This article first apeared on rabble.ca.
When
students take to the streets of Paris or London today, it is no longer to bring
about a better world, but to defend what they can of the world their parents
took for granted. — Dougald Hine, 'Remember the Future?',
Dark Mountain II
If someone has compiled an Occupy Wall
Street reading list, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi's book Griftopia is surely on it. Taibbi
argues: "The financial leaders of America
and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that
our society is not worth saving and have taken on a new mission that involves not creating wealth for
all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed-out
economy."
Taibbi is clearly dabbling in
rhetorical hyperbole here, as he so memorably did when he called Goldman Sachs "a great vampire squid
wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood
funnel into anything that smells like money," but the image of a
kleptomaniac elite stripping the commons of everything that's not bolted to the
floor because they've lost hope for the future has a certain truthiness to it.
The past three years of massive bailouts, deepening debt and vicious public
austerity make a lot more sense if Taibbi's right.
Capitalism has always been driven by
naked self-interest, of course. Under neoliberalism, selfishness just has a lot
more freedom to do its damage. So rather than seeking to change course to avert
catastrophe, capitalists seek new ways to profit from the devastation by piling
into the next speculative bubble, the safest hedge to hide behind, or the next
commons to enclose and exploit. This high-class looting act is both
self-fulfilling and self-defeating: slashing public revenues and looting public
infrastructure only destroy the common resources needed to mitigate the damage,
while deepening inequality makes everyone, including the one per cent, more
vulnerable. It's the prisoners' dilemma on a planetary scale. Walter Benjamin's
observation "perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human
race grabbing for the emergency brake" has never been more apt.
This is why
the occupy movement is such a game changer: these predominantly young activists
have seen the same storm clouds on the horizon that trouble the dreams of the
one per cent, and have caught on to the heist they are perpetrating. The
occupiers realize that for them, cynicism is a luxury they can't afford, and
they won't surrender their future without a fight.
With the cliff we're careening towards in full view, hundreds of thousands are
now in the streets and collectively reaching for the emergency brake. As Rabble
blogger Aalya Ahmad so pithily put it, "Let's carpe fucking diem on
this one, eh? The way this world is going, many of us may not get another chance."
The
nature of the beast
For all that has been written about the
financial crisis, there have been precious few efforts to connect it to its
shadow: the planetary ecological crisis. Over the past two decades, stagnating
growth, ecological limits and deregulated finance capital have meant that
private wealth comes increasingly from, and public wealth is increasingly destroyed
by, speculative bubbles which have rapidly accelerated the destruction of the
natural world while displacing more stable but slower-growth investments in infrastructure and productive
enterprise.
We are now witnessing the unraveling of
the latest and greatest bubble: credit, increasingly known by its four-letter
synonym debt. Debt, in essence, is a
gamble that the future will be more prosperous than the present: we defer
payment today because we assume we'll have more money tomorrow. This is not so
different from how we've dealt with the climate crisis: future generations, we
assume, will have the money to solve this problem, so we don't need to. In both
cases, our gamble that future prosperity will manage to pay for past excess is
starting to look like an incredibly stupid one. (No wonder so many banks —
both financial and fluvial — are getting washed out.) Without economic growth,
financial debt becomes unmanageable; without ecological regeneration,
ecological debt becomes unmanageable.
After years of underinvestment in the
real economy, the three per cent compound growth that capitalism requires has
stalled. Finance capital chases itself in circles, creating nothing. Economies
sink under the weight of rising commodity prices — themselves a speculative bubble,
though one rooted in real natural limits. The desperate and costly efforts of
governments and central banks to restart growth by further priming the credit
engine have created nothing but more debt. This is the endgame of finance
capital in an age of ecological limits, dashing the dreams of a generation and
threatening to bring down entire economies.
To stop this runaway train requires a
recognition that the basic tenets of capitalism — everything has a price, competition trumps cooperation, scarcity is the
natural state of humanity, material gain is the only motivator, the only agent
of change is the consumer — are only true because enough people believe
them to be true and act accordingly. There are other ways of relating, and
through collective struggle, we can and must awaken to them. This is not
utopian, but exceedingly practical: as philosopher Slavoj iek told the Wall
Street occupiers, "The true dreamers are those who think that things can go
on indefinitely the way they are."
Our fear of future scarcity cannot be
resolved within the terms of capitalism, because capitalism thrives on scarcity
and the fear of scarcity. Outside of the logic of that system, there remains an
abundance of the very things that nourish us: the desire to provide for
ourselves and our loved ones, the courage to approach an uncertain future with
creativity and generosity, the ingenuity to pool our resources to create
together what we could never create alone.
These are the seeds of the other world
that capitalism tells us is not possible. They are being sown in countless
individual and collective acts each day: a community raises funds for an
integrated health centre that had lost government support, a bus drivers' union
refuses to transport arrested protesters, 50,000 artists gather in the desert
to participate in a gift economy, a group of activists blockade the highway to
the tar sands, another group prepares meals from discarded food and gives them
away to anyone who's hungry. And so on. Everywhere you look you'll find
capitalism, and everywhere you look you'll find the seeds of its successor.
'Our
one demand'
Occupy Wall Street, like the indignados of Spain who inspired their
actions, has been criticized for the vagueness of its demands. But the
occupiers and indignados have seen
clearly what the politicians cannot: the situation is irresolvable within the
frame provided, so the frame itself must be broken.
To limit their demands to minor reforms
that leave the extractive structures of vampire capitalism intact would be a
terrible mistake. Those occupying the public squares know that we must think
both bigger and smaller. To demand anything, we must demand everything. Each
eviction, bankruptcy or new mining development must be fought in such a way
that a victory builds momentum rather than dissipating it. Each demand
formulated and won must propel the movement towards the point that it need no
longer address its demands to the illegitimate power structures it seeks to displace,
because it has already displaced them.
We will hear the same dismissals from
respectable corners when thousands descend on Bay Street in Toronto and the
public squares of many other cities on Saturday, but this next wave of
occupiers must also refuse to take the bait. The enigmatic "one
demand" of Occupy Wall Street was always only that, to occupy Wall Street. Shut it down. No more business as usual. No
more profit from human suffering and ecological destruction, no more
speculation on food and energy, no more sacrificing sound public policy to the
growth imperative.
With its own demands sidelined until
the economic crisis is resolved, the environmental movement faces a choice:
either continue to work within the frame provided, hoping against hope that
capitalism can resolve the crisis it has caused and get back to greenwashing
itself, or construct an anti-capitalist politics that places solidarity, mutual
aid, and the defense and expansion of the commons at the centre of its labors.
The economic crisis finds its true resolution in the ecological realm, and vice
versa.
The left in general faces the same
choice: either try to save capitalism from itself by putting a human face on
its worst excesses, or engage in the difficult work of theorizing and building
an ecologically sound, anti-capitalist alternative. Eco-socialists like Joel
Kovel and John Bellamy Foster have perhaps gone the farthest in articulating
the contours of such an alternative, which is prefigured in countless local,
indigenous, and commons-based initiatives. Such initiatives must be defended,
supported, connected and multiplied.
So, in sum: capitalism is in the
process of cannibalizing itself by devouring public infrastructure, personal
livelihoods and the planet. Faith that the system can save us from itself is
falling rapidly. Liberals and conservatives alike have abandoned any semblance
of pursuing what Noam Chomsky long ago called "the vision of a future just
society," and no viable alternative vision exists within the frame of
respectable debate. This is a deep crisis of legitimacy, irresolvable within
the current system. It's also a moment of immense opportunity, if we have the
courage to seize it. The emergency brake is just within our reach. Occupy the banks. Occupy the commons. Occupy the future.