Jacobin Show: Leaving Occupy Anarchism in the Past w/ Ben Fong & Christie Offenbacher

To start off this week’s Jacobin Show, Jen Pan looks at the discourse around "economic anxiety" as an explanation for voters' turn to Donald Trump and other right wing politicians. Why do mainstream commentators still refuse to see that these voters are, in fact, driven by material interests and not simply "racial resentment"? Next, Jen Pan and Cale Brooks think about how the Left should understand the middle class. What are the best social theories to understand the economic position of the middle class as well as their political interests? Must the Left win over the middle class to gain real power? Finally, we turn to the legacy of Occupy Wall Street. Jen Pan sat down with Ben Fong and Christie Offenbacher to discuss their latest Catalyst article, “Occupy in Retrospect.” While it is common to hear that Occupy was the “rebirth” of Left politics that led to the Bernie Sanders campaign and the rise of DSA, Fong and Offenbacher argue that, in fact, the contemporary Left has found success insofar as it has jettisoned Occupy’s horizontalism, anti-Statism, and refusal to issue concrete policy demands.

Read the piece in Catalyst: https://catalyst-journal.com/2022/03/occupy-in-retrospect

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The Jacobin Show, hosted by Jen Pan, offers socialist perspectives on class and capitalism in the twenty-first century, the failures of liberalism, and the prospects of rebuilding a left labor movement in the US. This is the podcast version of the show from March 16, 2022.