Occupied with class: the middle class in the Occupy Movement
A excellent piece on the ‘middle class’ and the Occupy movement, and how this identity and experience has shaped what the movement has looked like. This article appears in LBC Books new collection of essays on the Occupy Movement, “Occupy Everything: Anarchists in the Occupy Movement 2009-2011”.
By any measure – unemployment, foreclosures, the rise in food stamp dependency, homelessness,etc – the US middle class has taken a beating over the last several years. And although I’m always hesitant to start an essay off by quoting Zizek, I haven’t heard a better metaphor for both the current economic situation and the shock many Americans feel at what they see as the death of the “American Dream” than the iconic scene recounted by Zizek of a cartoon cat walking over a cliff who proceeds confidently for several paces into thin air before pausing and looking down. Seeing the gaping chasm beneath him, it is only then that he begins to fall.
After three decades of neo-liberal attacks, much of what we consider middle class life is really debt. That is, it is a fantasy, a placeholder filling in for the stagnation of wages that was the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s. Many other anarchist and Marxist authors have pointed this out (David Graeber and David Harvey come to mind) but it’s interesting how the entire language of debt and crisis has shifted over the years of the Great Recession. While today the media discusses it in terms of austerity, sovereign debt and debt to GDP ratios, early on there was a lot of talk of underwater mortgages and massive credit card debt owed by individuals to financial institutions. Briefly this popped into the media consciousness, as the sheer scale of resistance forced the media to pay attention to the rapidly spreading underground debt refusal. People walked away from houses, mailed the keys back to the bank, and stopped paying on their credit cards. Just as now the occupy movement routinely violates capitalist notions of public and private property, then there was a similar rejection of commonly held relationships and debt culpability. Whereas before default and bankruptcy had been shameful in the popular consciousness – with bankruptcy services ads run late at night or sandwiched between afternoon talk shows - all of a sudden everyone was doing it.
@sweet_epiphany much of what we consider middle class life is really debt.
I would say that the last 30years, since Reagan constitutes a strategic and deliberate wealth transfer, from the bottom to the top.
movements of global capital and labor + #reverseRobinhood - manufacturing jobs in the US = neoliberalism
(Source: violentopinions)
