Brian Holmes
Profanity and the Financial Markets: A User’s Guide to Closing the Casino

I want to begin, not with a curse, but with a very beautiful convergence—one widely held to be real, but shrouded in mystery for millions of people. I am talking about the “movement of the squares” unfolding on both sides of the North/South divide. What is the hidden link between the middle-class and precarious movements against the dictates of finance capital—Occupy Wall Street and the European Indignados—and the far more perilous struggles to end dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East? What relationship could possibly be sustained between the regions that concentrate global wealth and those from which labor, resources, and interest payments are relentlessly extracted?

Immanuel Wallerstein claims that the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa pit two historical groups against each other. One he calls the “1968 current,” which consists of nonviolent, directly democratic grassroots movements that challenge all forms of exclusion and abuses of power, in the name of an equality that includes respect for fundamental differences. The other group consists of people who oppose such movements and seek in whatever way to capture, contain, and neutralize them—and in North Africa and the Middle East, that chiefly means holders of oil wealth and U.S.-backed dictators. For Wallerstein, today’s uprisings are a continuation, after decades of latency, of “the world-revolution of 1968,” which extended by his account from 1966 to 1970.1

If this is true, then the people out in the streets today at least share a history. Because the world-revolution of 1968 also took place in Europe and in the United States, where it revolved crucially around solidarity and direct cooperation between Northern middle-class students and intellectuals and oppressed people in the South—which in the U.S. meant not only Vietnam and Latin America but also the South of our own country. Whites went to Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi to work with the civil rights movement. Oppressed minority groups, especially the Black Panthers, read Frantz Fanon and other anti-colonial thinkers and came to designate themselves as Third World peoples. The New Left sought to express its support for the Vietnamese revolutionaries by “bringing the war back home.” A vast, unruly, and often failed experiment in cross-class, cross-border collaboration defined the “1968 current.” But is this historical memory enough to explain the convergence of direct-democratic practices in the movement of the squares?

I do not think it is. To uncover the more complex grounds on which we meet, it’s necessary to look back to the reactionary surge that followed 1968, ultimately giving rise to neoliberalism. It began in the U.S. with the election of Richard Nixon. He ran on a law-and-order platform, and his administration crushed domestic dissidents with covert operations, legislated “spatial deconcentration” programs for inner-city gentrification, invented SWAT teams for attacks on the ghettos, launched the prison-industrial complex, and offered support to the military regime of Pinochet in Chile, opening the door to the coordinated repression of the Latin American Left by Operation Condor in the later 1970s. Nixon also presided over the settlement of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the OPEC embargo. That led on the one hand to the U.S. stabilization of Egypt (with military aid formalized in 1979 as part of the Camp David accords) and on the other, to the new petroleum prices and the introduction of a capital circuit linking Western banks, engineering firms, and armament makers to the most oppressive oil-exporting regimes. The whole process cemented the position of authoritarian leaders in the Arab world and provided the cash for a major round of predatory lending to developing countries across the planet. The dictators who have recently fallen in North Africa and the Middle East date from this period. Thus both domestically and internationally, the 1970s saw the installation of a police and military order that sought, and still seeks, to capture and contain the “1968 current.”

As police rapidly militarize in the North, the experience of repression becomes another thing that today’s movements share—unequally, as usual. Yet again, that’s not the whole story, and a further moment of history must be considered. In the U.S. and throughout the developed countries, student protest and the emergence of a counterculture appeared to herald the rise of a “new class” capable of grasping the levers of power in increasingly bureaucratic systems. This new class consisted of administrators, scientists, engineers, educators, social workers, opinion makers, and artists.2 It was nurtured in the liberal universities of the welfare state, at a time when the functions of government had dramatically expanded, leaving the old patricians behind. Decision making by committee had replaced the leadership of “great men,” and the private ownership of corporations was increasingly considered a legal fiction.3 To neoconservative eyes, the student revolt threatened to radicalize what was already a mainstream trend toward collective control of the American political economy. The societal struggle of the 1970s, at a time of deep economic crisis, revolved around furthering or blocking this possible takeover of power.

More recent sociological thinking observes that after the period of widespread alienation accompanying each major crisis, a reformed and transformed capitalist system has to succeed in reintegrating its qualified managerial and technical personnel along with the producers of artistic and intellectual culture.4 The new order has to recover the confidence of those who will be charged with administering and reproducing its logic. How was this achieved from the 1980s to today, with respect to the professional-managerial classes of North America and Europe and, indeed, to similar strata in the developing world? The answer to this question will reveal both the glaring divide and the hidden links between the Northern and Southern movements.

Here’s my idea: the integration of the professional-managerial classes into the neoliberal phase of capitalism has been accomplished by a complex but unified and deeply pervasive mechanism that may be called the financial apparatus. Or you could just call it the casino. Its operations can be felt across the spectrum of society, not only in business but in art, education, public administration, technology, the media, urbanism, diplomacy, and, most acutely of all, social psychology. The necessary converse of systematic military repression is an adrenaline-charged roll of the electric dice. When we occupy Wall Street in the global financial capital of New York City, or any other financial district in any other city, what we do is oppose the integrative strategy of those who seek to capture, contain, and neutralize the effects of world revolution. In this way we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in North Africa and the Middle East (and in Latin America and other regions) by taking actions that are in no way identical, but instead run parallel to theirs. Could one cross the line to direct cooperation? Let us hold on to that question.

Global Gamble

Marxists like David Harvey interpret the financial turn that began in the early 1970s as a “class strategy” to restore the prerogatives of ownership, giving rise in our time to the power of the worldwide 1 percent.5 Others such as Michael Hudson and the late Peter Gowan concentrate on the strategies of the American state: structural support for neoliberal finance is Washington’s “global gamble” to maintain control over the international monetary system.6 Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy integrate both approaches, but they also introduce a crucial class concept. In their view, Keynesian Fordism represented a compromise between the middle and working classes, while under neoliberalism (or what I call Neoliberal Informationalism) the middle classes have been sucked back into the service of capital.7 In the art world, the multiplication of billionaire patrons and corporate museums makes that clear enough. But let’s look at a more mainstream figure of this class compromise: the financial trader, who as the lowest rank of “golden boy” can strike it fabulously rich or lose big, burn out young, and fail abysmally.

With his eyes glued tightly to a personalized array of screens, the trader at a major bank or hedge fund is jacked into a transnational network comprising tens of thousands of institutions and millions of individual...