1. Although the number of their direct participants is small, the Occupy movements - in this country and internationally - evidently give expression to a widespread dissatisfaction with the management and recent results of economic and financial processes across the capitalist world. The claim that they speak for 99 per cent of the population would be absurd, of course, if we were to construe it as a claim to represent the views of that many people. The protests plainly don't represent anything like so many. This is merely an aspirational slogan, based on the notion that the protesters stand for the interests of the vast majority, as against a tiny number of the super-wealthy. Whether they will be able to translate that notion into an effective movement of political pressure and significant change remains to be seen.
2. Some of those protesting call themselves anti-capitalist. Others of them are not, but articulate the view, merely, that millions of ordinary people are now paying for the mistakes of governments, banks and suchlike; and an inchoate sense that a few people continue to enjoy spectacular levels of wealth while the democratic multitude are enjoined to struggle along in these austere times because such is in the nature of things present. To have this sense of unfairness and objection a person doesn't have to be anti-capitalist, and the occupying protesters appear to enjoy the sympathy of many who prefer not to live in tents for any length of time themselves.
3. Where the Occupy movement will go depends on many different factors, but I stand by the view I've expressed in earlier posts here that one thing it will depend on is the development of a coherent set of goals. Whether these are conceived in anti-capitalist terms or in terms only of constraining and regulating capitalist processes and financial markets so that they work more clearly to the benefit of the less well off, as well as or instead of to that of the most well off, unless people at large come to be convinced that there is such a set of goals, such a programme of credible diagnoses and demands, they are unlikely to be willing to take the movement seriously, much less give their own time, their numbers and their resources to supporting it.
4. One of the things that follows from this is the need for the Occupy protesters to situate themselves somewhere on the terrain of political reality and to recognize mere fantasy (to put the point gently) when it speaks. Movements of protest, movements for a better world, were not born yesterday, and there is a certain amount of experience to draw on. Not to draw on it is an invitation not to be taken seriously. In illustration, I focus attention on the observations about 'democracy' of two fantasy-merchants who will be familiar to visitors to this site. Here is Madeleine Bunting, in a veritable paean to Occupy London Stock Exchange:
The protesters are challenging how the illusion of public debate is created through a stage-managed process that excludes all but a self-regarding elite who are largely in agreement, quibbling only over technocratic detail.
The aim of the protesters is something far more profound than having their say in a debate in which the terms of the argument are predetermined.
This kind of stuff just rolls off a certain kind of leftist tongue, but it is false. Coming from a woman who has a regular column in a major national newspaper, in which one must presume she enjoys a very large degree of freedom to say what she thinks, it is not just false but also delusional. If Bunting can't give a serious-minded account of the democracy we actually inhabit, its limitations and its resources and opportunities, why should anyone take seriously what she says about the alternative democratic forms that she discerns at Occupy London Stock Exchange? That there is merely an 'illusion of public debate', that it is 'created through a stage-managed process', that it 'excludes all but a self-regarding elite', that its participants are 'largely in agreement, quibbling only over technocratic detail' - these are all demonstrable falsehoods. Would you put the care of democracy's future in the hands of someone who can so misrepresent the reality of Britain's political system as to indulge the view that it is undemocratic? Not flawed, not imperfect, not improvable. No - undemocratic. That is fantasy politics from someone writing in praise of protesters whose ability to protest and express themselves in would-be paradigm-shifting ways rests upon the very freedoms that this supposedly undemocratic system makes possible - the dispute about long-term encampments in urban spaces notwithstanding.
And here is Slavoj Žižek, in roughly the same neck of the woods - 'the bourgeois democratic state'. Žižek thinks to have discomfited Anne Applebaum with a contradiction in her views: on the one hand, the global economic crisis lies beyond the competence of national politicians; on the other hand, she recommends to the protesters action through their national political system. And what is Žižek's own preferred route - preferred, that is, to 'the familiar liberal-democratic frame'? It is that radical change should 'not be located primarily in the political sphere', but rather in the '"apolitical" network of social relations, from the market to the family'; or again, 'outside the sphere of such democratic devices as legal rights etc'. This is, without the name, the discourse of dual power, and it postulates the formation of an alternative democratic legitimacy to challenge the one that exists.
Now, there is nothing intrinsically anti-democratic about the idea of an alternative democratic legitimacy. If new institutions should emerge that are (a) genuinely democratic (with the usual liberal safeguards) and (b) have secured an unambiguous mandate from a majority of the population, then it is possible to envisage them playing a justified role in radical change. But the idea that they might transform an entire society while simply bypassing representative institutions at society-wide level, bypassing a democratically elected institution at, precisely, the level of national politics, whatever might also be going on in families, factories and markets - this idea is merely fanciful. Žižek imagines he has embarrassed Anne Applebaum because she refers the Occupy movement to politics at state level. But he for his part declines to explain why a movement capable of mobilizing a great social majority should be unable also to act through the institutions at national level - 'the familiar liberal-democratic frame', and 'such democratic devices as legal rights etc'. It's as if the history of making light of all this, or indeed of setting it aside as 'bourgeois', is little known. But it isn't.
A man of learning who tells young protesters that the name of the ultimate enemy today is democracy and commends to them 'a formal gesture of rejection' towards it is a fantasy-merchant. The fantasy in this case is not merely laughable, though it is that too.
