Occupy Wall Street

Well, got the following to say about that before I head to sleep:

1. Absolutely agreed. Regime-changing movements don't just randomly appear.

2. Agreed again. The Egyptian movement expected Mubarak to be the cause of death for tens of thousands of Egyptians before he'd step down/be overthrown.

3. The Arab world is very aware of the political games the US plays. Hardly anyone there is fooled, and if the US runs with this assumption rather than embrace the Arabs' new-found freedom and clarity of thought, they'll quickly run into many walls. Whatever the US was able to build from backing the removal of Mubarak in Egypt and their diplomatic activity to get action against Gaddafi going, it all instantly burned up with the US declaration that they will veto Palestine's bid for the UN membership. The dynamic has changed tremendously from a year ago and the "business as usual" rhetoric from a year ago will greatly damage their image, reputation and influence in the Middle East.

A very smart political move was executed by Turkey. Erdogan was already a champion of Muslims within the Islamic world, and the complete break-off of diplomatic and military ties with Israel greatly enhanced that image. Right now, he's considered a hero by most Arabs and Persians, even though relations between Arabs and Turks were never good to begin with. Turkey is expanding its political, economic and military reach all over the Middle East very aggressively right now. I don't believe Erdogan's proclamation a few weeks ago that "the situation of Palestine will be radically different by year's end" was an understatement. They've been waiting for a chance like this for years, and now that Turkey has reached a gold standard of quality of living and structure of its economy in the Middle East, they are likely to become an unstoppable force for the near future. One can only hope that Turkey's warships to escort the next aid flotillas to Palestine don't act on impulse and seriously engage Israel's navy. That would be catastrophic for the entire region, and for the US (due to its unwavering support for anything and everything Israel does).

4.
- The situation in the US and in Egypt are wholly different. Egypt was clear-cut: the good guys were the average citizen who suffered from the tyranny of the bad guys (Mubarak, Police, Intelligence).
- In the US, you have an inherently complex and difficult-to-navigate system which makes identification, and recognition by the public, of particular sides a very difficult task. Compound general confusion on this matter with a very experienced and strong PR machine that is the US government as well as its respective departments, and you will find the situation is much more difficult to change than in almost any other nation on Earth.
- A movement with the capacity to seriously challenge the US government currently does not exist in your country. It requires extensive funds and intellect, neither of which the Occupy movement seems to have much of at this point in time.
- Motivation and dedication is GREAT to have among your fellow members, but it's not nearly enough. After having seen very closely and in detail how much effort it takes to move against corruption within Afghanistan alone, I cannot possibly imagine the complexity and strength of the US government to be overcome by a civilian movement. The most likely scenario, is that the US's flawed economy will eventually collapse, forcing your military strength to be reduced to a fraction of what it is today, and quickly losing its international status as a superpower, to be replaced by an EU/China leadership.

 

i agree with most of what you say until 4. but even there, the main divergence lay in the assessment of the occupy movement. i don't expect that it is a static entity, like some clandestine organization. it's the early phases of something else...though at this point, which is still very early in the game, it's hard to say what exactly. i see it as a move, not a movement yet. the problems it seems to want to address are real and they're significant. what remains to be seen is (a) whether they pull other people in who are maybe more focused on playing the political theater game in a more focused (so higher stakes) way and (b) whether and how the move transforms more broadly into a movement. if it does. remember that with media coverage courtesy of those fine neo-fascists at fox news, the tea party was able to blow up pretty quickly--and get taken over by the same old same old reactionary financial structures almost as fast. but it's a volatile situation we're in thanks to 30 years of conservative socio-economic policy, compounded by a current administration that's nowhere near as far from conservative socio-economic policy as is necessary.

as far as legitimation crisis is concerned...the conditions are already in place.

 

Agreed with most.

Please elaborate how the conditions for a crisis of legitimacy are already in place, though.

 

how quaint to see more fail the intellectual marshmallow test in the face of possible challenges to the institutional framework that gives them access to the debt they leverage to generate such capital as allows them to pretend they're meaningful players in the market and therefore have a grip on the structural problems confronting contemporary capitalism.

glenn greenwald puts this in a broader perspective:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/28/protests

on the "critiques" of the protests, this in particular:

 

Interesting stuff on how democracies are losing credibility with the populace:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/w...otests-surge-around-globe.html?_r=1&ref=world

 

if the united states or spain were democracies, i'd see the connection between the sentence you wrote and the quotes. but i don't.

the ability to bring pressure to bear from outside the relatively narrow channels available in a republic is the democratization of those channels.

 

It's times like these when I love Germany.

And being German. And myself.

 

nice. so we're already here. next stop: why not go live there? the kind of nonsense you'd expect a 15 year old republican to say. so we can just skip that one.

direct democracy is workable, but would very different than what presently exists. unless you consider things like athens a fluke. plato didn't like democracy that much because, basically, he saw himself as better as a result of natural hierarchies and democracy enacted a kind of equality. didn't make him a bad philosopher--he just had his view of things which, unlike what is the case with most defenders of contemporary mcfeudalism, he could defend eloquently. so agree or not, at least there was something to talk about. the mcfeudalism set has trouble with that defense of their framework thing in general. it's like talking to any number of other religious zealots.

the present american situation is very far from democratic. could it be most so? absolutely. would that benefit people? well, the problem with democratic situations is that much hinges on the quality of information and the capacities of a population to sort through it critically in order to make informed decisions. that means that there'd have to be a media context quite different from the management tool we in this the best of all possible worlds have today---more information, less opinion managment for starters---so i would think that among the central targets of any democratic movement would have to be the structure of the dominant media. at the moment, you can destroy the hold opinion managment has on you pretty easily by simply going somewhere that's not the united states for a while---assuming you can speak the language---and maybe you'll find yourself in a position like what i did during the first gulf war watching a network stream of cnn on one channel and french television on the others and noticing the war graphics and the war music and the packaging of a great big war adventure c'mon kids and the wholesale abandonment of anything approaching serious reporting---or like a lot of people did this past january watching the pathetic non-coverage of tahrir square on us infotainment outlets and comparing it with al jazeera or al-arabiyya. this because if you put more decision power in the hands of most people, you have to have adequate information. otherwise you end up in the carefully managed stepford we currently live in---a fading empire in which there's no narrative of fading empire participant in a structural crisis of network capitalism without a narrative of structural crisis of network capitalism. you get the idea.

so breaking the ideological shell is easy---breaking the shell itself is another matter. and this is primarily aimed a viable restatement of the second question above---would a democratic situation be viable? it could be---but thinking about the problems that the dominant media situation in the states would create for it is a pretty good indication of how far from democratic the soft-authoritarian system of neo-liberal u.s.a.-land is.

a different distribution of power is obviously desirable. would it be a pure democracy, a direct democracy? unlikely at least from here because no-one's really thinking in particularly revolutionary terms. because there's no revolutionary project that's operative culturally. it's possible that one will coalesce. it's possible that it'll happen on the basis of writing and other media actions by people i know. or you know. lots is possible. what's sure is that the over-reaction to occupations on the part of the dominant order is going to radicalize the situation quickly.

and as that situation changes, the hold of ultra-rightwing ideology is likely to loosen at the dominant media level, which will likely result in a paralysis of the ultra-right, who are a passive bunch and are accustomed to being told what they think, being shown what they're angry about. at least i hope so because if not and the ultra-right comes out, the outcomes will look a lot like a return-to-the-18th-century all american red white and blue version of the rule of the khymer rouge. you can believe that.

bringing down the plutocracy---and opening up the american system, altering the distributions of wealth and power, dismantling the national-security state, breaking up the concentrations of wealth and power held by people working through the financial system would effectively be bringing down the plutocracy---seems to me something that's better for everyone, including the people who comprise the plutocracy, if a longer-term survival of the united states as something other than an imploded backwater run by neo-fascists is important.

 

I was going to post the full text of the Glenn Greenwald piece because I suspect as just a link less people will read it. Apparently, the new TFP doesn't allow posts that long.

 

again, to quote the glenn greenwald piece above---which is worth reading:

secondly, it's an entirely different demographic that is starting to mobilize.​

that will change, i expect. we'll see.​

 

lindy....love the condescension. particularly based on such a string of powerfully argued posts as you have in this thread. that "they just want to punish the rich" argument was particularly impressive. you really have a leg to stand on being condescending.

but let's play. so when referred to some imaginary list of my "approved democracies" what exactly were you asking about? anything?

 

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/20...ia-the-power-elite-loathe-occupy-wall-street/

the streets are public. as public spaces, they can be occupied. public space can and should be transformed into political spaces. i have no sympathy at all for the argument that they should have filed for permits, any more than i would have sympathy for the argument that the people who occupied tahrir square should have filed for permits to do it. it's nonsense, exactly the kind of nonsense that's pointed to in the article above.

 

Aw snap. Merriam Webster got it wrong.

Which narrow channels are you talking about, and, how does pressure democratize those channels? Specifics would help me understand your point a little better.

 

are you seriously quoting a dictionary definition at me? well gee, there's an immense body of political philosophy on democracy and it's variants that stretches back about 2000 years. i guess they shoulda looked at miriam webster and saved the effort. i mean, plato shouldn't have bothered. he should have waited for merriam-webster. please. that's not even an undergraduate move.

american-style representative democracy trades off system stability for openness. recurrent red scare hysteria has resulted in a suspicion of political actions that draw the dominant order into question. historically, american trade unions for example were sector monopolies. that's quite different from what obtains in western europe---which is, in the main, a more democratic system than the american not only because of the versions of parliamentary process that obtain (the exception being 5th republic france) but also because there's a long tradition of protests in a pluralist context in which the language of radical critiques of capitalism (for example) is part of the normal political game. the united states has none of that. the american system has a very narrowly channeled conception of power and process. it's highly bureaucratized. access to the game is largely out of the question for ordinary people because of the costs involved with elections to more than local offices. because there's no oppositional political tradition in the united states, there's a long pattern of citizen mobilizations around particular issues that, when they win, get assimilated into the process they initially opposed, and if they loose dissipate. these mobilizations are the primary way in which ordinary people can pressure the political process outside the (oligarchically dominated) electoral process. in western europe, the pattern is different because it's possible to maintain a consistent oppositional position and manage organizational coherence regardless of whether on issue x or y they win or loose. the money game is less extreme in elections there....there is free advertising on television and newspapers---but advertising is not the primary means of electoral campaigning---that's an american thing, the reduction of democratic process to a conflict between brands, the reduction of politics to a form of consumptions. that's anti-democratic. in most western european countries, the principle modalities of campaigning are information-based. and there's a monitorium on political activity in the press for 3 days before elections (in france anyway). so there's the existence of citizen-level pressures that can persist over long periods---not like here. there's a basically different notion of what political campaigns are---not like here. there's nowhere near the cash requirements to enter politics---again not like here. in parliamentary systems, it is possible for a vote of no confidence---that is in itself more democratic than anything in the american system.

but the problem really is not even the system itself here---its characteristics of that system that were always amenable to distortion that have been distorted, particularly with the development of the current plutocratic regime. the convergence of finance capital and the national-security state and 30 years of conservative political domination (alternating between far right and center-right...a cycle we're still stuck with). this plutocratic regime has and continues to demonstrate that it will not and cannot address the fundamental inequities produced by the dominant form of capitalism. people see themselves as having no future. the polarization of class relations is as bad as its been in a century. there's political paralysis brought to you by the right. there's ideological paralysis brought to you by years of intellectual monoculture. there's a fading empire as a result. and people are thinking....wait a minute....none of this is necessary. and theyre right. it's not.

these points all hinge on a conception of what democracy is.
but you already read merriam-webster.

 

About an hour ago, people from Occupy Wall Street started releasing their grievances. Because the protest is intentionally leaderless, this isn't necessarily the grievance of everyone there, but it does seem to outline common information we've gotten from statements from the protesters.

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/kunyb/ive_been_at_occupy_wall_street_since_day_1here_is/