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The Occupy Wall Street protest is nearing the third week mark this weekend and shows no sign of ending anytime soon. Despite the weather dropping below 50’s in Lower Manhattan this week, at least 15,000 protestors took to the streets toward Wall Street this past Wednesday night to show their resentment of economic inequality and corporate greed.

Last week, I wrote about what I saw as the contradictory nature of the protests: the organizers’ dogmatic call to arms against capitalism was diluted by their odd embrace of corporatism. I mainly noted that you had to watch a 15 second advertisement before you could watch a livestream video of the ‘revolution’. For me, that showed sloppiness on the part of the organizers, who could have easily found a website that would stream live footage while not allowing corporations to target their viewers as a hip, revolution-watching demographic.

I also found it distasteful that the organizers’ unabashedly endorsed an anti-fascist, yet highly commercialized Hollywood flick, V for Vendetta. Just because the movie has a ’fuck the system’ message, it’s still sold to you by the system. As Karl Marx once said of Capitalism:

“It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

Even though V for Vendetta symbolizes revolution, its only exists as a symbol because selling the revolution is profitable.

 

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Nevertheless, I came to terms that these were rather petty concerns in the grand scheme of the Wall Street protest. Amassing a continuous stream of people who share a similar cause for nearly three weeks typically only happens for events like Mardi Gras, the Olympics, and Kim Jong-Il’s birthday; or more recently, mass unplanned political uprisings like the one in Tahrir Square. The Occupy Wall Street protest is quickly turning into the latter.

This is due in part to the way in which the New York Police Department has handled the situation. Pepper-spraying, bludgeoning, and arresting en masse have all been used by the NYPD in order to (discretely?) disperse protesters. Contrary to what the NYPD thought they were doing, these pointless clashes have mostly led to increased media exposure for the protesters. With each new news report about the protest, there is mention of income inequality, corporate greed, or some other unsavory aspect about our political and economic system.

The latest development this week has been the formation of similar movements in cities all across the country. Boston, DC, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia have notable ‘occupations’ situated at banks, city hall’s, and public plazas. I’m not quite sure which ones will survive, but it’s certainly apparent that this movement has gone local, to a civic space near you.