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

Getting it ...

[dave hall (from livejournal.com)]

I saw your tweet and decided to follow it back and comment.

As best as I can tell the exponentially growing Occupy concept is a spontaneous movement aimed at waking up the 99% of people who feel they've lost their voice in the political arena. The "We are the 99%" meme is highly contagious and driving things forward as is the neutral politics. The few Occupiers camping out are keeping things going, kind of like holding the fort, with part-timers able to come and go from on-going protest actions. What the "end-game" is going to is not clear yet. All that has emerged so far is a Declaration of Occupation that reads much like the original Declaration of Independence, a long laundry list of complaints.

The positive outcome so far are the twice daily General Assemblies and off-shoot open forums where anyone with a voice can speak their mind. There are no leaders yet and no single demand requiring the action of others, so the movement is entirely open to the evolution of ideas .. the best ones will likely emerge. Check out http://www.occupylist.com for an example list of possible demands that have emerged that I've seen. Perhaps a 99% Party will emerge, who knows, it's early days still!

[preraphaelite.livejournal.com]

All I want to say is I *love* the song choice for this particular entry!

Some thoughts

[fiatlouis.livejournal.com]

Argh, wrote a long post that got deleted. Anyway, E. and I were talking about this last night, as I didn't really get it, and she and her political science friends thought it was really cool. One of the things we came up with was that many people (outside of certain academic communities) don't have a conceptual box to fit OWS into, and that makes it hard to understand/be comfortable with. If one thinks of it not as a protest (because it's a pretty lame protest) but as a group of people making space for democratic discussion and action, it makes a lot more sense.
It was suggested to me that the real "point" of the whole thing was as a way to give people a voice, not necessarily in the media but just in the world. They want to do things differently, and they are being the change in the world that they want to see, if you will forgive the cliche. There's also an argument that it is just good old-fashioned consciousness-raising, trying to make people think. And on a certain level, it doesn't have to be for more than the people that are there.
I heard some compelling arguments for why it is rational, and why it is a reasonable way of achieving what their actual goals may be, but I must admit I am still left a bit cold by it, just in the sense that I am uninterested in joining. It makes me think of people whining and complaining without "doing something" (in a more conventionally political way, anyway), which annoys me.
So those are some of the things running through my head, anyway, and perhaps some (or all of none) of it will mean something to you.

FRUSTRATION

[tiven weinstock (from livejournal.com)]

This is coming from one thing: frustration. People are frustrated with being unemployed, being underemployed, taking pay cuts, not being able to afford the basic necessities such as food and healthcare.

There is no real leader and therefore no specific goals laid out to achieve. People are just sick and tired of things only getting harder for most, while a tiny few get richer and richer. If I was unemployed I'd most certainly be there because what else would i have to do anyway?

I don't know what kind of effects, if any, this will have in the long run, but people seem to be waking up to the inequalities baked into our society and I for one am glad to see it.

[lowellboyslash.livejournal.com]

This might be relevant to your interests:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

[bronzite.livejournal.com]

You know, you often say a lot of the things I'm thinking here when it comes to social issues and movements like this; the same optimistic skepticism, I guess I'll call it. So thank you for commenting on these things spontaneously so I don't have to.

[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.

[how-low-am-i.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I completely understand it either but I am impressed by the amount of people it is involving without a leader.