Many have worried that the Occupy Movement will be co-opted — its language and imagery taken over by people who want to weaken its effect.
(What's co-option? Think about what ABC did to the women's lib movement and bralessness when it rolled out Charlie's Angels. It decoupled symbol from politics for profit. By pretending to support the underlying ideology (and only pretending), ABC blunted its effect. This became the new face of women's liberation for millions of Americans.)
Will the Occupy Movement be co-opted? Here's Hedges, writing in TruthDig (h/t masaccio via email; emphasis and paragraphing mine):
There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform. ...Hedges thinks that liberal institutions like MoveOn and others (including top-down union leadership) have lost legitimacy, and that the Occupy Movement, driven by values and not electoral goals, can't be taken over by them. Read the whole thing to get a sense of why; this is a real essay with real thoughts in it.
Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars.
The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.
One more point worth considering. Hedges says that the "liberal class" has always functioned as a safety valve for a capitalism he views as rapacious; and that in their hubris (my term), the 1%-ers have decided to dispense with the liberals, to discredit the liberals themselves. That creates a problem at the top — no modifying buffer:
The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class. It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets. Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater. But that game is over.This is one analysis you can marshal evidence for; well worth considering.
I would add that not retaining the trappings of rule of law is likely the fatal flaw in the 1% ointment (so to speak). They should have railroaded someone not named Madoff, someone with "CEO" stuck to the back of his shorts. By not keeping up the pretense of legal liability, they shredded the illusion of their own legitimacy.
But as I've said before, their hubris is our friend. Hedges thinks their hubris means Occupy won't be bought or sold. Here's hoping he's right.
GP
