PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington. I was in New York
a few days ago. I visited Liberty Plaza. And then we're eating at a restaurant outside,
and a couple of guys came over, and they sort of rap for a living--as you sit in a restaurant,
they do a rap, and they hope you give them some money. So I said, okay, do a rap about
what's going on with the Occupy Wall Street. So one of the fellows starts the rap. The
other guy's doing the noise. And I will shoot myself for not filming this. But at any rate,
the rap sort of begins with, you know, we love what you're doing--and I'm not going
to try to do the rap, 'cause I can't remember the rhyme, but the next line was: but they
got no demands. We want to know what they want. They got no demands. And this was this
guy rapping for living on the street. So now joining us to talk about the Occupy Wall Street
and this whole debate around demands is Leo Panitch. Leo joins us from Toronto, but he
was recently in New York. And he is the Canada research chair in comparative political economy
at York University. And he's also the editor of Socialist Register, which just came out,
called The Crisis and the Left. He joins us from Toronto.
LEO PANITCH: Hi, Paul.
JAY: So, first of all, your impression--.
PANITCH: Great intro.
JAY: What's that?
PANITCH: That was a great intro.
JAY: It would've been better if I could have done the rhyming. But anyway. So you were
just in New York and you visited the occupation. So what's your--what were your impressions?
And then, what do you make of this whole issue of demands?
PANITCH: Well, I was very impressed, I have to say. And I--when I went down there, I was
initially very skeptical. You know, I--Adbusters, which initiated this, their only politics
is to do an analysis of the world in terms of everything went wrong back in the late
19th century when the American court said that corporations were a legal personality,
and the implication being, usually, in their case, that if you just took that away, the
world would be fine. So I was skeptical for that kind of reason. I was also skeptical
because the turnout wasn't that great initially. But thirdly, I was skeptical for the same
reasons that you're raising, which is, you know, what are they demanding, what do they
want, what do they stand for. But then, when I went on the march, when the teachers union
and the transit union in New York joined them for a march from Foley Square, which is in
front of the municipal building, along Broadway and then into the square, which is two blocks
from Wall Street, the energy was remarkable, and I began to reconsider as to whether the
issue here is demands. It is very, very clear that this is a very broad and disparate set
of people, but they are saying the system is screwed up. And I think there's a big implication
in what's happening here of there being a politics around we want a different kind of
society, we want a different kind of economy. And although I don't think it hurts to try
to concretize that, I worry now that to come up with a set of reforms that people would
like to see introduced will reduce the movement, will make it smaller, and won't yield more
results. It'll just make it sound more practical in the sense of, well, the Democrats might
do this, whereas in fact the movement is much bigger than that and is saying that, at every
level, in terms of culture, in terms of the economy, in terms of the political system,
we need radical and fundamental change.
JAY: Well, it seems to me the strength of the occupation movement is also its weakness.
The fact that there aren't concrete demands, as such, that have to be agreed to means just
about anybody can show up if they agree with the fundamental critique, which is essentially,
like, if you say the problem's corporate greed, that is a way, you could say, of making a
systemic critique that the whole thing's not working. On the other hand, at some point,
if you're going to mobilize more people, broader sections of the population, like this guy
on the street who's rapping, they want something to fight for, not just to fight against. So,
I mean, there's going to be some kind of arc to this.
PANITCH: Yeah, I see your point, but the movements that have made change in the past can be pretty
vague on wanting a different world, a different system. To some extent they're going to hearken
back to what they had before that the current system can't give them anymore. I see your
point, but I--and I do think that it's important to try to concretize what a different system
would mean, but I don't think it's a bad thing that the thing be put in the largest terms.
Let me give you two examples at either extreme. One example is what was being handed out on
the day of the big march with the unions, was a one-page broadsheet laying out a plan
being put forward by a black congressman to have a 21st-century version of the Humphrey
/'lOk.li/ bill. That was a bill back in the mid-1970s that called for economic
planning for full employment. And as they concretized that in this broadsheet, it would
have meant a very large financial transaction tax on the financial sector, which would yield
some billions of dollars a year, which would be then passed over to state and local governments,
who would employ people directly in public services--fixing up schools, roads, etc.,
etc., the people--that employ people who've been unemployed for longer than x number of
months. That's a very good, concrete proposal, and in some ways a doable one. And that's
good. I have no--I'm not opposed to that at all. On the other hand, I saw a woman interviewed,
a gray-haired woman, I would imagine her late '50s, who had been a candidate for the Green
Party, on one of the cable New York television stations, and she was asked what it all stood
for. Do you want reforms or do you want another system? And she said, well, you know, I spent
my whole life trying to win reforms, and I've come to the conclusion that we really need
a different kind of system, call it socialism, call it communism. This was a Green candidate.
Now, she said, I don't know quite how to get there, but I think the important thing is
for us to say that we need a different kind of system, rather than reforms within this
one. And that was, I must say, a remarkable breath of fresh air in the American media
when I heard that.
JAY: Well, one of the things that sort of, I think, separates some demands from other
demands, and even some discourse from other discourse, is there's a lot of talk about
the 1 percent, the distribution of income, the inequality of distribution of income,
but there's not a heck of a lot of conversation about how stuff is owned, who owns stuff,
and how to challenge that, because I don't get how you challenge the power of Wall Street
if you don't start to challenge how things are owned. And you were one of the first people--that
I know of, at least--that has been talking about public banking, banks as a public utility,
banks in the public interest. That seems to me that that's an example of a demand that's
not only imaginable as something that's needed now, but it also starts to look--you know,
challenge things systemically.
PANITCH: Yeah, no, I of course entirely agree, Paul, and I very much hope that that kind
of purpose and vision and understanding of the system will develop through the movement.
And, yes, I think very much--I think it links up partly with the proposal for this new employment
act, but it needs to be put in a way that somehow gets the savings that now passes through
the banking system into the public domain, whereby financial institutions are public
utilities. So, you know, a financial transaction tax is not in itself going to lay the basis
for the type of full employment that we need, and it won't allow for the type of economic
planning that will allow us to decide democratically what's invested, how it's invested, where
it's invested, and so on. So I think very much one wants to take this kind of notion
that you're not going to get out of this massive stagnation with all of this unemployment unless
there is public employment. That said, we would like that to be done as democratically
as possible. So we probably ought to have locally directly elected job boards or economic
planning boards who would be given access to the savings that pass now through the private
banking system. For that, you would have to have the banks as public utilities. And one
hopes that that type of vision which concretizes what it would mean to contemplate a socialist
society, not as some abstraction, not some--as some, well, you know, we want Sweden or we
don't want the Soviet Union, etc., but actually comes forward with, yes, I think what you're
talking about, a concrete institutional vision that would allow people to think democratically
about sharing the wealth in a very concrete and productive way.
JAY: Now, one thing I'm kind of wondering why the mainstream media has so covered this
Occupy movement. I've never seen anything left, progressive, oppositional that gets
such attention. It's really remarkable--from Toronto to New York and further afield. What
do you make of the way the media and the political class is responding to this?
PANITCH: It's absolutely astonishing. It needs an explanation. And probably you, being such
a close observer and participant in the media, have a better explanation than I do. I notice--I'll
just say this--that The New York Times clearly made an editorial decision, about 10, 12 days
into the occupation, that it was going to get behind it, that it was going to cover
it sympathetically rather than cynically, which is what it did in the first 10 days.
And then it started giving it an enormous amount of coverage and started giving it,
on the whole, sympathetic coverage. Now, you know, one would need to figure out why The
New York Times decided that. I think it had something to do with the fact that they were
taking a progressive position in their editorials on the need to stop this business about austerity,
to not concentrate on the size of the deficit, and to have a massive stimulus again, bigger
than in 2009. And then I think they realized that if that was actually going to go anywhere,
it needed a movement behind it, not just liberal newspaper opinion. And I think they made it--now,
when The New York Times starts coverage that way--it is, after all, the official newspaper
of the United States--it then has an effect on the rest of the media. Certainly, we know
here in Canada that the CBC, let alone the private media channels, only say progressive
things when The New York Times says progressive things. When The New York Times says reactionary
things, the CBC runs under the table as well.
JAY: Yeah. I'm speculating here, but I would think one reason for it is that this has taken
the heat out of whatever was left of the Tea Party movement, in terms of expressing opposition
and anger, and now it's taking it up from a sort of left-of-center position, which I
would think the Democratic Party hopes will be able to somehow use to fuel the 2012 election
campaign, even though when you go down there and talk to people, that's certainly not what
they want in the occupations. But perhaps that's a hope the Democratic Party and its
allies have.
PANITCH: Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's something else. I think there's just
the bare facts of the situation, which is that polls have been showing all along that
70 percent of Americans don't want the Tea Party option, don't even want the Republican
Party option in terms of giving a priority to not paying taxes. The polls have been consistently
showing that the Tea Partiers, and for that matter the, you know, Wall Street Republicans,
do not carry the majority of opinion with them. That's very clear. And I think that
when this movement started, then, going and attracting more attention, etc., I think that
the liberal media realized that this was--for all of the fact that there were, you know,
lifestyle anarchists there, etc., that this was far more expressive of what people really
think than, you know, what Fox News was telling what people think. And so I think there was
just a certain recognition of reality here.
JAY: Well, I think we're just--. Yeah, go ahead.
PANITCH: You know, which I think the media will respond to, when they see that there
is a movement that is in tune with what public opinion polls are showing.
JAY: Well, if we're heading into a decade of global recession, which a lot of economists
are predicting, I guess this is just the beginning of a process.
PANITCH: Yes, I think that's right. And one hopes that this will be the kind of process
that--what the civil rights movement was or the welfare rights movement was or the women's
movement was. And I think it would be very good for you to talk to the great American
social theorist and historian on these movements, who is Frances Fox Piven. I saw her speak
not very far from Zuccotti place, and she's spoken here as well, but gave a remarkable
talk in relation to a book she just published called Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven,
because she was the object of attack--Glenn Beck and Fox News, etc.--for a year. And she
made the point that, you know, you need to remember that the first bus boycotts were
going on in 1955, and then things petered out for a while, and then they picked up again
a couple of years later. And we may see a bit of a downturn here. It doesn't have to
keep on becoming a greater protest each week. But if we look at this as a continuum, just
taking the United States, for example, so that, you know, there was Wisconsin and the
occupation of the government buildings, and then there was a petering out--including me,
including many other people, thought, well, that's it. But I think this is part of a general
willingness on the part of more and more people to stand up and to engage in even disruptive,
although not violent, political protest in order--given the absence of political institutions
that can change the system, in order to begin a process of changing the system.
JAY: Yeah, there's a--definitely when I was down there, both in New York and in Washington,
there is just a yearning for a mass movement in the United States, and people are just
looking for it. So any bubbling of it causes great excitement.
PANITCH: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
JAY: Thanks for joining us, Leo.
PANITCH: Good to talk with you, as always, Paul.
JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.