[lbo-talk] What happened to the Occupy movement?

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Thu May 24 14:42:43 PDT 2012


Chuc G: "I think as the cuts deepen, public employee unions will start to become more heavily involved, since a lot of those jobs have no private alternative or no acceptible alternative. As poverty deepens, then the more liberal religious associations will get more involved..."

[WS:] Hopefully.

As I see it, however, the problem is not the space or corporate media but a peculiar cost benefit balance that keeps people inactive. As the Old Man said somewhere, the proletariat had nothing to lose but their chains. That was a form Pascal's wager if you will, they had little to lose but quite a lot to win. That was their motivation to action.

Today, however, this Pascal wager does not obtain anymore. The proletariat has quite a bit to lose - their homes, their pensions (even if meager), their cars, tee-vees, iphones, bar-b-cues, sixpacks, games etc. - but not that much to win. Or perhaps they do not see that there is much to win, after the 'workers' states' of the 20th century ended up as a big fiasco - or so it seems. So they stay home instead of taking a considerable personal risk of getting involved in protest actions.

And the police state makes sure that this risk stays considerable. The shrewdness of it is that police repression is not heavy handed and unbearable like, say, in Nazi Germany or fascist third world dictatorships, but relatively modest as not to stir widely spread dissent, but sufficient enough to keep Pascal's wager from tipping the cost and benefits balance in favor of action.

-- Wojtek

"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."



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