Interesting comment by Al Sharpton on the Daily Show yesterday. When asked what the OWS! could possibly accomplish, Sharpton answered that they had already changed the national conversation. Meaning that:
- a few months ago, nobody (in the two parties) was talking much about jobs and making ends meet; the GOP had set the national conversation and it focused on deficit reduction. As the Occupy! movement gained traction, the national conversation (Sharpton says) has moved off the guidelines set for it by the GOP and both parties are talking about the issues important to the occupy! movement, not to the GOP.
- the initial GOP attack dogs (Cantor, attacking the "mobs" et al.) were called off or muted, and Romney apparently has even made noises about how he too is concerned about the 99%.
As a testament to the power of the Occupy! movement, this is impressive. Romney or any other top-tier GOP leader, IMHO, hasn't a chance in hell of attracting any Occupy! people, but to the extent that the Democrats can succeed in pulling Occupy! into their orbit, this would be the death of the Occupy! movement and of the new approach they are taking to the failure of capitalism.
The first Occupy Wall Street! people seemed to have a good instinctive grasp of the class war and its relevance to the current mess that the country finds itself in, not only at the symptomatic level, but at the root-cause level. In some areas, Oakland for example, the class-war perspective is front-and-centre, embraced without fear or apology and seems to form the basis of the day to day strategic planning. (Thanks again, CU4, for that exceptional video!) But ANY class-war perspective will inevitably be lost if the Democrats succeed in their attempts to co-opt this movement.
Of course, in the perspective of the class war, changing the "national conversation" from deficit reduction to jobs and homes doesn't seem like much of an advance, but given the perspectives of the demonstrators themselves (or at least, the most politically advanced of their leaders) any discussion of jobs will inevitably expose the roots of the class-war origins of the problem and has at least the potential to expose millions of the demonstrators to basic Marxist-Leninist theory in the most practical of all settings, the ruling class' inability to provide a true account of the loss of American jobs in non-class-war terms.