Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: the endgame

Late last week Ann Althouse said the OWS movement is hampered by not having an exit strategy.
You know, there's a real problem with this Occupy [Your City] protest format: It doesn't have an exit strategy. You come, you conquer, and then time passes, protesters get dirty and ugly, internal divisions crack them up, the nearby residents get disgusted, the local businesses get mad, and then what? There's isn't going to be a revolution. It's not Egypt. In the end, they'll have to break up and go home. Or hope the cops come in and bust them up so they can end with a bang. 
Althouse's critique resembles another which is that that the protestors don't have defined aims. But I'd suggest that the real issue here is that this movement is really anarchist in spirit. We're used to protests organized and run by doctrinaire leftists and this one isn't.

Anarchism, as I was writing just a little while ago, is all about community. They believe that our society is an artificial construct, an idol, and that when it begins to fail, natural community will spring up in its place. And when we consider that we can see how Althouse is wrong in a very important sense: they don't lack an exit strategy because the protest is the exit strategy. For most of these protestors, the whole point is being there and living in tents. They think they are living in the post-revolutionary world.

There are, of course, other people trying to manipulate this for their own ends but that is the way anarchists think. They think everyone else really wants to be like them. They especially think that young people want to be like them. As they imagine things, every person from age seventeen to twenty-nine watching this stuff on television wishes they were occupying too. (You can see this in their choice of a "revolutionary class". Working class , the choice of Marxists, and women, the choice of feminists, are both definable groups. The 99 percent, on the other hand is effing everyone.)

This is all about the celebration. The drum banging, the breast baring, the public defecation, it's all a party. Trust me on this one, when a beautiful young woman decides she wants to show everyone her breasts, it's not because she is seething with rage. OWS people like to think they are anti-corporation, but the truth is they think in exactly the way corporations have taught them to think. Can you spot the difference between OWS and a cruise-line commercial:

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