dagblog - Comments for "Eyes on the Prize, Occupiers. The 99-Percenters are counting on you."

Great points and questions,

Kudra — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:35:40 +0000

In reply to Eyes on the Prize, Occupiers. The 99-Percenters are counting on you.

Great points and questions, Ramona. I am dubious about recent developments (e.g. blocking traffic in Manhattan). I think OWS needs to tread mindfully about the 99 percenters who are just trying to get to work or pick up their kids. When they begin to negatively impact the people they purport to represent, they lose much of the moral force of their argument. I hope they don't f*** it up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Dan Kervick — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 05:33:01 +0000

In reply to Damn Straight !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj66DB_PKz0&feature=player_embedded

Damn Straight !

cmaukonen — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:06:08 +0000

In reply to The Occupy movement is the

Damn Straight !

When I woke to the news that

MrSmith1 — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:45:43 +0000

In reply to Eyes on the Prize, Occupiers. The 99-Percenters are counting on you.

When I woke to the news that Zuccotti Park had been cleared, I thought, 'They can clear the park, but they can't clear the ideas from my mind.' That thought led to this:

In addition to the Nov. 17th

Dan Kervick — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:25:52 +0000

In reply to Eyes on the Prize, Occupiers. The 99-Percenters are counting on you.

In addition to the Nov. 17th event, Occupy Oakland now has something happening on the 19th:

http://www.occupyoakland.org/2011/11/saturday-nov-19-day-of-action-into-the-streets/

Part of the message here seems to be, "OK, if you chase us out of the plazas, we'll take things further out into the streets."

The Occupy movement is the

Dan Kervick — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 04:23:00 +0000

In reply to Good comment from Occupy

The Occupy movement is the first major protest that has ever been made against private corporate institutions and not the government. The government is a prisoner of these institutions who are the real ruling class.

That's a very interesting statement. But I can tell you that it is very easy to find statements from other parts of the Occupy movement that tend in precisely the opposite direction. Some lean toward radical laissez faire solutions and claim that the only thing wrong with private enterprise is that has been corrupted by the state.

I'm hoping that the Occupiers will come to develop a consensus around the realization that they are just talking about two facets of the same phenomenon: political and social power and wealth are virtually interchangeable. Wealth is a means of accumulating social power just as social power is the means to accumulate more wealth. It's the same thing. The crucial question for people who wish to maintain a democratic society of social and political equals is how to distribute power and wealth more equally, and sustain that equality over time, while still permitting the dynamism to generate broad prosperity.

If a government is oppressive, that is because it owns a lot of tools for controlling people, and the control of that government rests in the hands of a wealthy elite, not the whole body of citizens exerting equal degrees of influence. And if a corporation is oppressive, that is because of the wealth it controls, and because of the limited number of individuals who command the disposition of that wealth, primarily for their own profit.

Laissez faire is no solution. The radical freedom to exchange and accumulate as one sees fit, without social restraint and regulation on behalf of the public interest and democratic values, is only a recipe for the most successful competitors to accumulate large concentrations of wealth and power, and then use those concentrations to dominate others. Initial states of equal competitors are inherently unstable, and tend toward winners and losers, and oligopoly and monopoly. Strong central states run by an elite vanguard also don't work. We need balanced networks of democratic governance, with both horizontal and vertical counterbalancing.

On the matter of the localist and small business emphasis, and the apparent call to crush and destroy large corporations, people need to remember that all of those corporations represent a massive flow of income and security to many millions of ordinary people. To successfully crash corporations would result in a profound global depression. With many tens of millions out on the street, and our economic production ground down to a much lower level, the small local businesses would suffer greatly too, from a dearth of customers with income to spend.

I suspect there will always be large enterprises and small enterprises, no matter what kind of society we have, because different kinds of enterprises require different scales. The question is for whom those enterprises work. How do they create value, and how is the value they create delivered to people? Is it delivered to a small executive and ownership elite who take the lion's share? Or is it distributed broadly among its workers and the public? Why not focus on assuming public ownership of large corporations, rather than destroying them, so that the aggregate value they generate can be preserved, but distributed more broadly. Corporations could be governed in entirely different principles than they are now. There is no reason at all that a corporate business enterprise must be owned, operated and exploited for value by small elites, and organized internally as an authoritarian and hierarchical command system.

The Occupy movement just needs to stay together and maintain solidarity, by continuing to make vivid displays of their collective power to disrupt exiting hierarchies and systems of elite control and privilege. And they need to keep talking until they have developed something close to a consensus vision of a more equal and democratic future, and a realistic and hard-headed plan for building that future. Right now, though, there doesn't appear to be any well-defined prize on which they have set their collective eyes.

Good comment from Occupy

Donal — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:57:40 +0000

In reply to Eyes on the Prize, Occupiers. The 99-Percenters are counting on you.

Good comment from Occupy Baltimore:

The Occupy movement is the first major protest that has ever been made against private corporate institutions and not the government. The government is a prisoner of these institutions who are the real ruling class…This is what makes the Occupy movement so important… Direct your protest at the corporations…Close your bank accounts…Limit your spending to the essentials…Support Local and small businesses…Cancel your monthly subscriptions…Use your local markets…

Also a lot of concern about the Protect IP bill.