Extending Occupy Wall Street's message and critique

Abstract

The Occupy Wall Street movement and the related manifestations of popular outrage at actually existing capitalism invites a dialogue. In this essay I develop themes stressed by Occupy while extending its critique. Three related subject areas are discussed. The first discusses inequality found in its various dimensions and significances in the United States. Second, the paper expands on understanding inequality, seeing it as the root of the contemporary economic crisis itself and suggests that failure to address extremes in inequality of income, wealth and power will mean repeated economic crises that in an interdependent transnational economy are likely to be qualitatively different than previous crises as experienced and dealt with at the level of the nation-state. Third, capitalism working as it normally does is a problem even when we are not in a deep crisis period for reasons that have to do with incentives that are dependent on and re-enforced by extreme inequalities of income, wealth and power but that appear to have independent existence in abusive rather than systemic causation.

Keywords:

• Occupy Wall Street
• inequality
• capitalist crisis
• alternatives to irrational production
• competing economic logics

Notes

¹ OWS's 1% is a symbolic category indicating in some usages the richest 1% of Americans in annual income or by wealth holdings. It indicates in other emphases the ownership class of capitalists or the people who run the economy and dominates the politics of the country. For data on the 1%, see Stiglitz (2011).