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By Anne Sullivan / 08 March 2012 / post comment

From the beginning the protest on Wall Street has presented itself through a prolific array of Web outlets: Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, an immense Tumblr site, a nonstop Livestream video channel, multiple Youtube and Vimeo accounts, and three main websites (occupywallst.org, nycga.cc, and the original campaign page at www.adbusters.org.) Of course to say that the protest "presents itself" is already saying too much. Its strategy is multiplicity: whatever this protest is, it cannot be reduced to any single channel, any official voice, or any definitive agenda. Unlike all those demonstrations whose actions are designed solely to attract media coverage, Occupy Wall Street has managed to manifest itself and indeed to proliferate far beyond lower Manhattan without really presenting itself at all.

Instead, the occuption has thrived in the gap between airing grievances (which are many) and making demands (which would have to be few). Those who complain that the protest has failed to offer a clear program have failed to notice the precise ways in which such a program has been deliberately blocked or deferred. Meanwhile those who insist that the aims of the protest are quite obvious have overlooked not only the fact that its explicit aims keep shifting, but also that maintaining the occupation itself has been the only consistent aim all along. To ask "what is their message?" is misguided: there's no "their" there. Better many messages than the wrong one.

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By Richard Dienst / 17 October 2011 / 2 comments

Richard Dienst is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television and The Bonds of Debt, and a co-editor of Reading the Shape of the World. He teaches in the Department of English at Rutgers University. Here, in a special guest post for the Verso blog, Dienst comments on the film Debtocracy.

Soon after the 17 June 1953 workers' uprising in the DDR, Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem called "The Solution." He wanted to mock the official response to popular discontent: the Secretary of the Writer's Union had declared that the people had lost the confidence of the government and that they must earn it back by working twice as hard. "Wouldn't it be easier," Brecht suggested with pitch-perfect irony, "for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"

Faced with nationwide general strikes, street riots in Athens, and jittery global markets, it is likely that Greek politicians are not the only ones who wish they could opt for such a solution. There must be presidents and legislators across the EU (not to mention bankers and investors around the world) who wish they could somehow dissolve the Greek people and replace them with a more docile, less demanding bunch, willing to work twice as hard for half as much.

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By Richard Dienst / 06 July 2011 / post comment