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First round results of the Des Moines Iowa Caucus is in.#CaucusForBernie pic.twitter.com/oZPCJkCEUw

— Students For Bernie (@Students_Bernie) February 3, 2020

In my darker moments I reflect on the fact that caring about politics is a mental illness, kind of—what it is is essentially a mad and desperate search for a sense of control.

It’s to feel like you have some sort of say over what’s going to happen, even though deep down in your darkest heart you know it’s not true. You know that you are totally at the whims of history and fate, the machinations of man and beast, and that you have very little say about where you end up. Politics is a way to feel like, “maybe I can influence it.”

For the most part that’s what it is, a big displacement of one’s sense of helplessness. And that goes beyond caring about politics, it goes to voting, to being involved and everything, because it really is an illusion — politics really is beyond us for the most part. Huge forces like capitalism shape things beyond a scale that we could ever even comprehend because we’re so small.

But — and I’ve been trying to fight against this for a year now because I don’t want to lose my way, I don’t want to get stars in my eyes — but I cannot get over this feeling, even when I’m feeling at my darkest and most pessimistic, that this is a moment that is the beginning of a chance to actually get closer to putting your hand somewhere close to the levers of destiny. Not with this election, not with this primary, not even with Bernie getting in — that’s just the opening of the door. You have to step through and you have to walk.

But I really feel like that if we have an ability as a species to come together in a common recognition of humanity, that this is maybe our last chance to do it.
But we might actually be able to.

­Matt Christman, Chapo Trap House, January 30, 2020

Phil Donahue: Are you a capitalist?

Bernie Sanders: 'No I am not a capitalist...do I believe that the profit motive is fundamental to human nature? The answer is no. I (believe in) the spirit of cooperation, that you & I can work together...rather than destroy eachother'

1981. pic.twitter.com/ANesbyz2OM

— Aisha Ahmad (@aishaismad) January 30, 2020

“I think being on this planet, one of the first things people would say if we were all dumped down here is - let us say there were only ten of us and we were dropped into this planet already formed - one of the first things we would say after a moment or two will be, ‘is everybody okay?’ let's get
something to eat.’

And that should be the first thing any society says, ‘Is everybody? Ok, let's get something to eat. And we don't, because we have this ‘private property’ thing. Property rights over people's rights.

And I just think that competition got the upper hand over cooperation. This species was successful. The verge of failure that we’re on is because two wonderful qualities that made us a successful species, cooperation and competition, are way out of balance now. Competition is everything.

Cooperation happens after a flood; happens for a few days and then everybody goes back to where they were before.

We need to get that balance back. If we can get that balance back, there’s hope.”

George Carlin, 1992

Occupy Wall Street ­ put a spotlight on rising inequality in the U.S. and mounted a challenge against the country’s financial and political elites. https://t.co/zx2De1xWj9

— Truthout (@truthout) February 3, 2020

A decade after the emergence of Occupy Wall Street ­­– which put a spotlight on rising inequality in the U.S. and mounted a challenge against this country’s financial and political elites — it would be easy, but wrong, to see a news segment like CBS’s as Occupy’s most lasting achievement. In promoting the story on Twitter, CBS referenced the “1 percent,” adopting Occupy’s framing. And the tone of the segment was significantly more sympathetic to activists’ central critique than coverage of the movement was at the time.

Occupy “changed the conversation,” as the saying goes. For years after the movement was violently suppressed, that explanation seemed sufficient. Now, after a decade of some of the most vibrant and exciting social movements in a generation, it’s clear that the organized left is doing much more than changing the rhetoric used by mainstream news outlets...

The rallying cry in Zuccotti Park and in encampments around the country was “all our grievances are connected.” The movement was always committed to a structural critique — and ultimately a rejection — of capitalism. Occupy activists insisted that to talk about environmental justice, and workers’ rights, and universal health care was really to be talking about different aspects of the same thing. In order to address these problems, it was necessary, if not sufficient, to name capitalism as the system linking other forms of oppression and exploitation.

That critique has gone from the fringe to the mainstream. Young people especially feel negatively about capitalism and positively about socialism. Tireless organizing has continued to give teeth to the rhetoric, as the last decade also saw some of the most exciting social movements in a generation. From The Fight For 15, to the Movement for Black Lives, to efforts to decriminalize sex work, to MeToo, to Standing Rock, to the disability-activist-led fight to defeat the repeal of Obamacare, to environmental justice and the Women’s Marches, people have organized and taken to the street to demand dignity, equality and a future worth living. Each of these movements have lineages separate and distinct from Occupy, but they exist alongside each other in a mosaic of collective struggle...

By the time Occupy arose, that mindset was still prevalent but starting to change. After the inability of the anti-war movement in 2003 to prevent the invasion of Iraq, many activists became more willing to at least consider the need to engage in electoral politics. With the resurgence of socialism as a guiding philosophy of the left, rather than the anti-consumerism and “conscious consumerism” that absorbed so much energy and attention in the ’90s, the left is no longer content to unilaterally withdraw from the halls of power. All that is to say the left hasn’t given up its outside game, but much of it is finally willing to play an inside game as well.

In 2016, many veterans of Occupy flocked to Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Here was a candidate who had fought for many of the same things as their movement. Although Sanders has faced critiques from the left, including from Black Lives Matter activists in 2015, and for his vote for the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, his many supporters on the left say the senator and those around him are receptive to good faith criticisms. “Bernie’s criminal justice platform responds to the demands of a movement that has been in the streets for the last five years,” Philip Agnew, an activist with the Movement for Black Lives and a Sanders surrogate, said in a recent interview. “His criminal justice platform is an amazing example of a campaign that is responsive to a movement, in a way that Sanders rarely gets credit for.”

That’s one of the reasons many veterans of Occupy and other activists such as those energized by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the vision of the Green New Deal have celebrated Sanders’s rise, and his refusal to play the respectability game by distancing himself from the label of democratic socialist. He embraced that label, and his rise in 2016 — as well as the national trauma of the Trump campaign and ultimate victory — drove an explosion of leftist recruitment, primarily by the Democratic Socialists of America.

#CapitalismKills
#SocialismSaves

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