Nietzsche once said that all “great philosophy” takes the form of “involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Philosophers try to give us Truth, he said, but in the process, they betray their vantage points, their specifics fears, their peculiar hopes. “To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at,” Nietzsche continues, “first ask oneself: ‘What morality do they aim at?”Watch five minutes of CNN’s coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and you might conclude the same of political punditry. No matter how rigorous their reporting, or esoteric their subject, journalists are always, in the end, writing about themselves.
Thus it shouldn’t surprise us that mainstream television reporters ridicule the Occupy movement. These journalists are trained to document Power—the President, Kim Kardashian, and so on. They lack the intellectual bearings to understand a leaderless movement, one that (we shouldn’t forget) aims its moral ire directly at the world of privilege they depend on for a living.
But make no mistake, we student journalists have our biases too. We’re graduating soon. Among other epistemological constraints, we have to find jobs. The arc of American history, our nation’s present “employment crisis,” and the first semester of our senior year, all mix into one. How could we not believe, at least a little bit, that our own futures are bound up in the fate of a movement that is advocating for a more inclusive, 21st century economy? How could we not see our own faces somewhere in the crowds at Zuccotti Park?
This might sound odd coming from a Harvard student, whose school has done more than basically any other to train the ranks of the 1%. But if you think that students and “the 99%” are in different boats – that this is about “the privileged” versus “the unfortunate” – then you don’t get it.
Our problem, in a word, is not weakness, but strength. “The 99%” is just too strong – too educated, too individuated, too creative – to fit into an industrial age economic system that was set up over one hundred years ago, in order to make production and consumption as “mass” as possible.
Henry Ford’s factory wasn’t just about manufacturing cars quickly. It was also about making our jobs as menial and standardized as possible, so that anyone could duplicate our labor, and corporations could grow. And so they did, at tremendous costs. If the demise of this system is imminent, it is being wrought, in a way, by its own success. Automation renders humans so replaceable that we soon won’t be needed at all. As one recent book concludes: “Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine.”
This is either catastrophe (an “unemployment crisis”) or opportunity. For by destroying labor, technology makes us stronger. Sure, it renders our crappy factory jobs obsolete, but who wanted them anyways? What we gain is so much greater: the capacity to create, to hack together organizations, and to do all the things of starting a business (from coordinating work, to building skills, to marketing and selling) are more widely distributed today than ever before in our history. In this post-Industrial world, Labor dies as everyone becomes Capital.
And therein is the promise of our time. If we want an economy that’s more awesome – that’s more humane, more local, more inclusive, more meaningful – we can build it ourselves. Indeed, I see no other option.
