Reply to Deseriis and Dean on OWS: “Fuck you and fuck Zizek too!”

Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean have opened their sectarian Marxist pie holes to argue Occupy is unable to address “division within the movement”. Their nonsense is posted to Kasama Project here.

Their trash is titled, “A movement without demands?”; but its real complaint can be better stated as “A movement without politics?”. Since Marxists can only conceptualize a movement of society as a political movement, Occupy’s refusal to raise political demands is confusing.

There is, Deseriis and Dean explain, a division within Occupy that many want to deny. However, to become more than a protest movement, Occupy will have to “acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality.” I think this is a bold assertion, since, so far as I can tell, neither of these two idiots has any accomplishment building anything.

I mean, when I was just a dumb kid, I went on a trip to China as guest of the Communist Party of China — it was a big deal to me. Here I was going to the place only just recently presided over by the great Chairman Mao himself. Surprisingly, although this party had in fact liberated China from the sphere of US hegemony, reorganized society along completely different lines, and turned the capitalist class into docile toadies, never once did anyone there say, “This is how you do it.” They had done it, but never once acted as though their practice had any particular significance for our own. They even emphasized that Mao’s ideas were only “Marxism-Leninsm adapted to the conditions of China” and did not have global significance.

But, Mr. Deseriis and Ms. Dean, who have never built a thing in their lives apparently think this lack of accomplishment sets the stage for them to “educate” the Occupy on how “to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement”. The fucking arrogance of these two imbeciles is just breathtaking.

According to Deseriis and Dean, apparently the objection to turning Occupy into a political movement arise from three different arguments within the movement. These arguments state that political demands are by definition not representative; that they reduce the autonomist character of the movement; and that they subject the movement to threat of being co-opted.

Deseriis and Dean take each of these three objections in turn, based on …what? Experience? No. It actually results from Deseriis’s and Dean’s diagnosis that what really bedevils Occupy at this point in its evolution is that it refuses to acknowledge the principle problem faced by the movement is not the state, but Occupy itself.

“The problem is that the objection as it has been raised in the movement misconstrues the location of the division that matters.”

Really? How so?

“The co-optation objection presents the problem as between the state and the movement rather than as a division already within indeed, constitutive of, the movement itself.”

According to Deseriis and Dean, then, the problem is not Wall Street, but Occupy Wall Street; the problem is not the one percent, but the 99%. The resistance of Occupy to reconfiguring itself as a mere political movement suggests it wants to suppress divisions within itself and these divisions are expressed in an aversion to raising political demands. But this aversion is entirely misplaced, Deseriis and Dean explain,

“First, we can make demands on ourselves. Second, demands are means not ends. Demands can be a means for achieving autonomous solutions. When demands are understood as placed on ourselves, the process of articulating demands becomes a process of subjectivation or will formation, that is, a process through which a common will is produced out of previously divergent positions. Rather than a liability to be denied or avoided, division becomes a strength, a way that the movement becomes powerful as our movement, the movement of us toward a common end.”

This argument appears quite rational — indeed it looks all dialectical and shit, Hegelian even — on the surface. But, let me ask Deseriis and Dean one question: Is not the state itself already this “subjectivation or will formation” that naturally emerges out of the divisions of society?  And why must we replace the existing “subjectivation or will formation” of the existing state with just another form of “subjectivation or will formation”?

Is the social revolution simply the replacement of one form of impersonal subjectivity with another? Or is it the abolition of all impersonal subjectivities?

If one is looking for a process unequalled by “which a common will is produced out of previously divergent positions” we already have one: the bourgeois democratic state. The periodic elections within the state, with its cesspool of corruption and parasitic collusion, gives us the opportunity to forge a “common will” every four years.

If this is what the Occupy should aspire to be, in the opinion of Deseriis and Dean, no matter how much this is framed in the form of obligatory references to “the commons” — that sacred institution of Marxist dogma — it is not just a dead end, but ignores the fact that every socialist state in the 20th Century was based on common ownership of the means of production.

And every one of them proved to be a horrific failure.

Does my argument deny the existence of divisions within the Occupy movement? Of course not. But these divisions cannot be overcome with some barbaric and regressive attempt to create a common will out of previously divergent positions; rather, it requires the end of circumstances by which individual wills are compelled into a state of absolute dependence and universal competition with one another.

Deseriis and Dean are deliberately confusing the need for associative management of common resources, with the needs for a common will. This is based on a fundamentally flawed Marxist analysis of the problem facing mankind. The problem is not that the common resources of society are not subject to a common will, but that the will of each individual has been subjected to the control of common resources.

Whatever form this control takes — individual, cooperative, or state ownership — the individual has always been subject to this form. It is always the commons of society that acquires subjectivity at the expense of the members of society. In the social revolution it is otherwise, the individual achieves true subjectivity, and the commons is reduced to mere means. Wal-Mart is just a place to buy toilet paper to wipe your ass after a satisfying shit — there is no reason it should be dominating our lives in any incarnation — individual, cooperative or as the common property of society.

My reply to Deseriis and Dean, therefore, is the same as my reply to Kliman:

“Fuck you and fuck Zizek too!”