Rebels on the Street: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis * by David Harvey

Rebels on the Street: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis 
David Harvey 
Verso Books Blog 

The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for 
far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the 
policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no 
matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or 
not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of 
politicians in both political parties upon its raw money power and upon 
access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the 
appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of 
Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the 
judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments 
increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as 
electoral, labor, environmental and contract law. 

The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there 
shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule 
absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Those 
possessed of money power shall not only be privileged to accumulate 
wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the 
earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not only of the land 
and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but 
also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and 
creative potentialities of all those others it needs. The rest of 
humanity shall be deemed disposable. 

These principles and practices do not arise out of individual greed, 
short-sightedness or mere malfeasance (although all of these are 
plentifully to be found). These principles have been carved into the 
body politic of our world through the collective will of a capitalist 
class animated by the coercive laws of competition. If my lobbying group 
spends less than yours then I will get less in the way of favors. If 
this jurisdiction spends on people’s needs it shall be deemed uncompetitive. 

Many decent people are locked into the embrace of a system that is 
rotten to the core. If they are to earn even a reasonable living they 
have no other job option except to give the devil his due: they are only 
“following orders,” as Eichmann famously claimed, “doing what the system 
demands” as others now put it, in acceding to the barbarous and immoral 
principles and practices of the Party of Wall Street. The coercive laws 
of competition force us all, to some degree of other, to obey the rules 
of this ruthless and uncaring system. The problem is systemic not 
individual. 

The party’s favored slogans of freedom and liberty to be guaranteed by 
private property rights, free markets and free trade, actually translate 
into the freedom to exploit the labor of others, to dispossess the 
assets of the common people at will and the freedom to pillage the 
environment for individual or class benefit. 

Once in control of the state apparatus, the Party of Wall Street 
typically privatizes all the juicy morsels at less than market value to 
open new terrains for their capital accumulation. They arrange 
subcontracting (the military-industrial complex being a prime example) 
and taxation practices (subsidies to agro-business and low capital gains 
taxes) that permit them freely to ransack the public coffers. They 
deliberately foster such complicated regulatory systems and such 
astonishing administrative incompetence within the rest of the state 
apparatus (remember the EPA under Reagan and FEMA and “heck-of-a job” 
Brown under Bush) as to convince an inherently skeptical public that the 
state can never ever play a constructive or supportive role in improving 
the daily life or the future prospects of anyone. And, finally, they use 
the monopoly of violence that all sovereign states claim, to exclude the 
public from much of what passes for public space and to harass, put 
under surveillance and, if necessary, criminalize and incarcerate all 
those who do not broadly accede to its dictates. It excels in practices 
of repressive tolerance that perpetuate the illusion of freedom of 
expression as long as that expression does not ruthlessly expose the 
true nature of their project and the repressive apparatus upon which it 
rests. 

The Party of Wall Street ceaselessly wages class war. “Of course there 
is class war,” says Warren Buffett, “and it is my class, the rich, who 
are making it and we are winning.” Much of this war is waged in secret, 
behind a series of masks and obfuscations through which the aims and 
objectives of the Party of Wall Street are disguised. 

The Party of Wall Street knows all too well that when profound political 
and economic questions are transformed into cultural issues they become 
unanswerable. It regularly calls up a huge range of captive expert 
opinion, for the most part employed in the think tanks and universities 
they fund and splattered throughout the media they control, to create 
controversies out of all manner of issues that simply do not matter and 
to propose solutions to questions that do not exist. One minute they 
talk of nothing other than the austerity necessary for everyone else to 
cure the deficit and the next they are proposing to reduce their own 
taxation no matter what impact this may have on the deficit. The one 
thing that can never be openly debated and discussed, is the true nature 
of the class war they have been so ceaselessly and ruthlessly waging. To 
depict something as “class war” is, in the current political climate and 
in their expert judgment, to place it beyond the pale of serious 
consideration, even to be branded a fool if not seditious. 

But now for the first time there is an explicit movement to confront The 
Party of Wall Street and its unalloyed money power. The “street” in Wall 
Street is being occupied – oh horror upon horrors – by others! Spreading 
from city to city, the tactics of Occupy Wall Street are to take a 
central public space, a park or a square, close to where many of the 
levers of power are centered, and by putting human bodies in that place 
convert public space into a political commons, a place for open 
discussion and debate over what that power is doing and how best to 
oppose its reach. This tactic, most conspicuously re-animated in the 
noble and on-going struggles centered on Tahrir Square in Cairo, has 
spread across the world (Plaza del Sol in Madrid, Syntagma Square in 
Athens, now the steps of Saint Paul in London as well as Wall Street 
itself). It shows us that the collective power of bodies in public space 
is still the most effective instrument of opposition when all other 
means of access are blocked. What Tahrir Square showed to the world was 
an obvious truth: that it is bodies on the street and in the squares not 
the babble of sentiments on twitter or facebook that really matter. 

The aim of this movement in the United States is simple. It says: “We 
the people are determined to take back our country from the moneyed 
powers that currently run it. Our aim is to prove Warren Buffett wrong. 
His class, the rich, shall no longer rule unchallenged nor automatically 
inherit the earth. Nor is his class, the rich, always destined to win.” 

It says “we are the 99 percent.” We have the majority and this majority 
can, must and shall prevail. Since all other channels of expression are 
closed to us by money power, we have no other option except to occupy 
the parks, squares and streets of our cities until our opinions are 
heard and our needs attended to. 

To succeed the movement has to reach out to the 99 percent. This it can 
and is doing step by step. First there are all those being plunged into 
immiseration by unemployment and all those who have been or are now 
being dispossessed of their houses and their assets by the Wall Street 
phalanx. It must forge broad coalitions between students, immigrants, 
the underemployed, and all those threatened by the totally unnecessary 
and draconian austerity politics being inflicted upon the nation and the 
world at the behest of the Party of Wall Street. It must focus on the 
astonishing levels of exploitation in workplaces – from the immigrant 
domestic workers who the rich so ruthlessly exploit in their homes to 
the restaurant workers who slave for almost nothing in the kitchens of 
the establishments in which the rich so grandly eat. It must bring 
together the creative workers and artists whose talents are so often 
turned into commercial products under the control of big money power. 

The movement must above all reach out to all the alienated, the 
dissatisfied and the discontented, all those who recognize and deeply 
feel in their gut that there is something profoundly wrong, that the 
system that the Party of Wall Street has devised is not only barbaric, 
unethical and morally wrong, but also broken. 

All this has to be democratically assembled into a coherent opposition, 
which must also freely contemplate what an alternative city, an 
alternative political system and, ultimately, an alternative way of 
organizing production, distribution and consumption for the benefit of 
the people, might look like. Otherwise, a future for the young that 
points to spiraling private indebtedness and deepening public austerity, 
all for the benefit of the one percent, is no future at all. 

In response to the Occupy Wall Street movement the state backed by 
capitalist class power makes an astonishing claim: that they and only 
they have the exclusive right to regulate and dispose of public space. 
The public has no common right to public space! By what right do mayors, 
police chiefs, military officers and state officials tell we the people 
that they have the right to determine what is public about “our” public 
space and who may occupy that space when? When did they presume to evict 
us, the people, from any space we the people decide collectively and 
peacefully to occupy? They claim they are taking action in the public 
interest (and cite laws to prove it) but it is we who are the public! 
Where is “our interest” in all of this? And, by the way, is it not “our” 
money that the banks and financiers so blatantly use to accumulate 
“their” bonuses? 

In the face of the organized power of the Party of Wall Street to divide 
and rule, the movement that is emerging must also take as one of its 
founding principles that it will neither be divided nor diverted until 
the Party of Wall Street is brought either to its senses – to see that 
the common good must prevail over narrow venal interests – or to its 
knees. Corporate privileges to have all of the rights of individuals 
without the responsibilities of true citizens must be rolled back. 
Public goods such as education and health care must be publically 
provided and made freely available. The monopoly powers in the media 
must be broken. The buying of elections must be ruled unconstitutional. 
The privatization of knowledge and culture must be prohibited. The 
freedom to exploit and dispossess others must be severely curbed and 
ultimately outlawed. 

Americans believe in equality. Polling data show they believe (no matter 
what their general political allegiances might be) that the top twenty 
percent of the population might be justified in claiming thirty percent 
of the total wealth. That the top twenty percent now control 85 percent 
of the wealth is unacceptable. That most of that is controlled by the 
top one percent is totally unacceptable. What the Occupy Wall Street 
movement proposes is that we the people of the United States, commit to 
a reversal of that level of inequality not only of wealth and income but 
even more importantly of the political power that such a disparity 
confers. The people of the United States are rightly proud of the their 
democracy but it has always been endangered by capital’s corruptive 
power. Now that it is dominated by that power the time is surely nigh, 
as Jefferson long ago suggested would be necessary, to make another 
American revolution: one based on social justice, equality, and a caring 
and thoughtful approach to the relation to nature. 

The struggle that has broken out – the People versus the Party of Wall 
Street – is crucial to our collective future. The struggle is global as 
well as local in its nature. It brings together students who are locked 
in a life-and-death struggle with political power in Chile to create a 
free and quality education system for all and so begin the dismantling 
of the neoliberal model that Pinochet so brutally imposed. It embraces 
the agitators in Tahrir Square who recognize that the fall of Mubarak 
(like the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship) was but the first step in an 
emancipatory struggle to break free from money power. It includes the 
“indignados” in Spain, the striking workers in Greece, the militant 
opposition emerging all around the world, from London to Durban, Buenos 
Aires, Shenzhen and Mumbai. The brutal dominations of big capital and 
sheer money power are everywhere on the defensive. 

Whose side will each of us as individuals come down on? Which street 
will we occupy? Only time will tell. But what we do know is that the 
time is now. The system is not only broken and exposed but incapable of 
any response other than repression. So we, the people, have no option 
but to struggle for the collective right to decide how that system shall 
be reconstructed and in what image. The Party of Wall Street has had its 
day and failed miserably. How to construct an alternative on its ruins 
is both an inescapable opportunity and an obligation that none of us can 
or would ever want to avoid. 

– 
David Harvey teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of 
New York. He is the author of The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of 
Capitalism (Profile Press and Oxford University Press). His forthcoming 
book Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution 
will be published by Verso in the Spring of 2012.