Wendy Brown in a special issue of Theory & Event:
For three decades, American populist politics have been largely reactionary, instigated and instrumentalized by monied interests. What finally triggered this left revolt against neoliberal deregulation and corporately bought democracy? Why didn’t it erupt in 2008 when the government bailed out teetering investment banks but not their victims-those holding subprime mortgages or gutted retirement funds? Why not in 2009 when gigantic bonuses were handed around to the very investment bankers who had crashed the system with their derivatives games? Why not in spring 2011 when the Supreme Court overturned limits on corporate contributions to Political Action Committees (permitting corporations to flood the electoral process) and then essentially killed off class-action lawsuits (workers’ and consumers’ main line of defense against corporate fraud and abuse)? Why not at any point in the last decade as mass access to higher education collapsed, infrastructure rotted, real income for the middle class plummeted, health care costs skyrocketed, while corporations, banks and the wealthy feathered their nests?
The OWS events this fall are the twin gifts of, on the one hand, the inspirational Arab Spring and, on the other, the colossal failure of the Obama presidency to place even a light rein on neoliberal de-regulation or install a modest interval of separation between Wall Street and Washington. If the first was an obvious trigger, the second should not be minimized: Had any of the promised Obama “hope” been substantially realized—early withdrawal from Iraq war, closing Guantanamo, stimulating economic recovery with jobs creation, repealing the Bush tax cuts, tightening regulations on finance capital, expanding access to affordable higher education, reining in health care costs—many Occupy Wall Streeters, especially the young, might have remained wedded to the electoral political process that engaged them so intensely just three years ago.
Continue reading Brown’s article here.
The just published Theory & Event special issue on Occupy Wall Street is edited and introduced by Jodi Dean, James Martel, and Davide Panagia, and includes additional contributions from Franco “Bifo” Berardi, William E. Connolly, McKenzie Wark, Slavoj Zizek, and others. It will be open access for the next three months. Browse the table of contents here.