Isn’t the vagueness & fluffiness kind of the point, though? As you say, if the occupation had announced they were the provisional London soviet and anyone not in the tent was an evil capitalist running-dog lackey they’d be even easier for journalists to dismiss.

The whole “we are the 99%” slogan, while not without its own problems, is basically a rephrasing of the concept of People Power as a force for change. It sounds obvious but it’s actually a major ideological break from the more traditional Marxist & Leninist view that only workers / workers-and-farmers / workers-and-students can make a difference.

So wherever they’re going, and whatever the woolly demands eventually solidify into, I think this WILL change the world forever. Just like 1968 — capitalism didn’t fall, but the radicalisation and ideas that flow out of global movements for change can create huge benefits to society in & off themselves.

I think specific demands would be foolish. The statement is blandish, but is definitely anti-capitalist and that is a start (except the bit about regulations bla bla).

There is a strident energy within young left wing activists now around the reclamation of the commons. Resources, information, education, land… with a specifically non-state anti-authoritarian drive.

This is where the most interesting ideas are coming from and will hopefully filter into the occuplsx movement. People can recognise that the current parliamentary system is bankrupt and politicians offer nothing so why ask them for anything.

Organising themselves democratically and seeking ways to actually seize back these ‘commons’ collectively over time is the task.

A long one, but certainly has a lot more exciting potential than the stale deadening repetition from the traditional organised hard left and left liberals on here.

Why does a movement have to offer a direct alternative? Why can’t it just be a collective expression of disgust at the kind of plutocracy that has taken hold in so much of the world in recent times?

I don’t think many people actually want a revolutionary change, but just some control over the global business community and some accountability. Honestly if you look at what business has done, Wall Street in particular, in recent years with the bailouts and the bonuses and whathaveyou, it’s hard not to be angry, and it’s simply crazy to think that situation ought to be allowed to continue.

What ought to concern everybody however is how far we are from the bottom in terms of the global crisis though. I mean things are bad now, but the trajectory is downward and who knows how far down it goes?

Vagueness is crucial though, isn’t it? If these people want a reasonable claim to represent “the 99%”, they can’t propose specifically Marxist or libertarian routes (say) to a situation in which the 1% are not doing very nicely for themselves at the expense of the 99%.

One person might think the best way to serve the interests of the 99% is to extract more money from the 1% via the tax system and spend it on public services; another might think breaking up monopolies and making it easier for SMEs to compete with major corporations is the way to go; another might favour moves to strengthen the bargaining power of unions; another might like to see more people becoming shareholders in the companies they work for, and helping to make decisions about executive pay etc in the boardroom.

This should be about saying not “here are the demands we want you to meet”, but “here’s the problem, now what are you going to do about it”?

The only people who shouldn’t be able to get on board at all are those who flatly deny that it *is* a problem if wealth and power become ever more concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of people who are almost completely detached from mainstream society and the real economy. And I doubt that many people who self-identify as right-wingers really think that’s the case.

Monglor @ 3:

“Why does a movement have to offer a direct alternative? Why can’t it just be a collective expression of disgust at the kind of plutocracy that has taken hold in so much of the world in recent times?”

Because expressing disgust with your situation is all very well, but if you want to change it, you have to have something to change *to*. Otherwise you can’t do anything except sit around complaining all day, which doesn’t really do anyone any good.

@ 3:

“Why does a movement have to offer a direct alternative? Why can’t it just be a collective expression of disgust at the kind of plutocracy that has taken hold in so much of the world in recent times?”

Because unless you have some idea of what you want to change *to*, you can’t do anything constructive to build an alternative. At most you can just pull down what we have without having anything to replace it, which rarely works out very well.

“Why does a movement have to offer a direct alternative? Why can’t it just be a collective expression of disgust at the kind of plutocracy that has taken hold in so much of the world in recent times?”

Down with this sort of thing!
Careful now!

@ 7 TimJ,

I recalled that very thing earlier on.

I suggest that people need to put aside the leftwing versus rightwing standard positions and discuss matters as fellow humans, because, although there are differences in outlook lurking within the standard bi-polar political paradigm, there is also a large measure of ‘divide and rule’ operating.

Also, many of the arguments (between left and right) are over economic matters, which really ought to be decided rationally in a scientific manner, rather than as an ideological struggle. There should be no such thing as ‘rightwing economics’ or ‘leftwing economics’, any more than ‘German science’ and ‘Jewish science’.

Green Party Leader Gives Support to Occupy London Stock Exchange….

http://haringeygreens.blogspot.com/2011/10/green-party-leader-gives-support-to.html

@ 6 XXX

“Because unless you have some idea of what you want to change *to*, you can’t do anything constructive to build an alternative.”

True, and if this was a small, focused group a failure to present a cohesive alternative would be a very bad sign. But the whole point of this, as far as I can figure out, is to get as many people as possible together to demonstrate public disagreement with the political/economic status quo. It’s unavoidably going to be vague.

For much the same reason, I don’t remember everyone who went on the Stop The War marches signing up to the same well-defined, complication plan for Britain’s foreign policy.

Green Party Leader Gives Support to Occupy London Stock Exchange….

http://haringeygreens.blogspot.com/2011/10/green-party-leader-gives-support-to.html

Chaise @ 10:

“For much the same reason, I don’t remember everyone who went on the Stop The War marches signing up to the same well-defined, complication plan for Britain’s foreign policy.”

I’m not sure that the two can really be compared. Stop the War were expressing discontent with something fairly specific — British involvement in the war in Iraq — and it was pretty obvious what their alternative was — to withdraw our troops from that country. But the Occupylsx movement’s dislikes seem to be rather more nebulous and ill-defined, so to change anything they need a reasonably detailed programme more than the Stop the War Coalition did.

Seems they want something they never had before, a debate, a say in how their lives are organized, their time and aspirations manipulated.

@13 Yes indeed. More democracy please! This could get interesting.

I’ve been at #occupybristol today, at two meetings which I have to say were more chaotic than your average NHS PCT meeting. That’s chaotic.

What was very clear was that they had had enough of economic injustice. And it was clear that they want economic justice.

Fair enough. Let’s have some division of labour here. These guys are out there in the cold and wet, a living advertisement that the people have had enough of living in a defective economic system. In return, our part, sitting comfortably by the fire at home, is to draw up an articulate, workable plan to turn this chaotic quasi-free market economy into something that serves the needs of all people, including our grandchildren.

It’s not rocket science. We know what needs to be done: close tax havens and loopholes, tax the rich, control the corporations, end the monopoly of private banks on money creation, conserve energy, build houses, invest in renewables & HVDC supergrid, stimulate the green sector of the economy with a wage subsidy based on 100% earnings disregard, and all the other stuff I have forgotten to mention.

Surely the least we can do for our comrade brothers and sisters out there in wet flapping tents is to craft these reasonable demands into say 1500 elegant and well-chosen words which will help msm journalists to understand what the agenda is?

@15

“draw up an articulate, workable plan to turn this chaotic quasi-free market economy into something that serves the needs of all people, including our grandchildren. ”

I agree. We need to get rid of the quasi-free market economy and replace it with an actual free market economy.

The attitude is so tiring.

So we’ve arrived in the centre of Glasgow, set up a tent city, sorted out food, first aid, information, flyers, banners, artwork. we’re building websites, blogs, making videos, sharing photos, social networking – all to get the word out to those not aware there’s anything happening in cities across the UK. Then we need to liaise with police, the council, troublemakers, families, stop our possessions being stolen by passersby, And most of us are doing this between jobs and most of us haven’t done this before.

And in the midst of all this they expect us to turn around with a coherent solution to the problems of the world that we can all agree on!

Presumably so they can pull it to pieces and ridicule it

It will come. But right now we’re frantically organizing – we don’t have the three months planning New York had and there’s been relatively little help from traditional left groups, unions and the press. Indeed I’ve yet to see one national British newspaper refer to the fact there are full time occupations camping in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol, Newcastle and more.

actually one thing we clearly are advocating, just by nature of being there:

the creation of people-driven, democratic, horizontal, peaceful assemblies in every town square in the world to discus and call for change.

@ 12 XXX

Stop The War is probably a bad comparison, fair enough.

Still: remember when we were explaining to Jim that pro-life organisations are unlikely to also be anti-war or pro-healthcare, even if the person in charge supports all these positions, simply because it mixes the message and puts off people who don’t agree with every single one of your beliefs? Similar thing here. Many of the people involved may feel they have a better system to offer, but if the movement itself advocated one of those systems, it might lose a lot of support. Speaking for myself, I might support a group who say they want to combat capitalist exploitation, but not one that said they wanted to replace it with a communist system.

Or consider a petition demanding for an MP or PM to stand down. They rarely demand that the person in question be replaced with a specific individual. The point of a negative petition such as this is to communicate the fact that there is a large group of people who are strongly against something in particular. Same with this. It’s not, as far as I can tell, trying to get the government to adopt a specific solution, it’s making it clear that a large amount of people will favour a solution that doesn’t involve the state propping up irresponsible companies at the expense of the poor. It’s guiding state policy in general terms.

Now, if an individual in this organisation told you that the current system is wrong, and you asked for their proposed alternative, and they said “urr… dunno”, then you’d be right to call them out on it. But a mass movement has to focus on a common denominator.

It’s easy to say “the system’s wrong” if there’s no analysis of it nor presented a comparable alternative. Any system would comprehensively fail those tests.

“actually one thing we clearly are advocating, just by nature of being there:

the creation of people-driven, democratic, horizontal, peaceful assemblies in every town square in the world to discus and call for change.”

Well said Pip.

This is just the start.

It’s far too soon to be craving structure and looking for rigidly codified “demands”. To do that is to miss the point anway. This thing’s a process, a fuzzy logic, involving millions of people all over the world and no-one can second guess it. This is about pragmatic change, not having the law laid down by a bunch of cadres.

A couple of interesting perspectives here:

http://www.infowar-monitor.net/2011/10/cloud-protesting-dissent-in-times-of-social-media/

http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428/

Agree with previous posters. Actions speak louder than words, and the actions have been marvelous. The demands are vague, but no less powerful than that, and specific enough to scare the right people and get the respect of many. The last thing we need are sectarian Trots or Tankies hijacking this.

Chaise @ 19:

“Still: remember when we were explaining to Jim that pro-life organisations are unlikely to also be anti-war or pro-healthcare, even if the person in charge supports all these positions, simply because it mixes the message and puts off people who don’t agree with every single one of your beliefs? Similar thing here.”

Even then though, “pro-life” is, Jim’s bizarre ramblings aside, a well-understood term for a fairly specific position. If somebody attends a pro-life rally, they don’t need to explicitly outline an alternative, because everybody knows that they’re attending because they want to see abortion outlawed/restricted more. Similarly, if the Occupy movement were protesting against a specific piece of economic policy — bank bailouts, or quantitative easing, or whatever aspect annoys them the most — then they wouldn’t need to explicitly outline a detailed programme, because everybody would be able to work that out for themselves. What they’re actually doing, however, is more the equivalent of saying “The NHS needs radical reform!” and then not specifying what form they want the reform to take. In such circumstances, it’s sensible to avoid supporting them until they come up with some more specific ideas, in case they end up passing reforms that will make the situation worse, and you unwittingly end up helping them to do this.

@xxx

I understand your fear about supporting something that hasn’t expressed explicitly what it supports.

But the key thing is that these gatherings are fundamentally democratic. They have democracy at the heart in a way most political discourse doesn’t – they are entirely bottom-led. One demand that is heard again and again from the various movements is the removal of the negative corporate influence from politics. From Werrity to Coulson, I’d hope the left and right would agree with that.

And it seems appropriate that if our democracy is beholden to the City of London (who made 50% of Tory campaign donations in the last year) and multinational tax-dodging businesses, that the age old tradition of assembly of the people in public squares to debate and demand change is the key first step of that.

Picture this lasting for the next six months. First step is assembling camps and negotiating with authorities to have them, and create the infrastructure to support them. Next step is to encourage a critical mass of support for the idea that ‘the status quo is not good enough’. Without mass popular support any ideas put forward are meaningless – the 99% is nothing but a brand. New York now has that with some 87% supporting the protests apparently. After that point the will be no shortage of proposals and ideas. And some will get traction and ultimately, I assume, be voted on and demanded.

The left has split into factions and in-fighting since, well, the Peoples’ Front of Judea – most memorably in Spain. Those leaders that do rise to power typically become co-opted by the system they once opposed. A leaderless movement not riding a single agenda beyond ‘this shit must stop’, has a chance to bypass that. It’s not the easiest path, but the outcome is far more exciting – a truly representative democracy not built upon corruptible egos.

If you’re concerned about their direction or possible ultimate goals – then get down there and engage with it. That’s the whole idea.