Paris, November 16, 2011 – The program to oust the
Occupiers’ movement from its sites of Occupation is now underway. The
Occupied, who own the police, have grown tired of the Occupation.
The advantage they possess is that the Occupiers have not provided a
coherent statement of what they want. Their other advantage is that
Americans are not revolutionaries – after all, isn’t the American
system the best in the world?
The Occupiers dismiss this demand for a program as contrary to the
spirit of the Occupation. There is not and cannot be an agreed
program because that is not the nature of the movement, which is
anarchistic in quality (yet having nothing to do with anarchism itself).
It is against “the system.” The system is how the world
economy works today, and is responsible for creating the
international crisis of which Occupation has been a response:
original, spontaneous, seductive, but incoherent and directionless.
How, after all, can “the system” be changed? Well,
first, justice could be done. This is what people want: justice.
We could indict and prosecute the bankers who were involved in the
conception, organization and conduct of the vast organized swindle
that foisted home mortgages on poor people who wanted homes, or the
cash from refinanced mortgages, and were sufficiently unsophisticated
to be persuaded that the international, and specifically American,
real estate price balloon would automatically absorb the mortgage debt.
We could indict and prosecute the brokers and financial operators who
conceived and organized the “securitizing” of those mortgages so as
to make of them an undifferentiated mass of anonymous debt that could
be chopped into individual securities and sold to criminal or
credulous bankers, who would sell them on to ignorant or credulous
institutional and individual investors. That, however, is so vast a
project, and the American public so passive, as probably to be
unfeasible.