Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.
This is great and I understand the whole "we don't want to make specific demands since these can be co-opted by the political/financial system that we are fighting against," I really do, but seriously, what is the plan, what does it mean for protestors to "win" in this case? What does it mean that we will "no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%"? Or, that they are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic? Does this mean that they are willing to risk their lives in order to drive out the government and live in anarchy or military rule (also, it is not like we will have the U.S. military supporting us like those uprisings, and the gov't we are talking about is a tough bigger and more powerful)? And if so, what then?
Further, if coup is what they are going for, I hate to be a buzzkill for the 1% that have this in mind, but I am pretty sure 99% of Americans are not in a bad enough situation--or fearless enough--to be willing to be run over by tanks protesting their out of control credit card bill or grad student loans. (Also, while 100,000 people is a lot (this is the most generous estimate of people who have stepped out to protest across the country) it is still roughly only .03% of the country.) The majority of us have simply become too accustomed to our cush lifestyles, where food is never too far away, death is never a real, immediate, concrete threat, and cheap amusement is readily provided in a multitude of forms. Until these things are taken away we will never have anything close to "revolutionary," whether that is a good thing or not.
So, what could happen? What could come out of these protests? For one, no one will pay attention to a completely decentralized group of people shouting inconsistent and/or incoherent general greivances. There needs to be a clear concise answer to the question: "what are these protests about?" If it is not chosen by the protesters it will be chosen by the media, or by someone antagonistic to the group, or by someone co-opting it for their own narrow ends. This has already happened, with unfortunate consequences. Although the one clear statement about the protest claims it is for the "99%" and includes people of all political persuasions, it has been labeled by the three aforementioned groups and protestors themselves with incredibly narrow terms. A common one, and perhaps the most unfortunate one is, "the left's tea party." One problem, not even the biggest, is that this implies a ridiculously simply political spectrum that somehow runs perfectly horizontal with the tea party just being really Republican, and this new movement just being really Democrat. Another problem is that "the 99%" just became 5%. Both these problems are solved by one simple understanding:
There are a lot of people fet up about a lot of different things spanning a wide range of political viewpoints, BUT there are areas of agreement. These similarities need to be recognized and clarified, the people from both (and all bases) mobilized, and these few simple, clear, common demands unrelentlessly fought for.
That is the only way the Elite, or better yet the millions of Americans in the 99% who are still very much satisfied with the status quo, will even begin to listen. If a group isn't clear and inclusive with simple, widely agreed upon injustices to argue for other elements of the 99% will be pitted against them until both are easliy controlled and marginalized.
What are some of these commonalities? One that I imagine both could agree on (and it need not be more than one at a time) would be the injustice that is our two-party system. When I am confronted about voting third-party I am usually confronted with one of two responses, neither of which is "I am against third-parties, I think only two options should be available." Beyond this there are several other commonalities the "left tea party" and the "right tea party" have if they would only listen and recognize this (for example the influence money has in politics). I am not the only one recognizing this either. Here, the intellectual purists of each "side": Paul/Nader.
