Re: <nettime> Occupy Wall Street and the Left

[Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com>]

Jodi wrote:

> as well as the ongoing threats to Social Security, Medicare, and
> Medicaid)?because people are mobilized as the 99%, the attack on
> capitalism takes different forms, forms loosely associated with the
> ideological span of the contemporary left.
> 1.  Progressive/left-liberal Democrat:  constitutional reform,
> legislative goals (abolish corporate personhood; money out of politics);
> locate problem in political process.
> 2.  Left Keynesian: jobs for all demand, tax the rich; locate problem in
> the economy
> 3.  Anarchists?see the state as well as hierarchical and centralized
> power as the primary problem (capitalism depends on the state); solution
> is to constitute alternative practices, alongside or outside the
> mainstream; a politics of refusal and creative production; any attempt to
> seize the state will just reproduce the structures of power and patterns
> of behavior in which we are caught.
> 4.  Communists/ revolutionary socialists?see the economy as the primary
> problem (state as instrument of class power); goal is over-throwing
> capitalism and establishing communism.

When I visited Occupy Wall Street this fall, a non-trivial number of the
occupiers I spoke to - including its Open Source media spokesman whom Chris
Csikszentmihalyi had invited to his class at the New School - were Ron Paul
supporters, followers of the Zeitgeist movement or even La Rouchians. While
the movement is anti-capitalist, I don't think that it is left-wing as a
whole.

Florian

-- 
blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl


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