Occupy Moonlight

 

            Last week’s full moon was too big for the November night sky. Surpassing the contours of the cosmos, it spilled over the forests of Putney and Dummerston and into the henhouse. Franklin maintained order among his flock but the ducks could not contain themselves. An irrepressible lot under ordinary circumstances, the ducks became ecstatic in the lunar glow. One by one, they raced out of the henhouse and into the poultry yard, squawking and clamoring like college football fans whose team had finally won.

            “Knock it off!” yelled Alison through the open window. “It’s the middle of the night! Go back to bed!” The ducks froze for a second, their slender heads rolled slightly clockwise to catch sight of the second-story nuisance. As soon as Alison withdrew her head, they commenced to cussing and hollering, slapping each other on the back. Pretty soon we heard splashing coming from the kiddie pool. “It’s a regular orgy out there,” muttered Alison as she got back into bed.

            “The productive forces have exceeded  the modes of production,” I murmured, still half asleep. “This is how revolution begins.” She didn’t respond. Plugged into her iPod, a pillow wedged between her and the moonlight, she was already drifting away, leaving me haunted by Marx in a world unhinged by the moon.

Marx, like Freud, is a compelling thinker. He names the dark and mysterious forces that haunt our everyday lives, explaining why we feel alienated and confused. By turning us into wage earners, capitalism has alienated us from our labor. Industrialization has removed us from the products we make and from each other. We can’t see what we’re capable of doing, what he would call our “productive forces,” we see only what the brutal system does to us. We forget that people made factories and the marketplace, and that we could make them more human if we wanted to. Instead, we worry that we’ll lose our jobs, thus increasing our alienation.

            According to Marx, history moves of its own volition through different economic stages. Each stage, such as feudalism or industrial capitalism, carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. The feudal serfs, for instance, gained so many agricultural and marketing skills that they eventually left the security of the manor to become proto-capitalists in Europe’s many ports. The working conditions in the factory at first benefited the capitalist but they also created the solidarity among workers that lead to trade unions. The productive forces of those entrepreneurial serfs and organizing workers could not be contained by the existing economic order. Occupy Wall Street is another example of a revolutionary force created by the limits of advanced capitalism. All that productive energy of the unemployed has to go somewhere.

            While Marx brilliantly revealed how economic systems go through powerful (and unintended) revolutions, he wasn’t so clear on how to create a more humane and ecologically-sustainable system. In his mind, capitalism would be replaced by a dictatorship of the working class. Private property would be eliminated (not by fiat but because advanced capitalism would make it impossible for wage earners to own anything) and individualism would be replaced with a class-consciousness that extended across the globe. In his new system, our productive forces will engage  in meaningful work that benefits the whole species.

Heady stuff! One can see why mid-nineteenth century capitalists and Putney poultry farmers are haunted by Marx. Who knows when the workers will unite and overthrow us all?

            And yet, history never moves quite so predictably as philosophers suggest.

As the Occupy settlements grow around the country, various General Assemblies and working groups are struggling to deal with all the productive forces camped out on municipal land. Drug use and sexualized violence are threatening the fragile systems of governance in these parallel cities. If the occupations can’t deal with the alienated who arrive each day, then mayors have no choice but to shut them down. If that happens, say some occupiers, the movement will have failed.

            The ducks, I should note, were never shut down. They revolted, they frolicked, and by daybreak they were back in their corner of the henhouse where one of them deposited a very fine egg. They never claimed they could stay out forever. They never promised the other poultry that they could take care of their needs. They never tried to reproduce the state. Rather they honored their excess of energy on their own terms and then they went back to work laying eggs.

            The advantage to the duck method of social revolution is that it operates on a natural calendar. When the moon is full and the weather warm, they use their excess energy to populate a new world, one that honors the ducks’ productive capacities. They can’t be alienated from their labor because their bodies are fully engaged in their moon work. But when the sun comes up, they find no contradiction in going back to work.

            As Marx pointed out, it is only the human animal that enslaves itself through mental fabrications, like the Free Market and the Norms of Occupation. It is only the human animal that judges present practices and relationships through specific outcomes. But if the real issue is excess energy, then the real need is for a ritual of exuberance.  Claims that the occupiers have succeeded only if they suffer through cold winds and by controlling drug use and sexual violence are not revolutionary but Puritanical moralizing.

There is nothing to say that the tents in New York and Burlington must remain in place. What started on a whim can end on a whim. The wheels of history that Marx saw following a singular linear track could become airborne at any moment. Attentive to the spell of the natural world, the occupiers could vanish like so many leaves in a November gust. Not vanquished, but hibernating. Not repressed, but ever following the irrepressible and episodic energy of nature herself.