Ed,
At 21:20 26/09/2011, you wrote:
There's something tragic going on in the world
right now. The role of young people has become
one of jumping up and down, waving placards and
getting shot, as in the Arab spring. Meanwhile,
the power-brokers are lurking behind the scenes,
waiting for the fuss to die down so that they
can move in and take over, just as they did with
regard to revolutionary movements some decades
ago in Egypt and other Mid-East and North African countries.
In Wall Street's case, what is least likely to
bring about change is young people jumping up
and down. It will take far more than that, and
will happen from the top and not from street level.
You're right. It's cliques at the top which have
already acquired some degree of power which
actually take the history-changing decisions. The
so-called Arab Spring, for example, is getting
nowhere, despite the envy of its people for the
goodies of the advanced world dressed up as
'democracy' (and the hypocritical support by
Western politicians who actually have their eye
on their resources). Tunisia is still in trouble,
the Army Council in Egypt still holds power, and
Libya is now a viper's nest of tribal infighting.
None of them are going to get anywhere near
something recognizable as a Western-type advanced
nation-state for generations. Cultures are
epigenetically inherited and it takes more than a
quick-change in the political or ideological
environment for cultures to adapt permanently.
Keith
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>michael gurstein
To:
<mailto:[email protected]>'RE-DESIGNING
WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' ;
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 1:54 PM
Subject: [Futurework] FW: Occupy Wall Street
rediscovers the radicalimagination
-----Original Message-----
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sid Shniad
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 9:36 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/25/occupy-wall-street-protest?newsfeed=true>http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/25/occupy-wall-street-protest?newsfeed=true
The
Guardian
25 September 2011
Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination
The young people protesting in Wall Street and
beyond reject this vain economic order. They have come to reclaim the future
Police tactics attacked as officers pepper-spray women
Occupy Wall Street: the protesters speak
David Graeber
People protest during the 'Occupy Wall Street'
rally in New York, 17 September. Photograph: Steven Greaves/Demotix/Corbis
Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has
the occupation despite the latest police
crackdown sent out sparks across America,
within days, inspiring hundreds of people to
send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start
their own movements called OccupyChicago,
OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?
There are obvious reasons. We are watching the
beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a
new generation of Americans, a generation who
are looking forward to finishing their education
with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with
enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found,
were of working-class or otherwise modest
backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were
told they should: studied, got into college, and
are now not just being punished for it, but
humiliated faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have
a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?
Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of
colossal social failure. The occupiers are the
very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose
energies a healthy society would be marshaling
to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are
using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.
But the ultimate failure here is of imagination.
What we are witnessing can also be seen as a
demand to finally have a conversation we were
all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a
moment, after the near-collapse of the world's
financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.
Everything we'd been told for the last decade
turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run
themselves; creators of financial instruments
were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not
really need to be repaid in fact, money itself
was revealed to be a political instrument,
trillions of dollars of which could be whisked
in or out of existence overnight if governments
or central banks required it. Even the Economist
was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"
It seemed the time had come to rethink
everything: the very nature of markets, money,
debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for.
This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of
the most colossal failures of nerve in history,
we all collectively clapped our hands over our
ears and tried to put things back as close as
possible to the way they'd been before.
Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming
increasingly obvious that the real priority of
those running the world for the last few decades
has not been creating a viable form of
capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that
the current form of capitalism is the only
conceivable economic system, so its flaws are
irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting
around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.
What we've learned now is that the economic
crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It
was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and
massive plunder abroad the latter, in the name
of the "third world debt crisis". But the global
south fought back. The "alter-globalisation
movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF
has been driven out of East Asia and Latin
America, just as it is now being driven from the
Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has
come home to Europe and North America, replete
with the exact same approach: declare a
financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral
technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an
orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".
The form of resistance that has emerged looks
remarkably similar to the old global justice
movement, too: we see the rejection of
old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace
of radical diversity, the same emphasis on
inventing new forms of democracy from below.
What's different is largely the target: where in
2000, it was directed at the power of
unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the
WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with
no democratic accountability, which existed only
to serve the interests of transnational capital;
now, it is at the entire political classes of
countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US
for exactly the same reason. This is why
protesters are often hesitant even to issue
formal demands, since that might imply
recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.
When the history is finally written, though,
it's likely all of this tumult beginning with
the Arab Spring will be remembered as the
opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the
dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years
of relentless prioritising of propaganda over
substance, and snuffing out anything that might
look like a political basis for opposition,
might make the prospects for the young
protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the
rich are determined to seize as large a share of
the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation
of young people to the wolves in order to do so.
But history is not on their side.
We might do well to consider the collapse of the
European colonial empires. It certainly did not
lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the
cookies, but to the creation of the modern
welfare state. We don't know precisely what will
come out of this round. But if the occupiers
finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold
that has been placed on the human imagination,
as in those first weeks after September 2008,
everything will once again be on the table and
the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities
around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can.
----------
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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