What "Occupy" Can Accomplish

I guess I can't have a blog like this and not comment on the "Occupy" protests. Although I have been busy and vacationy, and haven't really felt like writing anything lately. Just a few sentences...

In a general sense, these types of occurances tend to raise the heart rate of Marxists/neo-Marxists, as it demonstrates the types of conflicts that, according to them, are inherently built into the system. These events indicate that people have some sense of the limitations and injustices of the current political economic structure, and the ways in which they are being exploited to sustain it. More than that, they are dissatisfied enough to try to do something about it.

Many neo-Marxists, who have been writing for the past few decades about the current period of economic contraction (beginning in the 1970s), and theorizing the necessity of large-scale structural change, have insisted that growing social unrest was bound to occur sometime soon. Now it looks more probable that they could be right.

On the other hand, in a less general sense, do I think these particular protests are going to result in anything significant? My gut says no. But it is a start. Perhaps this is the first ripple of a movement that could, in the longer run, really reverberate and result in some major changes.

But the biggest take-home point is that conflict/resistance/revolution does not necessarily (if ever) result in real liberation. The conditions of most people, particularly the oppressed, do not actually improve in the long run. In fact, the historical precedent has been for structural rearrangements to serve as the ground of conception for new relationships and instruments of oppression, which are almost always far, far worse than what came before.

Thus, there is hope. And that is something. But the worst could be yet to come.