Mass protest movements should be deeply distrusted, but taken seriously. They almost never represent the populace as a whole, but they sometimes represent the future – many of the unpleasant novelties of 1968 have been inflicted on us ever since. Also, like the Bonus Marchers of 1932, their demands may make more sense than the official policies of a misguided government. So it’s worth picking through the inchoate demands of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd and its sisters elsewhere, to see where they make more sense than our current masters. More important, we should examine the points on which they are completely misguided and foolish, but which may nevertheless represent official policy and conventional wisdom of the 2050s.
Past examples of this abound in history. Twentieth century socialists generally refrained from the guillotine, but they owed much to the egalitarianism and intolerance of the Jacobins of 1793. Similarly the successful Communist revolutionaries of 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China owed more than their name to the unsuccessful Paris Commune of 1871. Often, as with the Jacobins and the Paris Commune, the ideas propounded by street demonstrators had no place in the political discourse of their time (otherwise the normal political processes would have been open to them) but became highly salient or even dominant after the demonstrations themselves had failed and appeared to have left no mark.
During the sit-in at Cambridge’s Old Schools in January 1969 (a precursor to the better-remembered Garden House Riot the following year), as a freshman undergraduate I attended a lengthy Open Meeting held by the protesters, for precisely this reason: I wanted to know what they were complaining about, since I had a nasty suspicion their political beliefs would not go away but would infest my adult life. There was a considerable cultural clash; even dressed casually by the British middle-class standards of that day in a tweed jacket and flannels I stood out like a sore thumb among the protestors. I was also probably quite close to getting lynched when I suggested the time-honored middle-class reaction to grievances: that they should write to the “Times” about it. After all, in the words of that organ’s 1960s ad campaign “Top People read the Times.”
Nevertheless, my instinct was right; a considerable amount (though not all) of those protesters’ demands and attitudes were to become standard in the following generation. Political correctness, for one thing; not only was there a great deal of “Madam Chairperson” etc. but deviation from the gathering’s norms of language and attitude was met with obscenity although not fortunately with violence. Then there was an insistence not simply on equality (already universally accepted in Britain) but on positive discrimination in favor of people belonging to various “historically oppressed” groups. Finally, something new to me at that time, not only was there a generalized hostility to large corporations, which I had expected, but that hostility was expressed in terms of those corporations’ effect on the environment. There was a determination to bear any cost, disrupt economic life to any extent, to eradicate the multinationals’ supposedly exorbitant ecological damage.
Overall, the experience was very educational, and taught me a lot about the themes and issues that were to become central to the Left and to political and economic life in the following generation. Most of the ideas expressed in my 1969 demonstration had little or no merit, yet they were important because we would have to deal with them for the next 40 years or more. It’s thus worth examining the inchoate demands of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd to see what today’s young businessmen and capitalists may have to deal with in their middle age.
The protesters have not published a manifesto detailing their requests; in this they are similar to the mob that stormed the Bastille in 1789 and the 1968 rebels, and unlike the American revolutionaries or the modern Tea Party. However like all modern movements they have a website, which has a 50-page “Discussion Forum.” By trolling through that, one can come up with themes common to several groups, some of which are obvious and some of which represent genuinely new lines of attack.
There is, first a list of demands which have been put up for voting. These include a return to Glass-Steagall, the 1933 legislation separating commercial and investment banking, abolished in 1999. This will either happen or not happen in years to come; it in any case represents a backward-looking and very moderate demand that seems unlikely to form the nexus of a future revolution. Similarly, a demand to enforce president Obama/s “Buffett Rule” that would prevent millionaires from paying less tax than their secretaries, for better funding of the SEC , limitations on lobbyists and a reversal of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision allowing corporate political contributions could all form part of the next Democratic Party platform.
Equally uninteresting are demands to prosecute “Wall Street criminals” – this was done after Enron, with the unfortunate Jeff Skilling receiving a 25-year sentence; it may have satisfied the left, but it’s not what I call justice. Free college education (like all lobbies, the Occupy Wall Street crowd have favorite government subsidies!), the end of the war on drugs, an end to capital punishment and limits to lobbyists are likewise perennial and utopian wishes rather than representing substantive change.
A more interesting demand is for Congress to repurchase the Fed for the $1 billion with which it was capitalized in 1913 and abolish its independence. There’s a certain amount of overlap here with Ron Paul and the Tea Party, although this crowd seem to think Fed policy is too tight rather than too loose – presumably their ideal Fed chairman would have been the Weimar Republic’s Rudolf von Havenstein.
There are however two common themes which are new, have substance and potentially could resonate through public life in the decades to come. First, there is a demand for deposit taking institutions to be mutualized, so that being owned by their depositors they could not engage in risky speculative activity. This to me has considerable merit; it would turn banks into mutual associations like the pre-1985 British Building Societies, entities that did their job well for over a century. It essentially reverses the modern concept of a bank as an institution that lends money to people and reverts to the nineteenth century idea of a bank’s main function being to safeguard its depositors’ funds. With this structure, we would no longer need deposit insurance, since depositors would have the ability to control bank management directly. Bank management would return to being modestly paid Jimmy-Stewart-like custodians of their clients’ money, another major improvement over current arrangements. Of course, corporate finance, venture capital and even some derivatives operations would still be necessary, but they would be carried out in institutions that did not take deposits. Overall, I could support this reform, provided sensible people got to draft the legislation (a tall order, alas!)
The other theme of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters is a call from a substantial minority of them for a “resource based economy.” This was a new phrase to me, but with the assistance of the invaluable Google and Wikipedia, I was able to track it down to the thinking of a modestly fashionable nonagenarian guru, Jacque Fresco. As with Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 1960s thinker Herbert Marcuse (who said “Liberating tolerance means intolerance of movements from the right and toleration of movements from the Left”) I have a nasty suspicion Fresco’s bad ideas will be with us for many generations to come.
Fresco’s resource based economy rests on the theory that poverty, crime, corruption and war are the result of scarcity created by the present world’s profit-based economic system. He also believes the profit motive stifles the progress of social beneficial technology, and would favor a system that replaced the profit motive with the “progress motive.” Technology, if it were carried on independently of its profitability, would make more resources available to more people. The new resources would reduce the human tendency towards individualism, corruption and greed and lead them to help each other. The key to making all this work is to cede control in each field to the expert – a computer programmed with the sum total of existing knowledge in that field and armed with decision-making algorithms.
Fresco’s system would abolish democracy as well as capitalism; of course it wouldn’t work. If an expert computer decided that, in return for no extra resources (because otherwise you’d be making a profit from it), your purpose was to engage in back-breaking and tedious labor for 12 hours a day, would you obey – or try to start a revolution? But like Marx’s nonsense or Rousseau’s it has just enough plausibility to be attractive to the young and to those acolytes of government who are in any case control-freaks. I have a nasty suspicion therefore that by the 2050s the younger among us will be desperately defending capitalism, not against Marxism nor against environmentalism directly, but against some bastardized version of Fresco’s theories, made all too plausible by advances in information technology in the intervening decades.
Yuck! Seeing the ideas of 1968 spread like a fungus through our political system was bad enough. I’m very glad I shall not be around to battle the grown-up and empowered version of this new intellectual weed!
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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)