Wall Street : Symbol or Substance?

Like it or not, every act of insurrection comes down to it's demands. Whether it is a protest or a strike or an all out revolt, unless some objective can emerge from the group dynamic/consensus at some point,it will only have been an exercise.

The objective need not be realized immediately, but I think it is important that it be articulated and circulated. This is why theatre is so powerful, it inserts itself by insisting that all imagination isn't dead (Yet), that symbols and metaphors still contain a power beyond the pull of the dominant ideology and institutions.

So is #Occupy Wall Street more important as theatre with symbolic objectives or a protest with concrete demands? If we look back at the occupation of the Republic Window and Door factory in Chicago or the occupation of the State capitol in Wisconsin, we see this modern dilemma play out.In both instances radical(symbolic) objectives such as: Workers Should Own the Means of Production were reduced in favor of objective demands: Workers Deserve Their Back Pay. A small victory was declared when the demand was (easily) met and the momentum for structural change was dissipated. In Wisconsin the more radical demands such as : Not Our Austerity or Fire the Bosses were reduced to recall elections and support for the Democratic Party. Again the momentum for deep, imaginative restructuring was dissipated and channelled into a form the capitalist state could easily manage.

The General Assembly in Liberty Park is faced with this decision as the weather gets colder and the media moves on to the Next Big Thing. Their Demand, which will probably boil down to: Tax The Rich, will be duly negotiated and considered by The Powers That Be. (who have already decided to do that anyway in order to save capitalism from itself again). Those Powers will be thinking "or else what?" but they will mostly be discreet enough not to say it out loud, instead congratulating the " sometimes messy democratic process".

But if there was no "demand", but instead a symbolic, theatrical, agreed upon suggestion or proposal: End the Capitalist System, it would actually give Wall Street and every other street (Main Street, K Street, Madison Ave., Pennsylvania Ave. etc) something to worry about. The Occupiers could say: Screw Your Reforms and call the action off on their own terms, vowing to show up again unannounced and better organized at some later (warmer) date.By saying : Wall Street is just a symbol of a whole brutal system which we want dismantled, they lose none of the energy and leave everybody hanging, suspended in a tension which Power hates more than anything.