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September 2011 shattered the ideology of an invincible Wall Street much as September 2001 shattered the illusion of an invulnerable United States. Al… - Jodi Dean
" "September 2011 shattered the ideology of an invincible Wall Street much as September 2001 shattered the illusion of an invulnerable United States. All of a sudden and seemingly out of the blue, people outraged by the fact that "banks got bailed out" and "we got sold out" installed themselves in the financial heart of New York City. Occupying the symbol of capitalist class power, they ruptured it. The ostensible controllers of the global capitalist system, still reeling from the crash of 2008, appeared to have lost control over their own cement neighborhood. Hippies with tents and cops with barricades had turned Lower Manhattan into a chaotic mess. Those seeking to combine the people's work, debts, hopes, and futures into speculative instruments for private profit confronted a visible and actual collective counterforce. There in the power of the people where investment banks and hedge funds had already identified an enormous social surplus, a cadre of the newly active located an inexhaustible political potential. It was like a giant hole had been opened up in the steel and glass citadel of the financial class. Through it, traders, brokers, and market-makers – as well as everybody else – could see the possibility of a world without capitalism. Wall Street was occupied.
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About Jodi Dean
(born April 9, 1962) is an American political theorist and professor in the department at in Geneva, New York state. She has held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at .
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Additional quotes by Jodi Dean
Although the contemporary Left might seem to agree with the mainstream story of communism's failure – it doesn't work, where "it" holds a place for a wide variety of unspecified political endeavors – the language of failure covers over a more dangerous, anxiety-provoking idea – communism succeeded. The Left isn't afraid of failure, it is afraid of success, the successful mobilization of the energy and rage of the people. Leftists really fear the bloody violence of revolution, and hence they focus on displacing anger into safer procedural, consumerist, and aesthetic channels. As emphasizes, the legacy of anti- is a preference for the condemnation of some kinds of violence but not others: leftists join democrats, liberals, and conservatives in denouncing the while they virtually ignore the "far more bloody ." Even those who see themselves as part of some open and varied constellation of the Left condemn the violence of the people against those who would oppress them. State violence and the force of is taken for granted, assumed, cloaked in a prior legitimacy or presumed to be justified in the interest of order.
Against the background of communist = Soviet = Stalinist, two interlocking stories of the predominate. The first is that communism collapsed under its own weight: it was so inefficient, people were so miserable, life was so stagnant, that the system came to a grinding halt. It failed. Linked to Stalinism, the story of failure features chapters on , and terror. Like most ideological constructions, it's not quite coherent: it neglects the fact that the Stalin period was also a period in which the US and the USSR were allies. In the era most exemplary of the Soviet Union's injustice and illegitimacy, the period when the USSR was present not as a failed state but a strong one, the US was closer to the regime than at any other time in its history. The second, related, story of the collapse of communism is that it was defeated. We beat them. We won. Capitalism and liberal democracy (the elision is necessary) demonstrated their superiority on the world stage. Freedom triumphed over tyranny. The details of this victory matter less than the ostensible undeniability. After all, there is no Soviet Union anymore.
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