The 99% Solution

News coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to be sporadic, but it’s there if you look for it. Business Week has run articles each day. Last night on WYNN, the show Capital Tonight, with the fabulous Liz Benjamin, devoted it’s evening call-in show to the movement. Many callers were middle aged middle income people who supported the protestors and objected to the perception that they are a bunch of incoherent college students whining about not being able to get jobs. On Democracy Now there have been reports every day, and last night a wonderful interview with Naomi Klein, who also has a piece in The Nation.

Lack of leadership at this point doesn’t matter in my opinion. Everytime they provoke the police to violence for instance they are motivating the public to come to their support. The support of labor unions is huge. The fact that the Transportation Union in NYC is suing to prevent the police from comandeering buses to cart protestors off to jail is unprecedented. And this movement isn’t sui generis. It is a conscious continuation of the Madison protests and the uprisings in the Arab world. The fact is it is occuring within new media, by means invisible to the mainstream media and pundits who do not understand this kind of direct action. Over the summer I read a fascinating book by George Lambie, called The Cuban Revolution in the 21st Century. Among many other things he discusses historical instances of direct democracy, of self-organized and directed radical movements that have usually failed but opened up possibilities of social change that didn’t exist before: The Paris Commune of 1871, Republican Spain, and the Russian Soviets of the early twenties. He also describes a movement towards self sufficiency and local action in Cuba as a response to its loss of Soviet sponsorship. Local agriculture, the use of organic fertilizers, informal distribution networks for food, school programs where schools grow food for students, etc. All of these things are happening right now, where I live, and all over the country. It can be dismissed as an upper class fad but the fact is there is a virtual farmers market in Ithaca where a person can buy directly from very small farmers, individuals even who might have say ten chickens, for very cheap prices. The network is decentralized and it depends on the internet. This type of organization, socially progressive, decentralized, using new media is second nature to young people today, and there are a lot of people who aren’t young, who aren’t radical, who feel screwed. They believe in science, they believe in fairness, and they’ve been following the rules, buying into the myths of market fundamentalism, and they have lost everything. This isn’t going away, and it isn’t about a thousand young people in a park in this or that city.

I have no doubt that a shrewd leader will emerge from this matrix. But we have had shrewd leaders without a social movement behind them. The social movement is the key thing. From that leaders either emerge, or it pushes establishment figures to do something more than they woul do in the absence of such pressure. And at this point we need to take what we can get.