While I’ve been too busy to follow the Wall Street occupation very closely, let alone participate in any but the most vicarious ways, I’m encouraged by the persistence of its participants. Isn’t it time Americans started saying basta! to government of the lobbyists, by the politicians, and for the corporations?
Here’s a collection of links I’ve found useful:
The Occupy Wall Street blog
Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber interviewed by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein
Graeber is cited a number of times on Mike Konczal’s (Rortybomb’s) useful discussion of anarchist (non-hierarchical, anti-authoritatian) versus traditional left organizing tactics
The Global Revolution livestream
Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the response to the protests is worth reading. Addressing some observers’ criticism that the protestors don’t have a clear message, Greenwald writes:
Some of these critiques are ludicrous. Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power — in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else?
And then there are the more-or-less sympathetic observers like Nick Kristof who, despite the obligatory critiques, manage to come up with a few useful suggestions for concrete demands, e.g., impose a financial transactions (“Tobin”) tax, close the huge corporate tax loopholes, etc.
(To such suggestions I would add: Unpave Wall Street and reforest it! But then I’d be added to those whose loony demands make the movement less credible. Ah well…)
Peter Catapano, at the Times’ Opinionator, also has a good collection of quotes and comments here. Catapano cites Michael Jackman’s argument:
Might news organizations’ reluctance [to cover the protests] stem from the fact that most of them are owned by the large corporations that are publicly traded on Wall Street? It’s hard to explain otherwise. After all, polls show that many Americans would be interested in the marchers’ arguments. A Pew Research Center poll shows that “nearly half of Americans — 47 percent — say Wall Street hurts the nation’s economy more than it helps.” According to a Bloomberg poll, a whopping “70 percent of Americans say big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts.” In another poll conducted by Lake Research Partners, 77 percent of respondents approved of tougher rules for Wall Street. Seems like viewers and news readers would enjoy having a look at these protests.
What the movement lacks in comparison to the Tea Party, according to Eric Bohlert, is a cable news outlet to promote its agenda. (Where is MSNBC now? And The Current?) But the larger point is that the cable news outlet has to be powerful and supported by the economic interests and lobbyists who filter and skew what becomes news in this country — but by definition no such outlet could become a mouthpiece for a movement that sought to overturn that very power.
Democracy Now is as close to a network as we get.
Finally, there is the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City. Here’s a piece of it:
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
“Will the protests evolve, as some progressives hope, into a sort of liberal Tea Party? ”
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201110061000
any signs of a/the green party in these affairs?
Occupy Wall Street has so far been successful in enlisting the support of a number of leftish celebrities, prominent unions, and young activists, and has received a lot of media coverage. The protestors have successfully stood their ground against Bloomberg’s attempt to evict them.
But this victory can by no means considered final. Rather, it tasks us with the question: “Where do we go from here?”
If this successful moment of resistance against the coercion of the State is to signal a turning-point for this movement, it must now address the more serious political problems that confront it. It is crucial that the participants in these demonstrations ask themselves where they stand in history, and more adequately conceptualize the problem of capitalist society. This requires thorough reflection and unsentimental self-criticism.
One of the most glaring problems with the supporters of Occupy Wall Street and the “occupations” in other cities is that they suffer from a woefully inadequate understanding of the capitalist social formation — its dynamics, its (spatial) globality, its (temporal) modernity. They equate anti-capitalism with simple anti-Americanism, and ignore the international basis of the capitalist world economy. To some extent, they have even reified its spatial metonym in the NYSE on Wall Street. Capitalism is an inherently global phenomenon; it does not admit of localization to any single nation, city, or financial district.
Another problem pervasive amongst OWS demonstrators is a general lack of historical consciousness. Not only are they almost completely unaware of past revolutionary movements, but their thinking has become so enslaved to the conditions of the present that they can no longer imagine a society fundamentally different from our own. Instead of liberation and emancipation, all they offer is the vague notion of “resistance” or “subversion.”
Moreover, many of the more moderate protestors hold on to the erroneous belief that capitalism can be “controlled” or “corrected” through Keynesian-administrative measures: steeper taxes on the rich, more bureaucratic regulation and oversight of business practices, broader government social programs (welfare, Social Security), and projects of rebuilding infrastructure to create jobs. Moderate “progressives” dream of a return to the Clinton boom years, or better yet, a Rooseveltian new “New Deal.” All this amounts to petty reformism, which only serves to perpetuate the global capitalist order rather than to overcome it. They fail to see the same thing that the libertarians in the Tea Party are blind to: laissez-faire economics is not essential to capitalism. State-interventionist capitalism is just as capitalist as free-market capitalism.
Though Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy [insert location here] in general still contains many problematic aspects, it nevertheless presents an opportunity for the Left to engage with some of the nascent anti-capitalist sentiment taking shape there. To this point, most of the protests have only expressed a sort of intuitive discontent with the status quo. In order to get a better sense of what they are up against, they must develop a more adequate understanding of the prevailing social order. Hopefully, the demonstrations will lead to a general radicalization of the participants’ politics, and a commitment to the longer-term project of social emancipation.
To this end, I have written up a rather pointed Marxist analysis of the OWS movement so far that you might find interesting:
“Reflections on Occupy Wall Street: What it Represents, Its Prospects, and Its Deficiencies
can we develop a new cognitive “toolkit” ?
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/39338