Occupy Wall Street may best be described as a meta-protest. The Occupy Movement, which spread from Wall Street to Occupy movements throughout the world all shared a common theme. People from different walks of life have come together to voice their displeasure at a wide range of things: bank bailouts, student loan debt, lack of healthcare, to name a few. The list is as diverse as the people involved in the Occupy movements. However, at the heart of it all, the Occupiers’ main critique is a protest against the rise of economic inequality, with much of their ire focused on the big banks, or “banksters” according to many in the Occupy movement. This is personified in their signature “we are the 99%”.

The banks have come to represent a system that has potentially failed. Bankers were given huge incentives to create complex financial products and extend cheap lines of credit, in many cases to people who normally would not qualify for loans. The bankers were making vast sums as of money when things were going well, but  when things began to unravel, these very same banks - who were engaged in a high risk / high reward game - suddenly became “too big too fail” and had to be bailed out with public funds. This incited the Occupiers’ sense of unfairness. Looking into the future, does the failure and bailout of the banks represent a turning point? Has Western style capitalism failed? If so, do the Occupiers give us any signals of what may replace it?

While the Occupy movement’s critique is accurate, they fall short in terms of any substantive solutions. The Occupiers have made a good start, but have seemingly reached the natural limits to where they could go. A solution for this could be that the Occupy movement widens its scope to help with constructing an alternative form of banking, one that can address the issues of economic equality. By joining with other groups, the Occupiers can move from being a loud voice that is too vague, to become a group working with the banks against which they protest. The purpose of this would be to create a banking system in the future that is socially useful for everyone. A banking system that contains regulatory and operational reforms, as well as dealing with the issues of equity that form the basis of the Occupy Movement. To devise a system of solidarity and reciprocity that meets the needs of our communities, not a system that divides the world into the ultra wealthy 1% and the other 99%.

Were the Occupiers right? They were. In highlighting the rise of inequality they helped to bring into light and popularize the problems of the global financial system. In coming up short in terms of solutions, the Occupiers may have reached their limits, and it may be necessary for them to reach out to other groups in order to craft a new financial system in the future, one that serves everyone, and not just the 1%.

Jason Swanson
© The European Futures Observatory 2013

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Resources:

A Leaf Being Turned: A speech given by Andrew Haldane (Bank of England) to Occupy Economics, 29 Oct 2012.

A Blueprint For Better Business?: A speech given by Archbishop Vincent Nichols at conference 18 Sept 2012.

www.blueprintforbusiness.org : Making the case for the need for change.

At the beginning of this decade, we were concerned with the trends that would dominate the decade - the decade in which we are currently living. At the time, it seemed to us that, given the high levels of state intervention in the economy, one trend that would dominate would be a more interventionist public sector. We wrote about this in both 2008 (see article) and 2009 (see article), before including the trend in our 2010-11 project 'A History Of The Next Ten Years' (click here for more details).

We are now 20% into the decade, and we are now collecting evidence that supports our view of the trend. In progressing from the identification of the trend to determining an underlying model that gave resonance to the trend, we took the view that politics, certainly from a European perspective, contained a tension between the mode of delivery (corporate -vs- atomistic) and the intended beneficiaries of the collective action (the individual -vs- the community). The model suggested that we were turning away from a period in which the individual would be the intended beneficiary of an atomistic (i.e. market based) collective action, and towards one in which the community would be the intended beneficiary of an atomistic (i.e. market based) collective action.

What does this mean in simple terms? The bottom line is that it implies a return to state owned corporations. Ones that are not within the public sector, but ones that do come under state control. In the UK, we have calls for a more interventionist industrial policy (see article), which Germany and France are leading the drive to greater state control of key industrial companies (see article). To a certain extent, this development was entirely foreseen.

If our model is correct, then in the decade after this one, we can expect to see a move from one in which the community would be the intended beneficiary of an atomistic (i.e. market based) collective action to one in which the community would be the intended beneficiary of an corporate (i.e. state directed) collective action. If we are right, then we may see the drive towards Big Brother increasing in the years to come. These are the data points for which we are now looking.

Stephen Aguilar-Millan

© The European Futures Observatory 2012