In an overlooked pieced from 2021, called, “Don’t Laugh, GameStop Really Is Occupy Wall Street 2.0,” the author claims:
“For all of its meme-fueled absurdity, there’s been surprising beauty in the Reddit revolt. Not only did it bloody the nose of the capitalist class, but the swift blowback from the establishment has also inspired a wide swath of ordinary people to band together to continue the rebellion.”
…”If this kind of story sounds familiar, it’s because this unruly flash mob of finance has morphed into something resembling Occupy Wall Street 2.0. For many, trading meme stocks has taken on an ideological element.”
This “movement”—if we want to call it that—began as a retailer attack on the “hedgies” (hedge funds) that the average consumer felt was artificially suppressing the price of certain stocks—and thus accelerating their demise—such as GameStop and AMC.
People didn’t like this.
They saw it as collusion between Wall Street and the state that they had witnessed firsthand not all that long ago in 2008 (perhaps their whole lives!). Furthermore, people were becoming more familiarized with “financialese” like “dark pools” (or alternative trading systems), “short squeezes” (where investors bet against a stock and yet the price is driven higher), and FTD (“failure to deliver”).
Unlike the original Occupy Wall Street, they were there to break the hedge funds entirely. The plan was simple: by purposefully buying up as much stock in these vultured (but dying companies nonetheless) as possible—regardless of whether these shares actually existed or not—and by refusing to sell them no matter how low the price was forced down, the cost to maintain short positions would eventually become too much to bear for those hedge funds and they would have no other options other than to bail on their positions, buy the stock themselves, and thus drive the price through the roof (and well-beyond the actual market capitalization of the company itself). This did occur several times, by the way.
GME:
AMC:
They even claimed a few scalps along the way, with Melvin Capital being their biggest:
This could not last, of course. After Washington ended the stream of liquidity the retailers were using to gamble with in the first place (stimulus, extra UI, etc.), and after the COVID restrictions were all but lifted around the country, the casino went back to doing what it does best: rigging the games.
All that’s left is what was left of the previous Occupy movement: more destitution and the greatest single transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.
HODL!
“HODL!” was the rallying cry of everyone in the movement. What began as a crypto typo slowly became the method and the way for many seeking glory and to be part of something:
“What the GameStonkers looks like now—at least in part—is a decentralized movement that acts in solidarity, largely because many of those involved have skin in the game: their own money. The short squeeze they’re trying to pull off takes coordination and discipline. Sell now and you profit or make some of your money back but then you’re no longer part of the movement. Many are choosing the latter.”
As the prices of the stocks settled back to earth—or split—many bailed on holding any longer, sold for small gains, or, most likely, at a tremendous loss (these are people who bought at the peak simply to be part of the movement and “invested” in hopes of both getting rich and getting to say they were part of the merry band of retailer Davids that took on the establishment Goliaths).
This is where phrases like “buy the dip” and “diamond hands” came from. You buy the dip because you believe the stock is being manipulated and will only go back up. You have “diamond hands” if you refuse to sell because that’s what they want you to do, after all—give up!:
“Fuck the SEC. Where does the manipulation stop? We have to fight back. We have to bring this to the forefront of the world. Look what they are doing to us! We won’t stand for it,” wrote one R/WallStreetBets user.”
All in all, this movement lasted much longer than the original Occupy Wall Street and did actual damage.
So, is there anything we can learn?
Yes, thanks for asking!
Lesson 1: You Don’t Take On Wall Street; You Take On The State Itself
While it may seem like the state and Wall Street are in cahoots. The real fact of the matter is that the state runs the show. Wall Street are just the bookies, the bean counters, and the middle-managers of utterly worthless financial assets that Washington lends to them (after that capital is first lent to Washington from the capitalist class themselves).
The state is the national-capitalist and it controls and has domain over not just the money-supply but what “is” money. A few hundred thousand—or even a few million—card counters would not be able to take down Wall Street, because they are backed by a creditor with infinite liquidity and are always playing with house money.
This was same mistake made in 2011/12. The original OWS movement made the error in believing that Wall Street was their enemy when it was really the architects of the “Great Recession” in the first place: the fascist state. It was Pelosi and all of Congress, Treasury Secretary Paulson, and Fed Chairman Bernanke who orchestrated not just the housing bubble (which would ensnare and dominate all of the European Union that lasts to this very day), but they were also the project managers of restarting the accumulation process while pushing monetary policy to its breaking point. They stepped in—like they always do–to buy absolutely worthless fucking capital, put it on their ledgers, and make the social producers slave away just to cover the net interest payments on what are colloquially known as “toxic assets” (i.e. they can’t be sold at any price—and yet, hey, they acquire one anyways AND a profit for the titleholders of them! Yay, fascism!)
If you were making a heist film, this is what you would call a SCAM.
There is no reforming this or making Wall Street say “uncle” like r/WallStreetBets wanted:
“Even now, many GameStonkers say they just want an honest and uncorrupt version of market capitalism—not socialism. But the left should patiently explain how capitalism’s very nature makes that a losing proposition.”
This is not unlike what OWS was calling for: a complete overhaul of the financial system. But what they—and r/WallStreetBets—do not understand is that the financial system runs downstream from Washington D.C.. The Right doesn’t want “crony capitalism” and the Left has not never bothered to learn that any form of a state results in “crony capitalism.” It’s not necessarily this vague “nature of capitalism” anymore (i.e. this Gordon Gecko-esque “greed is good” image people have in their heads).
It’s the nature of the state acting as the expropriator of all.
Lesson 2: (With)HODL Your Labor-Power!
There was a frequent saying during the height of the r/WallStreetBets movement that, in the proper context, would actually be somewhat of a salient point:
Now I want to show your two more quotes and you tell me the differences.
Here is from one of the investors:
“I’d rather lose it all than sell right now with my current profit if it means I’m helping make history,” [Paula] says.”
Here’s Karl Marx:
“You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
The only real difference, in my mind, is if the “stock” Paula was willing to let go to zero was her wages and of prices generally (i.e. the budget of the state).
“HODL!” has greater implications on the fascist state than hanging on to some financial claim to an ephemeral movement with no chance at success. For one thing, as I’ve already stated, the producers have nothing the state wants besides their labor-power and to increase the rate of exploitation year over year. They do this by debauching our wages since, as capitalist, they are its purveyors. All they have to do is throw a sum of M into the economy and so long as M’>M, everybody who has invested in this pyramid scheme eats, so to speak.
The other issue is the DTCC (The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation). They are insured up 70 trillion dollars and during the entire r/WallStreetBets saga, the retailers only managed to siphon off ten billion dollars on GME (that’s about $714 per member of r/WallStreetBets, assuming they were all investing).
Either way. It doesn’t matter. The collaterizing of securities is just the way valueless capital finds price expression as a derivative arising from the superfluous labor of the working class. It can’t be put to use, other to be gambled, speculated, and leveraged. Not selling your “stonk” has no real effect on the economy. It’s a symbolic gesture, at best.
Whereas if we all stopped selling parts of your labor-power during the workweek, then this worthless capital either goes away or must find its way into productive sectors of the economy. Whereas the retailers were trying to bankrupt the hedgies, simply reducing hours of labor—however it may take place—alters the very composition of capital itself. It expedites the accumulation process and thus an absolute fall in the rate of profit:
” With the absolute amount of living labour newly incorporated in individual commodities decreasing enormously as production develops, the absolute mass of unpaid labour contained in them will likewise decrease, however much it may have grown as compared to the paid portion. The mass of profit on each individual commodity will shrink considerably with the development of the productiveness of labour, in spite of a growth in the rate of surplus-value. And this reduction, just as the fall in the rate of profit, is only delayed by the cheapening of the elements of constant capital and by the other circumstances set forth in the first part of this book, which increase the rate of profit at a given, or even falling, rate of surplus-value.”
Communism-as-free-time is nothing more than eradicating the amount of unpaid labor-time that capital itself already decreases as productivity rises and thus:
“The mass of profit cannot increase so long as the same amount of labour is employed, unless the unpaid surplus-labour increases, or, should intensity of exploitation remain the same, unless the number of labourers grows.”
If labor-power were a stock, we’d want to be the “short-sellers” and have the price of wages and commodities to go to zero.
Only a few chapters later, Marx describes how this might work:
” …a fall in the rate of profit connected with accumulation necessarily calls forth a competitive struggle. Compensation of a fall in the rate of profit by a rise in the mass of profit applies only to the total social capital and to the big, firmly placed capitalists. The new additional capital operating independently does not enjoy any such compensating conditions. It must still win them, and so it is that a fall in the rate of profit calls forth a competitive struggle among capitalists, not vice versa. To be sure, the competitive struggle is accompanied by a temporary rise in wages and a resultant further temporary fall of the rate of profit.”
Remember: these are under relative conditions of a relative mode of production. The chapter on excess capital is describing what occurs normatively, without any influence from the social producers nor the state. After all, this occurred already. The temporary rise in wages was met by a permanent deflationary attack on them in 1933 and 1971. The “firmly placed capitalists” have been given solid footing as coupon clippers in various market indexes where they do nothing more than abstain from this competition and receive some portion of the mass of profits in the form of an ever-diminishing return on the rate of profit itself.
If the social producers are worried about “market manipulation,” there is only one way to “manipulate” it in-kind: to accelerate the mode of production to its absolute development. r/WallStreetBet’s version of “eat the rich” (“bring down the hedgies”) doesn’t factor in that the only way to beat them is to draw them into competition with one another. In other words, these massive asset firms would be compelled to kill each other off. Just as Amazon might kill Wal-Mart off. Or the U.S. might kill off the E.U.. The onus and damages are borne by capital and thus by the state—who manages it and its attempts to expand it (or at least stave off contraction).
Marx finalizes this thought as such:
“The limitations of the capitalist mode of production come to the surface:
1) In that the development of the productivity of labour creates out of the falling rate of profit a law which at a certain point comes into antagonistic conflict with this development and must be overcome constantly through crises.
2) In that the expansion or contraction of production are determined by the appropriation of unpaid labour and the proportion of this unpaid labour to materialised labour in general, or, to speak the language of the capitalists, by profit and the proportion of this profit to the employed capital, thus by a definite rate of profit, rather than the relation of production to social requirements, i.e., to the requirements of’ socially developed human beings. It is for this reason that the capitalist mode of production meets with barriers at a certain expanded stage of production which, if viewed from the other premise, would reversely have been altogether inadequate. It comes to a standstill at a point fixed by the production and realisation of profit, and not the satisfaction of requirements.”
In other words, in all instances, the real weapon against the mode of production—and all that comes with it: the state, Wall Street, “corporatism,” “cronyism,” etc.—is a conscious action to restrict the amount of unpaid labor-time (which, at this late stage in the maturity of global capitalism, means, among other things, a limit on not just the rate of profit, but a limit on how this profit is “realized” by the state).
Why?
Because the capitalist mode of production is about production of surplus-value, not the direct consumption of this surplus (unless it first can circulate as capital—i.e. go on to produce more surplus-value, purchase more labor-power).
The entire facade of this limited scope of production was already exposed once exchange value broke down:
“…the capitalists have only to exchange and consume their commodities among themselves, then the entire nature of the capitalist mode of production is lost sight of; and also forgotten is the fact that it is a matter of expanding the value of the capital, not consuming it.”
The state began to consume this excess capital in the form of deficits. This, too (the state’s supposed infinite liquidity and borrowing capacity), goes away if we draw down unpaid labor-time and, with it, the rate of profit as shared amongst capitals. Rather, we make them fight it out and auto-destruct.
All he have to do…is HODL!
Lesson 3: Political Organization Must Be Anti-Political (“Immiseration Theory” re-visited)
The author makes a final—and somewhat interesting—observation about the Left not joining these Redditors who dared to poke the hedge fund bears (and, indirectly, the fascist machine) that I’d like to expand upon:
“Organizing workers and building a working-class movement through unions to build political power is still paramount. But we also have to adapt to the times in which we live and realize that the fight against capitalism is also asymmetrical, decentralized, and digital—especially in the time of COVID. We can’t wait for principled Marxists to emerge fully formed from the womb. We have to meet people where they’re at—even if it’s from the seedier side of Reddit.”
Between OWS, MAGA, r/WallStreetBets, various militias, the Libertarian Party, and other kinds of dissidents—comprised of tens of millions of people, from different income classes, occupations, races, and even politics—I don’t think communists have ever once asked themselves an important question over the past 40 years:
“Are we even necessary?”
After 100 years of fascist rule, of utter barbarism, what do we need to “build” that the current mode of production and political-economy a.) hasn’t materially prepared vis a vis a “higher stage of production” (i.e. the non-necessity of labor itself; i.e. “The bourgeoisie demonstrated to be a superfluous class.”) and b.) hasn’t also conditioned and prepared an “anti-subject” in the form of radicals to usurp the state (“In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.”)?
The fact that they do not know how to do so is neither here nor there.
Let me then quote Marx at-length on immiseration:
“…when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
It might seem like I’m restating an old trope about worsening conditions—however relative—leading to some eventual uprising or revolution by the proletariat. I could be accused of that. But this needs at least some updating. Once the state itself becomes “the Juggernaut of capital” and once the working class and the bourgeoisie become “riveted” to it like “Prometheus to the rock,” no more organizing is necessary. The masses—including the billionaires who benefit from this arrangement most!—have already begun to calculate their overthrow of the state. It could be thus said that the only remaining job of communists, Leftists, and Marxists alike is to dissolve their own organizations, to stop “building” what is already arrived on the doorsteps of history after a century of this exploitation of all by Washington, and simply join them.
There is that tricky question of, well, what if they need stewardiship? A vanguard?
Perhaps.
All I know is this: in the past century, Marxists and communists have done nothing but fuck-up and the proletariat still hates the state, and, as inflation continues to eat away at their standard of living, the only thing that has been capable of organizing millions of people with discreet differences and zero class commonality is the following: their present mode of association (as social laborers, as working class, as wards of the state) is increasingly insufficient.
The proletariat will not continue to work for the state for free, nor can they live on air alone.
These seemingly spontaneous anti-state (or anti-establishment) movements are not even because of crises within the mode of production. They exist because its been 100 years of the fascist state’s inability to the solve the original crisis in the first place. To extend the shelf-life of capital requires the state’s further intervention, their further assertion as the national-capitalist, and what’s more, a further antagonism between itself and “civil society.”
I am pleading incredulity that any Marxist or Communist organization can achieve what fascism has already accomplished for us economically.
All anti-politics would mean is to stop pretending we’ve any more to contribute to where the working class is already heading.
Zer0 H0urs 
Leave a comment