Still digesting, but I think this is important reading for anyone (like me) trying to understand OWS

[usernamenumber]

Putting this here and then crossposting to Twitter, since the latter is not so great for conversation and I'd welcome comments if people have them.

Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it

It's true, I don't. I think I kind of get where the author is pointing, but still need to chew on it more. I'm having trouble seeing what's supposed to come of this, or if that's not the point, what the point is. Then again, the fact that it, and the surrounding issues, have just been talked about so much of late (I know it's been on my mind a lot), and some of the things I've learned about the way they organize themselves... maybe that points to a more subtle change in the zeitgeist, and maybe that's the big thing that it stands to accomplish.

Comments

[manana.livejournal.com]

I think some of the issue people are having with this is that there is indeed a certain amount of naivete involved. The key here, though, is that being naive doesn't automatically make it irrelevant or a passing fad; to use an extreme example, the Bolsheviks were quite hopelessly naive as well.

And it's not as though there's any lack of naivete to go around; modern day Wall Street is founded on the ideas that a) people make rational economic choices (we don't), and b) free market capitalism is stable and beneficial for everyone (it's neither). Add on to that the stupidity of Austrian School economics (which is founded on the idea that you can't treat human behaviors in a statistical manner, a claim which is well past proven false and would get you laughed out of any biology or sociology classroom), and the OWS people start looking like the reasonable adults in the room.

The problem here as I see it is that, although it's a great first step for consciousness-raising and movement-building purposes, the OWS protest is ultimately targeting the wrong people. Businesses are essentially bacterial in their behaviors, and blaming them for optimizing within the system they're given is naive, since any business that doesn't do so will just get replaced by one that's more ruthless. Moreover, businesses do not respond to political power; they only respond to economic power (fines, taxes, boycotts, etc). The end game of these protests has to be political change, since it is a show of political force, and to that end the real target has to be Congress, not Wall Street. The goals may be economic, but the whole point here is that the 1% controls most of the economic power in this country, so the 99% will need to use other levers to effect change.

I am hopeful that once momentum has built sufficiently, things might start moving more in that direction, but I'm also a cynical old man, so . . . we'll see.