Occupy Wall Street Continues to Grow

It is good that it isn't only fraud, but the exposure and protest of fraud that is going on in Wall Street right now. It is good that the fraudsters aren't the only ones occupying Wall Street right now. It is good that the victims of global finance are not invisible and that the assholes can't pretend they are invisible right now.

I do not share the scorn of those who decry these protests as disorganized or unfocused. Sometimes you have to scream to be heard at all, especially in places where only money is doing the talking.

Neither is the predatory behavior playing out in Wall Street organized by a conscious program after all. People opportunistically privatize profits and socialize the risks and costs of their conduct -- and now the people screwed and abused by this state of affairs are calling out the fraud and testifying to their suffering. The disorder, if that's what you want to call it, is indicatively symmetrical. A space devoted to fraud is now devoted not only to fraud but righteous responses to fraud. That this is not the end of the story should not distract us from the substance of the transformation playing out as the story unfolds.

And in any case, there is no one program or online manifesto that should pretend to represent or circumscribe the conversation playing out among the many protestors in Wall Street right now -- especially not just to provide Establishment Media figures with "focus" or "organization" or "aims" they can comfortably recognize as such. I understand that there is a General Assembly on the streets itself in which the diversity of stories, and perceptions, and proposals of the protestors are being expressed in that diversity. The record of that assembly is the "program" afoot if anything is.

My point is not to suggest that programs are not necessary, that platforms are obsolete, that campaigns with explicit aims have been superseded. I just don't think that all politics that contribute to progress toward equity-in-diversity ever will or even should look the same.

Politics is not confined to one mode. I do not scorn the sorts of connections, illuminations, provocations that can arise from scenes of collective protest -- not least because my own political consciousness was forged in such protests in Queer Nation when I was a kid myself. Education, agitation, organization, celebration can support and strengthen one another, they need not undermine one another or discourage efforts otherwise.

We can join together in protest and celebration in the places the plutocrats have claimed for their own while making us pay, and we can still support and vote for more, and better, Democrats. Radical democracy need not be either/or, it is invigorated by both-and.

I do think Democrats should forcefully acknowledge these protests, should affirm the righteousness of the anger expressed in the protests, should stand shoulder to shoulder with the protestors, should get out of beltway and into the streets to unlearn what they have long imagined the limits of our politics to be. Hell, make the Democratic Party Platform one of the manifestos in the streets and have organized labor hand it out along with Union membership forms. Why not explain the importance of the American Jobs Act at the General Assembly and mobilize petitions to representatives to express support for it?

Rather than symptomize the demoralization of the left with Democrats, these righteous protests can re-energize the left to re-elect Obama, regain the House, retain the Senate, enact progressive taxation of income and spend the revenues to build a sustainable and equitable and democratic America from the ruins of the catastrophically failed neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist experiment.

If you are a critic of the protests, go into the streets and introduce your worries into the mix. Be the change you want to see in the world. And for heaven's sake, remind everybody to call or write their Representatives to support the American Jobs Act here and now and to vote for more, and better, Democrats now and next November and ever after.