Excerpted from Jodi Dean:

‘After the movement was impossible to ignore, after the protesters had demonstrated determination and the police had reacted with orange containment nets and pepper spray, other efforts to efface the fundamental division opened up by Occupy Wall Street emerged. All tried to reabsorb the movement into the familiar and thereby fill-in or occlude the gap the movement installs. Three ways stand out: democratization, moralization, and individualization.

I use “democratization” to designate attempts to frame the movement in terms of American electoral politics. One of the most common democratizing moves has been to treat Occupy Wall Street as the Tea Party of the left. So construed, the movement isn’t something radically new; it’s derivative. The Tea Party has already been there and done that. Of course, this analogy fails to acknowledge that the Tea Party is astro-turf, organized by Dick Armey and funded by the Koch brothers. A further democratizing move immediately reduces the significance of the movement to elections: what does Occupy Wall Street mean for Obama? Does it strengthen the Democratic Party? Will it pull it back toward the center? This democratizing move omits the obvious question: if it were about Obama and the Democratic Party, it would be about Obama and the Democratic Party—not marches, strikes, occupations, and arrests.

A related democratization suggests that the movement pursue any number of legislative paths, that it seek Constitutional Amendments denying corporations personhood, change campaign finance laws, abolish the electoral college and the Federal Reserve. The oddness of these suggestions, the way they attempt to make the movement something it is not, appears as soon as one recalls what the protesters are doing: occupying. In New York, they are sleeping outside in a privately owned park, attempting to reach consensus on a wide range of issues affecting their daily life together (what sort of coffee to serve, how to keep the park clean, how to keep people warm and dry, what to do about the drummers, how to spend the money that comes in to support the movement, what the best ways to organize discussions are, and so on). Democratization skips the actual fact of occupation, reframing the movement in terms of a functional political system. If the system were functional, people wouldn’t be occupying all over the country—not to mention the world for, indeed, an additional effect of the democratic reduction is to reformat a global practice and movement against capitalism into US-specific concerns with some dysfunction in our electoral system.

Finally, an additional democratization begins from the assumption that the movement is essentially a democratic one, that its tactics and concerns are focused on the democratic process. From this assumption it raises a critique of the movement: occupation isn’t democratic and so the protesters are in some sort of performative contradiction. They are rejecting democratic institutions, breaking the law, disrupting public space, squandering public resources (police overtime can get expensive) and attempting to assert the will of a minority of vocal protesters outside of and in contradiction to democratic procedures.5 This line of argument has the benefit of exposing the incoherence in the more general democratization argument: occupation is not a democratic strategy; it is a militant, divisive tactic that expresses the fundamental division on which capitalism depends.

This division should in no way be assimilated into Claude Lefort’s idea of the empty place of democracy. The gap that Occupy Wall Street opens up cuts through democracy as the real of class antagonism, that is, as the division that necessarily exposes democracy under capitalism as a form of government for the sake of capitalism and that democratization seeks to repress, deny, displace, and conceal. Likewise, holding it open is neither for the sake of democracy nor for the sake of plurality, indeterminacy, and multiplicity (as if these were values rather than attributes that may or may not be worth valuing in a given setting). Rather, occupying the gap, maintaining it as the division between the very rich and the rest of us, is crucial for inciting and cultivating collective desire for collective approaches to common goods, resources, and responsibilities.

The second mode of division’s erasure is moralization. Myriad politicians and commentators seek and have sought to treat the success of Occupy Wall Street in exclusively moral terms. For these commentators, the true contribution of the movement is moral, a transformation of the common sense of what is just and what is unjust.6 This line of commentary emphasizes greed and corruption, commending the movement for opening our eyes to the need to get things in order, to clean house. Moralization occludes division as it remains stuck in a depoliticizing liberal formula of ethics and economics. Rather than acknowledging the failure of the capitalist system, the contemporary collapse of its neoliberal form and the contradictions that are demolishing capitalism from within (global debt crises, unsustainable patterns of consumption, climate change, the impossibility of continued accumulation at the rate necessary for capitalist growth, mass unemployment and unrest), moralization proceeds as if a couple of bad apples—a Bernie Madoff here, a rogue trader there—let their greed get out of control. It then extends this idea of corruption (rather than systemic failure), blaming the “culture of Wall Street” or even the consumerism of the entire country, as if the United States were a whole and as a whole needed some kind of spiritual cleansing and renewal. In short, moralization treats Occupy Wall Street as a populist movement, mediating it in populist terms of a whole people engaging in the ritual of repentance, renewal, and reform. Again, this approach to the movement proceeds as if the division Occupy Wall Street reveals and claims were a kind of infection to be cured rather than a fundamental antagonism that has been repressed.

The third attempt to eliminate the gap comes from individualization. Here an emphasis on individual choice displaces the movement’s collectivity. So on the one hand there is an eclectic, menu-like presentation of multiple issues. Occupiers, protesters, and supports are rendered as non-partisan individuals cherry-picking their concerns and exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. On the other hand there are the practices and tenets of the movement itself, particularly as it has been enacted in New York: decisions must be reached by consensus, no one can speak for another, each person has to be affirmed as freely and autonomously supporting whatever the GA undertakes. In each case, individualism not only supersedes collectivity, but it also effaces the rupture between the occupation and US culture more generally, a culture that celebrates and cultivates individuality and personalization. Given that the strength of Occupy Wall Street draws from collectivity, from the experience of groups coming together to occupy and protest, an experience amplified by the People’s Mic (the practice of collectively repeating the words of a speaker so that everyone can hear them), to emphasize individuality is to disavow the common at the heart of the movement. It reinserts the movement within the dominant culture, as if occupation were a choice like any other, as if choices weren’t themselves fantasies that individuals actually could determine their own lives or make a political difference in the context of the capitalist system and the class power of the top one percent.

Democratization, moralization, and individualization attempt to restore a fantastic unity or wholeness where Occupy Wall Street asserts a fundamental division. Whether as a democratic political system, a moral community, or the multiplicity of individuals, this fantasy is one that denies the antagonism on which capitalism relies: between those who have to sell their labor power to survive and those who do not, between those who not only have no choice but to sell their labor power but nonetheless cannot, because there are no buyers, or who cannot for wages capable of sustaining them, because there’s no such opportunity, and those who command, steer, and gamble upon the resources, fortunes, and futures of the rest of us for their own enjoyment.

The three modes of disavowing division miss the power of occupation as a tactic that asserts a gap by forcing a presence. This forcing is more than simply of people into places where they do not belong (even when they may ostensibly have a right). It’s a forcing of collectivity over individualism, the combined power of a group that disrupts a space readily accommodating of individuals. Such a forcing thereby puts in stark relief the conceit of a political arrangement that claims to represent a people that cannot be present, a divided people who, when present, instill such fear and insecurity that they have to be met by armed police and miles of barricades. It asserts the class division prior to and unremedied by democracy under capitalism.

That Occupy Wall Street brings to the fore the fundamental antagonism of class conflict is born out even in the slogan “Occupy Everything.” The slogan seems at first absurd: we already occupy everything, so how can we occupy everything? What matters is the minimal difference, the shift in perspective the injunction to occupy effects. We have to occupy in a different mode, assert our being there in and for itself, for the common, not for the few, the one percent. “Occupy Everything’s” shift in perspective highlights and amplifies the gap between what has been and can be, what “capitalist realism” told us what the only alternative and what the actuality of movement forced us to wake up to.7 The gap it names is the gap of communist desire, a collective desire for collectivity: we occupy everything because it is already ours in common.”