To say that an oppressor class doesn’t exist is unnecessary bourgeois mysticism. However, it is definitely harder to define what is ‘oppression’ and an ‘oppressive class’ when the mechanisms of repression and control have been swung into every corner. The little priest and the little king and the little colonizer run rampant into the synapses and cells. New contusions, new painful reactions, physical, psychical, emotional and transcendental confront us. A barrage of ‘opportunities and choices’ beats us daily – so many that they have become hallow, in Image and Reality. Shall we all head off to the ashram? Into the television? Into the sunset? The sunset on the television? But, which channel? Or, Do we fight? What does it mean to fight? How much do we fight? Who do we fight? And wow, we may or may not even have the privilege to ask this question (which is important to remember!). It is perhaps here that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) offers some great clarifying Events and Discourses of articulated desiring possibilities. If we are to fight, to protest-as-our-fight, OWS says, then let us protest the Symbolic nexus of Capital: Wall Street. First a base to commit genocide against the Native Americans and to sell people from Africa as slave-commodities, Wall Street is the perfect place to start directing our Conscious and Unconscious articulated desiring possibilities against the great social situations of semi-conscious and unconscious synthesized mutually holding juxtaposition-as-oppression.

What is the Unconscious of OWS? For me OWS is lot like a mushroom, feeding off the organic material readily available to it. It has taken on a life of its own, its own, capitalist-revolutionary hybrid. Perhaps it was ‘started’ or is ‘co-opted’ by the U.S. government. Considering its fissures and ruptures, the genesis is surprisingly still important but less so. With OWS the message is inherently economics, and while this may be limited, the extreme functioning of U.S. economic stratification and its many material and psychical contradictions underpins contemporary imperialism, colonialism, racism, homophobia and it represents the ‘divine culmination’ of years of bourgeois ideology, and perhaps even bourgeois-society-at-its peak, complete with such laughable dichotomies as new therapies on how to control to ‘your anger’ to new ‘patriots’ ready to bunker-bomb entire villages into history. The madness of this sanity is all too apparent and juxtaposed, and this does not go unnoticed by a population reeling from contradictions about personal responsibility, distance and ‘freedom’ in a social organism that seems more like Hannibal and less like Mom. But then, given the semi-conscious and unconscious paradox, perhaps Mom and Hannibal were always the same person, a mirror of each other? Mom cooks the food – bacon and apple pie - for the ‘good boys’ before they go off to war, where Hannibal’s greatest dreams possess them as they slaughter entire villages from their comfy offices in Colorado. Looking into a little screen from Colorado Springs, a picture-esque town in the mountains where the U.S. military operates its ‘unmanned drones’, they decipher whether the ‘ants’ on the screen are ‘terrorists’ or children, or ‘children terrorists.’ Within seconds of a decision to ‘engage’ the ants they disintegrate – like when the boys were young and used magnifying glasses to get those damned insects or when they played a fun video game. Oh how childhood replicates itself endlessly! This is the great deception and paradox of Western bourgeois culture, which constantly couches its terrifying process in the sterility of ‘wholeness,’ ‘patriotic heroism’ and ‘family values.’

As I sit to write this article in a small, working-class U.S. town in the Pacific Northwest region of the country, I am reminded of the many narratives that compose the ideology of our day-to-day ‘existence.’ Like mores around gendered being and sexuality, a man is talking loudly in the line for coffee about ‘the freaks’ of the town, Grants Pass, OR. He states to another person, also in line, that ‘the freaks come out at night, at Wal-Mart, 2am,’ commenting ‘one time I saw a man with pink pajamas, with his hair in bun, in the women’s clothing section, with tampons.’ What a disturbing and exciting event for him! He even approaches me at one point to talk. Here homosexuality and homophobia coincide again. Juxtapositions fly around on neon carpets singing the national anthem and burning the flag! What are these moments of contradiction and how can we use them? Does OWS represent a moment of great contradiction? The kid with the U.S. flags, expounding anti-Capitalist rhetoric and complimenting the rebels in Libya for other-throwing Qaddafi. Yes, this is frustrating. White people talking about social justice, but blocking people of color from making proposals or talking at General Assemblies. Yes, this is oppressive. But is it anymore frustrating and oppressive than the everyday contradictions that we already participate in unconsciously and sometimes consciously? Isn’t it time we consciously inhabit the Unconscious of OWS? Begin to place a little fear of castration into the discourses of oppression? Isn’t it time we began to inhabit consciously the Unconscious of the first national movement in the U.S. since before the 1930s to address economics? When the Left splintered off into identity politics in the 1960s and before, the power of collective Marxist analysis and praxis was lost. The Specter of Communism became Casper, and was sold at Disney Land to gay couples at Disney PRIDE. Fracturing and commodifying the Left like other parts of U.S. culture, is a ‘normal’ part of the continued atomization, individualization of capitalism. Shall we offer something to the Collective Unconscious too, something that stamps out the silly displacing representational ‘feel good’ mantras of clouded and veiled brutality by making anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism messages to infuse all our work?

At the same time, diffused matrices of control and obfuscation at the level that is experienced in the U.S. – with all of its subsequent distractions, alienations, commodity fetishes and personality markets – doesn’t mean that we have all been totally subjected to the same, uniform treatment. Yes, we all live under the same biopolitical realities as outlined by Foucault, Fanon, Marx and others – government administration/regulation of the poor, massive benefits for the already wealthy, a secured but anxious reality for the upper middle class, and an unsecured anxious ‘treadmill’ life for the middle and lower middle classes. Police violence and brutality, especially against people of color, immigrants and queers. State intervention to ‘protect and serve’ the elite. Modes of life presented and enforced by ‘elders’ and parents – who are still protected by codes against ‘the youth’ that invariably support the effective passing of the status quo. Entrenched racism, homophobia and sexism as evident in ‘mega churches,’ the rise of the Tea Party, and even conservative memes in communities of color and white nationalist ideology amongst white gay and lesbian people. Inhabiting various ‘places’ within this dizzying mise en scene, some are more comforted, or disturbed, by the objects of commodity fetishism, while others are more moved toward horror or happiness. The ‘Unconscious’ or reified patterns that ‘appear’ at OWS are nothing more than an expression of a movement fighting the mechanism of economic oppression and passing through the ‘zero point’ of history, or the totality of now, and opening itself up to the Collective Unconscious – the reifications – of the larger society. We must revolt against all of these oppressive unconscious juxtapositions. Revolt means toppling these Unconscious and Conscious memes and structures of socio-psychobiological and political stratification. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out in neurotic capitalism we have a lot of things-without: ‘Coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, cream without fat and so.’

Revolution means little without revolt.