Adbusters is a bi-monthly you can find in the magazine shelves at Farmington’s excellent Mr. Paperback. I noticed it some time ago, but thought nothing of it at the time. Having since read that an Adbusters Media Foundation’s September advertisement set off the world-wide protests that started with the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York’s Zucotti Park, I invested in the current copy last month.
Most of the OWSer supporters and defenders are claiming that the very incoherence of the movement is its special virtue. If there’s an actual idea behind this defense it seems to be that rage, or at least noisy indignation, will provide a fecund soil from which a post-capitalist civilization will grow in time.
This resembles the “program” of the nineteenth century Russian Nihilists who refused to espouse any concrete revolutionary agenda. The Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) aimed only to destroy government, religion, family, tradition, manners, commercial hair cuts, cravats, soap, private property, etc. in the expectation that once humanity is free of these chains something better would emerge.
Resembles, but not the same. The Adbuster crowd aims to destroy consumerism and the capitalist system it supports. The Nihilist method was to assassinate czars, grand dukes, generals, officials, policemen. The OWSers method is to sleep in tents, defecate in port-a-potties (if available), shout slogans, and wave signs.
Saying that the Adbuster program is incoherent is not the same as saying that it has no ideas. The magazine is awash with ideas. There are still some copies at Mr. Paperback if anyone wants to investigate for themselves. If you wish to spare yourself the expense I have provide some samples below.
Readers might be interested in this excerpt from an article entitled “Long Night of the Left is Drawing to a Close” by Jessica Whyte,
“In 2010 Slavoj Zizek…gave a public lecture at the London School of Economics on the necessity of communism.” A member of the audience challenged him to explain his use of the word “we.” This is the result: “In speaking of the communist ‘we,’ he explained, he was not evoking an already existing political subject, let an inherently revolutionary sociological class. Rather, the use of “we” could best be understood as a speech act or a performative utterance—this is, as one of those utterances identified by the philosopher of language J.L. Austin that do not describe an exiting reality but instead produce a new one. Just as statements like “I do” or “You’re fired!” are themselves actions, transforming rather than describing a situation, Zizek said he hoped that the act of evoking a communist “we” would contribute to bringing a collective subject into existence.”
Some pretty deep thinking going on at the LSE as I’m sure you will all agree. Whenever you hear a phrase like “performative utterance” you got to know that something pretty profound is going on.
Jessica adds a description of the reaction to Zizek’s observation: “People around me chuckled and riotous laughter from the main auditorium blasted over the video.” Good for you if you got the joke. I admit it eludes me completely, but then I’m just a simple Franklin County rustic.
It’s only fair to point that if you read the whole article you will find that the communism advocated at the conference by Zizek and the philosopher Alain Badiou is not like any form of communism that ever actually existed. It’s opposite variety.
Here’s a condensation of a meditation by a certain Darren Flood: “Your mom tells you…that you are very lucky and the world is your oyster. And she is right. You will travel greater distances in a single day than most people only a century ago traveled their entire lives. You will have food choices that English kings couldn’t have imagined….You will live longer than any generation before. Your wardrobe will contain cloth from what was once beyond the reach. Broken bones won’t render you a cripple…blah, blah.” And in closing: She is careful not to explain that this oyster isn’t for all the children of that the world or that such good fortune is making the world sick. [Emphasis added].
Some possible interpretations:
1. We should travel by ox-cart, eat porridge, shorten our lives, walk around on crutches and dress in loin cloths so that the world can heal.
2. We should travel by ox-cart, eat porridge, shorten our lives, walk around on crutches and dress in loin cloth until all the world’s children get oysters of their own.
3. We should continue as before, but feel guilty about it.
You may find this excerpt from Nicole Demby’s “A Message Entangled With Its Form” illuminating “…perhaps the sight from Liberty Plaza is similar to the one a person might have glimpsed from Tahrir Square, from Ben-Gurion Boulevard, from among the indignados in Madrid and the protests in Greece.”
Or perhaps Nicole Demby is a dimwit.
Wait, she has more to say: “Occupiers are learning to use their bodies in ways that break with the modes of moving circumscribed by our culture of efficiency and the near-total encroachment of privatized space.”
OK, drop that second “perhaps.” All that remains is to determine whether dear Demby has removed the door from its hinges in the privatized space of her Brooklyn apartment. If I find out I’ll send word.
I’ve given you a fair sample of Adbusterian cogitations. If you doubt me get a copy and read for yourself.
The recent election proved that people are starting to take notice of Mr Frary and Mr Webster. Please gentlemen, speak often and write copiously. Do so at great length. Please consider running for something. We need you. Especially now with Herman Cain gone.
Is the first commenter using irony?
the anti-capitalism OWS crowd are also selling an IPAD app. in the apple store, if any wanted more irony, or hypocrisy today.
The OWS movement is anti-greed, not anti-capitalism.
Since the professor has deigned to issue another screed from his fortress of solitude, I’m wondering if he’d care to make odds on whether anyone at Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Aurora Bank, EverBank, HSBC, MetLife Bank, OneWest, Sovereign or U.S. Bank will be enjoying the lux amenities of our nation’s more exclusive prisons. That is if the DOJ can take the time from it’s busy schedule of not investigating torture and scaring Californian pot merchants to zealously prosecute them for recent foreclosure crimes against active duty military personnel. I’ll leave the dealings of Goldman Sachs and the ineptitude of the SEC for other posters to contemplate. The fact that some of the mass of Mr. Frary’s great unwashed have a anti-capitalist agenda should not detract from the argument for the need to prevent harmful Wall Street excess with meaningful regulation to prevent another crash of ’08, somehow lessen the influence of the financial sector in government, and at least prosecute those financial wizards who caused the crash. Equate OWS with fringe anarchists and communists and your missing a more valid point. Turn your argument upside down and your pro-czarist.
P.S. Not that I’m against outlawing cravats and bow ties, but considering living conditions in nineteenth century Russia, can you understand why some might have been fed up to the point of advocating a total upheaval of convention? For the capitalist version, see Hutch’s libertarian utopia a.k.a. Somalia.
townie: The OWS movement is anti-greed, not anti-capitalism.
In the lead up to OWS, and ever since, the predominantly chanted purpose is to bring down capitalism. Whenever anyone has the temerity to ask what should replace it, the answer is either dead silence or some form of benevolent communism, something that has never existed.
One person’s greed is another person’s success. Among the deadly sins, greed is right up there with envy, on prominent display in OWS.
Irony? Certainly not. Like the aforementioned gentlemen I am a loyal Republican Tea Party American PATRIOT. Each night I pray fervently for the president and the nation to fail. That way our side wins and gains power,see? After that who cares. As long as the powerful remain in power and the wealthy are not inconvenienced. In the slightest.
This country is broken. Herman Cain, Sarah Palin , and Donald Trump will fix it. Send them money. At once
if OWS was anti-greed they wouldn’t be out there demanding they want more of other peoples money, isn’t that greedy of them?
:D
Getting rich from other people’s money is the definition of investment banking.
Fine. Unless it’s unregulated.
See Louis Brandeis, “Other People’s Money” (1914)
Thank you Seamus. You nailed it when you wrote “the argument (is) for the need to prevent harmful Wall Street excess with meaningful regulation to prevent another crash of ’08, somehow lessen the influence of the financial sector in government, and at least prosecute those financial wizards who caused the crash.”
I do not understand why fair minded person would oppose such ideas.
I don’t see investment bankers out there demanding the government take money from individuals by way of legislation for their investments.
Bankers do not need to take to the streets to get their friends and former employees in Congress, the White House, and the Federal Reserve to “take money from individuals (taxpayers) by way of legislation (TARP for example) for their (lousy) investments”, especially if they are allowed to remain too big to fail. Which illustrates my point about their money having far more influence than their vote.
hutch, that’s because they can afford to pay lobbyists to loiter in the halls of congress and make their demands for them.
Nobody familiar with the responses that have appeared on the BD threads is going to believe this , but there are actually liberals and leftists who can follow an argument and respond in analytical and factual terms. It’s true. I was e-mailing back and forth with one such only last year.
So here’s article about the weirdly muddled Adbusterian ideology. If there was someone out there who wished to contest my characterization they had only to go over to Mr. Paperback and buy a copy of the magazine. There are still copies available. I checked.
Not a chance. Never.
All I ever see are the usual dogs bounding out of the junkyard, snarling and baying. There’s not a single response that has anything to say about Adbusters and precious little about the OWSers. Nothing but ready-made fuming and frothing about greedy bankers—as if I had a single word to say in their defense.
The professor’s words always sound brown to the rest of us. The same old recycled Rush Limbaugh poltroonery. Yet another voice bravely and tirelessly defending the wealthy and powerful. I hate to have to oversimplify things for a guy who has gone to some college or another but it appears necessary. As to the age old debate of Capital vs Labor; this is not a chicken or the egg question. Without labor there is no capital. Never has been. No matter where your family got its wealth, be it in gold,oil,coal diamonds,steel,railroads,etc. some poor buggers sweated struggled and died way early to enable you a life of ease,comfort and privilege. You didn’t snap your soft,pink fingers and it appeared.
As to those tired mindless mewling complaints of “Class Warfare” ; it has always existed and it is your side that has waged it. Since time began to this very moment your side is undefeated! You have pitched ,if not a perfect game,a complete game shutout. That’s not enough?
I’ve never been to college and have no idea what they teach there. I’m going to guess that it’s not history.
@John Adbusters is a venture that uses what it is not to hide what it is to perpetuate its own existence. It’s not a new business model but it seems to work well enough since they’re still in business. My stand is to not buy them nor to give them free publicity.
OWS is unstructured, rudderless and still a nascent entity. It may or may not survive, but OWS, like the Tea Party shows the deep dissatisfaction of the people with the government and their agents.
For now they do it in different fashions, but I suspect that there is enough common ground that Congress should be very, very afraid.
Professor Frary:
It is regrettable that you are dismayed at my shift in focus from your comments on protesting anarchists to the banking practices that brought them, and many others, into the street. I strayed from your script because it only points out, as you say, the junkyard dogs. In this case, your choice of the more avant garde opinions associated with OWS. I have as little interest in defending the plausibility of a society based on these views as you do in defending unregulated banking speculation. More constructive debate can be had on the causes of the protests and the possible beneficial effects. Enacting legislation with teeth to prevent another crash like ’08 and prosecuting banking CEO’s for tanking the economy for profit is implausible under the current regime, but more likely and more rational than outlawing top hats and monocles. Since you were compelled to point out the more extreme voices of OWS, I felt obliged to offer some other opinions I have heard from the OWS coverage. The mere fact that they are protesting at foreclosed homes, the homes of large bank executives, and on Wall Street should give you clues as to their main concerns. Cheers.
@David Firsching: It was only yesterday that our illustrious president delivered yet another salvo in the class war, another load of “fair share” bloviation, and generally topped up the bucket of warm – I agree – brown stuff that, when the left’s not slinging it, it’s stepping in it. You should rethink your decision to skip college. Perhaps some of the professor’s legion of former students will lend you some study materials.
@gus: Nancy she-who-would-be-queen Pelosi has delivered the left’s view of OWS, pronouncing it “focused, spontaneous and non-violent”. Three strikes and she’s out.
@seamus: Would your legislation deal with insider trading on the D side in Congress? Would you prosecute former D crooks like CEO Corzine? These groups are getting a free pass in the press and OWS. Where’s the fair share of righteous indignation?
mr. frary laments that bulldog readers do not find him all that interesting. in fact, for most of us, the adbusters-ows link is no revelation. while the non-profit was instrumental in the birth of ows, the movement is governed by itself. mr. frary’s review of the magazine (which has always been mostly pictures) focuses on two things: attacking the most relevant philosopher since sartre based on a narrow interpretation of a second-hand account of his opinion of a pronoun (what a shame he’s not available to debate frary into the ground,) and extrapolating from its pages the most ignorant, infantile, and unoriginal criticism of occupy he could think of, i.e. “if they had their way we’d all live in caves.” furthermore, insulted that nobody wants to play with him, frary accuses “liberals and leftists” of being mentally incompetent and unable to sufficiently argue against his points. (frary cannot fathom the alternative explanation, simply that nobody cares what he has to say.) suggesting that those who disagree with him in the bulldog comments are nothing but drooling imbeciles while those who share his misinformed views are champions of logic is truly the pot calling the kettle black. comments above that continually insist that ows’s primary goal is to “destroy capitalism” and the bizarre cognitive dissonance that cannot comprehend a leftist movement able to embrace technology or aspects of a capitalist system, demonstrate clearly that left-leaning bulldog readers have no monopoly on fallacious logic.
“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
-theodore roosevelt, the “trust buster.”
And thus, the idea of a constitutional amendment to outlaw corporate personhood is born. This, plus much more may be the work of OWS and others who understand that no corporation has freedom of speech, a corporation can’t speak for itself! Move To Amend
Any one who says the OWS movement is asking for anyone else’s money is guilty of straw man reasoning. Anyone who thinks the banks did not ask for their bail-outs is kidding themselves. It may be a good time to invest in a guillotine company.
What burdens I must endure! Here I am, an enfeebled, arthritic septuagenarian pricing coffins and counting the days until the end. My short-term memory is down to about two seconds and my long-term memory so fragmented that I can no longer remember where I buried Jimmy Hoffa. The Bulldog’s readers are not interested in what I write. Nobody wants to play with me. Nobody cares what I have to say. My views are misinformed. I’m unable to fathom alternative explanations. My words sound brown. I’m a poltroon. I don’t know no history.
Cheers back at you SEAMUS. I acknowledge that the Daily Bulldog owns this thread and no one else. I only suggest that you submit a column of your own about the merits of the OWS movement. I would be happy to assess the accuracy of your facts and the clarity of your analysis and I won’t say a word about Adbusters.
JONBOY. Since you have no interest in what I have to say there’s no point in my replying to your opaque and pretentious blather.
DAVID FIRSCHING. You may want to look up the word “poltroon.” I recognize that it has a nice insulting sound, but that’s no excuse for abusing it. You don’t need a college education to buy a dictionary. Just use my name and Mr. Paperback will be glad to sell you an inexpensive volume.