Why are there so many Ron Paul supporters at Occupy Wall Street?

by Bruno Fournier

For the past several weeks, the contingent of Ron Paul supporters at the Occupy Wall Street protest has made its presence felt.  They form a small minority of the mass at Zuccotti Park, but they have made themselves an extremely visible and vocal minority, and, arguably, they have created the best-organized faction of the protest.  The Ron Paul supporters’ presence is undeniable primarily because they are so easy to identify: Just listen for the second-loudest group (after the drummers) and look for a cluster of “End the Fed” signs, and you’ve found them.

A couple of weeks ago, the BBC website put up a fun quiz game entitled “Who said it: Wall Street Occupier or Tea Partier?”  The game’s point was to demonstrate that the rhetoric and demands of the Occupy Wall Street crowd and that of the Tea Party folks are remarkably similar to one another, even though those within both groups would, of course, claim to have nothing to do with one another.  And, indeed, the point is, for the most part, quite correct.  Selecting Stones has explained many times that the Tea Party can only be properly understood as a direct reaction to the current recession, and the same is even more obviously true of Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots.  The conclusions that each group draws from the current set of problems may differ, but as the BBC piece demonstrated, they can also be quite similar.  And, crucially, the proposed solutions to the economic crisis often differ between the two groups, but, just as frequently, they bear a remarkable resemblance.  It makes perfect sense, then, that one of the most well-organized factions of the Tea Party coalition — the Ron Paul supporters — would show up as one of the most well-organized factions of Occupy Wall Street.

The Ron Paul supporters have one point absolutely correct: The current recession is a clear demonstration that post-WWII Keynesianism and welfare capitalism are currently succumbing to their own self-inflicted disease.  Its own contradictions are tearing capitalism apart.  While they may have correctly diagnosed one aspect of capitalism’s current crisis, their failure comes in that they see a disease only within the Keynesian variety of capitalism, and not an endemic plague within capitalism as a whole.  The exact same thing can be said of Occupy Wall Street, as well.  Just take out “Keynesian” and stick in “corporate” (as if that descriptor actually meant anything).

In one of our earliest articles, Selecting Stones explained that there is a curious affinity between Marxism and Dr. Ron Paul’s diagnosis of the American economy, but that, at the end of the day, Ron Paul makes the fatal mistake of believing that it is possible to turn back the clock to an imaginary time when a mythical egalitarian constitutionalism reigned with a light hand over a virtuous republic of small capitalists.  At least the mainstream of the Occupy Wall Street protesters aren’t so blind as to think it possible to roll back the year 2011 to a romanticized image of a fictitious 1776, but at the most basic level, their error is still the same: They want to turn back time, not to the early republic, but instead to, approximately, the mid-1990s.  The majority faction of Occupy Wall Street simply wants the Clinton years back.  Little do these people know, however, that their desires are completely irrational.  Time marches on, and, more importantly, capitalism marches on.  The deregulations of the past decades are not simply an aberration from an earlier capitalism that “used to work right”.  On the contrary, they are the necessary response of the need to make profits in the face declining rates of return.  No amount of compassion can change the fact that profits are highest when banks form monopolies and jobs go to cheap overseas labor markets.  But the Occupy Wall Street protesters insist on denying this basic reality, and, in that sense, they differ in no way from the Ron Paul supporters.  They want nothing more than the impossible: A quick fix for capitalism by turning back an imaginary clock that only goes forward.

After the Great Depression and World War II, the capitalist world settled into the Keynesian Welfare State as the most viable model to keep capitalism from imploding in on itself.  It worked for several decades.  Now, in the early twenty-first century, we are presently witnessing this six-decade status quo fly apart at the seams as it finally falls prey to capitalism’s unavoidable contradictions:

• The tendency toward monopoly
• The crisis of overproduction and the falling rate of profits
• The necessity of limitless expansion

The editors of Selecting Stones are quite certain that old status quo has gone obsolete.  Ron Paul supporters and the upper-middle-class leaders of Occupy Wall Street find themselves in a desperate search for a new status quo, a new capitalism.  Both, however, treat the symptom and not the disease.  It’s not a question of preference: Capitalism must clear the way for the coming of Socialism.  We don’t know yet what that society will look like.  As every small child knows, it’s impossible to tell the future, and the past is in the past!  But we do know that — somehow, someway — a socialist society of some sort lies on the horizon, so we damn well better get ready for it.