George Lakoff wrote this truly troubling piece about the Occupy movement.
The only thing I agree with is the sentiment that he begins the column with:
"I think the movement should be framing itself. It’s a general principle: Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends."I am willing to give Lakoff the benefit of the doubt, and say that he probably is a well-meaning friend when he tries to frame the movement, though it is a special kind of well-meaning friend the decides to take up the mantel of "framing" the movement for us now that we are "maturing." However, Lakoff throwing in his lot with those who represent one of the most dangerous threats to the Occupy movement: co-opters.
In this piece, Lakoff reinforces the idea that society is divided into the traditional left-right (aka conservative-progressive, aka Republican-Democrat) political dialectic, an idea that has defined the dominant worldview regarding politics for some time. He makes the mistake of assuming that this paradigm accurately reflects the ideological makeup of the country and, by extension, that it accurately reflects reality. He has no way to understand the occupy movement except as a progressive counterweight to the Tea Party in this narrow conception of politics. If that is all we are, the left's answer to the Tea Party, then we may as well stop right now.
In truth the paradigm that Lakoff draws on is actually one that is maintained by the two major political parties--the Democrats and Republicans--in order to bury the truth: that the divide between the two is completely artificial. Both parties have the same agenda, to serve the oligarchy, and blame the other party when this hurts the rest of us. "The party in power is tinkering with the state incorrectly, and this is the source of our problems," they both claim, because they both seek to hide the innate impotence of this particular government, and governments in general, to correct the ills that are inextricably linked to the larger politico-economic system itself. This quote from Marx goes beyond the scope of this point, but clarifies the positions of our two parties in the US:
The state will never discover the source of social evils in the "state and the organization of society", as the Prussian expects of his King. Wherever there are political parties each party will attribute every defect of society to the fact that its rival is at the helm of the state instead of itself. Even the radical and revolutionary politicians look for the causes of evil not in the nature of the state but in a specific form of the state which they would like to replace with another form of the state.
From a political point of view, the state and the organization of society are not two different things. The state is the organization of society. In so far as the state acknowledges the existence of social grievances, it locates their origins either in the laws of nature over which no human agency has control, or in private life, which is independent of the state, or else in malfunctions of the administration which is dependent on it. Thus England finds poverty to be based on the law of nature according to which the population must always outgrow the available means of subsistence. From another point of view, it explains pauperism as the consequence of the bad will of the poor, just as the King of Prussia explains it in terms of the unchristian feelings of the rich and the Convention explains it in terms of the counter-revolutionary and suspect attitudes of the proprietors. Hence England punishes the poor, the Kings of Prussia exhorts the rich and the Convention heheads the proprietors.
Lastly, all states seek the cause in fortuitous or intentional defects in the administration and hence the cure is sought in administrative measures. Why? Because the administration is the organizing agency of the state.
The contradiction between the vocation and the good intentions of the administration on the one hand and the means and powers at its disposal on the other cannot be eliminated by the state, except by abolishing itself; for the state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities, since the scope of its own power comes to an end at the very point where civil life and work begin. Indeed, when we consider the consequences arising from the asocial nature of civil life, of private property, of trade, of industry, of the mutual plundering that goes on between the various groups in civil life, it becomes clear that the law of nature governing the administration is impotence. For, the fragmentation, the depravity, and the slavery of civil society is the natural foundation of the modern state, just as the civil society of slavery was the natural foundation of the state in antiquity. The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery.
From "Critical Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian'" (1844)
I think that most people in our country, particularly the ones that encounter extreme forms of oppression, have come to realize that "democracy" has become a meaningless catchphrase in a country where regardless of the party that wins, the 99% lose. The economic elites that make all the major decisions never seem to come up for election, only their stewards. Low participation in elections reflects the fact that people see complicity for this in Democrats and Republicans alike, though to be fair they wouldn't be able to stop it, on their own, even if they wanted to. What people want is not another party they can "shop" around for--what they want is a new process altogether. To me, this is what the Occupy movement represents.
The Tea Party itself is an excellent case example of what the Occupy movement need most be afraid of at this stage: co-optation by established liberal political institutions, the behemoth of which is the Democratic Party. This open letter was supposedly written by a former tea party member to the occupiers quite early on in the movement. In this letter, the author describes the way that the Tea Party, which began as a movement to call out both parties as being corrupt, pro-corporate, anti-citizen, and pro-big (oppressive) state (though perhaps the Tea Party was also racist, individualistic, and "libertarian" in the right wing sense of the word). He also describes its co-optation by the conservative political machine. This co-optation has made the Tea Party nothing more than another cog in the same machine it hated. In an effect, no new ideas were introduced, and worse yet, nothing at all, fundamentally, changed. Whatever systemic threat they posed has been neutralized. A "Tea Partier" is now just a code term for a dogmatic Republican.
But if we take the author's word for what the Tea Party began as (and I hesitate to do so, but let's do that for the sake of argument), we can see that it wasn't really pro-Republican at all, nor did it express ideas that are allowed to be expressed through sanctioned channels like Republican Party (and still aren't). The true political and "moral" spectrum is vastly wider, and different, then what is legitimized by institutions in society, as well as what Lakoff will acknowledge.
For instance, my own moral/political lens, that of a critical/radical orientation, leads me to the following views that are not presented in Lakoff's piece: that the economic and institutional structures themselves, fundamentally, are what causes these recent problems like joblessness and poverty; that there can be no compromise between the "The Private" and "The Public" in which we, the vast majority of citizens of the country and the world, make out ahead; that working within the system has been encouraged by people in power precisely because it changes nothing; that as bad as money in representative political processes are, the representative political process is itself the problem because it is undemocratic by its very nature; that wages going up has no real consequence on the fact that workers are exploited by a tiny leisure class, and always have been, and always will be under a capitalist system; that ending the destruction of the natural world is not contingent on changes in the administrative orientation of the state, but is contingent instead on ending capitalism itself, which would collapse without the ever increasing consumption of natural resources; and, most importantly, that compromise with a system that causes the poverty and dehumanization of 80% plus of the world's population is complicity with that poverty and dehumanization.
I am not proposing that this alternative political/moral framework to supplant what Lakoff proposed. I am merely pointing out that his article does not encompass a true range of political and moral thought, just as our formal political process has failed to do so. Our only hope now is to replace this formal process with a new one, where people freely exchange ideas in an arena where no one has power over anyone else, where we decide what to do together. That is what the occupation movement is; an alternative process that has taken on the struggle of trying to accomplish true democracy.
Chris Hedges promises that the co-optation I fear is not possible in his newest column. His work on this has been pretty awesome; I hope he's right.
