One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it … When philosophy paints its gloomy picture then a form of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.
—G. W. F. HEGEL, “PREFACE,” PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT (1820)
PROGRESSIVE INTELLECTUALS may secretly find solace in Hegel’s resigned observation that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. For it relieves philosophy of the burden of moving beyond its gloomy portrait of a form of life grown old. Yet the political event known as Occupy Wall Street may well challenge this accepted wisdom, accompanied from the beginning as it was by a healthy serving of radical political theory and coddled through its brief infancy with constant advice and analysis by theoreticians on the left both internally and externally. For once, the owl of Minerva was flying at dawn. Occupy may well be one of the most theoretical movements in historical memory, as well-known theorists from Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and Cornel West to the New Age maven Deepak Chopra came to speak to the band of occupiers that had almost overnight captivated the political imagination of the globe.1
That theorists flocked to Occupy Wall Street as an embodiment of their critiques of contemporary society reflects that Occupy is itself involved its own unique mode of practical theory production rather than merely illustrating or exemplifying what has already been demonstrated in theory. Occupy responds in important ways to the theoretical and practical dilemmas of neoliberal societies, which we have discussed in the previous chapters, and does important work in translating these dilemmas into politically actionable terms. In this sense, Occupy illustrates and produces the contours of a practical critique of neoliberal reification and, ultimately, of a political economy of the senses.
Taking the world by storm in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street began in the midst of a political ferment that arose in the wake of intense democratic uprisings across the globe. Though seemingly spontaneous, the movement was influenced by the outpouring of democratic action that had immediately preceded it. In 2010 and 2011 the popular protests of the Arab Spring had erupted throughout North Africa and the Middle East, bringing new modes of protest into the political imaginary. Shortly thereafter, protesters brought unrest to the Wisconsin capital and the UW Madison campus, protesting the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill. The bill was an example of neoliberalization par excellence; it limited collective bargaining rights for state employees and made deep cuts to the state budget in the areas of health care, retirement benefits, and compensation for government workers. Further uprisings in Latin America, Spain, Asia, Africa, Israel, and Europe followed suit, and, using now ubiquitous smartphone and social network technologies, the protesters of these diverse movements maintained global communications and connections. On July 13 the leftist, anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters issued a call to action:
#OCCUPY WALL STREET
Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?
On Sept. 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.2
On that day more than one thousand protesters gathered to protest Wall Street. Zuccotti Park, which stood between the former World Trade Center site and Wall Street, became the site of an occupation, with about three hundred people settling in the space to sleep. More would gather eventually to live there and to deliberate, as occupations spread throughout the country and the world, embodying a twenty-first-century version of an Athenian democratic agon built upon the most prominent symbol of American capitalism.
Occupy has become an important example of an innovative political struggle that challenges familiar paradigms in contemporary political theory and practice and calls forth and produces its own new conceptual frameworks for understanding its politics. In this chapter I will argue that the Occupy movement is engaged in a struggle against neoliberal reification in the following ways:
1. The Occupy movement tackles the two axes of neoliberal depoliticization delineated in chapter 3: the rigidification of political forms and the bracketing of the political from the economic. Occupy uses strategies that challenge the rigidification of politics by making use of local grassroots structures that challenge not only statist forms of democracy but also vanguardist political forms. Equally important, Occupy has also pushed back against the bracketing of the political that characterizes neoliberal polities through actions that have emphasized the political economic facets of neoliberal domination, focusing on issues of housing foreclosure, debt relief, and cultural production around promoting economic awareness of the ways in which capital pervades politics and political experience. From its inception the Occupy movement worked along both axes, putting forth practices of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. Occupy thus exemplifies a movement that pushes beyond the theoretical and practical impasses generated by a stratified distinction between the economy and politics, which, as I argued in chapter 1, reproduces rather than challenges key dimensions of neoliberal domination.
2. Occupy engages with the criteria of dereified praxis that I derived from Lukács’s work on reification. First, Occupy’s politics is a struggle that seeks to connect the isolated perspectives of social actors with a perspective on the totality of capitalist relations without, however, essentializing or substantializing the perspective of totality. Second, Occupy issues a critique of neoliberal formalism and dissociation. And third, Occupy directly challenges what I termed, in chapter 4, the closed system of capitalism.
3. Occupy makes use of strategies resembling the defetishizing fetish that I distilled from Adorno’s aesthetic theory in chapters 5 and 6, a strategy especially suited to challenging the neoliberal forms of subjectivity that many theorists have referred to as homo oeconomicus. I suggested that the defetishizing fetish is a strategy that is particularly useful in the context of the ambivalence of neoliberal political subjectivity, as subjects grapple with conflicting and parallel subjective positions in relation to the economy. The notion of the defetishizing fetish is a kind of theoretical and practical Trojan horse, which inhabits the interstitial space between the contradictory and parallel subject positions characteristic of postindustrial neoliberal societies.
I will highlight the ways in which Occupy’s politics crosscuts the impasse between economics and politics that has proven debilitating to progressive political theory in recent decades, as debates between post-Marxist radical democrats and neo-Marxists have polarized theories of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. Although I categorize various aspects of Occupy’s politics into actions that either challenge the rigidification of politics or the bracketing of the political from the economic, I show that ultimately Occupy’s political strategies begin to unsettle the very distinction between the two forms of neoliberal depoliticization. To be clear, my intention is not to reduce Occupy to a conceptual framework. Indeed, the movement is an extremely complex and diverse formation, comprised of competing goals and fragments that cannot be subsumed under any one conceptual schema. However, the debate between radical democracy and the critique of political economy was one that ran through the movement itself. Rather than imposing a framework of interpretation upon the Occupy movement, I hope to show that Occupy contributed a novel response to the debates I’ve been exploring in its practices.
RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
First I discuss the radical democratic components of Occupy, focusing on the ways in which the movement self-consciously enacted grassroots forms of democracy that were radically participatory in nature, eschewing hierarchical political forms or stratified institutional designs. Three crucial innovations stand out as Occupy’s contribution to a radical democratic politics: the General Assemblies and their unique forms of decision making and deliberation; the now famous founding meme of the movement, “We are the 99%”; and the movement-building process that Occupy followed in its early stages.
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLIES
Occupy’s general assemblies were radically open to broad participation and notoriously chaotic in the types of communication that prevailed within them. It was clear that the Occupy movement, nationally and worldwide, sought a way of doing politics that challenged the existing statist forms of politics and, within the U.S., resisted the gravitational pull to the center of the American electoral system.3
Occupy’s use of direct council democracy was key to their performative rejection of the form of depoliticization that I called the rigidification of the political. In general, most commentators on the movement have emphasized this radical democratic dimension of Occupy’s politics. They have, as such, referred to Occupy as a fundamentally anarchist movement for its emphasis on direct action and for its rejection of existing institutional forms of politics and decision making. As anthropologist and Occupy activist David Graeber underscores, Occupy is not merely a protest movement but a direct action movement. “Protest, however militant, is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action, whether it’s a matter of a community building a well or making salt in defiance of the law (Gandhi’s example again), trying to shut down a meeting or occupy a factory, is a matter of acting as if the existing structure of power does not even exist. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”4 The participatory structures of the Occupy movement, in New York City as well as throughout the United States and beyond, emphasized consensus-based forms of decision making that were intended to resist internal hierarchy. There were no leaders of the movement, at least in a formal sense, and forms of deliberation and decision making operated through consensus rather than through majoritarian principles.
The General Assemblies were, moreover, a form of direct democracy in that they were spaces in which participants spoke directly and out loud with one another as decisions were being deliberated. Responding to the demands of speaking outside in the occupation site of Zuccotti Park, participants made use of the device of the “people’s mic,” where participants echo the words spoken aloud during deliberation to amplify speech so that all can hear without the aid of logistically challenging technologies. While the larger assemblies made use of facilitators to moderate the flow of communication, even in these contexts all members present were engaged in constant communication with one another through the use of an elaborate set of hand symbols, inherited from prior democratic traditions, most notably from Quaker practices. The hand symbols allowed participants to silently but effectively communicate when they wanted more clarity on an issue, when they agreed or disagreed, or when they wanted to raise a procedural point of order.
The emphasis on consensus-based decision making has generated criticism from the institutional left, the mainstream media, and other sources who decried the movement’s lack of structure and of its emphasis on concrete demands. Indeed, many have posed the question of how a movement can issue demands if any individual present at one of its General Assembly meetings can issue a “block,” a veto of sorts, to any proposal under discussion. Many have criticized Occupy as being process oriented to a fault. Moreover, from both inside and outside the movement the issue of exclusion and diversity became crucial, with many participants criticizing the way in which the movement reproduced class and racial hierarchies uncritically.5
Graeber, emphasizing the radical democratic dimensions of Occupy, underscores that the question of Occupy’s forms of decision making cannot be reduced to an issue of institutional design or to any other instrumental question. According to him, consensus is based on a set of principles that are at the heart of Occupy’s democratic politics. “I’ll say it again. Consensus is not a set of rules. It’s a set of principles. Actually I’d even go so far to say that if you really boil it down, it ultimately comes down to just two principles: everyone should have equal say (call this “equality”), and nobody should be compelled to do anything they really don’t want to do (call this, “freedom”).”6
The emphasis on consensus creates a radical fluidity in the structure of the movement. It anchors a commitment to a dissensual politics within the institutions of deliberation. Finally, it bespeaks a commitment to a radically noninstrumental politics. Graeber, among others, argues that this commitment to a noninstrumental politics distinguishes Occupy from traditional Marxist politics, which historically advocated the seizure of state power as the means to the political transformation of society, and demonstrates the anarchist nature of the Occupy movement. “It’s not just that the ends do not justify the means (though they don’t), you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. Hence the famous anarchist call to begin ‘building the new society in the shell of the old’ with egalitarian experiments ranging from free schools to radical labour unions to rural communes.”7 Following Graeber, one might argue that Occupy’s politics could fully well be described by the post-Marxist autonomy of the political paradigm that I critiqued in chapter 1. Basing their politics on principles of consensus and by the living axiom of equality in which every individual is in principle included, whether homeless, middle class, black, brown, or white, seems to bear a great resemblance to Rancière’s democratic politics of dissensus, which I discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, Rancière himself claims Occupy as an illustration of his conception of radical democratic politics in an interview in 2012:
These movements [Occupy and the 15-M movement] respond undoubtedly to the most fundamental idea of politics: that of the power possessed by those to whom no particular motive determines that they should exercise power, that of the manifestation of an ability which is that of any one. And they have materialized this power in a way that also conforms to this fundamental idea: by affirming this power of the people through a subversion of the normal distribution of spaces: normally there exist spaces, such as the street, destined for the circulation of individuals and goods, and public spaces, such as parliaments or ministries, destined for public life and the treatment of common affairs. Politics is always manifested through a distortion of this logic.8
I would suggest that the autonomy of the political paradigm well grasps the dimensions of Occupy’s politics that have been concerned with what I described as the rigidification of the political. Challenging the legitimacy of existing electoral and political institutions, Occupy’s emphasis on direct action and consensus-based political forms that are radically revisable, fluid, and noninstrumental challenges a crucial dimension of neoliberal depoliticization that post-Marxists have done well to emphasize. However, as I will stress later in this chapter, an exclusive emphasis on the radical democratic aspects of the movement fails to grasp the innovative ways in which Occupy has synthesized a radical democratic politics with an experientially focused critique of political economy. It also has the tendency of foregrounding a moralistic approach to neoliberal injustices by taking the political purely on its own terms. To be clear, Rancière’s theory foregrounds dissensus and the naming of a wrong as the key to a democratic politics, so I am not putting this forth as an application of his version of radical democracy. However, foregrounding radical democracy as opposed to the critique of political economy in the case of Occupy has the effect of treating systemic forms of domination in capitalism as somehow emanating from contingent forms of corruption and greed, which does not challenge the neoliberal displacement of the relationship between economics and politics that I have been foregrounding in this book. As Dean argues in a similar vein, the moralization of neoliberal injustices rather than focusing on a critique of the structural injustices of capital “occludes division as it remains stuck in a depoliticizing liberal formula of ethics and economics. Rather than acknowledging the failure of the capitalist system, the contemporary collapse of its neoliberal form, and the contradictions that are demolishing capitalism from within … moralization proceeds as if a couple of bad apples … let their greed get out of control.”9 Thus, while radical democracy is central to the Occupy movement, it cannot be considered in abstraction from the broader context of a critique of political economy without sacrificing the crucial ways in which Occupy challenges neoliberalism at a discursive and practical level.
“WE ARE THE 99%”
If future generations remember nothing else from Occupy, it may well be the now famous meme that initiated the movement, “We are the 99%.” Orienting around this new articulation of the demos, Occupy began with a political articulation that simultaneously marked the economic as the primary terrain of struggle in neoliberalism. The 99% meme beautifully illustrates what Rancière has termed the operation of “declassing,” which he argues is central to democratic politics. Declassing is the means by which a new political subject comes into being by turning a merely sociological form of classification into a political one. The sociological distinction between the economic elite and the economically disadvantaged is rendered political through the universalization of class struggle and the axiomatic declaration of equality. We are all the 99%. And this designation is capacious enough to include individuals from across the political spectrum, including traditional leftists, the middle class, immigrants, homeless people, and racial and sexual minorities. As Joe Lowndes and Dorian Warren have argued, the empty signifier of the 99% “allows a diverse array of people to attach to it their own grievances, and participate in their own way. This opens up the possibility for groups excluded from prior notions of populist majoritarianism—blacks, Latinos, LGBT folks, and women—to insist on full inclusion and direct participation.”10
But even with respect to this slogan, which perhaps expresses Occupy at its most radically democratic, I would argue that “We are the 99%” is also important in the unique way in which it figures the relationship between the economy and politics in neoliberalism. The 99% meme delineates the economy not as a bounded sphere of society among others but as the basic structural principle of American society. By claiming that we are the 99%, as opposed to the 1%—the economic elite who reap the benefits of the crises of capitalism while wealth is unjustly redistributed upward—the economic is no longer conceived as something separate from the political. In neoliberalism, so suggests Occupy, the economy frames political experience on many levels beyond the apparently economic realm.
Moreover, the specific way in which Occupy articulated the 99% in its early stages exemplifies an experientially oriented critique of political economy—a political economy of the senses. In the early days of the movement, thousands of participants from all walks of life posted, and continue to post, their stories on a Tumblr site entitled, “We are the 99%.” The site includes photographs and statements from thousands of people, in multiple languages, detailing their specific experiences of economic life in the post-bailout context.11 Some include specific stories of job loss, housing foreclosure, or bankruptcy caused by illness. Others merely express sadness or outrage. Many of the statements end by declaring, “I am the 99%” or “We are the 99%”. A middle-aged man, photographed standing outside on the street writes, “I am here for everybody, or rather the 99% that have been taken advantage of for so many years. Things are so much worse than 20 or even 30 years ago. Everything goes up except wages, and workers are expected to do so much more for less. I am the 99%.” A statement in Spanish, held in front of the face of a woman, reads “Somos ese de 99% de la población, que no estamos viendo sus suenos realizarse gracias a ese 1 porciento de las mismas que a mucho malos manejos de nuestra economía. Tenemos un futuro insierto para nuestras generaciónes.” Another reads: “I am a broke-a$$ college student. I am the 99%.” And the stories go on.
The public sharing of specific experiences of economic hardship and frustration are a crucial dimension of how Occupy has sought to politicize the economy. Yet it’s important to note that these stories are not primarily, I would suggest, part of a politics of recognition, as put forth by Honneth among others. Perhaps standing on their own, such modes of storytelling and personal narrative could be taken as an expression of disrespect, in the way that Honneth foregrounds in his work on recognition. And, indeed, this dimension of the 99% Tumblr should not be neglected. But the expression of disrespect here is part of a broader politics of connecting disrespect and economic domination to the level of structural injustice. The 99% Tumblr does not, I would suggest, express an identity that is to be recognized, but rather is part of a larger articulation of a structural critique of capital through the radical particularity of each contributor’s experience.
AGAINST THE BRACKETING OF THE POLITICAL FROM THE ECONOMIC
Therefore even the aspects of the movement that many have described in anarchist or radical democratic terms, I would suggest, already invoke aspects of a new kind of critique of political economy. In addition to the radical democratic politics of challenging the rigidification of politics, the Occupy movement was equally involved in challenging what I called, in chapter 1, the bracketing of the political from the economic. One misses a crucial aspect of Occupy’s politics by focusing exclusively on their unique forms of deliberation and on their emphasis on the autonomy of the political.12 In deeply practical ways, Occupy has crosscut distinctions between post-Marxist autonomist approaches and Marxist critiques of political economy that have polarized political theories of the left in recent years. I will highlight in particular the ways in which Occupy has put forth a practical, experiential critique of political economy that articulates a concrete rather than formalistic approach to the dilemmas of neoliberal subjectivity and citizenship. While Occupy has been involved with many actions that focused on targeting economic inequality, I will highlight two: actions taken toward striking debt and the politicization of so-called public-private spaces.
In November of 2012 an offshoot of the Occupy movement initiated an action called the Rolling Jubilee. The plan was to use money obtained from donations to buy distressed consumer debt from lenders at a deeply discounted price, just as debt collection agencies do. However, instead of tracking down the debtors and demanding that they pay, the plan was to simply cancel the debts. The debtors would owe nothing in return; however, the movement voiced hope that individuals who benefited from the measure might contribute to the Rolling Jubilee Fund in the future, thus helping future generations of debtors escape the crushing burden of debt.
The Rolling Jubilee illustrates several aspects of what I conceptualized earlier in the book as a struggle against neoliberal reification. At the most general level, the Rolling Jubilee exemplifies a protest against the bracketing of the political from the economic. It makes a clear statement that the massive debt that so many Americans face in the contemporary economic climate is not merely an issue of personal responsibility; it is a structural issue that manifests the limits of what we have taken to be political in the context of neoliberalization. Debt cannot be challenged merely by actions that view the political as somehow autonomous from the economic. Rather, making debt the object of political struggle involves challenging the boundary between economics and politics that predominates in neoliberalism.
Moreover, the Rolling Jubilee politicizes key aspects of neoliberal subjectivity. The entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism, homo oeconomicus, produced by the phenomena of deregulation, privatization, and primitive accumulation of the commons, is made to feel solely responsible for her own economic welfare, as the state rolls back even the minutest protections against citizen’s economic distress. As Foster and Magdoff emphasize in The Great Financial Crisis, in the context of the inherent stagnation tendency of monopoly capitalism, debt and financialization becomes a means for stimulating growth. Thus we witness an explosion of public and private sector debt in the last two decades as a counterweight to stagnation. The point here is that debt becomes structurally motivated in monopoly finance capitalism.13 Debt becomes a means of stimulating a stagnant economy, but it does so at the cost of creating precarity, inequality, and subjection on the part of the financially disadvantaged.14 As Foster and Magdoff argue, “The huge expansion of debt and speculation provide [sic] ways to extract more surplus from the general population and are, thus, part of capital’s exploitation of workers and the lower middle class.”15 The neoliberal subject is therefore not only homo oeconomicus, “an entrepreneur of the self,” who sees herself as fundamentally competitive and rational, and views her own value in terms of “human capital.” The neoliberal subject is also “the indebted man,” to use Lazzarato’s term, the precarious and vulnerable underbelly of the entrepreneurial subject. The indebted (hu)man internalizes the risks and costs that the neoliberal state has externalized onto civil society.16 Individuals must manage their own employability, debts, drops in wages and income, and bear the effects of the curtailment of public services. Most important, debt becomes moralized—it becomes a means of motivation for further work toward self-improvement.17 We could see the immense amount of economic self-help discourse in this light as well as the need for more and more techniques to care for the self in a climate of increasing risk and precarity.18
The Rolling Jubilee protests against the excessive responsibility that the neoliberal subject feels for his economic welfare and renders what appears to be an individual issue to be instead a structural issue perpetuated by the state’s desire to evade responsibility for the distributional consequences of their policies in a period of low growth.19 Activist and economic writer Charles Eisenstein highlights the ways in which the Rolling Jubilee challenges key aspects of the moral regime that anchors the legitimacy of debt in contemporary society. He writes,
Two pillars uphold the present debt regime: the moral legitimacy of debt in society’s eyes, i.e., the idea that a person “should” pay back what he owes; and the coercive mechanisms that enforce repayment, such as harassment, seizure of assets, garnishment of wages, denial of employment or housing, and even imprisonment. The Rolling Jubilee erodes both. It destigmatises debt by saying, “we’re all in this together, we believe your situation is unfair, not shameful, so we’re going to help you out.”20
By making individualized debt an issue of social responsibility, and by challenging the stigma of debt, the Rolling Jubilee challenges one of the most salient and depoliticizing dimensions of neoliberal subjectivity, by protesting against the statist and corporate production of homo oeconomicus.
As Graeber underscores in his work Debt: The First 5,000 Years, our society’s association of debt repayment with morality is based on blindness to the fact that the debt relations that permeate contemporary society are rooted in a history of violence and domination.21 Debt and money, Graeber shows, are themselves social creations and not unalterable facts of nature. A manual written by Operation Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, similarly critiques the fetishization of individual responsibility. They write,
Everyone seems to owe something, and most of us (including our cities) are in so deep it’ll be years before we have any chance of getting out—if we have any chance at all. At least one in seven of us is already being pursued by debt collectors. We are told all of this is our own fault, that we got ourselves into this and that we should feel guilty or ashamed. But think about the numbers: 76% of Americans are debtors. How is it possible that three-quarters of us could all have just somehow failed to figure out how to properly manage our money, all at the same time?22
The Rolling Jubilee practically enacts the critique of debt to be a form of domination as opposed to a matter of personal responsibility.
Finally, the usage of so-called public-private space as the site of the original Occupy Wall Street encampment brought attention to the way in which neoliberalism hollows out the public sphere, yet obscures the economic conditions of possibility of this process. In this respect Occupy was challenging the bracketing of the economy from the political by means of an aesthetic politics of dissensus. Zuccotti Park, the site of the original occupation, is not a typical public park but rather falls into a gray zone between public and private property. The park is owned by a private company, Brookfield Properties, which, in the days and weeks following the original settlement, made many attempts to evict the protestors in concert with the police. The repeated attempts to evict the protestors made evident to all that the space did not carry with it the protections of free speech that public property does.23 The existence of public-private spaces is the result of a zoning concession in New York City that allows real estate developers to evade certain building restrictions in exchange for setting aside a space that is nominally “public.” There are over five hundred such spaces in New York City alone. On the other hand, the protesters were also exploiting the loophole of the public-private space to remain there, as the police claimed they did not have the authority to evict them in the early days of the encampment.
Making visible the existence of public-private spaces revealed the ways in which neoliberalism entails the silent corrosion of the public sphere through corporate entitlements. Yet, by naming these spaces “public,” the very economic conditions of possibility for this corrosion are obscured. The public in this case is revealed to be a fetish, until political actors actually use or are prohibited from using the space for democratic ends. The occupation of public or public-private spaces by the Occupy movement, I suggest, referring back to Lukács’s criteria of dereified praxis, exemplifies a practice of totality thinking. As Kevin Floyd argues, “practices of totality thinking critique capital’s systemic, privatizing fragmentation of social production especially and social life more generally.”24 The key to a dereified understanding of totality, however, is not to reduce all distinctions, such as that of public and private, to capital, for that would be reductive. Rather, a dereified approach to totality involves an aspiration toward totality. In this case, positioning the sites of occupation in the liminal space between public and private, which allowed them to function simultaneously as sites of democratic agonism as well as sites of militant, divisive revolutionary struggle, exemplified the aspiration toward totality that called into question what Floyd terms “the epistemological fetishization of difference” that characterizes the split between public and private in neoliberalism.25
ROLLING JUBILEE AS A DEFETISHIZING FETISH: POLITICIZING HOMO OECONOMICUS
In chapter 6 I looked at the work of contemporary political artists engaged in putting forth artistic critiques of capital. A characteristic that the works of Claire Fontaine, Mika Rottenberg, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg shared was the strategy of the defetishizing fetish. These works played with the ambivalent political subjectivities characteristic of neoliberalism by using strategies that recognize the diverse and internally complex positions of subjects in relation to capital. They operate by magnifying the experience of the incommensurable and plural positions subjects are bound to occupy in neoliberal society. This is an apt aesthetic and political strategy in neoliberal society given that neoliberal subjectivity occupies a complex position in relation to capitalist accumulation. There is no single definition one might offer to theorize the neoliberal subject in a universalizing way.
In the context of postindustrial economies of the West, however, we could minimally describe the complexity of neoliberal political subjectivity as producing forms of political and normative ambivalence, as I explored in chapter 1. Unlike Lukács’s proletariat, who is unified through a common source of oppression in capitalist society, the neoliberal political subject is, at best, inescapably ambivalent. Relatedly, there is no single vantage point one could take in relation to neoliberal capital that leads to the creation of a collective subject. This is in part because a key aspect of the reproduction of neoliberal capital has been through the proliferation of identity positions, including racial, sexual, and class positions, that complicate an individual’s relationships to capital. For example, Warren has studied the emergent ideological differences among African Americans in Chicago regarding the megaretailer Walmart’s bid for expansion into the city. Some African Americans opposed the expansion on grounds of social justice, labor rights, and the detrimental proliferation of low-wage precarious jobs. Yet an almost equal number welcomed Walmart because it created jobs, low wage or not, and provided more retail options in an underdeveloped inner-city zone. Warren shows that the fragmentation of the economic interests of urban blacks is complex and multifaceted in light of the paradoxical logics that characterize neoliberal economic policies.26 These paradoxical logics create normative and political ambivalence for subjects.
In the face of such ambivalence, the strategy of the defetishizing fetish is a political strategy that allows individuals to experience the incommensurability, contradiction, and tension that characterizes neoliberal society. It is a strategy that grasps the complexity of a society in which, for example, a majority of the middle class bears great amounts of debt and yet also possesses retirement accounts that are dependent upon the stock market and the financial success of corporations.
The Rolling Jubilee initiative possesses characteristics of the defetishizing fetish strategy. Interestingly, the Rolling Jubilee is not articulated primarily in terms of a structural critique of capital. Rather, the initiative appears on its face to be based on liberal principles of fairness, liberty, and equality. As Eisenstein notes, “The Rolling Jubilee says, non-threateningly, ‘We just want to help people in this unfair system.’” By buying back debt one person at a time, the Jubilee appears to enshrine liberal individualism. One could even go so far as to say that the Jubilee appears to be a form of charitable action rather than of politics.
Yet this fetish of the individual is actually belied by the strategy of buying debt back from banks. The practice of buying back debt at a fraction of its value mimics the practice of predatory debt collection agencies, which profit off of individual’s economic hardship in the context of the structural crisis of the U.S. housing market. But, rather than exploiting those in debt, the Rolling Jubilee instead reveals the socially constructed and structural nature of debt itself. Those involved with the movement refer to this strategy of buying people’s debt back at discounted prices as “The People’s Bailout.” At the moment of publication, the Rolling Jubilee has raised $701,317 to abolish $18,591,435.98 of debt.27 While this number may not seem economically significant on a societal level, my claim is not that the Jubilee is actually making an empirically significant dent in the vast amounts of debt that citizens bear. Instead, I am arguing that the Jubilee invokes a political and theoretical strategy that politicizes neoliberal economic structures exerting domination through both structural and subjective means. The Jubilee, as a defetishizing fetish, is therefore politicizing the subjectivity of homo oeconomicus in innovative ways.
Of course, one could argue that it would be more radical to protest the paying of debt altogether rather than paying back debt and thereby helping the large banks and corporations who have engaged in predatory lending. Yet resisting the payback of debt altogether doesn’t perform the work of immanent critique achieved by the Rolling Jubilee. It is precisely by buying into the liberal notion of responsibility for debt and then imploding that notion from the inside that the Jubilee derives its critical force. The strategy of buying back the debt of average citizens manifests the duplicity of an economic system in which the response of monetary and fiscal authorities to financial crises has been to bail out creditors, but never debtors. As demonstrated by the government bank bailout of 2008, the government has been more than willing to buy faulty loans from the private sector and thereby essentially create a tremendous distribution of wealth upward by turning a banking crisis into a national budgetary crisis. The Rolling Jubilee, by mimicking the predatory strategies of collection agencies as well as the techniques used by the government to bail out large banks, thus employs the strategy of the defetishizing fetish to provoke a radical critique of the structural obfuscation of debt in contemporary society.
Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach remains the most urgent task for a contemporary critical theory of society: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”28 Yet as long as the theory-praxis split that Marx denounces in that text is addressed only at the conceptual and cognitive levels, critical theory cedes its tools for social transformation and hermetically seals critique off from the society from which it arises. The answer, to my mind, is not to abandon theory but to materialize critique. Theory lives within praxis. The more that we as critical theorists can fluidly attune our approaches to the movements of praxis in its various forms, the more capacity we will gain to create forms of theory that are dereifying, which, after all, has always been the goal. This will entail the development of new kinds of critical faculties that allow for a more sensuous, embodied, and concrete engagement with the material of critique. In this book I hope to have cleared the ground for such an inquiry.