Strike!, October, Battleship Potemkin! The vivid poetic montages of Eisenstein cinema created an intellectual universe that thrust upon us the sheer force of political movements. The vigor of emotions, kinesthetics of movement of people across the streets, the organic unity of the masses, the synthesis of ideas in public, dream vocabulary; it was the realization of a film sense that resonates in the heights of imagination. Even after nearly a century, this film sense inspires my political blood and rips of the media clutter of our times.
Occupy Wall street Movement (OWM) ! A conglomeration of people in the ivory towers of finance capital in gargantuan scale. The volume, variety and velocity of people associating at a global happening place! The world wide media coverage and the news flash showered upon their initiatives are beyond the reach for any working class organization aligned to communist or socialist movements. Yet they fail to send ripples down the memory lane. It freezes in the thin time frames of our life. When I tries to recollect the organic unity of the event, OWM reminds me of yet another flash-mob that happens in shopping malls or public spaces.
The movement arithmetic of contemporary anarchists fail to rip off the fundamental equations and governing laws of finance capital and new forces of hegemony. OWM lacked the coherent vision required to overthrow the hegemonic forces of finance capital. They proclaimed themselves as the 'movement of squares'. Out of the polemic and rhetoric, what do they really signify? As a political activist, should I be concerned if my movement should be only inspired by Tiananmen square protests? A mass resistance to the walls of finance capital should not be allergic to the trade unions and political parties. International Socialism magazine hails OWM as 'Construction of mass experiments in cooperative living'.
We know the deplorable extents to which the mass experiments of cooperative living corrupted the public spaces in the Anna Hazare model experiments for cooperative living. They fail even to qualify to be called as anarchist for the simple reason that they had no democratic ideology or a basic inspiration in the values of peoples democracy.
Strike is not a carnival moment for participatory living in the market spaces. It is a call for overhaul in the ways of market capitalism. When required to communicate the strength and significance of the cause, it disrupts the passive living of the market dynamics. The obsessive embrace and hedonistic inspirations of mass experiments in OWM completely forgotten that the any movement that calls for a social change must be united by a logical goal that unites the length and breadth of the movement.
They hail a term called direct democracy! Who would you like to be the cardinal of the direct democracy. Imperial nation states? multi national corporate syndicates? A movement rationale should know the phases and strategic critical path for transitioning from each phase. #Lenin and #Grmasci had written elaborately on the tactical directions for collective resistance against an oppressive market force and its institution.
A collective resistance will never be frozen in time. The class struggle will not strive to amplify the market force or an institution. The first and foremost contribution of OWM to the social consciousnesses is that it amplified the significance of #WallStreet. What is wall street really? Just another trading center of market capitalism. It is just a place where all the market manipulations take place. By overthrowing wall street you are not going to eliminate the finance capital forces. They have incarcerated each ounce of our political institution. They have penetrated into the tiniest entities of governing and bureaucratic entities in government.
Thus the basic nature of market hegemony still remains very much the same. The different form of commoditization that emerged in our times is in society and social organizations itself. It was what we call ambiguously as 'Social capital'. The #NGOs, #CSOs, the Carnival Celebration organizations (CMO) can be seen as the manifestations of this abhorrent and hedonistic conscience in the society. They act as the cheerleaders of the finance capital. They can stage manage the protests at any mammoth scale. They can get you any hit rate on social media and TRP in Global television channels. It is such a versatility and innovation that oppressors and oppressed becomes hale and happy at the end of a six month long mass resistance. All is well!
Thus mass resistance becomes a corporate ritual for branch awareness and market positioning. They strip naked their half baked intellect in front of the altars of the market and corporate. They scream, they howl, they dance, they enact all sort of epic plays to incite a tickle of laughter or an apathetic gaze in the pathological senses of finance colonialists.
Yes, it is very hard to digest the sumptuous meals and the folk art served in your mass media in Kerala soil. When the communist movement of Kerala in Solar protest plummets to an OWM scale of irrationality it invokes the memories of a ritual to titillate the emotive prowess of the Sun God. It becomes nothing more than a 48 hour long stage drama forgetting the root causes of solar scam and the market dynamics of energy politics behind the scene. However this is the moment of truth for a political critic to realize that market can commodity even out of the resistances against it and to make mileage and media attention out of it.
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