Anticipating the Occupy Movement

There is a vicious campaign underway at the moment against ‘communism’, this despite the utter lack of a Left with any social power. The most meager Democratic Party proposals, or defenses of remaining aspects of the social safety net, minor extensions in unemployment aid, are branded ‘class warfare.’

This comes off as completely unnecessary in face of the absent Left, unchallenged neoliberalism, and the further concentration of wealth following the financial meltdown. Is it a preventative measure against a potential Left? An attempt through discursive power to disarm any possible counter-hegemonic forces from emerging? Do they hear and anticipate a coming insurrection (like Glenn Beck did back in 2009)?

It seems like the Right is pushing too far. Are they not inadvertently creating an opening for a Left with all this talk about ‘communism’ and ‘class warfare’? Are they not over-stretching themselves and putting themselves in danger, by pushing (in the middle of a recession) to raise taxes on low-income households on the grounds that they are not really poor because they in fact own luxury items like refrigerators? (This is when record percentages of people were living below the official poverty line, alarming levels of malnutrition were being recorded, increasing numbers of people skipping meals to get by, etc.). Are they not producing the very discourse which at any time could be turned around to undermine them?

Where the Left has been incapable of politicizing the issue of class, the Right has done it for us, creating the opportunity for the Left to go on the offense. Hopefully something can be made of this.

– Journal entry from Summer 2011, a month or so before Occupy Wall Street began