Why the "Occupy Wall Street" Initiative is Failing

Rev Scare wrote:I have never entertained the notion of aligning ourselves with such gaudy middle and upper class waste. I am not averse to the possibility of collaborating with dedicated working class activists, but as we represent a new movement entirely, our pursuits should be directed in a serious capacity designed to attract the working class population by addressing genuine issues of concern.

I have also never quite understood what the purpose of the ridiculous displays presented by typical "left-wing" protestors served to accomplish politically, but then I came to realize that they do nothing toward that end and that the true aim of these spectacles is to provide an outlet for the frustration within bourgeois culture. We must remember that the participants constitute the afterbirth of the New Left, which abandoned even the pretension of revolution and accommodated itself to the establishment; indeed, it was born of the bourgeois establishment. They represent the public outburst of bourgeois contradictions. The entailed struggle lies between those who wish to retain the stolid and indifferent face of traditional bourgeois culture and those who wish to efface it in favor of a more "humanitarian" image. The claim to speak on behalf of the poor and oppressed, but in actuality they speak on behalf of their own cheap bourgeois morality within the context of a capitalist crisis.

More photographs from the "front":

Notice how there is an absence of true anti-capitalist sentiment, but instead merely a prodding for capitalism to favor one particular course.

Godfaesten wrote:Yes, you're exactly right, but you've got to admit. "Top 1%, y u no pay taxes?!" is pretty goddamn funny.

Rev Scare wrote:That depends upon what type of message you wish to convey: that serious issues are a joke or that they are indeed relevant. What is with the silly V for Vendetta masks? Do these individuals think of themselves as "revolutionaries" of some sort?

By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.

“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Ms. Tikka, 37, told me.

“This,” presumably was the opportunity to air societal grievances as carnival. Occupy Wall Street, a diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty byproducts of wayward capitalism not easily extinguishable by street theater, had hoped to see many thousands join its protest and encampment, which began Sept. 17. According to the group, 2,000 marched on the first day; news outlets estimated that the number was closer to several hundred.

By Wednesday morning, 100 or so stalwarts were making the daily, peaceful trek through the financial district, where their movements were circumscribed by barricades and a heavy police presence. (Various arrests for disorderly conduct were made.) By Thursday, the number still sleeping in Zuccotti Park, the central base of operations, appeared to be dwindling further.

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GMG wrote:I stumbled upon this forum after typing "occupy wallstreet is failing" into Google. I just wanted to post to tell you how wonderful it feels to know that there are like-minded individuals out there, with beautiful rhetoric I might add.

Admin wrote:I'm wondering if the recent police brutality — and the corresponding attention it has drawn from various mainstream outlets — may actually serve to turn 'Occupy Wall Street' into a meaningful demonstration.

Thoughts?

Coach wrote:It could do so, but only if other forces join this protest and basically swallow it up or overshaddow its originators to the point where its a whole different protest with different aims and tactics. A mass of striking workers, or mass of rebellious proletarian youth would change the character of the Occupy Wall Street demo is a hurry, especially if they democratically put their feet down and made it their own.

But the trendy left-scene and liberal hippies? No, as long as fighting masses aren't involved, these fringe-freak people and pacifist idiot liberals won't learn shit. And the only way that fighting masses would get involved 'from below' is if they basically overwhelmed the previous left-scene elements through their numbers, and then immediately remade the whole protest into their image/likeness and for their own interests. The masses are not going to be interested in following the infantile pathetic middle class left-scene. So long as it talks and acts like today's fringe-scenester or popular frontist faux-left, it will lose with the real masses who have nothing to lose, it will not resonate among the deeper and lower masses that are needed to get a real system-challenging occupation/fightback on Wall Street to occur, and because it can't do that, it sure can't put any pressure on the organized labor movement (or sections of it) to join/support that battle, nor could it cause the successful independent organizing of more precarious working class masses for class struggle.

Rev Scare wrote:We must remember that the participants constitute the afterbirth of the New Left, which abandoned even the pretension of revolution and accommodated itself to the establishment; indeed, it was born of the bourgeois establishment. They represent the public outburst of bourgeois contradictions. The entailed struggle lies between those who wish to retain the stolid and indifferent face of traditional bourgeois culture and those who wish to efface it in favor of a more "humanitarian" image. The claim to speak on behalf of the poor and oppressed, but in actuality they speak on behalf of their own cheap bourgeois morality within the context of a capitalist crisis.