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"A world of pure imagination": How Occupy turned to "anarchy"
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"A world of pure imagination": How Occupy turned to "anarchy"

Source: againstausterity.org


In the closing ceremonies of London’s 2012 Summer Olympics, comedian Russell Brand, perched atop the Beatles’ "Magical Mystery Tour" bus, opened his performance by singing the first lines of "Pure Imagination" from the movie Willy Wonka:

Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of
Pure imagination
Take a look
And you’ll see
Into your imagination

We’ll begin
With a spin
Traveling in
The world of my creation
What we’ll see
Will defy
Explanation


Just over a year later, fresh off his worldwide "Messiah Complex" comedy tour, Brand would become something of a countercultural icon for a widely-seen BBC interview, followed by a series of editorials and interviews in the British and American press, including a role as guest editor of the New Stateseman, in which he wondered:

Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot. Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We’re inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?

Brand’s excoriation of the political class felt to many like a breath of fresh air. But while Brand’s humor-infused brew of Marxism, anarchism and New Age spirituality may seem like the mere rantings of a rebellious entertainer who frequently refers to himself as a "Jungian Trickster," I would argue he represents a more dangerous omen.

The Occupy Wall Street "movement" (if there ever was such a thing) – and emerging generations of young Americans more generally – is being led by Brand and other pied pipers away from practical reality and into an illusory "world of pure imagination". What in 2009 had the makings of a New Deal-oriented mass strike upsurge is being steered off course by Wall Street interests in a rehash of 1968.
Occupy: just another "Situation"

Most casual observers will remember Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as disorganized mobs of young leftists expressing their anger at the rich and powerful. What they may not recall is that the Occupy movement:

1) Came on the heels of very large, very mainstream mass movements for union rights in Wisconsin and Ohio. Compare the estimated 100,000 workers demonstrating for collective bargaining rights in the middle of February outside the Madison, WI Capitol building to the comparatively small "Tea Party" rallies of 2009 that nevertheless drew widespread media coverage and led to a massive schism in the Republican party.

2) Happened with the memory of the 2009 Wall Street bailout still fresh in the minds of the protestors.

OWS was initiated, organized, and funded in part by AdBusters, a Canadian "anti-consumerist" outfit. AdBusters, whose magazine can be found on advertising agency coffee tables the world round, was by its founders admission inspired by the Situationist International, which became known for its role in France’s 1968 student strikes that nearly brought down the decade-old regime of Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle was by most accounts an excellent leader who owed his tenure to France’s rapid industrialization and improvements in living standards – based on his "dirigisme," a variation on Hamilton and Lincoln’s "American System of Political Economy". The Situationists emerged against a backdrop of some social and economic turmoil, in which a coalition of French communists and socialists had formed to challenge the de Gaulle regime. The Situationists were mostly avant-garde artists and activists like filmmaker Guy DeBord and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (then known as "Dany le Rouge", now a German politician and member of the EU parliament), who presented themselves as the intellectual force behind the events of May 1968.

And what were the issues that engaged some 11 million French workers and students in protests, riots and spontaneous "wildcat" strikes? According to the Situationists, it was not the cost of living, unemployment or any other kitchen table issue, but abstractions like "social alienation" and "commodity fetishism." The Situationists used artistic methods known by AdBusters as "culture jamming" – the goal of which is to effect psychic dislocation between the public and modern life itself. One famous 1968 poster declared, "Beneath the paving stones: the beach!" – the idea being that a perfect primeval past had been paved over by a corrupt civilization, with a hint for activists to use actual paving stones as weapons against the police.

At their core, both the Situationists and the AdBusters networks steering OWS were anarchists. AdBusters contributor David Graeber was considered by many to have been the intellectual force behind the movement. Graeber has been employed as an academic anthropologist by Yale and the London School of Economics. His field of expertise is the study of primitive "gift societies" like those in Madagascar where he did his field work. Somehow his sojourn amongst these "noble savages," noted for their historic practices of cannibalism and black magic, qualified him to publish books and countless articles on economics, democracy, the history of debt and other subjects. In an essay for The Baffler, he summarized his political program as follows:

"At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seventies, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace."

How mass discontent against the multi-trillion dollar bailout of JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and other bankrupt financial institutions was channeled into buttressing an agenda to reduce economic production (think infrastructure, cars, food, energy, etc.) may require a conspiracy theory. Suffice it to say, Graeber was and is not alone in his outlook. As Timothy Leary succeeded in getting a certain number of anti-war protestors to "turn on, tune in and drop out," OWS leadership turned righteous indignation into irrationalism. Occupy started with tremendous political potential and became something of a middle-class laughing stock for its stated demand of "no demands." What was expected to produce political reform became instead an unwashed, "leaderless" mob camping in the park, marching across bridges to nowhere, and claiming to have "changed the conversation," a change which was sadly short-lived.

[...]

Read the full article at: againstausterity.com



READ: Russell Brand to rewrite classic fairy tales for children ’to change how they see the world’




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Tune into Red Ice Radio:

Larken Rose - Hour 1 - Violence of the State & The "Terrorists" Rebellion

Nathan Fraser - Anarchism & Sovereignty

Walter Block - Hour 1 - Libertarian Philosophy & Anarcho-capitalism

G. Edward Griffin - The Collectivist Conspiracy

Keith Preston - 21st Century Anarchism: Anarcho - Pluralism, Radical Localism & Effective Resistance

Josie the Outlaw - Anarchism: Speaking Out Against Tyranny

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