Re: Occupy Wall Street Protests

Excerpts lifted from ILP thread:

Fixed Cross wrote:

Being integral part of the system is not necessarily a bad thing of course, it depends on how one defines "the system". If the system is "the world", then being part of it is better than not to be.

The protesters are subservient to the specific practices they are protesting against, until they formulate a usable new set of laws, rules, and manage to create a space in the media for them. They need to become a philosophical movement.

This is what they are waiting for, ideas, thought, philosophy. Of course I would refer to value ontology, if I had the intention of hijacking this thread. We must perhaps in time 'hijack' (give direction to) the entire movement. It would be a waste to have it go down as yet another slave-revolt, there can more to it than that.


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First of all the Occupy movement would have to establish its self-valu(e)(ing).

In it in fact a classical case of "slave-morality" versus "master-morality", as I've explained... elsewhere.
Holding a slave-morality means to not have ones natural self-valuing produce a conscious notion of self-value self-value. It means to adopt a conscious self-value by the negative valuation of the/an Other.

The Occupy movement has a lot of vitality and good will, but is not able to formulate its values beyond "away with the evil X". It is not able to posit a value in its stead. It does not have its own value, for its value it is entirely dependent on the thing it is protesting against. As long as this is the case, it will have no effect, it could not possibly have an effect.

There is of course a lot of self-valuing going on within the movement, i.e. people, organisms. But all these are subjecting themselves to what is, thusfar, a slave-revolt. Nothing wrong with a slave revolt, but it will not see any of its demands realized if these demands are not formulated as positives, meaning formula's capable of replacing the "evil" ones.

This is the finest tip of the iceberg of what can be said of Occupy in terms of value-ontology. The bulk of it would come down to actually formulate a (possible) philosophy for it, to forge it into a "Master Signifier" - an authentic, original voice. Of course value-ontology pertains quite acutely to the financial world and what is wrong with it. To begin with, all of the disasters and exorbitant payments to the masters of these disasters, are based on disregarding, or rather violating, the concept of value. In short: speculative value has replaced functional value. That which is of value to value-determining institutions (Moody's, etc) does not have anything whatsoever to do to what is of value to a human.

Value needs to be restored in its definition. The speculative market will have to be dramatically curbed and reformed, rationalized. Without joking, we now have the tools to do this. A thorough understanding of the concept value was lacking. This is how it could be diffused through focusing on very conditional/context bound derivatives as if they are the actual concept, thereby gradually disconnecting the notion value from its conceptual root, which is actual, real-world value, i.e. that which is valuable to (a) (human) life.

This is how the Occupy movement may look for its signifier (instead of bloody-faced idiotic grins); to collect/assemble around it those things which are of real value to the participating people. To create/build a "mountain of wealth" in human terms -- that is to say not hummers, prostitutes and dollar bills, but the diversity of real-world value coming together wherever many people are assembled for a long time, which translates into 'culture'.

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. . .this is exactly why the movement is not yet capable of representing an improvement. They are still inferior in standards to the people they are protesting against, because they have only "no" as a standard. They are not capable of a "yes", because this takes creative minds, and disciplined thinking.

"Civic disobedience" as an ideal, as a measure of potency, this is still pure slave-revolt. Zizek calling out "we are not going away, look at us" is not going to change anything. Neo-Marxism is not going to do the job. We need a revaluation of values -- of value, and it is the question if the occupy movement is a good enough vessel for a philosophical redesigning of western civilization.

. . .if this movement persists (and I am sure that it will), it may acquire political substance, which means a decently worked out value-system, enabling such things as rational representation. I urge anyone who is sympathetic toward this movement and its general sentiment of disapproving of speculative banking/investing, the practice that now passes for capitalism, to take a look at value-ontology (do a search on it) and take from it what suits you.

There are not many thoughts around that can make a true difference in the way economies in the west are being run. "The will to power", for example, only supports the present way of dealing. With a philosophical centralization of the term "value", the study of what value is, how we can recognize and establish it, the current dealings become instantly recognizable as stupid, anti-natural, and doomed to drag whatever gets mixed up in it into chaos, and it sets against it a principle that may very naturally lead to a gradual stabilization of the balance between production and profit, enabling a slow and stable economic growth.

[Emphases added after-the-fact]