Don't dismiss Occupy
A good friend of mine who I will always respect wrote about Occupy: “It seems to simply be a trendy event that malcontents of every stripe are using to air their ill defined (or plainly selfish) complaints.” This comment is similar to many that disrupt the twitter feeds.
Here is my unedited response:
You are stuck on the symptoms, and there is certainly foolishness there. The shit fight regarding the drummers in NY is an example how leaderless self-organising can develop cracks. You are also quick to make universal judgement, nor realising the diversity of people and ideas that the movement has swept up. Also, they have chosen a consensus-seeking format that is not good at filtering out weirdness. But it IS worth taking the time to read and think about the underlying motors, and why we see this outbreak now. It is complex and it is uncharitable to make sweeping statements. To demand that they have well-articulated demands demonstrates the dominance of the frame of economic “rational choice” (a technical term, wikipedia does a poor job of explaining it) which harbours an evolutionary “survival of the fittest” ethic. I don’t blame you for not thinking outside of that, most people don’t, it’s culturally embedded. More and more, it is dawning on writers (less so from the defensive Right) that the movement is restarting a conversation about power and fairness that has been suppressed since the 1960s. It’s the conversation that’s important, and how that’s conducted. The mainstream media has gone from ignoring the movement outright, to opening its opinion pages to discussion, and that’s a good thing. It is too bad that some activists and administrative power are stuck in an agonistic mode. Hopefully, it can proceed peacefully (it did not in Melbourne and Sydney). BTW, most people attending the general assemblies at various Occupy sites are university educated (or in the process) and are well-employed. My criticism of them is that many are utopian, not understanding that you can’t just demand revolutionary change and expect power to move aside willingly. Increasingly, its dawning on the various sites as their conversation develops that change requires raising public awareness and engaging slowly with the authoritative power complex. And that requires a deliberative process.
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