SCAD Alert: Occupy Wall Street Is to Capitalism What Labor Unions Were to Communism — A Systemic Contradiction That Can Be Neither Swallowed nor Spit Out

Abstract

This chapter presents a preliminary canvassing of the police response to the Occupy Movement and the thesis that this response is indicative of an elemental shift in state reaction to perceived legitimation crises. The chapter opens in the next section with a synopsis of Habermas’s (1971) formulation of a state legitimation crisis as this takes shape in advanced capitalist societies. The following section synopsizes the legislative initiatives establishing the deregulatory conditions that made possible the financial crisis of 2008 and addresses how this legislative shift earmarked stalled capitalist production and profit accumulation. The next section details the early days of the Occupy Movement and how the media shaped the public perception of the protesters. The final section documents the apparatus of increasingly militarized police in the United States and the pretexts used to establish the basis for total crackdown on dissident expression and protest. How this all augurs in the context of the “permanent terror state” is summarized in the concluding section.