Prabhat Patnaik
THE “Occupy Wall Street” movement may be small, but it has the support
apparently of two-thirds of the entire American population, according to
opinion polls; and the international response it has generated is impressive
too. About 100 cities in the
The first difference relates to the fact that its challenge is to the system
as a whole. For many years now, people’s protest and resistance movements,
by and large, have been concerned with particular issues, or have been directed
against particular projects, or have been in opposition to particular policies.
In our country for instance we have had agitations against SEZs,
or against the POSCO plant, or against nuclear power plants, or for forest
rights, or for defending the interests of the tribal people, or against
specific instances of land acquisition for this or that project. These are not
to be pooh-poohed, but they do not pose a challenge to the system as a whole.
Capitalism can live with such movements, conceding something here, negotiating
some settlement there, risking a prolonged face-off
somewhere else. Capitalism does not of course welcome such movements; they do
constitute a challenge of sorts for it but a challenge that does not threaten
its very existence.
Indeed, the fact that in the current epoch we only have a series of micro-level
challenges that do not morph into any serious macro-level offensive against the
system, has led many to believe that the era of macro-level challenges is over,
or as modish expression would have it, “grand narratives” are altogether passé.
While the bulk of the last century was obsessed with “grand narratives”, of
capitalism, socialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, and de-colonisation, we are now supposed to have entered the
“post-modern” era devoid of such “grand narratives”. This basically means that
the current period is supposed to have been characterised
by an acceptance of the final triumph of capitalism, with popular struggles
confined at best to making it function better in one’s locality, or making it
function in a more humane manner vis-a-vis abjectly
poor and “excluded communities”, and so on.
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement by contrast is not concerned with any such
specific demands; indeed, to the chagrin of the pundits, it does not even
have an agenda of any description. It is simply, conceptually, a rejection
of the system as a whole. This rejection is not based on any intricate theoretical
arguments; it is simply visceral. And the rejection extends even to the manner
in which the “occupiers” conduct their daily affairs: the internal organisation of the “occupiers’ universe” represents an
attempt at a “cooperative community” that is opposed to all the rules of the
game of the capitalist order. The point is not necessarily to glorify this
attempt, but to underscore the fact that the attempt itself constitutes a
conceptual rejection of the capitalist society, and in that sense a return
of the “grand narrative”.
The “occupiers” have brought back on the agenda the question of the continued
acceptance of the capitalist system as a whole. They are not fighting for
this or that demand within the system; they are on the contrary rejecting
the system in its entirety. And such a conceptual rejection is a necessary
starting point for any system-transcending resistance, including the struggle
for socialism.
The fact that the movement of the “occupiers” is not inspired by
socialism or Marxism is of little moment: if the strength of Marxism lies in
its being true, then this movement, if it is to adhere to its agenda of
conceptual rejection of capitalism, will necessarily have to come to terms with
Marxism, to imbibe its insights, and to transform itself accordingly. To say
this is not to claim that the entire “Occupy Wall Street” movement, as it
currently exists, will transform itself in this manner; it is only to suggest
that this movement marks the beginning of a new historical epoch when, the initial
step of a conceptual rejection of capitalism having been taken, resistance to
the system will keep getting built up, through stages, to more and more mature,
refined and effective forms of revolutionary consciousness and action for
transcending the system.
NEW HISTORICAL
EPOCH
The “
The second distinct feature of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is that it has
gone beyond mere “morality” to the question of “property”. The very fact that
it is “Wall Street” that is being occupied signifies an attack on finance
capital; and while it is true that an attack on finance capital is not
synonymous with an attack on capitalist property as such, the fact that
contemporary finance capital represents the highest form of the development of
capitalism, implies that it amounts to an attack on contemporary capitalism,
and, hence, for all practical purposes, on capitalism as such. In other words,
since a historical regression to a pre-finance capitalism is impractical, an
attack on finance capital is ipso facto an attack on capitalism as such. The
counter-offensive that contemporary capitalism will unleash against such
resistance will necessarily make any compromise by way of a reactionary return
to a pristine pre-finance capitalism, which after all is what has given rise to
finance capitalism, an impossibility. In short,
immanent in the attack on finance capital is the promise of a new order beyond
capitalist property.
The fact that the “
The point about going beyond “morality” to “property” is best illustrated by
the anti-corruption movement in our own country. This movement, since it sees
“corruption” as much in the 2G Spectrum scam as in a clerk in a government
office demanding a Rs 50
bribe to move a file, is concerned exclusively with “morality” and not with
“property”. To say this is not to suggest that a concern with “morality” is
wrong, or that the demand for a bribe of Rs 50 to move
a file should be condoned (that would be counter-posing one “morality” with
another, or simply having a different “morality” from that of the
anti-corruption movement); it is to say that the demand for the Rs 50 bribe is the indirect outcome of the same property
relations that visibly underlie the 2G scam, that the need is to go beyond the
flat surface of “morality” to the underlying structures of property. Put
differently, if society was so organised that
everybody enjoyed a minimum standard of living then the incentive for demanding
the Rs 50 bribe would be much less, just as, since
such a society cannot be based on capitalist property (which is an analytical
proposition), there would be no 2G scam either. Going beyond “morality” to
“property” in other words is not an invitation to be “immoral”; it is an
invitation to be analytical, to be scientific. And what is striking about the “
ATTACK ON
CAPITALIST PROPERTY
It is a moot point of course why the most striking movement in contemporary
India that is not concerned with specific demands remains at the level of
“morality”, without, in the least bit, straying into the question of
“property”, while in the US a morally-motivated movement, invoking very similar
inspirations (eg Mahatma Gandhi), goes straight into
the question of “property”. The answer must lie in the different economic
fortunes of the two countries, at least as far as the middle class is
concerned. In the US, where the distinction drawn is between 1 per cent and 99
per cent, the overwhelming mass of the population, including the middle class,
has suffered from the crisis, while in India a fairly significant segment of
the population, which includes a chunk of the middle class, has done well
economically in the recent period and is not too keen on opposing as yet, the
“property” as distinct from the “morality” of the 1 per cent.
The third distinct feature of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is that it has
gone beyond an attack on the State to an attack on finance capital, and hence,
by implication, on capitalist property. Marx had visualised
anti-capitalist consciousness coming first to the workers (through trade union
action for instance), and had been concerned with how this anti-capitalist
consciousness can get extended to a correct understanding of the nature of the
capitalist State. (In The Poverty of Philosophy he outlines the process of how
the workers, through their experience, begin to understand that behind the
capitalist class stands the capitalist State). It has been a hall mark of
contemporary capitalism that opposition to the State has preceded any
opposition to finance capital, let alone to capitalism; and in many cases the
latter opposition has been even conspicuous by its absence. The Arab uprising
for instance, which constitutes another source of inspiration for the “
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement lacks an agenda, does not constitute as yet a
challenge that the system can be frightened of, has no clear strategy or tactics,
and can be dismissed as being “naïve”. Nonetheless it is the first indication
that a new revolutionary wave is arising against the rule of capital, that,
instead of being at the “end of history”, we are at the beginning of a new
history.