 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Prof. Vijay Prasad and we will discuss the issues of the United States and particularly the Occupy Movement. Vijay, we had discussed the Occupy Movement about five, six months back. The movement seems to have not come back as we thought it might do in summer. Why do you think this has happened? Well, the first thing to remember is the movement appeared almost out of nowhere although it didn't come from nowhere. It appeared in these manifestations. You know, it's a word that one got from Spain. Manifestación where people would come and manifest themselves in public, would take over public space. And that was a dramatic thing about the Occupy Movement. You know, this taking possession of apparently public space although very quickly those who came and manifested themselves found out that public space in the United States is a sort of public-private partnership and they had to negotiate with big corporations who had seized large areas of cities, you know, in the name of making parks and such like. So, they came into these spaces and then refused to leave. So, what had happened was very early into the Occupy Movement, the tactic of manifesting themselves in public spaces became the movement. You know, so that when people saw Occupy, what they saw was the people in tents creating cities, creating a mode of making decisions, you know, the General Assembly, creating a mode of dealing with food, garbage, etc. Lots of mics. And mics, exactly. The mic, the way of talking to each other in big groups. So, but that this approach was a tactic. It was not itself a strategy. It was not a political orientation. Those things had to come afterwards. So, the movement begins as a tactic. When the tactic came under attack from the police, you know, they fought fiercely to defend those manifestations. And then a combination of the cold weather and very harsh repression by the police forces disbanded the tents, disbanded the cities. It is taken time now for these people to gather, you know, to talk through. What now is not the question of just return to the tactic of manifesting, but what is our strategy? What is our way forward? What is our orientation? How should we orient ourselves in relationship, say, to the mainstream political parties? How shall we orient ourselves to the trade union movement? So, this has been the major discussion, you know, the question of strategy, the question of whether there should be a national movement or whether it should be rooted in different cities. And I think this is why you haven't seen a major return of people into the tent cities, because they have understood that the tactic is not really the central phenomena of Occupy. Do you think the Occupy movement really changed the discourse in the United States, brought back the issue of poverty, disparities, 1 percent, 99 percent being an expression of that? Well, let's take it from two different directions. The first thing I can say is that in the summer before Occupy, I mean, Occupy comes at the end of the year in 2011. So, we have the major breakthroughs in the Arab world. The Arab Spring begins in the, you know, January, February, March of 2011. In Wisconsin, a major struggle breaks out. Public employees are fighting against a right-wing governor. They occupy, before Occupy, they occupy the state house in Madison, Wisconsin. So, there are these moments, these punctuations of struggle. In the summer of 2011, you have the Indignados movement in Spain. You see the major strikes and struggles in Greece. You begin to see struggles break out in Britain. Again, public sector employees, you know, against the cuts from the Cameron budget. So, I remember in the summer of 2011, many activists, intellectuals, people involved in movements, feeling a real sense of despondency. You know, people had even started to say, what's wrong with the United States? You know, we have the whole world on fire. Fine, in Wisconsin, there's a struggle. But what's wrong with the United States? So, there was a real downhill slope. You know, Obama had been for left liberals in major disappointment. You know, so there was a despondency. When Occupy opened up, the subjective condition on the left wing of American political life was greatly transformed. You know, so people, intellectuals, organizers, you know, all brand of people from liberal out to left were now doing a kind of darshan at the Occupy sites. It became almost a tourist destination. People would bring their children. Let me show you what we are capable of. And that should not be underestimated. The subjective power of this breakthrough enthused a section in the United States that had begun to feel like, you know, here nothing like this could ever happen. So, that's the first thing I would say. The second thing is I think they were very clever. You know, one should remember that the call for Occupy was not given by a political party, a political tendency, nothing. It was given by a Canadian magazine called Adbusters. They are a very smart magazine. You know, they have understood the power of branding, the power of the media, how to take political campaigns and sharpen it through the media. You know, for instance, there used to be a billboard put up on the airport road between San Francisco airport and the city. The Nestle had their headquarters in San Francisco and Nestle had been pushing powdered milk into Africa. So, what this group did was they took a billboard and on it they just had the text, Nestle kills babies. Very sharp branded statement. Nestle was greatly embarrassed. So, these prose in terms of spinning messages, when they crafted the idea of the 1% and the 99%, that fired the imagination. You know, so that mainstream right-wing politicians in the Democratic Party also began to talk about the government of the 1%, a society of the 1%. That language has entered American political life across the spectrum. So much so that people in the Republican side like Mitt Romney will say some defensive things about the 1%, you know, the 1% actually create jobs, etc. That's a big breakthrough because now everybody had to at least acknowledge, not poverty, because they were talking about poverty. What they had to acknowledge is actually fundamental and that is inequality. You know, poverty you can talk about, we feel bad about the poor, we therefore need to have social spending, there should be some charity, things like even George Bush talked about poverty. But they don't like to talk about inequality because inequality tells you the mechanism of how people are made poor. In that sense occupy open space for left liberal people to feel like change is possible and it created a vocabulary which the mainstream had to take seriously which is a vocabulary of inequality. These were two big breakthroughs. Tea Party has operated in its earlier avatar and what it is now in trying to capture the Republican Party. This really mobilized the Republican right aligned with certain sections and then trying to transform politics by capturing the Republican Party. Do you think that that is a trajectory the left liberals in the United States will follow or they will remain outside the party system and try to work out policies by which actual change can take place in the United States? I mean, this is an open-ended question. The Republican Party had been on a very swift, you know, they were in the fast lane of right radicalization since perhaps the 1960s. You know, now no longer in the Republican Party can any moderate opinion be tolerated. I mean, it has gone speedily out of the general kind of middle class mainstream. You know, the middle class is not keen on some of the very far right positions of the Republicans. They sound cruel. They sound intolerant. But the fact is that that's where they've gone and they've been able to still maintain a fairly large coalition of religious conservatives, etc. with them. So when the Tea Party appeared, the Republicans who had recognized that they no longer had actually any kind of mass position, you know, they had become a party of the very rich. They had become a party whose coalition included, you know, Christians, etc. But what they didn't have was a mass orientation and what the Tea Party gave them was the ability for basically very rich people who dominate the Republican Party to appear as a populist force and they threw money at the Tea Party. You know, people start to say, this is not a grassroots movement. This is an astroturf movement, meaning the rich have seeded it. But no, it's not entirely an astroturf. This is also a reaction of people in the middle class, white-collar middle class who found that they were not getting jobs. You know, one of the principal issues in the Tea Party was not just racism and all that. It was also outsourcing. They were furious. You know, their jobs, those white-collar middle class jobs were going to places like India. There was a lot of anti-Indian sentiment in the Tea Party movement. So there you can understand how the Republican Party so willingly and gratefully absorbed the Tea Party. Occupy is a totally different beast. You know, Occupy was largely, yes, a youth movement, but then it was a magnet for all the disgruntled sections of the left and some sections of the libertarian movement that came together. But all the disgruntlements and grievances were there. You know, it was, there were sections of people against prisons, sections of people against, you know, the brutality against women. Every single issue you can think of had been brought there. And the way I understood it, it was a way for the American left to breathe in all the grievances in order to finally exhale and say we exist. You know, there was nothing wrong with that kind of thing to bring everything out into the open. Problem is, Democrats at a much harder time bringing in or yoking Occupy to their own politics because the Democratic Party has gone so fundamentally in a neoliberal direction. It is so fundamentally taken advantage of the fact that the entire liberal left has nowhere else to go. You know, they are not going to vote for the Republicans who are insane. And at the last instance in the loneliness of the voting booth, even the most left-wing people often vote for the Democratic Party. So they have taken advantage of this group. They were not keen to fully absorb them. You know, there were anarchists, there were all kinds of people that the Democrats don't want to be seen to be affiliated with because Occupy wasn't the populist middle class uprising. It was always, it always had a counter-cultural left-wing orientation. Only a few politicians came there. And also on the other side, among people in Occupy, there is a disdain for organized politics. You know, the position of anarchism has a very strong hold on a lot of young people in the United States who have a very strong suspicion of being taken in or absorbed by tendencies that don't represent them. So there was a strong, from the very beginning, a strong sense, we don't want anything to do with the Democratic Party. Occupy, for those few reasons, will not be able to be absorbed by the Democrats as easily or as willingly as the Republicans absorb the Tea Party movement. But Vijay, when you say the Republicans absorb the Tea Party movement, you could also pose it the other way around and say really the lunatic right, if you will, and the very rich have taken over the Republican Party. And in that sense, it's not an absorption of the Tea Party as much as Tea Party absorbing the Republican Party. Well, yeah, that you could see it like that, except that the Republicans trajectory towards the far right happened before the Tea Party appeared. You know, the Tea Party only appears after Obama comes to office. You have to remember, of course, that before Obama comes to office, the Republican Party for eight years had as its standard bearer George W. Bush. You didn't need the Tea Party to radicalize the Republicans to the right. I mean, you can't have a more bizarre right-wing guy than Bush. And then the standard bearer, before Tea Party begins into the election, was Sarah Palin, who represents perhaps the most outlandish section of American politics. So when Tea Party appeared, it's not like they had to go to the Republicans and radicalize them. That had already happened. So the Republicans were able to take advantage of the moment, they were able to, as it were, provide leadership. Michelle Backman, the Congresswoman for Minnesota, she was already in Congress. She was already taken seriously. These are people who, to my mind, are totally off the charts. Somebody like Rick Santorum, previously Senator from Pennsylvania. I mean, how can these people be taken seriously? He's a guy who says things like, the Quran is written in Islamic. They have bare understanding of the world, or if they do have an understanding, they have a pretense of being people of the soil who don't know anything about the world. So in that sense, I feel like the arrow goes the other way. When the Tea Party broke out, it was an authentic movement in the initial period. It was people who were angry with outsourcing. This is that they were angry at having a black president. Bailing out the banks. Bailing out the banks. There were many issues. And then the Republicans were able to take or harness very large sections of them. Occupy was so different. Its social basis was different. Its political trajectory was different. They were asking questions in Occupy that the Democrats were hesitant to raise. For instance, fundamental questions of finance capital. What is the role of finance in our societies? Why do banks get bailed out? Why do people who are being evicted from their houses getting no handouts from the government? That was a fundamental question about choices being exercised not by the opposition party but by the so-called liberal left party which is to say the Democrats. So they were asking questions that Obama did not want to have asked. Nancy Pelosi didn't want to have asked. So in the initial period, the Democrats were very cagey about what these young people were asking. Because don't forget, they were asking finance capital questions. Then they asked a fundamental question which affected their own lives. During Occupy, student debt in America crossed $1 trillion. They were asking questions of why is it that I enter college? I am a young person. I graduate with a bachelor's degree. I am $20, $30,000 in debt personally. So during my time in college, where is the moment for me to extend my imagination? I can't risk studying literature or history or things like this. I have to study economics. I have to take internships. My entire college career is in a sense indentured to that debt that I am carrying. So they were furious about these questions. And Obama tried to wiggle around on the student debt issue by saying we should maintain the levels of repayment. We don't want those to be increased. But they didn't come to the fundamental question which Occupy was asking. And that is the real gap between where the Democrats have gone, you know, which is really, they've tied themselves into a fundamental neoliberal kind of commitment. And then where Occupy was going, which was at least raising questions about neoliberal policies. Thank you very much, Vijay. We'll discuss in the next part some of this question more detail.