[D66] Žižek: Occupy first. Demands come later

[Antid Oto]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton/print

Occupy first. Demands come later

Critics say the Occupy cause is nebulous. Protesters will need to address what
comes next – but beware a debate on enemy turf

          o Slavoj Žižek
          o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 October 2011 20.15 BST



What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that
started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back
around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will
fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street
occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to
participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: "They are
asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a
good time."

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day
after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in
love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their
basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible
world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after
abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of
anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly
re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do
not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed,
the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not
"Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street
cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult
questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want.
What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new
leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The
20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the "horizontal organisation" of
protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we
should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: "Merely having an open mind
is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut
it again on something solid." This holds also for politics in times of
uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new
master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question,
"What is to be done?"

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer. Are the protests
un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian
nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free
egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are
the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent
(occupation, and so on), but they are violent only in the sense in which Mahatma
Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way
things are – but what is this violence compared with the violence needed to
sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

They are called losers – but are the true losers not there on Wall Street, who
received massive bailouts? They are called socialists – but in the US, there
already is socialism for the rich. They are accused of not respecting private
property – but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased
more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying
it night and day – just think of thousands of homes repossessed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed
in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most
ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an
ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a
divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care
for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by
the system.

They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things
can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. They
are not dreamers; they are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a
nightmare. They are not destroying anything, but reacting to how the system is
gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the
cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking; it starts to fall only when it
looks down and notices the abyss. The protesters are just reminding those in
power to look down.

This is the easy part. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but
also of false friends who pretend to support them but are already working hard
to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer
without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, those in power will try to make the
protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

In boxing, to clinch means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in
order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street
protests is a perfect case of political clinching. Clinton thinks that the
protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the
nebulousness of the cause: "They need to be for something specific, and not just
against something because if you're just against something, someone else will
fill the vacuum you create," he said. Clinton suggested the protesters get
behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple
million jobs in the next year and a half".

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of
the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the
protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and
time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum,
an opening for the truly new.

The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where
recycling your Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars to charity, or buying a
cappuccino where 1% goes towards developing world troubles, is enough to make
them feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies
started to outsource even our dating, they saw that for a long time they were
also allowing their political engagements to be outsourced – and they want them
back.

The art of politics is also to insist on a particular demand that, while
thoroughly "realist", disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology: ie one
that, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible
(universal healthcare in the US was such a case). In the aftermath of the Wall
Street protests, we should definitely mobilise people to make such demands –
however, it is no less important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the
pragmatic field of negotiations and "realist" proposals.

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily
remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All
we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence,
this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous
and threatening as it should be.


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