Doug wrote:
> So much of the Occupy movement is - was? - about space and state but has a lot of trouble talking about production and property.
Keen observation. Here in Berlin, a big political orientation point for the radical left is the struggle against gentrification. And it has the same defect: a basic orientation toward "space" rather than class, and an allergic attitude toward the state, even the merely municipal state.
What irks me about the really existing anti-gentrification movement is how culturalized the discourse is: basically lamenting that the "wrong" people are moving into the neighborhood, i.e. "hipsters" or "students" or Swabians moving in and displacing Turks and leftists.
I've been guilty of some of this culturalism -- I'm always up for bashing Southern Germany! -- but what sticks in my craw about this stuff is 1) That white counter-cultural leftists are unable to problematize their own relationship to gentrification, i.e. students and hipsters gravitate to neighborhoods where leftists and other assorted oddballs have already formed a beachhead of gentrification, and 2) how the reflexive anti-statism of this movement basically inhibit its own ability to do anything effective: like, rent control would be nice. Or ending tax incentives to landlords. But to get all that stuff done, one has to dirty one's hand with political decision making and legislation. So people would much rather engage in symbolic, marginal politics.