Verbatim Mac

***NEG***

1nc

There is a gap between theory and praxis that only the Marxist telos can reconcile – criticisms of our strategic essentialism are depoliticizing because our science of history is the only way to push it forward. Only a politics that endorses violent class conflict can awaken the masses and give them the theoretical tools of their own liberation. Anything else keeps us stuck playing language games.

Tumino ‘01 (Stephen Tumino, Really Hardcore Marxist, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before”, Red Critique vol. 1, wcp)

Without Revolutionary Theory There Can Be No Revolutionary Movement Orthodox Marxism has become a test-case of the "radical" today. Yet, what passes for orthodoxy on the left—whether like Smith and Zizek they claim to support it, or, like Butler and Rorty they want to "achieve our country" by excluding it from "U.S. Intellectual life" ("On Left Conservatism"), is a parody of orthodoxy which hybridizes its central concepts and renders them into flexodox simulations. Yet, even in its very textuality, however, the orthodox is a resistance to the flexodox. Contrary to the common-sensical view of "orthodox" as "traditional" or "conformist" "opinions," is its other meaning: orthodoxy not as flexodox "hybridity," but as "original" "ideas." "Original," not in the sense of epistemic "event," "authorial" originality and so forth, but, as in chemistry, in its opposition to "para," "meta," "post" and other ludic hybridities: thus "ortho" as resistance to the annotations that mystify the original ideas of Marxism and hybridize it for the "special interests" of various groups. The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from their effect as "demystification" of ideology—for example the deployment of "class" that allows a demystification of daily life from the haze of consumption. Class is thus an "original idea" of Marxism in the sense that it cuts through the hype of cultural agency under capitalism and reveals how culture and consumption are tied to labor, the everyday determined by the workday: how the amount of time workers spend engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount of time they get for reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without changing this division of labor social change is impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the resistance to orthodoxy as "rigid" and "dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the other, its hybridization by the flexodox as the result of which it has become almost impossible today to read the original ideas of Marxism, such as "exploitation"; "surplus-value"; "class"; "class antagonism"; "class struggle"; "revolution"; "science" (i.e., objective knowledge); "ideology" (as "false consciousness"). Yet, it is these ideas alone that clarify the elemental truths through which theory ceases to be a gray activism of tropes, desire and affect, and becomes, instead, a red, revolutionary guide to praxis for a new society freed from exploitation and injustice. Marx's original scientific discovery was his labor theory of value. Marx's labor theory of value is an elemental truth of Orthodox Marxism that is rejected by the flexodox left as the central dogmatism of a "totalitarian" Marxism. It is only Marx's labor theory of value, however, that exposes the mystification of the wages system that disguises exploitation as a "fair exchange" between capital and labor and reveals the truth about this relation as one of exploitation. Only Orthodox Marxism explains how what the workers sell to the capitalist is not labor, a commodity like any other whose price is determined by fluctuations in supply and demand, but their labor-power—their ability to labor in a system which has systematically "freed" them from the means of production so they are forced to work or starve—whose value is determined by the amount of time socially necessary to reproduce it daily. The value of labor-power is equivalent to the value of wages workers consume daily in the form of commodities that keep them alive to be exploited tomorrow. Given the technical composition of production today this amount of time is a slight fraction of the workday the majority of which workers spend producing surplus-value over and above their needs. The surplus-value is what is pocketed by the capitalists in the form of profit when the commodities are sold. Class is the antagonistic division thus established between the exploited and their exploiters. Without Marx's labor theory of value one could only contest the after effects of this outright theft of social labor-power rather than its cause lying in the private ownership of production. The flexodox rejection of the labor theory of value as the "dogmatic" core of a totalitarian Marxism therefore is a not so subtle rejection of the principled defense of the (scientific) knowledge workers need for their emancipation from exploitation because only the labor theory of value exposes the opportunism of knowledges (ideology) that occult this exploitation. Without the labor theory of value socialism would only be a moral dogma that appeals to the sentiments of "fairness" and "equality" for a "just" distribution of the social wealth that does the work of capital by naturalizing the exploitation of labor under capitalism giving it an acceptable "human face." It is only Orthodox Marxism that explains socialism as an historical inevitability that is tied to the development of social production itself and its requirements. Orthodox Marxism makes socialism scientific because it explains how in the capitalist system, based on the private consumption of labor-power (competition), the objective tendency is to reduce the amount of time labor spends in reproducing itself (necessary labor) while expanding the amount of time labor is engaged in producing surplus-value (surplus-labor) for the capitalist through the introduction of machinery into the production process by the capitalists themselves to lower their own labor costs. Because of the competitive drive for profits under capitalism it is historically inevitable that a point is reached when the technical mastery—the amount of time socially necessary on average to meet the needs of society through the processing of natural resources—is such that the conditions of the workers worsen relative to the owners and becomes an unbearable global social contradiction in the midst of the ever greater mass of wealth produced. It is therefore just as inevitable that at such a moment it obviously makes more sense to socialize production and meet the needs of all to avoid the explosive social conflicts perpetually generated by private property than to maintain the system at the risk of total social collapse on a world scale. "Socialism or barbarism" (Luxemburg) is the inevitable choice faced by humanity because of capitalism. Either maintain private property and the exploitation of labor in production, in which case more and more social resources will go into policing the growingly desperate surplus-population generated by the technical efficiency of social production, or socialize production and inaugurate a society whose founding principle is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Selected Works, 325) and "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works, 53). The time has come to state it clearly so that even the flexodox opportunists may grasp it: Orthodox Marxism is not a free-floating "language-game" or "meta-narrative" for arbitrarily constructing local utopian communities or spectral activist inversions of ideology meant to seduce "desire" and "mobilize" (glorify) subjectivity—it is an absolute prerequisite for our emancipation from exploitation and a new society freed from necessity! Orthodox Marxism is the only global theory of social change. Only Orthodox Marxism has explained why under the system of wage-labor and capital communism is not "an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself" but "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (The German Ideology 57) because of its objective explanation of and ceaseless commitment to "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works, 45) to end social inequality forever.

Their questioning is anti-political and creates philosophy as a tautological and self-referential project instead of one that has an active role in political life.

Buck-Morss ’13 (Susan Buck-Morss, Professor of Political Science @ CUNY Graduate Center and Professor Emeritus at Cornell, “A Commonist Ethics”, The Idea of Communism vol 2, ed. by Slavoj Zizek, pg. 57 – 61, wcp)
The first point: politics is not an ontology. The claim that the political is always ontological needs to be challenged.' It is not merely that the negative is the case - that the political is never ontological (as Badiou points out, a simple negation leaves everything in place). Instead, what is called for is a reversal of the negation: the ontological is never political. It follows that the move from la politique (everyday politics) to le politique (the very meaning of the political) is a one-way street. With all due respect to Marcel Gauchet, Chantal Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben, and a whole slew of others, the attempt to discover within empirical political life (la politique) the ontological essence of the political (le politique) leads theory into a dead end from which there is no return to actual, political practice. There is nothing gained by this move from the feminine to the masculine form. The post-metaphysical project of discovering ontological truth within lived existence fails politically. It fails in the socially disengaged Husserlian-Heideggerian mode of bracketing the existential to discover the essential nature of what 'the political' is. And it fails in the socially critical, post-Foucauldian mode of historicized ontology, disclosing the multiple ways of political being-in-the-world within particular cultural and temporal configurations. This is not news. From the mid 1930s it was Adorno's obsessive concern, in the context of the rise of fascism, to demonstrate the failure of the onto­logical attempt to ground a philosophy of Being by starting from the given world - or, in Heideggerian language, to move from the ontic, that is, being (seind) in the sense of that which is empirically given, to the ontological, that which is essentially true of existence (Dasein as the 'a priori structure' of 'existentiality'4). Adorno argued that any ontology derived (or reduced) from the ontic turns the philosophical project into one big tautology.6 He has a point, and the political implications are serious. Ontology identifies. Identity was anathema to Adorno, and nowhere more so than in its political implications - the identity between ruler and ruled that fascism affirmed. Indeed, even parliamentary rule can be seen to presuppose a striving for identity, whereby consensus becomes an end in itself regardless of the truth content of that consensus.7 It is not that Heidegger's philosophy (or any existential ontology) is in itself fascist (that would be an ontological claim). Rather, by a resolution of the question of Being before subsequent political analyses, the latter have no philosophical traction. They are subsumed under the ontological a prior is that themselves must remain indifferent to their content.8 Existential ontology is mistaken in assuming that, once 'the character of being' (Heidegger) is conceptually grasped, it will return us to the material, empirical world and allow us to gather its diversities and multiplicities under philosophy's own pre-understandings in ways adequate to the exigencies of collective action, the demands of actual political life. In fact, the ontological is never political. A communist (or communist) ontology is a contradiction in terms. But, you may ask, did not Marx himself outline in his early writings a full ontology based on the classical, Aristotelian claim that man is by nature a social animal? Are not the 1844 manuscripts an elaboration of that claim, mediated by a historically specific critique, hence an extended social ontology of man's alienation from nature (including his own) and from his fellow man? Yes, but in actual, political life, this ontological ‘man’ does not exist. Instead, we existing creatures are men and women, black and brown, capitalists and workers, gay and straight, and the meaning· of these categories of being is in no way stable. Moreover, these differences matter less than whether we are unemployed, have prison records, or are in danger of being deported. And no matter what we are in these ontic ways, our beings do not fit neatly into our politics as conservatives, anarchists, evangelicals, Tea Party supporters, Zionists, Islamists, and (a few) communists. We are social animals, yes, but we are also anti-social, and our animal natures are thoroughly mediated by society's contingent forms. Yes, the early Marx developed a philosophical ontology. Nothing follows from this politically. Proletarian dictatorship is not thereby legitimated, and the whole thorny issue of false consciousness (empirical vs. imputed/ ascribed [zugerechnectes] consciousness) is not thereby resolved. At the same time, philosophical thought has every light - and obligation - to intervene actively in political life. Here is Marx on the subject of intellectual practice, including philosophizing: But again when I am active scientifically, etc. - when I am engaged in activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others - then I am social, because I am active as a man [human being]. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being. Again, no matter how deeply one thinks one's way into this ontological generalization, no specific political orientation follows as a consequence. It describes the intellectual work of Heidegger and Schmitt every bit as much as it does that of Marx or our own. For Marx, ontological philosophy was only the starting point in a lifelong practice of scientific thinking that developed in response to the historical events surrounding him. Through the trajectory of his work, the entire tradition of Western political philosophy took a left turn away from metaphysics and towards an engagement with the emerging social sciences - economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology - under­ stood not in their positivist, data-gathering or abstract mathematical forms, but as sciences of history - not historically, historicity, historicism and the like, but concrete, material history. With this hard-left turn (which is an orientation that may or may not involve elements from the 'linguistic turn,' the 'ethical turn,' the 'aesthetic turn'), political philosophy morphs into social theory done reflectively - that is, critically. It becomes critical theory. When Marx said thinking was itself a practice, he meant it in this sense. He did not then ask: What is the ontological meaning of the being of practice? Instead, he tried to find out as much as he could about the socio-historical practices of actual human beings in his time. So the question Marx's early writings leaves us with is this; How do we turn this social - we could say, in a descriptive way, socialist - fact of our work, and our consciousness of this work as social beings, into a communist practice? How are we to conceive of a communist ethics? Not by the phenomenological reduction to some essence of what it is to be a social being: i.e., a caring being, a being-to-death, a being-with, and so on, as Heidegger proposed - but rather by an analysis, a becoming-conscious, of the specific society, the specific cares, the specific deaths that are simultaneous with our own; not common in the sense o f the same as ours (experiences are very unequal in today's society), but of happening to others who share, in common, this time and this space - a space as big as the globe and a time as actual as now.

Their theorizations obscure the historical agency of social production and play into the hands of the bourgeois academic elite.

Tumino ‘01 (Stephen Tumino, Really Hardcore Marxist, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before”, Red Critique vol. 1, wcp)

Two Why Everyone has Suddenly Become an Orthodox Marxist A parody of politics has taken over left politics in the U.S. and Europe. A parody in which—after the dead-end of the designer socialisms of postmarxisms—suddenly everyone is an "orthodox" Marxist: from Zizek who in the introduction to a selection of his work writes of the need to "return to the centrality of the Marxist critique of political economy" (Reader ix); to Michael Sprinker who referred to himself as a "neo-conservative marxist" ("Forum" 68). In calling himself a "neoconservative" Sprinker was embracing with pride Butler's definition of the term in her "Merely Cultural" in which she equates it with "leftist orthodoxy" (268). Then there is Paul Smith who now, after mocking Orthodox Marxism in Discerning the Subject and Universal Abandon, says he has a "fairly orthodox understanding of what Marx and the Marxist tradition has had to say about capitalism" (Millennial Dreams 3). Parody is always the effect of a slippage and the slippage here is that in spite of the sudden popularity of "orthodox" Marxism, the actual theories and practices of the newly orthodox are more than ever before flexodox. It seems as if once more Lenin's notion that when the class antagonism emerges more sharply "the liberals. . . dare not deny the class struggle, but attempt to narrow down [and] to curtail. . . the concept" ("Liberal and Marxist Conceptions of the Class Struggle," 122) has been proven by history. "Orthodox" Marxism has become the latest cover by which the bourgeois left authenticates its credentials and proceeds to legitimate the economics of the ruling class and its anti-proletarian politics. Take Paul Smith, for example. In Orthodox Marxism class is the central issue. (I put aside here that in his writings, on subjectivity for example, Smith has already gotten rid of the "central" by a deconstructive logic). What Smith does with class is a rather interesting test of how Orthodox Marxism is being used to legitimate the class interests of the owners. Smith reworks class and turns it into a useless Habermasian communicative act. He writes that "classes are what are formed in struggle, not something that exists prior to struggle" (Millennial Dreams 60). To say it again: the old ideological textualization of the "new left" is not working any more (just look at the resistance against globalization), so the ruling class is now reworking the "old left" to defend itself. Against the Orthodox Marxist theory of class, Smith evacuates class of an objective basis in the extraction of surplus labor in production, and makes it the effect of local conflicts. In short, Smith reverses the Orthodox Marxist position that, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (Marx, Contribution, 21), and turns it into a neomarxist view that what matters is their consciousness. In this he in fact shares a great deal with conservative theories that make "values" (the subjective) as what matters in social life and not economic access. Zizek provides another example of the flexodox parody of Marxism today. Capitalism in Orthodox Marxism is explained as an historical mode of production based on the privatization of the means of subsistence in the hands of a few, i.e., the systemic exploitation of labor by capital. Capitalism is the world-historic regime of unpaid surplus-labor. In Zizek's writings, capitalism is not based on exploitation in production (surplus-labor), but on struggles over consumption ("surplus-enjoyment"). The Orthodox Marxist concepts that lay bare the exploitative production relations in order to change them are thus replaced with a "psycho-marxist" pastiche of consumption in his writings, a revisionist move that has proven immensely successful in the bourgeois cultural criticism. Zizek, however, has taken to representing this displacement of labor (production) with desire (consumption) as "strictly correlative" to the concept of "revolutionary praxis" found in the texts of Orthodox Marxism (e.g., "Repeating Lenin"). Revolutionary practice is always informed by class consciousness and transformative cultural critique has always aimed at producing class consciousness by laying bare the false consciousness that ruling ideology institutes in the everyday. Transformative cultural critique, in other words, is always a linking of consciousness to production practices from which a knowledge of social totality emerges. Zizek, however, long ago abandoned Orthodox Marxist ideology critique as an epistemologically naïve theory of "ideology" because it could not account for the persistence of "desire" beyond critique (the "enlightened false-consciousness" of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Mapping Ideology,. . . ). His more recent "return to the centrality of the Marxist critique" is, as a result, a purely tropic voluntarism of the kind he endlessly celebrates in his diffusionist readings of culture as desire-al moments when social norms are violated and personal emotions spontaneously experienced as absolutely compulsory (as "drive"). His concept of revolutionary Marxist praxis consists of re-describing it as an "excessive" lifestyle choice (analogous to pedophilia and other culturally marginalized practices, The Ticklish Subject 381-8). On this reading, Marxism is the only metaphorical displacement of "desire" into "surplus-pleasure" that makes imperative the "direct socialization of the productive process" (Ticklish Subject 350) and that thus causes the subjects committed to it to experience a Symbolic death at the hands of the neoliberal culture industry. It is this "affirmative" reversal of the right-wing anti-Marxist narrative that makes Zizek's writings so highly praised in the bourgeois "high-theory" market—where it is read as "subtle" and an example of "deep thinking" because it confirms a transcendental position considered above politics by making all politics ideological. If everything is ideology then there can be no fundamental social change only formal repetition and reversal of values (Nietzsche). Zizek's pastiche of psycho-marxism thus consists in presenting what is only theoretically possible for the capitalist—those few who have already met, in excess, their material needs through the exploitation of the labor of the other and who can therefore afford to elaborate fantasies of desire—as a universal form of agency freely available to everyone. Psycho-marxism does what bourgeois ideology has always done—maintain the bourgeois hegemony over social production by commodifying, through an aesthetic relay, the contradictions of the wages system. What bourgeois ideology does above all is deny that the mode of social production has an historic agency of its own independent of the subject. Zizek's "return" to "orthodox" Marxism erases its materialist theory of desire—that "our wants and their satisfaction have their origin in society" (Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 33) and do not stand in "excess" of it. In fact, he says exactly the opposite and turns the need for Orthodox Marxist theory now into a phantom desire of individuals: he makes "class struggle" an effect of a "totalitarian" desire to polarize the social between "us" and "them" (using the "friend/enemy" binary found in the writings of the Nazi Carl Schmitt, Ticklish Subject 226). What is basic only to Orthodox Marxist theory, however, which is what enables it to produce class consciousness through a critique of ideology, is its materialist prioritization of "need" over "desire." Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes that although capitalism is compelled to continually expand the needs of workers because of the profit motive it at the same time cannot satisfy these needs because of its logic of profit. "Desire" is always an effect of class relations, of the gap between the material level and historical potential of the forces of production and the social actuality of un-met needs. In spite of their formal "criticality," the writings of Zizek, Spivak, Smith, Hennessy and other theorists of designer socialisms produce concepts that legitimate the existing social relations. The notion of class in their work, for example, is the one that now is commonly deployed in the bourgeois newspapers. In their reporting on what has become known as the "Battle of Seattle," and in the coverage of the rising tide of protest against the financial institutions of U.S. monopoly capital which are pillaging the nations of the South, the bourgeois media represents the emergent class struggles as a matter of an alternative "lifestyle choice" (e.g., the Los Angeles Times, "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Catch Our Anti-Corporate Puppet Show!"). On this diffusional narrative, "class" is nothing more than an opportunity for surplus-pleasure "outside" the market for those who have voluntarily "discarded" the normal pleasures of U.S. culture. It is the same "lifestyle" politics that in the flexodox marxism of Antonio Negri is made an autonomous zone of "immaterial labor" which he locates as the "real communism" that makes existing society post-capitalist already so that revolution is not necessary (Empire). What is at the core of both the flexodox marxism and the popular culture of class as "lifestyle" is a de-politicization of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism which neutralizes them as indexes of social inequality and reduces them to merely descriptive categories which take what is for what ought to be. Take the writings of Pierre Bourdieu for example. Bourdieu turns Marx's dialectical concepts of "class" and "capital" which lay bare the social totality, into floating "categories" and reflexive "classifications" that can be formally applied to any social practice because they have been cut off from their connection to the objective global relations of production. Bourdieu, in short, legitimates the pattern of class as "lifestyle" in the bourgeois media by his view that "class" is an outcome of struggles over "symbolic capital" in any "field." I leave aside here that his diffusion of the logic of capital into "cultural capital," "educational capital" and the like is itself part of a depoliticization of the relation between capital and labor and thus a blurring of class antagonism. What Bourdieu's "field" theory of class struggle does is segregate the struggles into so many autonomous zones lacking in systemic determination by the historic structure of property so that everyone is considered to be equally in possession of "capital" (ownership is rhetorically democratized) making socialist revolution unnecessary. What the reduction of "class" and "capital" to the self-evidency of local cultural differences cannot explain is the systemic primacy of the production of surplus-value in unpaid-labor, the basic condition of the global majority which determines that their needs are not being met and compels them into collective class struggles. Without totalizing knowledge of exploitation—which is why such dialectical concepts as "capital" form the basis of Orthodox Marxist class theory—exploitation cannot be abolished. The cultural idealism of the de-politicized voiding of Marxist concepts fits right in with the "volunteer-ism" of the neoliberals and "compassionate" conservatives that they use to justify their massive privatization programs. Considering class struggle politics as a matter of cultural struggles over symbolic status is identical to the strategy of considering the dismantling of social welfare as an opportunity for "local" agency freed from coercive state power, i.e., the bedrock of the "non-governmental" activism and "community" building of the bourgeois reformists. When President select Bush seeks to mobilize what he calls the "armies of compassion" against the "Washington insiders" and return "power" to the "people" it is the old cultural studies logic that all politics is "people vs. power bloc," a warmed over popular frontism that makes politics a matter of building de-politicized cross-class coalitions for bourgeois right, utopic models of a post-political social order without class struggle possessing equality of representation that excludes the revolutionary vanguard. As Marx and Engels said of the "bourgeois socialists" of their day, such utopian measures "at. . . best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works, 59). Zizek's "affirmation" of revolutionary Marxism as a "totalitarian" desire that polarizes the cultural "lifeworld" between "friends" and "enemies" is another relay of "class-as-an-after-effect of 'struggle'" of the networked left. What the parody does is make class struggle a rhetorical "invention" of Marx(ists) analogous to the bourgeois "rights" politics of the transnational coalitional regime of exploitation ruling today, and erases the need for a global theory of social change. Orthodox Marxism cuts through the closed atmosphere of the "friends" of the networked left and their embrace of a voluntarist "compassionate" millenarianism with a critique from outside so to expose the global collective need for a revolutionary social theory and red cultural studies to end exploitation for all.

<>

Alt – Boring Politics

The alternative is boring politics – engaging bureaucratic structures like the state through concrete demands is necessary for material change

Frank, 12 – PhD, History, University of Chicago and Political Analyst (Thomas, “To the Precinct Station,” Baffler, No. 21, http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/to-the-precinct-station)//SY

Measured in terms of words published per political results, on the other hand, OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time. Nearly every one of these books makes sweeping claims for the movement’s significance, its unprecedented and earth-shattering innovations. Just about everything it does is brilliantly, inventively, mind-blowingly people-empowering. And what do we have to show for it today in our “normal lives”? Not much. President Obama may talk about the “top 1 percent” now, but he is apparently as committed as ever to austerity, to striking a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item.[***] With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate. The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But it’s exactly the wrong question. What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks’ overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval of Occupy’s cause as an approval of the movement’s mechanics: the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a “community” in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomsky’s thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that “one of the main achievements” of the movement “has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange,” et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans “tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.” How building such “communities” helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky’s implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up. And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks’ agenda—how they intended to stop predatory lending, for example—you have truly come to the wrong place. Not because it’s hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building “communities” in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, that’s not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison. With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. “The process is the message,” as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: that’s what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world. Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by “the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media.” Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue. And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our society’s productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting—by a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers’ own uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters’ lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But that’s no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticized—way back in 1973—as the “cult of participation,” in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.

Alt - Revolution

Our alternative is the affirmation of the historical necessity of communism. The AFF is irrelevant to a movement that seeks the abolition of inequality forever, a class based revolutionary theory is a prior question.

Tumino ’12 (Stephen Tumino, Really Hardcore Marxist, “Is Occupy Wall Street Communist”, Red Critique vol. 14, wcp)

Leaving aside that the purpose of Wolff's speech was to popularize a messianic vision of a more just society based on workplace democracy, he is right about one thing: Marx's original contribution to the idea of communism is that it is an historical and material movement produced by the failure of capitalism not a moral crusade to reform it. Today we are confronted with the fact that capitalism has failed in exactly the way that Marx explained was inevitable.[4] It has "simplified the class antagonism" (The Communist Manifesto); by concentrating wealth and centralizing power in the hands of a few it has succeeded in dispossessing the masses of people of everything except their labor power. As a result it has revealed that the ruling class "is unfit to rule," as The Communist Manifesto concludes, "because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him." And the slaves are thus compelled to fight back. Capitalism makes communism necessary because it has brought into being an international working class whose common conditions of life give them not only the need but also the economic power to establish a society in which the rule is "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). Until and unless we confront the fact that capitalism has once again brought the world to the point of taking sides for or against the system as a whole, communism will continue to be just a bogey-man or a nursery-tale to frighten and soothe the conscience of the owners rather than what it is—the materialist theory that is an absolute requirement for our emancipation from exploitation and a new society freed from necessity! As Lenin said, "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" (What Is To Be Done?). We are confronted with an historic crisis of global proportions that demands of us that we take Marxism seriously as something that needs to be studied to find solutions to the problems of today. Perhaps then we can even begin to understand communism in the way that The Communist Manifesto presents it as "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority" to end inequality forever.