the collective

The Occupy Movement

Largely understood as an awakening of consciousness, The Occupy movement prides itself on sparking an international reinvigoration of the rights and autonomies that are being blocked by the continual relegation to the death of choice, opportunity, mobility, and the life of exploitation, overworking, economic struggle. In their organizing, the Occupy movement addressed and superseded the Spectacle in accurately realizing their status for themselves and the world, “[occupy movement] is also transforming how we, the 99% , see ourselves. The shame many of us felt when we couldn’t find a job, pay down our debts, or keep our home is being replaced by a political awakening. Millions now recognize that we are not to blame for a weak economy.” Accurately, affirming the truth of the system, ridding themselves of shame, and exposing the rampant exploitation of the impoverished was the success of the 99%. 

Raising the consciousness of those experiencing this life of exploitation, the movement has been associated with redistribution and reordering as a basic philosophy of the revolution necessary. Fanon claimed from the onset of The Wretched of the Earth that marginalized persons within repressive societies in their consciousness recognize an inherent need for the revolution of their society. Bringing disorder and disorganization in the heavily compartmentalized world of the dominant is the agenda of this change. And through disorder, the rightful restoration of the already known humanity of the marginalized is centered and ordered. This important revolutionary doctrine is the dispossession of possession, and the end of the institutions, and power relations that govern it. Focusing in on this perspective of change, The Occupy movement stood for the reordering, not restructuring as it conveys a sense of recognizing the previous structure as valid in some form necessary to be shifted to work better, of the capitalistic system beginning with Wall Street. Understood to “liberate Main Street from Wall Street,” one of the first steps to liberate the collective 99% is to “Reverse the process of bank consolidation and rebuild a national system of community-based, community accountable financial institutions devoted to build community wealth. Break up mega-banks into independent, locally owned financial institutions back by tax and regulatory policies that favor community financial institutions.” The breaking up and reordering of the institutions of banks is one prescriptive task of revolution that can be further deepened by “the Social Solidarity Economy is an alternative to capitalism and other authoritarian, state- dominated economic systems. In SSE ordinary people play an active role in shaping all of the dimensions of human life: economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental.” The practitioners of this work are those at the frontlines enacting this radical disorder in the embodiment of their identities as state antagonisms, taking the life-death binary into building their own institutions, operating in their own autonomous sovereignty, redefining and reenacting the use of power, and invoking the subjugated knowledges.

The latter-- the subjugated knowledges-- is the last contribution of the proof of the theoretical framework. Foucault describes the recent shift of knowledge in modernity as a product of local criticism that“in reality is an autonomous, non-centralised kind of theoretical production.” His description here prioritizes the epistemological right of existence to everyone, and particularly to that stems far from the preluding dominance of intelligence as a form of subjugating power. This transition and evolution of the axiology of knowledge extended to those communities whose humanity had been marginalized by the systemized hegemony of white supremacy. Foucault continues, be characterizing this kind of emancipatory knowledge production as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges. By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation.” The importance of knowledge and education as a form of power-relation subjugation is the first level of the unconscious socialization of people to a propagated ideology.