There is something hyper-self-conscious afloat ... as is only natural, They have taught us well ...

This is an excerpt from an e-newsletter sent by the 'Culture Jammers' at Adbusters about their Occupy Wall St. campaign:

"What will happen this Saturday when thousands of us descend on Lower Manhattan and start walking towards Wall Street?

If the police try to stop us, how will we respond? ...

If the police block us temporarily from occupying Wall Street, then let's turn all of lower Manhattan into our Tahrir Square. Let's sing our songs in the lobby of Goldman Sachs and in Chase Manhattan Plaza; let's wave our signs outside the SEC and the Federal Reserve; let's convene our people's assemblies around the Charging Bull statue at Bowling Green … and if need be, let's set up our encampments in nearby Battery Park and other places until we're ready to walk into Wall Street again …

Anything can and will happen this Saturday. That's the beauty of it! Ultimately, the only thing that matters in how many of us turn up eager to be a part of a spontaneous creative swarm and determined to bring the financial fraudsters to justice.

Bring signs, flowers, food and a revolutionary mood … and a commitment to absolute nonviolence in the Gandhian tradition."


Well, I guess this must be emblematic of the state of politics today. Maybe all we have today in terms of a possible politics is this kind of self-conscious, hyped-up (like a rock concert, no? Don't miss out!), copy-paste, 'meme'-like tactic? I applaud Adbusters for giving it a go. But I can't help feeling there's something strange going on here; 'Let's do it!', response-based indoctrination is all I can sense in these 'wild' words. Is so-called 'revolutionary' action really so self-conscious, I daresay, even pretentious?

Does this sort of 'occupation' really aid in bringing supposed 'justice' (already a term heavily loaded with neoliberal dogma) to those whose lives are really effected by the 'financial fraudsters'? Who are they representing by such an occupation? And, pray tell, who are these 'financial fraudsters', actually?

And who reads Adbusters? Exactly the kind of hipster 'activist' types who like to go to music festivals purporting to be 'green' or 'charitable'. We really need to get off this band-wagon and start to really consider what our actions mean and how we ourselves are implicated in upholding the rule of Capital.

Blame, or the blame-desiring machine that campaigns like this one produce, is one which is equally and to a comparable measure produced by Capital, in fact you could imagine Capital as the author of blame. Who can we blame for the shit we are in? It is certainly someone's fault (not mine!). We only have to find them and out them and things will be better. This is a lie. That someone does not exist, even in the form of a corporation. Blame is a lie that eases the depressive truth that we are all implicated.

The real question of today is how to move from this depressive junction of totalitarian 'safety' measures, States Of Emergency and fear-of-life, and toward a space where we may again have some agency in our lives.

This is not about individual moral responsibility - we are all responsible, together - it is about being aware how all our actions and choices, and the way we interact with others, maintain a certain power-relation that is exactly the one that campaigns like Occupy Wall St. claim to want to dismantle. A big question: How can we take responsibility for our actions whilst also being the victims of them?

It is not the 'financial fraudsters' who we must blame (what, do you want to replace them with some other, 'better' people, who aren't 'fraudsters'?), for they are also trapped within the violence of financial capitalism. It is Capital itself that we must disown. It is Capital, and the violence integral to its existence that we must renounce.

This will occur only slowly and through a progressive reconsideration of how we actually want to live our lives, not how we are told to live by a generation of old rich men in whose interest it is that we never question the world they have given us and never demand anything more than to graciously follow their footsteps into the positions of so-called 'power' they have brainwashed us into desiring.

Meanwhile, the rich men are probably sniggering nostalgically from their 31st floor offices at how naive this little bit of youthful 'unrest' really is.