Forum Post: Occupy the Election

There is a general tendency right now among many in the Occupy movement to claim that the movement will never be associated with a legislative agenda, because everyone in the movement has realized “the system” is irredeemably corrupt and can’t be reformed through electoral politics and legislation.

I don’t buy that, and I believe that as 2012 evolves we will indeed see a clear and very ambitiously progressive - possibly even radical - legislative agenda take hold that is shaped and ultimately endorsed by the Occupy movement.

The belief that the system is too broken to be fixed electorally is based on the idea that money rules electoral politics, and there is no way to take that money out of electoral politics. But the whole reason money plays a role in electoral politics is that getting elected requires a mass communication effort, and money buys access to the standard means of communication. Can OWS take the money out of politics? They are already succeeding in doing just that. Each day, they succeed further in speaking over and around the gatekeepers of the mass media. The voice of the Occupy movement is being heard, and is getting louder by the day. It is not too far-fetched to believe that by the summer of 2012, many tens of millions of Americans - or hundreds of millions of Americans - may be getting their information through online access to publications such as “the Occupy Oakland Tribune”, or through local Occupy chapters that are even now in the process of building a network that is spreading out from the large cities, to small cities to towns.

When that happens, it won't matter how many television and radio spots the 1% and its preferred, pre-selected candidates can buy on television. The Occupy movement has the opportunity to rot away much of the media superstructure that now rules the American mind. That media system is sick and decadent, and will decay rapidly from the inside as the new movement grows.

There is nothing wrong with this country that can’t be fixed by throwing out each and every millionaire member of Congress, and replacing him or her by a solid progressive from the 99%. If we get two vigorously progressive houses of Congress, modest reforms like the transactions tax will just be the smallest of changes on the table. We can get much more: radical transformations of corporate governance and workplace rules, a much more egalitarian income and compensation system, a vigorously progressive tax system, a national full employment program, a public sector non-profit banking system, a publicly run health care system, a fully funded public education program, a shrunken and re-regulated financial system, and an expanded public sector program for building up and democratically controlling our national infrastructure.

If the towns and states and community organizations of this country seem short on cash right now, that is because an obscene proportion of our national wealth and output is wastefully diverted into the bank accounts of the most wealthy members of our society, including large corporations. Our nation's capital is being wasted on the luxury of the few, rather than the needs of the many. But we can vote that wealth back into the treasuries of our own communities and the needs of struggling, ordinary people. In short, we can take control of the existing institutional power structures of this country, through entirely legal and constitutional means, and use those institutions to make new, radically progressive laws. We can use the electoral system to commandeer the vast wealth of this country; to promote equality, human dignity and the public good; and to drain the luxuriant overgrown swamps of capital accumulation and waste among the wealthy.