On OWS

It's pretty exhilarating to see a mass movement that actually seems to be getting some traction and also seems to be largely independent from the usual political actors, at least for now.  Some links:

• Business Week profile of David Graeber, who seems to be at the intellectual center of the movement:

  David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

• Here's a discussion of an article by Barbara Eherenreich on the relationship of the homeless to OWS, with some thoughts about the developing culture;
• Mike Godwin reports on the Oakland police violence;
• Teenager denied cancer treatment becomes the voice of Occupy SF
• One more: It's always been about equality vs aristocracy, says Gordon S. Wood:

Looking for something deep to say about this rare phenomenon, a bottom-up spontaneous large-scale collective action with no clear goal and no clear boundaries. What binds it together? The slogan "we are the 99%" is brilliant. There's a deep vein of anger at the manifest economic injustices that have become baked into the structure of society. "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out" was another good slogan being chanted the last time I was there.

I believe that a sense of injustice, rather than mere resentment at the economically fortunate, is what animates most of the participants. The sense of fair play, that everyone in society is playing by the same rules, has been virtually destroyed in the last few decades; we want to get it back.

And about that "we": it feels odd for me to include myself in anything this massive and populist, to use the first person plural as if I can speak for it, but also feels oddly right. I don't pretend to be near the center of it, or even a fraction as involved as many other people, but it doesn't matter. We're all doing what we can.