Occupy What?

I am really getting tired of people who look at the Occupy Wall Street protestors and just call them deadbeats and tell them to go out and get jobs. While I am fairly confident that there probably are some deadbeats in the mix, I am equally confident that there are many who are simply fed up with the American situation and need to do something (whatever seems possible at present) about it. It is ridiculous to scream at people that they should get jobs and work when the jobs simply do not exist. 

All of this yelling, it seems to me, is a device for ignoring the point of the protests --- and maybe an excuse for not joining them. The American economic system is badly broken and it is not going to repair itself. On one side, the 1% has successfully waged a "class war" over the last thirty years or so in which they have cornered most of the wealth in the country. They have done that by buying off the government --- Federal and state both --- and reducing their tax contributions to all time lows. They have also done this by elevating salaries and bonuses for executives like themselves to ridiculous amounts. The 1% lives by a simple truth; they have the power so they take the money.

The meaning of "economy" in Greek was essentially "household management." In modern times "economy" applies to communities or commonwealths  and is the way in which the production and distribution of goods and services is organized. When the system was based on barter, there was a clear understanding of who has produced what and how the distribution proceeds. When barter is replaced by a system of money exchange, however, the accumulation of wealth becomes possible. Then, all one needs is a system of protecting wealth. Kings and nobles amassed armies. Modern governments a la John Locke instituted laws and administered enforcement. In modern times the feudal system of kings, church, and serfs has been replaced by a modern system of "corporate feudalism" in which the corporation owns everything, the government protects corporate interests, and the people work to maintain what they can in the margin. Doubtless that corporate feudalism is just as much a "system" as was household management; but there is one enormous difference. In the household there were social (moral) relations between husband, wife, children, and slaves. Corporate (capitalism) feudalism today functions under no sense of relationship, no moral bond; it simply pursues the accumulation of more wealth. The name of the game is purely Greed. 

In the 19th Century, Marx clearly and convincingly described the situation of uncontrolled capitalism. Motivated by greed, the capitalist will always attempt to extract the maximum amount of work from labor and pay as little as is possible. Since no "social consciousness" is involved, the worker's plight is left to a losing fight to make ends meet. The proletariat class is created and it expands. Marx concluded that the proletariat would eventually be forced to rebel or simply starve. 

Interestingly, Lenin realized that the major Western economies were headed in a different direction. Through the system of Imperialism they could export the proletariat class to what we have come to call the Third World. By a system of economic colonization, the Western states obtained their raw materials from the Third World and they paid higher wages to their own workers so as to create a friendly and cooperative "middle class." The middle class, being modestly well off, would not rebel and the foreign proletariat would be too far away.

This system worked effectively through the middle of the 20th Century and then it started to come apart. It has been coming apart ever since. What is interesting (in an academic sort of way) is that the system came apart not only because the colonies began to rebel and declare independence, but that capitalists decided to join the program. Advanced transportation and communication technologies now allowed corporations to move production facilities off-shore and, hence, to cut off the American worker completely. The same technologies allowed corporations to move their wealth off-shore as well --- which they have done under the flag of "globalization". In short, the whole idea of the middle class has been abandoned in America. So as the ranks of the proletariat come together again in the American economy, we have to ask where this will take us. But what we face is something different than we might have faced in the 19th Century. We face corporations that still remain in control of the government over us but have also rendered themselves less vulnerable to rebellion by being largely absentee holders of American wealth. 

The Occupy movement may not be articulating all of this but I do believe that they are an early vanguard of something quite important in the evolution of an American political economy.