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Wall-Street
Protestors: What is Really Progressive? Glen T. Martin
As the
Wall-Street protests begin to attract world-wide
attention after 20 days of creative protest
actions (with the help of New York City police
mismanagement and brutality), other cities
across the nation have begun similar protests.
People with faces painted white like
Wall-Street zombies, with hands full of fake
cash, paraded down the Street.
Many articles in the progressive internet
press have appeared defending the idea that the
protestors really do have demands in the face of
what may seem like an outburst of spontaneous
rage against the machine. But others accuse the
protestors of exhaling mountains of hot air with
no organization or coherent set of demands.
The analysis here
does not come from the ideological right, as,
for example, from the zombie fake news service
called FOX. It comes from a deeply progressive
point of view that attempts to discern events in
the light of our global system and its
deleterious consequences for the majority of
humanity and our planetary ecosystem. Our lethal
problems are not simply a consequence of
Wall-Street. They are a consequence of a global
system of exploitation and domination that must
be transformed on a planetary scale.
Like the
Paris Commune of 1871, the “General Assembly” of
the New York City protests, through
“participatory democracy,” arrived at its
official statement issued on September 29, which
reads in part:
As we
gather together in solidarity to express a
feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose
sight of what brought us together. We write so
that all people who feel wronged by the
corporate forces of the world can know that we
are your allies. As one people, united, we
acknowledge the reality: that the future of the
human race requires the cooperation of its
members; that our system must protect our
rights, and upon corruption of that system, it
is up to the individuals to protect their own
rights, and those of their neighbors; that a
democratic government derives its just power
from the people, but corporations do not seek
consent to extract wealth from the people and
the Earth; and that no true democracy is
attainable when the process is determined by
economic power. We come to you at a time when
corporations, which place profit over people,
self-interest over justice, and oppression over
equality, run our governments. We have peaceably
assembled here, as is our right, to let these
facts be known. (Occupy Wall Street.mm.
9/29/11)
There followed a
list of the many abuses that the rich have
inflicted on ordinary citizens in the United
States.
No demands, no coherent program of
change, simply a list of abuses.
More than one article, however, has been
widely circulated to address the charge that the
protestors have no coherent demands or program.
One claimed that the demands boiled down to the
restoration of real democracy within the
country, as if a country dominated by the rich
for more than 200 years ever had “real
democracy.” Another writer, Kerry Picket of the
Washington Times, lifted 13 demands from one of the Occupy
Wall-Street websites.
These included providing a living wage, a
national single-payer healthcare system, a
guaranteed annual income for all citizens, a
fast-track conversion to alternative energy,
honest, accountable elections in the US, the
ending Wall-Street’s foreign wars, and
conversion of a trillion dollars in saved
war-money to education and infrastructure within
the US.
These demands are
clearly coherent and could be easily
accomplished if it were not for the global
system that obviates these possibilities through
systematic domination and exploitation of the
bottom 90% of the world by the top 10%, a
worldwide phenomenon not limited to the United
States. The
protestors indeed have the passion of an
outraged population behind them that has the
police and FBI worried, the FBI claiming on
October 4 that they will use “all necessary
means” to keep the protests from becoming
violent.
Translated into less deceptive language,
the FBI and Police throughout the country are on
alert to use the immense violence at their
disposal to protect the system of exploitation
and domination (a system of horrific structural
violence) at all costs.
Their violence is
legitimate, but any responsive violence on the
part of the poor and disenfranchised will be met
with even harsher forms of repression. In the
face of this vast system of institutionalized
violence protected by the US government with the
violence of its militarized forces of
repression, calls to protest like that of award
winning journalist Chris Hedges appear Quixotic:
There are
no excuses left. Either you join the revolt
taking place on Wall Street and in the financial
districts of other cities across the country or
you stand on the wrong side of history. Either
you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which
is civil disobedience, the plundering by the
criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated
destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the
human species, or become the passive enabler of
a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and
smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or
sink into the miasma of despair and apathy.
Either you are a rebel or a slave.
(Truthdig.org
9/30/11)
As Socrates
replies to a similar outburst in Plato’s
Crito,
such passion would indeed be admirable if it
were informed by the voice of reason and
accurate analysis of the situation. Otherwise,
it leads us nowhere or perhaps into folly.
Voices speaking from the larger perspective of
the historic class struggle, like Michael
Parenti, remind the protestors that the larger
framework in the struggle is capitalism itself:
Once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our
way to talking critically about capitalism,
another verboten word in the public realm. And
once we start a critical discourse about
capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to
act against it and defend our own democratic and
communal interests.
(readersupportednews.org. 10/3/11).
However, most of
these voices from the fantasy world of the
American left emanate from a so-called
progressive agenda that is hopelessly
anachronistic and confused.
Hints revealing their confusion pop-up
now and then in the Wall-Street discourse.
The official statement quoted above
states that
the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members.
Imagine that?
Americans cooperating with other
oppressed peoples throughout the world?
An article posted at Portside.org on
10/3/11 is entitled “The Wall-Street Protestors
and the Making of a Global Counterculture.”
Again, recognition that the capitalist system,
intertwined with the system of so-called
sovereign nation-states, is a planetary system.
The protestors
seemingly recognize that the problem is global
and requires a global solution. However, like
all good Americans (including their right-wing
counterparts) they know in their gut that
America is the key to all the world’s problems.
American exceptionalism pulses through
the veins and arteries of their so-called
progressive consciousness.
Just as the US assumes the “right” to
preemptively invade or overthrow any country
that opposes its global “national interests,” so
the US left believes that the list of demands
outlined above could by some miracle be
implemented while leaving the rest of humankind
in the same living hell dominated by a global
elite in a planetary system of exploitation and
domination.
Simply stated:
the problem is planetary and the solution must
be planetary. The left understands that
government
is a key factor in the capitalist onslaught of
the wealthy against the rest of us. They have
repeatedly pointed out that Wall-Street has
colonized our government and purchased the
loyalty of most of our elected officials.
One of the accusations on the “official
statement” above is “they have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are
responsible for regulating them.” If government
is responsible for regulating the global
investors and corporations, then what good is
“the making of a global counterculture”? A
counterculture is not democratic government but
a mere cultural force protesting the corruption
of government and governments worldwide. What we
need is good government throughout the world,
with the real democratic mandate to transform
the global system of domination and exploitation
by the rich, a system which is today also
protected by the majority of governments whom
the rich have colonized.
If
the future of the
human race requires the cooperation of its
members, then we should ask what is clearly the preeminent, most
organized, and most effective mode of human
cooperation?
Democratic government.
There will be no end to the
horrific onslaught against the people of Earth,
unless we Americans join in real solidarity with
the people of Earth to create democratic
planetary government with the global authority
to control the Wall-Streets of every corner on
Earth and bring the rule of law to the people of
Earth by ending war, ensuring planetary health
care, and protecting the well-being of the Earth
and its citizens.
The World
Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA)
has been working toward this end since 1958,
having long transcended the arrogance of
American exceptionalism and understood that
there can be no solution unless there is a
planetary solution. We are in progressive
solidarity with the people of Earth, not only
the people screwed by Wall-Street within the
United States.
World citizens from nations around the
world have created a beautiful and brilliant
Constitution for the Federation of Earth (www.worldproblems.net),
which guarantees to all people on Earth exactly
what the demands of the official Occupy
Wall-Street web site quoted above want for the
people of the US: healthcare, decent wages,
environmental protection, education for all,
peace and not endless wars, and regulation and
control of the economy in the service of
ordinary people.
It is time the
American left woke up from its fantasy world
premised on the mythology of American
exceptionalism and superiority.
It is time we all became world citizens
and took real action to address the real root of
our global problems.
There can be no solution to our lethal
problems without global democratic government
ending exploitation and guaranteeing a decent
life to all citizens of the Earth.
Glen T. Martin is professor of philosophy at Radford University in
Virginia and Secretary-General of the World
Constitution and Parliament Association.
His most recent book is “The Earth
Federation Movement – Founding a Social Contract
for the People of Earth”
(2011).
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