The onset of the capitalist crisis in 2008 gave rise to an acute and widespread sense of ideological disorientation.  The ruling-class soon recovered their bearings to impose an austerity agenda aimed at shifting the burden of the crisis on to the backs of ordinary workers but the rest of us remain dazed and are looking for answers.

The collapse of Soviet bloc after 1989 has freed the anti-capitalist left from the crushing dead weight of Stalinism.  This is of course a good thing but the fall of the Berlin Wall also left a black hole where there was once a conception of a society different to capitalism, albeit one which was horrifying and in many ways worse.  Nevertheless, the absence of a visible alternative or an otherwise gripping utopian ideal has created a vacuum.

The Occupy Movement in many ways illustrates the dilemma.  On the one hand, it is a visible symbol of people's anger and disillusionment at continuing high unemployment and social breakdown. The slogan “We are the 99%” rightly takes aim at the tiny minority who have benefited most from the crisis, at everyone else's expense. 

But it is also a movement borne out of weakness.  The failure, or indeed reluctance, to put forward a clear programmatic understanding of and alternative to capitalism has resulted in an observable loss of momentum; the camp at St Paul's today is a fraction of its size four months ago.  More insidiously, many of the ideas being hawked around the margins of Occupy camps are not only useless in understanding the current crisis but also positively harmful and dangerous.

In the post-Enlightenment morass in which we find ourselves, all manner of crack-pot ideas, conspiracy theories- what Francis Wheen calls 'mumbo-jumbo'- have taken root.  Many of them are able to play off the ambiguities of the 99% slogan to suggest that the key to understanding the current crisis lies in exposing the machinations of a plutocratic elite, said to be manipulating world events, often through control of the money supply. 

One such conspiracy theory can be found in the Zeitgeist films which focus excessively on money, the Federal Reserve and 'international bankers' as the root of the problem. This manner of explanation is what the Russian-born French historian Léon Poliakov called 'diabolical causality', attributing the outworking of systemic impulses to the conscious and omnipotent agency of certain groups or individuals.  Zeitgest pedals an age-old trope, the emphasis on money and its alleged manipulation by a secretive cabal little more than a coded version of the anti-Semitism found in the writings of French fin de siècle scribbler Edouard Drumont or the Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 

Although proponents of Zeitgeist may deny this, arguing that Jews are never explicitly mentioned, this is besides the point; the film plays on centuries of accumulated discourse about money and finance which is explicitly anti-Semitic.  More basically, to be plausible in their defence they would need to explain away the uncritical citation of the notoriously anti-Semitic US Republican Senator, Louis McFadden as an authority on the world-conquering ambitions of 'international bankers.' 

Focusing on money also fundamentally misses the point about what capitalism is and how it functions.  For Marx, the key to understanding the motor forces of capitalism lay in historicising the reified categories of bourgeois economics.  This involved revealing money as merely the expression of certain sets of social relations, money as capital functioning as the expression of the exploitative relationship between bosses and workers. This is why it is convenient for politicians who have not broken with capitalism yet wish to benefit from popular anger at austerity, such as the French presidential candidate François Hollande, to declare 'the world of finance' as the enemy, as if it is merely a cancerous growth on the body of an otherwise workable system.

If concentrating merely on money ignores the structures in society which create and sustain oppression, misery and unemployment, it also provides no strategic guidance on how to change these structures. Believing that world events are caused by the unchecked conspiracies of the New World Order is completely disempowering; if Freemasons were behind the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution was a Jewish conspiracy, and history is an unbroken line running from the Illumunati straight through to the Bilderberg Group then who are we to change things now?

It must be said that the 99% slogan is problematic too because it flattens out the various hierarchies of oppression in society, capitalist, gendered, racial or otherwise, into a majoritarian binary. The point, however, about those of us who are or will soon be forced to sell our labour power is not just that we are in the majority (although we are), it is that with this strategic position in the social relations of capitalism comes the potential social power to change it.

But in order to actually change the world we first have to understand how it works.  This task is not helped by flat-earth conspiracy theories about 'world government', the money supply or the corrupting effects of fiat currency which cloud the mind and muddy the waters.  Such nonsense only serves to distract us from the real enemy: David Icke's lizard people.