NOVANEWS
When someone calls for a protest in America lately the joke is usually on the Left. I have to admit that I was so cynical about American prospects for an Atlantic Fall that I did not properly register that 5000 people (according to typically low-balling mass media estimates) were on Wall Street Saturday, and that as I write these words, hundreds are still camped out there. One was quoted by the NYT: “When you idealize financial markets as salvific you embrace the idea that profit is all that matters,” he said. (I guess that’s attributable to either contempt for American capacity to mobilize from the sub-editor who approved that quotation or surety that the readership will never join the crowds).
By comparison, the antiwar rallies that took place earlier this summer, which took a full year of planning, got between 5000 and 10000 people. Is this massively significant? Puerto de Sol in Manhattan? Tahrir in Times Square? We will see. The only way to make sure that it is insignificant is to assume that will be so, and that’s what they want. David Graeber writes, “Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced.
To understand this situation, we have to realize that the last 30 years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus that creates and maintains hopelessness. At the root of this machine is global leaders’ obsession with ensuring that social movements do not appear to grow or flourish, that those who challenge existing power arrangements are never perceived to win.”
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