Monday, October 31, 2011
Bart Csorba on the "Occupy" movement
It appears that the media and those of the mainstream are having some difficulty in understanding the 'Occupy Movement'. Here's what I think.
The key to understanding the movement is in the idea of the occupation of space. The Occupiers are primarily claiming that they represent the ‘99%’ of the population who are not millionaires, captains of industry, masters of finance, or political insiders. The Occupiers argue that the sovereignty of the state and its associated political space, which their citizenship fills and legitimises, and the economic space, which their labor empowers, have been corrupted, occupied, and co-opted by another opposing amorphous group who they call the '1%'.
The Occupiers posit that the '1%' have corrupted the political space, in which the both the 1%’ and the '99%' are supposed to be able to voice their concerns and find agency, through economic and financial manipulation. In essence, the ‘1%’, the mega-wealthy, captains of industry, and masters of finance have colonised, like an occupying imperial power, the political space through which the ‘99%’ are, according to the principles of liberalism and democracy, supposed to be able to manifest their power and hold the powerful few to account.
The ‘Occupiers’ argue that the political agency, of the ’99%’ is being oppressed by the economic and financial might of the ‘1%’. In a protest against this (and perhaps in an effort to exercise some real agency) the ‘Occupiers’ (specifically those on Wall Street) are attempting to occupy public spaces as a metaphorical and physical challenge to the occupation of their political space by the ‘1%’.
Simply put, the ‘Occupiers’ are proposing a reconsideration of the principles of democracy and a reinvigoration of political space. This is why, when the media does attempt to broach the topic of ‘what the Occupiers are demanding’, it is difficult to distill their motives. Many different groups are represented, as they should be, and what they collectively ‘want’ (in tangible terms) is varied and sometimes contradictory. However, what they ‘want’ may be different to the overall objective of the ‘Occupy Movement’.
This movement is trying to address first-order problems that have begun to erode our beloved democracy and much reified liberalism: who empowers the power of the state? Is it the citizenry whose very lives legitimise its power and drive its economy? Or, is it the ‘1%’ that truly command the political and economic spaces of our increasingly interconnected world and its systems? Perhaps, more provocatively, the Occupiers are asking an important question: Why has it come down to a pseudo-class war between ill-defined groupings - the ’99%’ versus the “1%’ - when the development of modern democracy was supposed to result in a system which represented of the ‘100%’? Maybe, one could argue that the ‘Occupy Movement’ is a collective effort to redress an imbalance which privileges the ‘1%‘, their opinions and influence, over those of the ’99%’.
That’s what I’ve been thinking. Thanks for reading.
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