, political authorities of all stripes did not expect protest mobilizations to spread with such speed or endure for so
long. That is, in part, because political elites were accustomed to dealing with one another, and not with civil society as such. Because the dynamics of transformation were rooted in everyday life,
in associations of secondary ties, ruling classes on all sides were blind to the potentials of change. But as the wave generated momentum in 1989, Western leaders could no longer assume the status
quo and came to embrace and support democratic, peaceful protest in the name of universal goods like human and civil rights. 2011 is not 1989 That universality already limits the parallels
between 1989 and 2011. After some initial hesitation, there was full support for liberal democratic transformations across the European communist world, standing in stark contrast to the Wests
general caution at the start for the 2011 transformation, and its continuing silence around the brutal repression of peacefully mobilized civil societies in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. But consistency

There are three big

structural differences between 1989 and 2011. First, the principal imperial contest in 1989
was between a Soviet empire and what most east Europeans perceived to be a democratic community expressed through NATO and the European
is not something on which we should base our comparative sensibilities, for larger structures establish the probabilities of coherent foreign policies.

Union. Most Russians did not see it that way, but their leadership also did not want to continue an arms race impoverishing socialism. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, rather sought a

In that release from

imperial rule, several leaders with authoritarian and some with arguably murderous pasts embraced
democracy and compromise, from Polands Jaruzelski in 1989 to Ukraines Kuchma in response to his countrys Orange Revolution in 2004-05. In this
embrace of non-violence, even at the risk of their own fall from power, those associated
with dictatorships past supported democracys future. 2011 looks very different. Second, and
structurally speaking, the Soviet Union occupied the counter-revolutionary position of
1989s revolution. However, despite its legacy of counter-revolutionary actions, most evident in its
European common home made with overtures of peace, expressed by letting east Europeans decide for themselves what futures they sought.

invasion of Hungary in 1956, of Czechoslovakia in 1968, its pressure for martial law in Poland in 1981, and even under Gorbachev its killings of peaceful protesters in Georgia in 1989 and Lithuania

USSR ultimately used its power to facilitate 1989s democratic extension. By

contrast, the counter-revolutionary position in 2011 has many more geopolitical actors with
in 1991, the

very different associations with and commitments to democracy. While Saudi Arabia might be most obvious in that position with its invasion of Bahrain and role in Yemen, the implication of the

calls for stability stymie calls for democracy and

That stands in stark contrast, again, to what happened in 1989, where the West was
perceived to be innocent, and a clear ally against communisms corruption . In 2011, charges of corruption are not limited to authoritarian
homes, and reach quite easily to corporate and political elites in those places claiming the democratic mantle. Third, global economic dynamics shape
civil societys allies and enemies. Simply speaking, the wake of 1989s emancipation anticipated an
extraordinary, if not all real, expansion of the global economy allowing many more resources from the rich to be invested in the newly
US and the European Union in authoritarianisms defense is not hard to recognize when
justice.

emancipated countries. That capital opportunity was coupled with the anxieties of not knowing how long the Russians, now without their Soviet infrastructure but still looking to define their own

Both conditions moved the West to embrace the east

central Europeans in NATO and the EU more quickly than anyone ever would have expected, thanks as well to extraordinary initiatives by elites and publics alike in the
postcommunist world. By contrast in 2011, with the EU focused on how to stave off economic collapse at home, and the US and the EU worried
about how they are making the prospects of even greater global financial disaster quite
real, the idea of supporting civil society in the EU neighborhood pales in comparative importance for
most Western elites. Ironically, that is why 1989 looks so useful as a comparison for Europeans in 2011. It is true that in 1989 civil society led change, just as in 2011 it leads
it again. But civil society could institutionalize transformations following 1989 because national
authoritarians and global geopolitical forces reinforced that change with a prosperous
economic outlook channeling that trajectory. In 2011, those conditions work in the opposite direction , while
great power role, would be so accommodating to Western designs.

civil society is nonetheless still expected to lead. When Europeans argue that civil societies must prove their worth to get more resources, they are taking a page from the history of 1989s success,

they are not prepared to be as invested in the emancipation of 2011

as they were prepared to be invested in 1989. That is why, if we seek historical parallels, we should look to 1968
but they are also demonstrating something else:

even as we look toward Occupy Wall Street. 2011 approaches 1968 Its not hard to find the
connections between the protest movements of the Arab Spring and lower Manhattan:
protesters from Tahrir address the Wall Street Occupiers and Mosa'ab Elshamy advises how to build the movement. The
parallels and contrasts of 2011 remain to be elaborated not only across Cairo and New York, but Madison and Santiago, Hama and Madrid. With those comparisons,
moving beyond protests in the authoritarian world to those in the democratic , we are all emancipated from 1989s constraints on
our imagination. 1989 was defined, in part, by the east Europeans wish to be normal, to
return to Europe, to escape an empire that painted socialism but produced degradation and indignity. 2011 has no road map, no
actually existing normality toward which to drive . It appeared to have begun that way, for dissolving dictatorship,
ending random and brutal violence, and enabling free and open association and speech are the foundations for that public sphere in which public goods can be identified, defended, and sought.

2011, with public demonstrations for dignity and

justice expanding across the world, shows that the normal has become
insufferable. And that is why 1968 might be the better historical analogy to consider. In 1968, the normal was defined by
imperialisms struggling to hold on to a worldview defined by elites alienated from mass
publics, especially their youth. Those elites realisms inspired rebellions without
roadmaps for change that were grounded in an alternative ways of being . Yes, the students of Warsaw
That embrace of freedom is the common starting point of 1989 and 2011. But

University emphasized free speech, the students at Columbia University an end to war, the students in Paris a new morality, but they and so many others came to recognize one another as part of

You can see some of the same in 2011,

where protesters in Madrid, Santiago and Madison have very different demands, but
increasingly recognize one another by their common alienation from power and
expression in new symbols. The internet is critical here, not just for the words that can be shared, but the ways in which new
images fuel identifications, bringing visual parallel to all the movements pressing for
global change, with something so simple as this: it is time for us to unite ; its time for
them to listen. If one were to ask for a common platform for change across all these
movements, either in 1968 or 2011, one would fail to find common ground. But if one were to ask
these mobilized publics whether the one percent is ruling wisely or in the best interests
of publics present and future, the no would be deafening. And that is enough, in 2011 or in 1968. In neither
time is this a global movement with a destination; it is rather an expression
asking us to see the world as ninety-nine percent of the world live it, not how
one percent of the world promise it could be if they are given more license, more power, more bailouts, more time. By
looking to 1968 for the value of new explanations, questions, and metanarratives that its association brings to 2011s recognition, we no longer put
the onus on Middle Eastern civil societies to liberate themselves to prove
their worth to the already democratic. If instead we look to 1968, we overcome the limitations of
talking about an Arab [Revolution] Spring by itself, or as an extension of 1989, and rather ask what
the occupations in Madrid and Athens, on Wall Street and in Madison, in New Delhi
and Santiago, have to do with one another, and with the continuing struggles
in Cairo, Hama, and Manama. Its a time to open up, to question relationships and
systems. But that also carries risk. Some invoke 1968 to warn that 2011 is doomed to failure. Without
roadmaps, without leaders, without clear and realistic policy choices, movements like
these are destined for takeover by ideologues detached from knowing how to
institutionalize democratic and peaceful change, and for destruction by authorities who know how to divide and conquer and/or to
stimulate violence and hate within civil society if simple state repression is not enough. That is why, in the end, I look back to 1980 for
my final historical frame. The largest social movement in history was named for the
value that was its greatest resource, allowing it to organize more than nine million men and women in a non-violent movement for radical change, leading
with workers rights while extending democracy, freedom, and equality. Polands Solidarity movement of 1980-81 grew in its demands, but was
dedicated first and foremost to recognizing how demands might be local, but
solutions are found by recognizing the struggles of others and sharing their
burden across class, religious, and regional lines. And that lesson of solidarity was born in the struggles
of 1968, where Polish communist authorities mobilized workers against protesting
students, arguing that their calls for freedom marked them as enemies of socialism,
justice and equality. Poland should not be the only nation so fortunate as to birth solidarity from its 1968 experience. Indeed, it is especially
important in 2011. Identifications between Tahrir and Wall Streets Liberty
Square are nice, but where solidarity remains to be made, and becomes increasingly important if the negative lessons
the same effort, tied by similar tastes in music and art, and a common alienation from what passed for normal.

Solidarity, more than any other policy prescription, might be

the greatest good to be realized in 2011, in anticipation of what 2012 can
bring.
of 1968 are not to be repeated.

What democracy assistance really is cant be answered without an

investigation into democracy within the US
SAMIEI 10 (Mohammed, Senior Lecturer in Faculty of World Studies @ U. of Tehran, Neo-Orientalism? The relationship between the West and Islam in our globalised world
Third World Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 7, pp. 1156-1157)

The limits, shortcomings and deficiencies of the West should not be ignored either. Although Western
societies enjoyed an early start and have made considerable progress in the direction of
democracy, they leave much to be desired. The deficiencies of the West are appropriately understood by outsiders who at times are victims of
unjust Western actions. This is perhaps most evident when Muslims look at how the West easily
sacrifices its values for its own interests, advocates a brutal tyranny, keeps silent before a
military coup, unconditionally advocates violent Israeli actions and wages a totally illegal
war in Iraq in contrast to the will of the Western public. Democracy, thus, needs to be promoted not only
outside the West, but also within it. Since the West, in practice, attempts to follow its interests first and foremost, its
promotion of democracy is therefore episodic, self-serving, half-hearted, selective, and often
designed to embarrass inconvenient regimes or to provide a moral justification for its
imperialist ambitions. President Bushs speech in Bahrain, a country which is among the most tyrannical regimes in the Persian Gulf region, was an example. Bush
addressed the king: Your Majesty, I appreciate the fact that youre on the forefront of providing hope for people through democracy. Every independent observer understands without much
difficulty that the kings programme for democratisation of his country was merely a cover for reinforcing dictatorship. The main motive for praising him, however, as Bush stated in the same
meeting, was the fact that Bahrain has welcomed the United States Navy and is now home to our Fifth Fleet.54 Through such words Bush sacrificed the political freedom of the Bahraini people to

As globalisation unfolds, we need more mutual understanding and

more democratic patterns for global politics. This is the biggest intellectual and
political challenge of the coming period. Separating the West from the Rest leads
our world to a new barbarianism in which conflict, war and terror are legitimate means, because there is no
institutionalised means to communicate peacefully for solving problems . Instead, based on a global
US interests, seemingly because they are others.

egalitarian approach, the international order should be revised to be more democratic in the new paradigm, integrating all new-coming partners and providing some brand new democratic means

We should attempt to promote democratic actions not only in non-democratic states

of the Middle East but also at the global level. This seems to be the sole possible solution
that we have.
for all.

Rather than see democracy as a one-way street ending at model America,

our politics of occupation recognizes the fight in Egypt is ours as well.
Alessandrini 11 (Anthony Alessandrini, affiliate faculty member of the Middle East
and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, associate professor
of English at Kingsborough Community College-City University of New York in
Brooklyn, Nov 16 2011, Back to Work: OWS and the Arab Spring,
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3130/back-to-work_ows-and-the-arab-spring)
I have been trying, and failing, to write about the Occupy movementmore specifically, about Occupy Wall Street, and even more specifically, about the connections between OWS and the popular

One of the many feelings

that hit me yesterday morning when I woke to the news of the police raid on Liberty
Square (nee Zuccotti Park) was a dismal sense of failure. I had thought that there would
be more time; but now, maybe, it was all over. I was at Zuccotti Park last evening, and
Im happy to report that no one there is talking about failure, and nothing is over. After the
uprisings that have come to be known by the convenient (although no longer remotely accurate) name of the Arab Springfor weeks now.

massive spree of late-night-into-early-morning police violencewhich, in all truth, given the weaponry involved, should really be referred to as a military action (coordinated, it now seems, to
absolutely no ones surprise, by the Department of Homeland Security), and after a day of uncertainty as police occupied the space (prompting a fine satirical piece on the OWS website: The NYPD
have been occupying Liberty Square since 1am Tuesday morning, with the brand new occupation now set to enter its second day in just a few short hours. But will anyone listen to them when their
message is so incoherent? What are their demands? asked social historian Patrick Bruner. They have not articulated any platform. How do they expect to be taken seriously?")on Tuesday

the New York General Assembly was back in session in Zuccotti (I suspect it may still be going on as I write
by far the overwhelming theme was: Lets get back to
work. This is not the piece I had meant to write about OWS, about the Occupy movement, about what has been happening in this city and in so many cities around the world. But its a
place to start: the ongoing work of Occupying. I dont think anyone can deny that OWS
has done some astonishing work over the past two months, and its far from finished;
in fact, it just seems to be getting started. I think those of us who are engaged with the
evening,

this). There were report-backs on the arrests and the ongoing legal battles, but

struggles of the Arab Spring (forgive me for using the too-convenient shorthand) would do well to keep this particular
temporality in mind, especially when considering the question of solidarity. This
question that has come up quite a lot in recent weeks, in particular around two sets of issues: the Twitter message seemingly (but, it
turned out, unofficially) sent by OWS in support of the Freedom Waves flotilla and later retracted (due, by all accounts, to questions of process rather than specific political motivations); and the
decision to send a delegation to Egypt, apparently to observe upcoming elections. Both of these have touched off debates about solidarity with popular liberation movements in the Middle East.
As some have asked, how can a movement that declares itself to be inspired by the movements of the Arab Spring not take an unambiguous position in support of breaking the blockade of Gaza?
Why would a movement that has taken to the streets and occupied parks and cities out of a dissatisfaction with the false promises of the game of electoral politics send a delegation whose
presence could play into the hands of a process that many Egyptian activists consider to be just a means of legitimating the ruling juntas seizure of the revolutionary process, as a much-read and
circulated open letter to OWS from Comrades from Cairo so justly articulates it? These are hugely important questions, and not just for OWS. The struggle for justice in Israel-Palestine has always

the question of how to best support and

work in solidarity with the ongoing struggles in Egypt, and throughout the region, is one
that is just beginning to be raised in the US context. All this is important to note, not as a way to simply excuse OWS (if one can even
been a source of red-hot controversy in US politics, including (perhaps especially) among the left. And

refer to it as some unified entityas Ill suggest, I think that we cant, or shouldnt, do so) or defend it against all criticisms in the name of solidarity, but rather as a way to think about solidarity as
something that happens slowly, over time and space, and only through some hard and often agonizing work. I think this notion of solidarity is clear in the statement by Comrades from Cairo, which
is one of the things that makes it such a moving and energizing (and profoundly ethical) document. The criticism of the position taken up by OWS in deciding to send a delegation with the specific
task of observing the elections is clear and unsparing: we recently received news that your General Assembly passed a proposal authorizing $29,000 dollars to send twenty of your number to
Egypt as election monitors. Truth be told, the news rather shocked us; we spent the better part of the day simply trying to figure out who could have asked for such assistance on our behalf. It is
also noted, albeit implicitly and rather gently (given the life and death urgency of the issues involved), that through this action OWS is actually failing to act in solidarity with the call sent out by the
No Military Trials for Civilians Movement, which was specifically a call to defend the revolution. Insofar as the elections could be seen as part of the military juntas attempts to legitimize the
seizure of the revolution, sending a delegation to observe these elections could be seen as doing precisely the opposite of defending the revolution. These points need to be made, and reiterated
(and also argued overnone of them are self-evident), since they definitely indicate a failure on the part of whatever decision-making bodies at OWS designed the particular rationale for this
proposed delegation (although, according to some accounts, it was a decision that was made in consultation with political groups working in Egyptclearly, not any of the groups represented by
Comrades from Cairo). But also worth noting is the tone taken up by the Comrades letter. The sentence above expressing a sense of shock is followed by this statement: We have some concerns
with the idea, and we wanted to join your conversation. The tone is, in many ways, that of a conversation within a movement rather than between agonistic forces. There is of course a you and
usin this case, one separated spatially, among other waysbut its interesting to see where the emergence of a we shows itself in the statement: We have, all of us around the world, been
learning new ways to represent ourselves, to speak, to live our politics directly and immediately, and in Egypt we did not set out to the streets in revolution simply to gain a parliament. Our struggle
which we think we share with youis greater and grander than a neatly functioning parliamentary democracy.But even though the idea of election monitoring doesnt really do it for us, we
want your solidarity, we want your support and your visits. We want to know you, talk with you, learn one anothers lessons, compare strategies and share plans for the future.Let us deepen our

critique is there, and it is a

, a loving critique

lines of communication and process and discover what these new ways of working together and supporting one another could be. The

sharp one, but it is,

(necessarily)
to use a definition of solidarity once proposed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
. I note this because it is
worth comparing the tone of the actual critique made by the Comrades from Cairo with much of the commentary that it has engendered as it has become a meme of sorts. Even on the Jadaliyya

a lot of informal
commentary that I have been encountering, seems to take the Comrades statement as a
way to make a larger criticism of the privilege, arrogance, and imperialist tendencies of
OWS. Again, it is good that such things be said, and certainly privilege, arrogance, and imperialist
tendencies have, sadly, been all too present in the way the US left has dealt
with popular movements in the rest of the world, especially movements in
the Middle East and North Africa (but also more generally movements throughout
the global south). As I noted in a recent piece on Edward Said, one of Saids great lessons is that there is no true solidarity without criticism. But I think we also have to
insist upon the opposite: that, politically and ethically speaking, criticism without solidarity is
not necessarily any more helpful. It strikes me (and I can only speak anecdotally here) that many of the more dismissive critiques
of OWS around these particular issues have actually come from fellow activists in the US,
especially activists who have been working on issues of Palestine solidarity and other
issues related to the region. There are, I think, some very good reasons for the skepticism that is revealed by these responses. Palestine solidarity activists in
page where the statement is posted, the tone of the piece itself and the tone of the readers comments differ pretty widely. The latter, like

particular (as I can tell you from experience) have all too often been asked to check their politics at the door in various political coalitions in the US, in the interest of not alienating the
mainstream (if we can speak frankly, this was a major issue in organizing against the Iraq war during the past decade). The recent response of Daniel Sieradski, a driving force between Occupy
Judaism, to the controversy over support for Freedom Waves shows that this logic is still, unfortunately, current in parts of the Occupy movement (the interview quoted below is worth reading in
its entirety, in particular for the way that Adam Horowitz pushes Sieradski on his position): The ramifications I imagine begin with a mountain of press attacking OWS as being anti-Israel and proterrorism. Whereas beating back false charges of antisemitism was easy because the movement is not antisemitic, were the movement to embrace an explicitly pro-Palestinian agenda, it would be
impossible to counter charges that the movement is anti-Israel. No matter how much we as individuals may reject such a framing, supporting the breaking of the Gaza blockade will surely be
labeled as enabling the flow of arms into Gaza that will be turned on Israeli civilians. No matter how one might rebut those claims, we all know that mainstream media does not handle nuance well
when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This sort of dont alienate the mainstream mentality is unworthy of a movement with the transformational energy that OWS has shown; this is
similar to the question raised by Comrades from Cairo about why such a movement would be interested in dealing with elections. And indeed, this may be the important point: that to attribute
such a position to some stable entity called Occupy Wall Street is to fundamentally misunderstand the energy of the Occupy movement, which is that of a movement that has seized certain spaces
in order to, in a sense, slow down time long enough to have extended, horizontal, consensus-based conversations about issues both large and small (indeed, anyone who has attended or
participated in a GA knows that the experience is alternately exhilarating and exasperating). Both the decision to retract the Freedom Waves tweet (made explicitly on the grounds that no
consensus on the issue had yet been reached) and the preliminary and perhaps badly-formulated nature of the attempt to reach out to activists in Egypt have a great deal to do with the necessarily
somewhat clumsy nature of such a process. It is not designed to come up with neat, streamlined solutions to key issues. As a friend, who is both a veteran of movements related to Palestine, Iraq,
Egypt, and other parts of the region and also a sometime participant in OWS discussions, put it in a Facebook exchange, a week ago, OWS was criticized for not hastily endorsing a specific
Palestine solidarity thing; and now, OWS is criticized for hastily endorsing a specific Egypt solidarity thing. Obviously, the issues are more complicated, and it may be that the specific decision in
each case is to be criticized; but the equally important point is that what we are talking about here are not fully-worked-out positions of some united political front, but the ongoing work of trying to
work towards these positions. This work is envisioned as the opposite of hasty; it needs time, and part of what the Occupy movement has attempted to seize is precisely the time (and, equally
necessarily, the space) to have these sorts of important political conversations. Solidarity is, if things work as they should, what emerges from this work; its not something that can be determined
in advance, with only the details then to be filled in. This is true even in terms of the delegation to Egypt: while the statement released by OWS is clear about constituting a delegation specifically to
observe elections, a video of a deliberation regarding the nature of the delegation that was held in Liberty Square indicates that there is far from a consensus about the sort of solidarity work that
such a delegation might best do. Indeed, it is not clear that the participants in this discussion even have a fully worked out position on the role of elections versus revolutionary change in the US,

this lack of a fully-formed political position, might well strike many of

us who have been involved in these struggles for years as frustrating, so frustrating that we might, as we sometimes have had to do before, throw
up our hands and simply conclude that this is not a group with whom we can work . I think
this would be a grave mistake. I think our impatience is motivated by our sense of the urgency of these struggles, and we would be wrong to give up this sense of
urgency. But I think it might be balanced by the temporality of the Occupy movement, which
reminds us that these struggles have moments of life and death urgency, but they are
also, in another sense, struggles that can only unfold slowly, and that need to be
sustained over a long period of time. It is in these sustained, slow, and often frustrating
but sometimes exhilarating periods of work together, not in the composing of a tweet or a press release or the other sound bytes
required by the temporality of our current political culture, that solidarity is created. I have to add that for all the missteps that OWS will no doubt make in building
never mind in Egypt. This confusion, and

the very fact that the Occupy movement declares itself,

in its very foundation, to be inspired by the Arab Spring [Arab revolutions] is a hugely
hopeful thing that must not be overlooked. The young occupiers who make up the heart
of the movement are, in many ways, the generation that has grown up under the shadow of 9/11.
They have been force-fed the notion of America as the bringer of democracy to the world
specifically, to the Middle East. It seems fitting that OWS began less than a week after the much-hyped tenth anniversary of 9/11, and that the space being
occupied is directly adjacent to Ground Zero. This country has been living the aftermath of 9/11 for the past
decade. It may be that 9/17 marks the beginning of something completely different. A
generation that has been told that the greatest dream of the rest of the world
is to be like us (so much so that this dream sometimes turns into its nightmarish, jealous, fairy-tale-villain opposite: they hate us for our freedom) has
pointed to the place in the world that they have been told is the most backwards, the
most undemocratic, the place in most dire need of being saved (by force, if necessary)OWS looks
to Cairo and says: we want to do what they have done. We want to make
Tahrir in New York. We want to fight they way they fight. One more step (a huge
step, a slow, agonizingly slow step) to: their fight is our fight . OWS declares itself to be inspired by the
Arab Spring . Many of those who have made OWS may not necessarily even know what they mean by this, and as recent events show, many of the
participants have a lot to learn before a real solidarity can be built. But the good news is that they have
not stopped wanting to learn, and if we can keep our patience, we and I mean all of uscan maybe
learn together, as Beckett might have put it, if not to succeed once and for all, at least to fail better each time.
solidarity with those who are engaged in the struggles of the Arab Spring,

Occupy is not just a movement but a heuristic for re-engaging politics

policymaking should start with the 99%
Marcuse 11 (Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University,
November 3, 2011, For Occupy, What Does 99% Mean (with slogans),
http://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/for-occupy-what-does-99-mean-withslogans/)
the issue of just who the 99% and the 1%
are, and what difference it makes, is a thorny one. The occupiers themselves, as a rough
estimate, comprise less than .1% of the population. What is the line of division the
occupy movement is trying to get across? How can it be done? The answer connects with the questions of demands vs.
In the debate about the meaning, potential, and future direction of the Occupy Wall Street movement,

goals, the slogans the movement uses. Some sound-bite size slogans can be imagined to suggest how a real debate might be provoked and the message of the occupations spread convincingly

Formulating the specifics of separate demands is not

what the Occupy Walls Street movement is about. Its goal is rather dealing with the inequality between
the 99% and the 1%, the concentration of power in the banks on economic issues, the lack of real democracy
in political decision-making, the organization of society around the accumulation of
wealth, consumerism, violence, conformity. Their goal is a different world, in which the specific demands of
the 99% would be realized, together. The slogans: OCCUPY WALL STREET and OCCUPY TOGETHER go hand in hand. The Occupy Wall Street
movement supports a wide variety of demands, as all of the placards and signs and posters show. But the Occupy Wall Street demand itself
incorporates those demands, but its own demand is broader, more general. It calls for
a society organized around the needs, desires, dreams, of the 99%, not the
1%. Yet there is a necessary link between the more specific demands and the general
demand, and it goes from the aggregation of individual demands into a realization of
their general unity and larger meaning. Judging from history, if a real revolution were possible today, it would include all the specific demands of the
Occupy Wall Street signs as part of its general demand for comprehensive change. The patriots who dumped tea in Boston harbor in the
American Revolution were not just after repeal of the tax on tea ; they wanted independence and
democracy. In the French Revolution the participants marched on the Bastille wanted not just the opening of that
hated prison, and not even just, bread for the hungry, but Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. In the English Revolution the Puritans and the
Levelers wanted not just freedom of religion and from feudal tithing, but an end to the monarchy and feudal constraints over-all. But how can this linkage
between the specific demands and the general goal be forged today, in practice as well as
in rhetoric? The question needs to be addressed, not only to the occupiers, but to those who press for the specifics, and their organizations the no-occupiers who are sympathetic to
the occupations and constitute at least 58% or so of the total population in the United States. It seems to me that the essence of the Occupy Wall Street
among the large number of their actual or potential supporters. * * * * * *

movement is its understanding that issues of poverty, of peace, of education, of health, of

environmental change, of exploitation in the work place, dissatisfaction in the
community, discrimination on ethnic and gender lines, cultural discontent , all in the
end have to do with the division of society between the top and the bottom,
symbolized by the relations between the 1% and the 99%, calling attention to the
structural features of a system that benefits the one at the expense of the other . It is this
understanding that must be brought to inform all the specific demands that
it encompasses. How? The process of linking is already beginning, both from the side of the occupiers and their goals and from the side of the non-occupiers and their
specific demands. The occupations are already being used to inform, to share, to discuss, to criticize.
There are Open Forums on a wide range of issues, little libraries in tents, innumerable one-on-one debates, invited speakers. And marches on banks, marches on neglected schools, marches on city
halls, marches on centers of foreclosed homes, marches on uncomprehending and hostile media. And there is support from many specific groups outside the occupations: unionized workers,
longshoreman, service workers, teachers, retail workers, community-labor centers, neighborhood groups and members of the right to the city alliance, of National Peoples Action, lawyers, nurses,

As the link is made from both directions, from occupiers to nonoccupier sympathizers and vice versa. The 1%/99% divide can emerge sharply as what
brings the two together within the 99%. It can be made explicit in many ways. For instance (and others can certainly improve on these examples,
neighborhood residents, students, academics, artists.

and these are points to be made, provocations for discussion, rather than bumper-stickers or slogans on signs):

[Marcuse continues]
It is important to read the 99% in all its complexity. The line between the two is not a
simple quantitative one, and is not the same in every dimension of life. 58% of the population (U.S. context) may support the occupations. 86% may feel the country is
on the wrong path. Obama captured 52% of the popular vote in 2008; the Republicans captured almost exactly the same percentage two year later. 66% of the population may consider themselves
in the middle class; very few like to admit that theyre poor, but that undoubtedly includes many of the over 42 million who are living below the poverty level, and many who are managers,
technicians, factory workers, service workers. About 30% of whites, 20% of blacks, have a college education or more; surely some are in the upper class, others support the occupations. And of

The
important point about the occupiers, though, is not how many they are, but that they are
calling attention to a basic division, no matter how calibrated: between the
haves and the have nots, the included and the excluded, the rich and the poor, the
powerful and the subordinate, the plebes and the gentry, the rulers and the ruled. In an earlier
post, I suggested a set of divisions along political/ideological lines. It is not neat, but it suggests the task ahead; the actual occupiers may total 200,000 or more,
but in any case less than .1% of the population. So producing change will not be up to them alone ;
they may be a spark that sets off a greater movement, but ultimately it is the
understanding of the existence of a dividing line within the society, in which a small
minority is benefiting handsomely at the expense of a large majority of the other, that is important. The danger of cooptation remains. Joseph Stiglitz, a respected and
course none of these numbers can capture the extent of the deep discontent, insecurity, worry, unhappiness, that runs through all sections of society, including even some of the 1%.

progressive economist, said recently: You are right to be indignant. The fact is that the system is not working right. It is not right that we have so many people without jobs when we have so many
needs that we have to fulfill. Its not right that we are throwing people out of their houses when we have so many homeless people. Our financial markets have an important role to play. Theyre
supposed to allocate capital, manage risks. We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds. Theres a system where weve socialized losses and privatized gains. Thats not capitalism; thats not a market
economy. Thats a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we wont succeed in growing, and we wont succeed in creating a just society.[1] But unfortunately the point is exactly that it is a

The 99%/1% split isnt because the market isnt working; its the way,
under capitalism, that it does work. That needs to be stated clearly and boldly. The question is, who is the we in that quote. Its surely not most of us, and
the 1% and the 99%, symbolically, play very different and indeed conflicting roles. The leadership of the fight for the demands and the
goal of Occupy Wall Street is thus not simply, or even primarily, with the occupiers; it must be picked up by the much larger number
and older organizations of the non-occupiers who are in sympathy with them. The occupiers are not the leaders of the movement,
there to run it, control it, establish themselves as its forefront. They are the spark that is igniting it, not the
old-fashioned vanguard called on to lead it. The question is not will the
occupations grow, but will the message of the occupations grow. More important even than what will the occupiers do
market economy, and it is capitalism.

next is the question of what will the non-occupiers do next.

Dont map Occupy onto an existing view of politics. The ballot affirms a
fluid, polyvalent site of protest thats necessary to create a true Plane of
Knowledge
Shulman 11 (George Shulman teaches political theory and American Studies at the
Gallatin School of New York University, December 20, 2011, Interpreting Occupy,
http://www.possible-futures.org/2011/12/20/interpreting-occupy/)
The appearance of OWS has been a thrilling event and incipient movement. It has
already shifted the terms of debate in national and electoral politics, even as it has stimulated intense intellectual
excitement among academics. How do we (and might we) understand what it is, characterize what it
portends, and engage it? My goal here is to wonder out loud about the relationship
between this movement or event, and the inherited (or even recently minted) categories we use to interpret

it, and so also about how we relate thought and action. I would not so much justify one interpretation as better than others, as endorse using their differences to rethink our categories, though I
also want to add one more interpretation to the mix. I would not so much defend a correct relationship to this inter-subjective object, and so to ourselves as political subjects, as ask, what are we

My starting point is the striking commonality in the very struggle of journalists, and of academics, to
represent OWS. My impression is that journalists have typically framed OWS by reading it into
inherited narratives of sixties social movements, while also insisting that there must be
leaders to whom to attribute its appearance. Many journalists have also claimed that OWS is illegible, or
literally without sense, unless it addresses demands to established authorities . They
require OWS to be an integral agent with avowed intentionality, so that it can be a
protagonist in a story, which means finding leaders acting as authors in charge . While proposing the
story of a social movement as a protagonist, however, they also recognize that OWS lacks the feature of unified
intention or agency. They resolve this contradiction, and rescue their story, by depicting
OWS as a faulty (or a not-yet crystallized) social movement. Others have relieved the contradiction by finding leadership. In
doing?

a recent New Yorker piece, Pre-Occupied, the author attributes OWS to Adbusters organizers, as if they were not only initiators but leaders in charge of its future. OWS becomes linear and
predictable as contingency, incipience, and collective action are moved into the background. Likewise, John Heilmanns recent piece in New York Magazine claims to locate the real organizers, a
cadre whose disagreementsover avowing leadership, articulating demands, and connecting to electoral politicswere the focus of his report, which recurrently returned to contrasts with 1960s
radicalism, and so to the authority of Todd Gitlin. Surely, those are central and open arguments among participants, too, but by identifying leadership, Heilmann also creates a legible object and

representation is a crucial issue among participants in OWS, and because

accusations about representation are part of the resonance of OWS, it is no mere irony
that strained or failed representation also characterize journalism about it. Academics
readily analyze such representational strategies and so have thematized (and resisted!) the medias
insistence on locating demands and leaders. But issues of representation persist, and other issues,
coherent narrative. Because

call them issues of self-representation, appear. It is striking how some of our colleagues visited the New York site, not to inhabit its practices and listen to participants, but to give speeches.
Granted, those speeches celebrated the very appearance of OWS and asserted its validity and viability despite media narratives depicting it as a failed protagonist unless it met certain narrative and
political expectations. But I wonder, did participants need to hear this message? Might it have been directed more productively to the media directly? Maybe it is intellectual self-hatred on my own
part to even wonder, but do we seek a kind of prestige or charisma by proximity to this event, as if to validate the importance or relevance of our ideas, as if to signal that we are not mere academics
or theorists, but public (organic not marginal) intellectuals? Why give a speech at all, rather than participate, one person among others, in deliberations at hand? But this either-or is

Some of us display spectatorial distance from actual political activism while

avowing a radical politics, and others of us move to performances of identity or
immediacy with OWS, but why not open and occupy a real relationship involving both
engagement and tension? Inside this issue of mediation remains the question of how we interpret OWS: do we really have a new or illuminating perspective to offer
to activists and citizens? Academics seem all too much like the journalists to whom we condescend , at least
to the degree that our commentary in blogs, posts, and journals also struggles to fit OWS intoand uses it as
evidence to validateour own preferred frameworks of analysis. For some academic
commentators, OWS is an anti-capitalist insurgency that signals the rebirth of class
struggle after years of neoliberal ascendency. For others, OWS is a populism that has the potential to escapeor repeatthe limitations and flaws of its antecedents. For some, OWS is a
social movement whose horizon is holding elites and states accountable. For others, OWS is the reappearance of a fugitive
democracy that episodically projects res publica as a possibility to incarnate by action in
concert. For some, OWS thus signals the generativity of natality in politics. For others,
OWS is the multitude not so much protesting the failure of representation as rejecting representation as a form of politics, and displaying instead the potentiality of
misconceived.

the virtual taking contingent shape as an incipient line of flight. I do not mean to suggest that these positions are each so discrete, or one-by-one identified with specific figures and theorists, but

the range of our interpretations do repeat and defend the theories already jostling in
academic conversation prior to OWS. Must any effort to understand OWS make it
evidence to confirm what we already (want to) believe? Justifiably esteemed academics in many
cases simply, even simplistically, capture the event as evidence of a theory
they have long asserted; in some cases, our colleagues speak about OWS in terms that contradict what they previously had been arguingsay, about the total
grip of neoliberal rationality and the evisceration of alternative languagesbut the contradiction is not itself acknowledged let alone analyzed. I have not read an
author confessing perplexity because this event disturbed what he or she had assumed
about the character of neoliberal hegemony, or about the possibility, presuppositions,
and shape of oppositional politics. Dont get me wrong, I find real theoretical and political value in
these various frameworks; their deployment does illuminate important aspects and
potentialities of OWS. I tend to feel agnostic and pluralist, resist choosing one optic,
and worry instead that the event is disappearing under various (albeit contradictory)
interpretations. I remind myself that a fluid, cacaphonous, and polyvalent assemblageshall we say
movement, constituent moment, event? will necessarily, thankfully, elude our grasp, and yet also that there is great value in
striving to represent if not capture its meaning. But in the contradiction between the story and categories we assert,
and an OWS that inevitably challenges what we say politics means and does, our prose
signals an epistemological anxiety we affirm only as theory but disavow in

our practice. For we really are not sure what kind of object we face, what kind of story
to tell about it, and what would count as evidence to resolve ambiguity. OWS should be
an opportunity to explore, not only confirm, our theoretical axioms or
settled views of politics or late modernity, of the state, capitalism, and citizenship, of
political action, cultural creativity, and social change. Of course I also want to bring my own theoretical pre-occupations into the
discussion. My sense is that, despite those in the media who decry a lack of demands, OWS has put the
issue of inequality into public discourse in a powerful way that already resonates in
electoral politics, and that this is a major (and intended!) accomplishment whose full impact depends on what activists, unions, parties, and politicians do next. To put this
differently, OWS has made equality a political issue again and at the same time has made the
meaning of public a political issue -not only in the critique of a state serving the few
and private interests rather than the many and public goods, but in the form of its own practice of occupation
as democratic reclaiming, re-possession, and embodied inhabitation. In the Tocquevillean terms I often find
useful, a demand for equalitythrough a metaphor of 99 percent that is open to multiple significationsis thus connected to arts of association and capacities to initiate. But I also would argue

For making equality into a political issue means articulating (not simply bespeaking)
the profound sense of loss, anxiety, and crisis in American culture. That sense of loss is
not uniform: fearing loss of social security and medicare is not the same as lamenting the
loss of racial status because of immigration, which is not the same as protesting the loss
of viable and valued livelihoods, which is not the same as white (or middle class) students feeling the loss of a promise of economic success they cannot
that another rhetorical turn is needed.

actualize, which is not the same as living the denial of dignity constituting our ongoing racial state of exception. These different and often cross-cutting senses of lossof status, belonging, rights,
livelihood, dignity, and futurityare not (yet) in conversation, nor is there a compelling narrative framework for relating them. But articulation of loss seems crucial to any political change, or

we hear
the Republican right using economic distress to advocate further deregulation and
budget cutting, as if to resurrect Ronald Reagan, or a nineteenth-century family capitalism, and we also hear contrasting calls by the liberal left for a new New Deal, as if to
resurrect Franklin (or in Obamas recent speech, Teddy) Roosevelt. There is also the culture war jeremiad that national
difficulty is due to moral failure linked to gay rights, abortion, secularism, etc. These stories signal the fatigue of a
culture that resurrects the dead because it lacks other visions of futurity, but if a credible
alternative is to speak to loss, it cannot abandon a history of the resonant references that
define what loss and promise mean. The rhetorical and political challenge, then, is to
engage the experiences and associations that these tired stories bespeak, while directing
people to more fruitful ways to think about and act on their feelings, perceptions, and
aspirations. My own formation recalls Machiavelli: the role of narrativenot of 99 percent as a metaphoris making desolation
and crisis into conditions of possibility. The new or emergent thus has conditions, partly
in recognition of loss, partly in acts of making a-new the meaning of inherited words,
and partly in acts of re-occupying that re-define inherited spaces, institutions, and
customs. If newness emerges as feeling and fact through creatively agonal re-making,
narratives that polarize tradition and innovationthe inherited and the incipientwill obscure actual
conditions of political possibility////. Accordingly, I see OWS as an opportunity for
intellectuals and citizens to explore three issues in particular. The first concerns neoliberal hegemony
as we enter a moment of crisis and contest, in which residual and subordinateand perhaps emergent
languages can reassert claims to public attention and value . It is important to ask: what investments sustain the grip of
neoliberalism among people on whom it imposes loss and dispossession? At the same time, what alternative do we conjure instead? The second issue thus
concerns the horizon of growth that has framed modern politics in industrial and
developing nations. It may be imperial injustice to demand that the many relinquish a horizon only a few have reached, but there is no injustice in asking if that horizon is
viable in a de-industrialized and increasingly unequal American society. What is the alternative to futurity imagined as economic growth? An alternative horizon
must re-imagine the meaning of livelihood, work, and individual aspiration in relation to
material necessities of life. It might still involve a kind of capitalism, but it must reimagine markets as well as the role of different scales of organization in a democratic
society. It must also revalue the good life in terms other than economic success,
whether through meaningful work, participation in public life, spiritual congregation, or
environmental attunement. In turn, a third issue concerns the meaning of sovereignty and
nationhood, for what should be the role (if any!) of the nation-state in a globalized world now
dominated by the unregulated power of capital? It is striking in this regard how most commentaries on
OWS act out rigid pre-conceptions about the state, sovereignty, and national forms of
rather, salutary political change depends on how such conditions of loss, suffering, and difficulty are made into conditions of action rather than mere reaction. At the moment

belonging, as some demonize and ignore the state and nation , some depict inevitable waning and compensatory reactions
to it, and some make a salvaged welfare state the horizon of national possibility. Such positions mirror the arguments already
constituting OWS as an inter-subjective reality, and these arguments surely arise from
the strategic dilemmas and visionary choices that participators confront in their practice,
and thus dramatize for all of us. In regard then to the broad issue of our categories and stories, my sense is that a reversible figure-ground
relationship, by which activists and intellectuals move OWS back and forth between
foreground and background, may widen a space to occupy with self-reflection
and creative action.