Gapper om Occupy Wall Street

John Gapper har en bra krönika i FT om Occupy Wall Street (OWS) och huruvida den rörelsen - som Gapper sympatiserar med, "Who does not feel there is something wrong with government-backed banks acquiring such a disproportionate share of society’s wealth?" - kan förändra någonting.

Gapper gillar att rörelsen sa nej till att gå in i traditionell politik och att man fått goodwill genom sitt direktdemokratiska arbetssätt, men menar att för att kunna åstadkomma verklig förändring behövs ändå något mer än att tälta i en park och ha långa diskussioner. I slutet av sin krönika kommer han in på att även innan OWS blev utslängda ur parken av polisen, så hade viktiga verksamheter flyttat därifrån och in i intellektuella arbetsgrupper. Och det här är intressant:

"The intellectual action has already been moving out of the park and into working groups that discuss everything from alternative banking to green economics.

The alternative banking group defies the traditional image of Occupy Wall Street. Many of its most committed participants come from the finance industry, including some bankers and traders from large Wall Street firms. It has been organised by Carne Ross, a diplomat and author of The Leaderless Revolution, and Cathy O’Neil, a quantitative financial analyst who has worked at D.E. Shaw, the hedge fund, and RiskMetrics, the consultancy.

The group is drafting comments on implementation of the Volcker Rule limiting proprietary trading in large banks, and trying to invent a structure for a new kind of mutual bank. It could draw on credit unions and mutual organisations such as Mondragon, the Basque federation of worker co-operatives.

“I worked in the financial industry and spent years doing something that I slowly but surely realised was a house of cards,” Ms O’Neil told me. “You observe the incentives at first hand and see how corrupt it is.” She admits it is “a little bit bizarre” to find insiders planning Wall Street’s overthrow but they are “the only ones who understand it”.

If Occupy Wall Street is to leave a permanent mark, this is the sort of effort on which it must focus, rather than seizing patches of land. The brokers who met at a Buttonwood tree on Wall Street in 1792 to found the New York Stock Exchange created something enduring. They did not need to sleep under it."

Jag tror verkligen på att "plan beats no plan" och att samhällskritiska/kapitalismkritiska rörelser därför måste ta tag i just sådant intellektuellt arbete för att kunna erbjuda konkreta alternativ. Därför är det intressant med dessa offshoots från OWS.

John Gapper, "A better way to occupy Wall Street", FT 16 november