A few thoughts on the Occupy movement, politics and economics

[chess]

I like the Occupy movement, and the 15M movement across Europe which pre-dated it. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can find some more information at http://takethesquare.net and the website of the London occupation http://occupylsx.org, or the global map at http://occupytogether.org - or the article that 'started' the Occupy movement in particular and underlies many of its principles and methods at http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/91/capitalism-crisis.html - which also explains what that big Capitalism Is Crisis banner you might have seen on the news is about and why it isn't just an 'anti-capitalist' statement. I have been spending quite a bit of my energy attempting to support it, although mostly by the virtue of Arguing With People On The Internet which I'm not sure is the most useful thing ever.

If any of you have any questions about it, or politics and economics in general, or how to get involved, I have been doing a lot of talking and thinking about this stuff lately and am very happy to provide information about or enter into debate about it :-).

I am, however, worried it may have a bad case of the That Stuff Is Easy syndrome, though. The only thing that the current movement as it stands is truly good for is spreading the word - waking people up - explaining how the current system is corrupt, how certain financial institutions are cheating, as well as the general issues of global inequality (which less people are likely to get behind, as solving that will reduce living standards for those like us who are on the top of the pile globally!).

The movement thinks it can develop alternatives - it can come up with solutions - and maybe it can, by getting people talking, by getting them together. But the alternatives will take time. There are simpler stop-gap solutions that can be put in place - more restrictions on the use of money in political campaigning, maybe even debt forgiveness / jubilee or some similar 'reset switch' on the world economy - but the massive changes to the world that many people are advocating can't be done well in one step in a handful of weeks or months.

It's all very well, very inspiring and comforting, to share our grand visions of the future and utopian ideals, to dream of what might come - but there are serious individual problems with the current order that a much broader swathe of people can get behind solving, and I fear that they will get lost in the very attractive noise about more radical alternatives which haven't had enough time to be developed or trialled and are likely to come to nothing - or worse than nothing - if forced or rushed.

I love the idea of universal rights to basic sustenance without forced labour, direct democracy, a world where nobody starves or freezes on the streets again, and I can see why people want to seize the opportunity of change given by this current crisis, but the more of that kind of thing we attempt to embrace the further off necessary change gets and the more people we alienate and the more likely it is that instead we get one of the nightmare scenarios instead - collapse to the level of small communities due to violent revolution, or a society which is worn out too much to care about the plight of all the people discarded at the bottom...

Comments

[passage.livejournal.com]

I would have to say I don't understand the St Paul's camp protesters. What does the movement seek to achieve, and how does it see camping in church grounds achieving it?

I read the Capitalism Is Crisis article. That argued, persuasively, that we've come to believe Capitalism can't be changed for something else; which it clearly can be. However it then seemed to argue that no one knew what yet, but it would definitely involve revolution (I don't understand how we can know the method until we know the goal).

I couldn't understand how we got from 'We need a serious intellectual exploration of hitherto unexplored economic options' to 'we should camp in St Paul's'. It may just be me, but I don't think any clearer in a tent.

[king-of-wrong.livejournal.com]

That Rolling Stone article is long on innuendo and short on facts. Wall Street is 'cheating', in some fuzzy undefined way, by obeying the law? The author draws the parallel between overburdened mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, yet flip-flops from considering them to be equivalent bets to wanting jail time for bank officers. The tax argument is facile and duplicitious - any public company paying more tax than the minimum it was legally required to do would be guilty of fiduciary misconduct, and open to (at the very least) shareholder lawsuits. That applies equally to Goldman Sachs, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca Cola, General Motors or Ben & Jerry's. The article's lack of research or basic journalism would be shocking, but that boat sailed long ago...


I also fail to see how any article, let alone one titled Capitalism Is Crisis, which says:
"By acknowledging how deeply we are immersed in capitalism, how capitalist logic has come to curtail our ability to imagine anything beyond itself, we might open up spaces in which alternative possibilities reveal themselves"
is not anti-capitalist. The earlier paragraphs try to dress it up as referring to neoliberal capitalism, uncritically using that meaningless term, but it's anti-capitalist (or, more likely, Marxist) rhetoric with a veneer of postmodernist academia and a pretence that the various different options haven't been exhausted over the centuries. I suspect the author has a very clear idea of what "alternative possibilities" he would like to see, given his PhD topic.

[gwyntar.livejournal.com]

I was writing a message about how I disagree with your specific radical (but implementable) ideas, but i think the core point is that you are right - the occupy movement has pitched its camp too far to the "idealist" end of the spectrum. What is needed is advocacy for innovative, but reality-based, solutions.

antiques

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