The protest group Occupy Wall Street has tapped into a widespread sense of frustration and disgruntlement in America about the financial crisis.
Down with the dollar: Occupy Wall Street members stage a protest march near Wall Street in NYC
The Occupy Wall Street protest, now in its fourth week, has transformed Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district into a carnivalesque campsite. There’s a soup kitchen, prayer circles, spontaneous jamming sessions, and workshops on everything from “political yoga” to “anti-oppression”.
Now and then, protesters who want to make an announcement call out: “Mic check!” Then they make their point, which those surrounding them repeat, sentence by sentence. This “human megaphone” is also used in the scheduled “people’s assemblies”, in which protesters discuss everything from how to recycle the camp’s waste to how to overthrow capitalism.
The protest has attracted a mixed crowd, with everyone from trade union leaders to Hare Krishnas joining in. A number of celebrities have visited to show solidarity: Roseanne Barr, Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Kanye West. It has inspired copycat protests across America – and tomorrow, British anti-corporate activists are planning to launch their own version, by taking over Paternoster Square near the London Stock Exchange. The London protest, which has the Twitter-friendly name “OccupyLSX”, shares the US insistence on keeping the movement leaderless and an emphasis on non-hierarchical “direct democracy”.
The campaigners’ goals and strategies will be decided upon in open assemblies – a seemingly endless series of meetings where anyone can put forward their views and complaints.
Yet even though the protests have tapped into a widespread sense of disaffection in America, the movement is underpinned by some distinctly dodgy ideas. Like Occupy Wall Street, the organisers of OccupyLSX have adopted the slogan “We are the 99 per cent”. The idea is that the masses are scraping by, while the ultra-rich – the 1 per cent – wade in wealth acquired through greed and corruption.
While its spread has been relatively rapid, this isn’t exactly the mass, grassroots movement it claims to be. Nor does the MacBook-armed core of the movement really differ all that much from the conspiracy theorists who tend to blame some nebulous force or other for all the injustice they perceive in the world.
At Zuccotti Park, there are placards and banners sloganeering against everything from shale gas drilling to capital punishment, from animal experimentation to the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. Inside the camp, this free-for-all is celebrated as an inclusive, establishment-threatening strategy. Whenever the protesters are asked to clarify what they actually want, they tend to sneer that this is a superficial demand, that the “mainstream media” don’t get it, that the press is only interested in snappy headlines and soundbites. As an article in The Occupied Wall Street Journal – a newspaper produced and distributed by protesters – puts it: “Since thinking is often too much to ask of the American mass media, the question of demands has turned into a massive PR challenge.”
It is the protest’s all-encompassing nature that has allowed its initiators to claim, and to convince themselves, that they are speaking for the whole of America. This movement is about anything and everyone – so in some way, at some point, it will touch on some issue affecting some of the people who make up 99 per cent of America.
But despite all the talk of fighting for the interests of ordinary Americans, the protesters show a great deal of contempt for the masses. They claim that America is an “ignorant nation”, that its citizens have been “brainwashed” by the media and tricked into “over-consumption”, to the extent that they pose a threat to themselves and to the planet. As the Occupy Wall Street website says: “The masses are incessantly encouraged, even conned into, consuming, even if it is beyond, or way beyond, their means.”
This is not about showing solidarity with people who are facing economic hardships – it’s about making the masses see that they are feeble-minded fools who have fallen under the spell of greedy corporations. Rather than representing a shining beacon of democracy, the radical occupiers sound more like those despots who justify their regimes by posing as the righteous protectors of citizens too ignorant to perceive their own best interests.
The closest thing to a statement of intent since the Wall Street occupation began is the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, a document drawn up “so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies”. Yet this declaration is also the clearest manifestation of the conspiratorial thinking that runs through the protest movement. It describes corporations as some kind of nebulous force controlling everything from the government and the media to the judiciary, and committing all sorts of crimes against humanity, nature and the animal kingdom. “They” (the corporations) have not only “perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace”, they have also “poisoned the food supply” and “purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media”. The list goes on.
This imagining of Evil Corporations as puppetmasters controlling every sphere of society shows that the occupiers have little faith in individuals’ ability to control their own destinies, and no patience for understanding the workings of modern capitalist society and contemporary politics. Instead, they embrace a victim mentality – it’s all the fault of bankers and big business – and imagine that billionaires, like some kind of alien invaders, have completely infiltrated the world’s institutions to exercise control over Americans.
Occupy Wall Street has evidently tapped in to a widespread sense of frustration and disgruntlement. But for all their obsession with transparent consensus-reaching, it is curious that the organisers could determine from the outset that their aspirations and outlook reflected those of 99 per cent of the population. The protesters down at Zuccotti Park may be enjoying the carnival – but some of us would like to be counted out.
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