Moment that mattered: Protesters are evicted from the Occupy London camp

Taken with a fisheye lens, Occupy London protesters with their belongings gather across from St Paul's Cathedral in London after bailiffs moved in to remove tents from the Occupy London camp, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012. Occupy London was last week refused permission to appeal against a High Court decision to allow their eviction to proceed. (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

For the general population, the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh – and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1 percent and even less – the .1 percent – it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing. In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called ‘Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.’ It urged investors to put money into a ‘plutonomy index’. The brochure says “the World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the ‘precariat’ — people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” – hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) – was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called ‘growing worker insecurity’. If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a ‘healthy’ economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat – in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that
will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Extracted from Noam Chomsky’s ‘Occupy’ – a collection of the writer’s thoughts, lectures, essays and interviews on the movement – published by Penguin at £5.

Posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2023 - Categories: #6 - Jan-Mar 2012, App Issues.