Occupy Wall Street and the cultural politics of the class struggle by Kristin Lawler

"You can learn a lot about a movement by listening to its opponents... As the movement spreads like wildfire, so does elite fear. Both concession and repression are testament to the way that formally, elite/mass power relations have been reshaped radically in just a few short months. Both signal raw movement power."

"And although there’s certainly a segment of the movement that’s agitating for the kind of Keynesian policies that would relieve the widespread stress and scarcity under which so many Americans live today and allow for a relatively comfortable life of quiet desperation, the truth is, it’s more than hard work and fair pay that the Occupy movement may ultimately be demanding."

"The OWS protests began with a critique of economic and political inequality (which has, nearly everyone now agrees, become ridiculous) and of the simple injustice (“banks got bailed out, we got sold out”) of the “99%” being made to bear the downside of the ever more highly leveraged risks taken by finance capital. But protest discourse very quickly saw the terms “unfairness” and “injustice” replaced with “austerity,” a change that explicitly links the movement with anti-austerity struggles around the world and throughout American history... Perhaps this anti-austerity history helps to explain why the “jobs and fairness” line doesn’t inspire quite the way that the more revolutionary “another world is possible” strain of movement discourse does."

"And like its predecessors a generation ago, this OWS statement rejects the elite discourse of scarcity that says there just isn’t enough for people to enjoy their beaches without oil spills, their mountains without clear-cutting, and their time without the stress of an increasingly heavy daily grind. It’s a vision of human entitlement to a good life on earth rather than a vision of a fairly paid and thus happy worker. It’s a vision of real democracy, not just a better market."

"Here then, is what movement opponents call “class warfare”—the creation of a counterculturally oriented space and the utopian vision that it inspires. An Occupation is a place where people (uselessly and inefficiently) converse, enjoy one another’s company, make their voices heard, eat food, play and listen to music, connect, engage in the experimental practice of radical democracy, and generally contribute nothing whatsoever to the production of profit."

"Mounting a lived critique of austerity— of capital’s relentless instrumentalization of time and space and of the myth of material scarcity that says it’s simply not realistic to expect from advanced industrial society the decent standard of living that it makes technologically possible with a minimum of toil— the protesters are indeed slackers. They are also class warriors, struggling against the capitalist imperative (which struck back, hard, beginning in the early 1970s) that everything and everyone be a tool for making profit and for the human one—for the freedom to constitute time on one’s own terms, for friendship and laughter and conviviality and “useless” thinking and pleasure."

"When the right attacks OWS as a bunch of countercultural slackers and as the vanguard of class warfare, they very presciently apprehend the significance of a moment in which the capitalist work ethic and the artificially perpetuated scarcity it’s predicated on are being roundly rejected. One in which the utopian demand for cultural freedom joins the labor movement’s push for a more robust share of the spoils of capitalism."