MARK WORRELL SUNY CORTLAND NOTES ON THE OCCUPY WALL STREET AND TEA PARTY MOVEMENTS Much has been made out of the supposed unity of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements at the point of their shared antipathy toward concentration and centralization of power and wealth. We can locate their supposed similarities in the following formula: Tea Party: get politics out of money; OWS: get money out of politics It seems, then, that they both have a problem with money (the middle term) even thought both movements are absolutely committed to the sanctity of money. This is basically the root that will make both movements unsuccessful in the long run. But that’s for another day. Here I will point out that OWS and the TP are not united in any polar form (except for their commitment to money) but are in fact diametrically opposed. Any society can be roughly mapped out in terms of its organizational parameters: how members are (a) related to one another and (b) how they are controlled. A well-­‐functioning society is a place where the individual’s roles are balanced or harmonized with their private existence and where they are well-­‐regulated but not crushed by over-­‐regulation. There is probably no sociologist today who could argue that the US is a ‘balanced’ society. The extremes of wealth and power inequalities have reached an absurd level of imbalance. The middle class and their offspring are under severe duress and both the TP and the OWS movements are representations of this imbalance. However, they are ‘photo negatives’ of one another. The Tea Party vision of America is one in which: A. Corporate functions will be liberated from all or most public regulation and the financial burden of odious taxation. The fantasy of market self-­‐regulation is adhered to despite a total lack of empirical evidence that the free market leads to anything but chaos. B. At the same time that the TP wants to free ‘the economy’ (corporate hegemony) from rules they want to hyper-­‐regulate issues that pertain to civil rights and expose individuals and families to the full brunt of capital accumulation. C. The implicit model of TP social relations is one where the individual is best served where there are no social impositions placed upon them. This is classic Egoism. The TP self is one that is defined negatively by what they are not. After every form of what they consider to be essentially un-­‐American identities are canceled out at the level of signification what is leftover is the TP identity: white, male, Christian, straight, etc., accessorized with a robotic wife and obedient children consuming blissfully at the mega mall. D. Despite the TP’s inherent egoism and selfishness (get everything and everybody off our backs) they are committed to a fantasy Other that guides the providence and destiny of God’s nation. Here is the key to the TP implicit model of social organization: a society can be balanced through the superimposition of four pathologies: egoism, devotion to god, the under-­‐regulation of civil society (capitalist functions), and over-­‐regulation of morality. We get, with the TP bad on top of bad two times over. Since money makes the world go around then who pays for society? Not me, not you, not business. There is no society. ‘Society’ (here) is just a word, a fiction; society is just the sum total of individuals that live in ‘America.’ Some TP types are hardcore libertarians that condemn all involuntary spending whereas others are okay with some, limited state functions, e.g., road and bridge building, mega-­‐military spending, etc. But, despite variations, the TP movement is characterized by a deep nominalism. The OWS movement, on the other hand, represents in nascent and confused form, the exact opposite: A. The self is not an island unto itself. Cooperative relations with others are the key to survival and prosperity. The classic Hegelian formulation applies here: the I that is We and the We that is I. OWS recognizes that individual need social roles to play and that individuality and freedom are found within civil society and not in the suburbs. B. The devotion to abstractions and fantasies is replaced with a commitment to society itself. Taken together (A and B) OWS cancels out, at least at the level of ideology, egoism and otherness such that they two pathologies are fused, cancelled, and raised to a new, different, and higher scale or register of reality. Likewise, the OWS model of control is radically opposed to the TP vision. C. The OWS model of corporate life is one where capital accumulation, production, distribution, consumption, etc., are all well regulated by the state. The explicit claim is that the market and corporations, left to their own desires, will devour not only the US but also the entire planet like a pack of ravenous wolves. D. OWS, unlike the TP crowd, wants to liberate social relations that fall within the scope of what we would call ‘civil rights.’ Where conservatives loose sleep at night worrying about what others (deviants) are doing the OWS crowd is fine with letting people marry whoever they want to and having sexual relations with whomever they want. TP types wail on about moral chaos but are fine with business chaos. Then is the OWS vision of the world not guilty of permitting civil chaos? Not really. Artificially keeping people apart is actually chaos of its own kind; allowing people the freedom to associate any way they see fit enables them to actually reconstitute a society that has degenerated into atomization or, as Durkheim put it, a ‘swarming of bees.’ Taken together (C and D) commercial/business chaos is tempered by a thick but rational net of regulations and civil relations are liberated resulting in a fusion and upward cancellation of both poles of social control into a higher register of social reality. OWS is a movement of people who think, unlike the TP types, that society is a real thing, not just the sum total of individuals that live in a particular geography. The OWS model of social organization is one where society is greater than and different than the sum of its parts. Indeed, we see that OWS is literally the emergence of a new, dynamic and fluid society within the crystallized matrix of the old, ossified, and decaying world convulsing toward implosion. A graphical summary might be of use in visualizing what we are getting at: Here we can see how the Tea Party world is one where four pathologies: egoism, devotion to a fantasy (alienated) representations of the sacred, business chaos, and an ‘iron cage’ of fatalistic over-­‐regulation of morality leads to a society that is nothing more than a random collection of individuals and families in antagonistic relations with one another. Society is reduced to a one-­‐dimensional hell of petit bourgeois molecularism where the social ‘substance’ vibrates with antipathy. Tea Party freedom is identical with what critical theorists call ‘negative’ freedom: getting others off the back of the individual. They are ‘free from’ others while dropping the hammer on others not in conformity with their ideal vision of society. The Occupy Wall Street vision of the world is one where, quite the contrary, egoism, primitive devotions to alienated symbols, capitalist chaos, and an incarceration-­‐
punishment model of civil rights are all negated and synthesized into a higher form of social existence where real individuality is constituted in its fullness. OWS freedom is what we call ‘positive’ freedom: where real individuality (not egoism) is the ‘freedom to’ get things accomplished in a rational world of cooperation and sharing. Ultimately, though, I think that OWS is hobbled by an uncritical stance toward capitalism and money itself for it to amount to anything that cannot be repulsed by the status quo. The TP was appropriated and driven by corporate interests and had some effect in recent political machinations but OWS is steadfast in its resistance to cooptation by the Democratic Party (thankfully) but if it cannot construct its own, organic mechanism for projecting power into the actual workings of the state (an independent party apparatus combined with the power of direct action) it will be forced to spontaneously generate a new society within a society which is something unlikely without the prospect of near total systemic collapse of the US economy coupled with continued failures on the world’s battlefields coupled with a retreat that sees hundreds of thousands of battle-­‐hardened troops flooding back into a wrecked nation with no prospects for reintegration.