The Roots Of A Movement

Submitted to Occupy Texas State by Gregory VanWagenen, Philosophy Major at Spokane Community College

Missing amid the cornucopia of goodies shoveled at the feet of the one percent, provided endlessly and thanklessly by the productive American worker, is a list of demands, a manifesto, an explanation for the appearance of so many people flooding the streets during the occupy protests.

Critics of the occupation – both the wealthy and their closest lackeys – are united around the idea of entitlements. The same people who create the vast majority of this society’s wealth, it is assumed, owe those who buy and sell, but produce nothing. The producers don’t merely owe their masters money, food, a life free of taxes. They also owe them a categorical explanation for everything they do and say. The same workers and farmers and thinkers, once they quit working and farming and thinking, owe their overlords an explanation for the mass gathering that has taken shape in Zucotti Park and which has subsequently spread to cities and towns throughout the world.

What the banker class and their media seem not to understand is that they were not owed anything, ever. They can’t be faulted. Those same people were born, and came to adulthood in an era in which such an unnatural state of affairs was deemed to be normal. Many of them likely imagine that this is the way life ought to be. A few people get to live well without working, while millions struggle to provide them with wealth while enduring deprivations.

In fact, this is not a normal state of affairs. It isn’t healthy, sane or sustainable. The advanced industrial societies of the world are all built upon a structure which is now collapsing beneath the weight of its own internal contradictions. The occupy movement is not an ordinary protest. It is not a protest which seeks to change some superficial aspect of the system, so structured as to make the protest irrelevant once a few grievances are addressed. The fact that it seems directionless is not an accident. Rather than a movement with a manifesto, it is a tendency driven by conclusions rooted in the dissonance of modern life. A hundred people come together in a park one day, each convinced, in his own unique way, that the social order is dysfunctional. Within a month, he’s joined by three thousand others.

The protests are not taking place in impoverished nations, or in nations which are particularly brutal to the majority populations. The occupy protests, post-modern and leaderless, are constructing a critical theory of societies which have, for generations, provided a minimum level of subsistence for the material bodies of their inhabitants. At stake is not reform, but the necessity of consolidating an entirely new theory of social praxis, of including aesthetics, sensibility and sensitivity in the social contract. Most importantly, they seek to address an oft neglected dimension of human existence within the ongoing discourse.

If there is an underlying issue, then, it is psychological rather than physical, expressed in the conscious drive of the inhabitants of the affluent society, toward making an absolute break with the social structure they find themselves in.