Don't forget the dream of occupy walls street: to make a
true alliance against the two main modes of empire; the Corporation, and the State. Most people are starting to understand that these two things are linked, but It seems that very few people understand the impossibility of corporate
power apart from the state. The State is the monopoly of force. The corporation
is a legal entity contracted, sustained, and defended by the State. Who does Black Water call when it's systems get hacked? One of the
major pit falls of the ill faited occupy Wall Street, in my opinion, was its
unwillingness to address the role of progressivism in the very formation of the
Corporation. The Corporation as we know it today arose from the kinds of
public works programs and progressivist policies one sees in F.D.R.'s New Deal. The corporate charter was penned in order to lower the burden (responsibility) of corporations
so that they could produce more jobs for the working class. But it wasn't just
the progressivis that refused to see the pit falls of there ideology, the Libertarian
wing of the movement had even harder internal conflicts to deal with.
How progressive are the interment camps?
No Doubt the Progessivist wing had a few blind spots, but they weren't the only ones protesting wall Street. It was Libertarians like Peter Schiff and Ron Paul, who most accurately predicted
both the coase and the nature of the 2007 finical crises, but alas, they where unable to reach
out to the people hardest hit by the crises, because of their opposition to the kind of
government ad that this population has come to depend on, larglely do to sustemic problems with both wings of politics. Thus came the re-emergence of Marxism in the occupy movment.
No Doubt Marxism is sexy, although I fail to see how 1x1=1 could salve the real world problems we find our selves in today. I do owe a debt of gratitude to Marx for
inspiring a number of my own direct influences; Guy Debord, and Herbert Marcuse to
name a few--"Zizek will put you in gulag!"...[[one of the most glaring, yet unanounced, conflicts
between Zizek and the occupy wall street movement is Zizek's concept of the "Big
other." For Zizek the "Big other" is an imagened conspiracy that limits
our ability to enjoy pleaser, the 1% is an example of the "Big other"
only for occupers the 1% is real. This aperint contradiction with the movment didn't stop Zizek from capitalizing
on the movement though.]] It was occupy Wall Street that got me seeking out
these Marxist types. There is a lot of veriety in Maxist thinking. But really, what does a credit bubble have to do with labor value?
It does, albeit in an indirect way, the Fed prints money to keep pace with the
debt they make possible, which leads to inflation, which widens the gap between
wages and the cost of living, which increases the working classes dependence on
credit, starting the whole process over again. Each time this process is repeated
the working class gets more in debt to the "capitalists.” See Richard Wolf,When Capitalism hit the Fan, for a more detailed alyises. Richard Wolf thought he came up with a radical new
theory, What he doesn't seem to realize is his thoery depends on the kind of credit critique that
was pioneered by the Austrian school economists like, Friedrich August Hayek,
and Murray Rothbard. Marx doesn’t address the calculation issue, which is the core
problem of bubbles, overproduction is one of the major contributors to bubbals.
One way that Marxism could solve this problem is by putting the power of
"market" planning in the hands of the consumers themselves, and sense
workers are also consumers this could be done at the factory level. Worker counsels
that make only what they need, pace Guy Debored, and/or anarcho-syndicalism.
But that’s not really what the current wave of Marxists like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou are calling for,
those guys are Trotskyite globalists that just want to incress global codependency. In
the end the issues that divided all these groups to begin with proved to be insurmountable
to make a true opposition to the status-quo, and the open form made space for
all manner of washed up old ideology. In the process of examining all these
political philosophies I've come to realize something though. The State is primarily
concerned with controlling the means of production, in our case the State has
handed over that control to the Corporations, through land grants, production
contracts, legal immunity, money laundering privilege, I couldn't list all the ways the government makes corporate corruption possible. We can't forget that
this handing over is no lose to the State its self, the State and the Corporation
are made up of the same people, the Corporation is powerless without the State
and the State is even more powerful with the Corporation as a mechanism of manipulation
and rescores extraction. Government services, the benevolent arm of the State,
is just a way to keep its host alive while it sucks its vital life blood. The
means of production, and the land it is made from, does not belong to the Government.
It belongs to the people, and the plants and animals that inhabit it. It is only
though a monopoly of force, and contral of vital resources that the Government is able to
continue its false pretense of benevolence. This is the same strategy the Empire
uses to conquer other countries through the faults pretense of nation building, foreign ad, and (predatory) lending.
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