Occupy Wall Street

The widening gap in economic inequalities and the increasing concentration of wealth within American society came to national attention during the fall and winter of 2011, as an increasingly mesmerized public witnessed the spreading protest of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, marveled or sniggered at its particular form of participative democracy and cheered at the vibrancy of its simple, alluring slogan – the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent. ¹ While there is no disputing the disruptive potential of OWS and the number of small victories it was able to score, we may wonder in hindsight what were the real chances for the movement to bring about any kind of long-term substantial change, or to significantly alter the current power structure. This chapter posits that one of the main obstacles preventing this from happening was not so much the loose organization model favored by the protesters or their reluctance to morph from street action to a more structured activism, but rather the fact that they may ultimately have misjudged their target. Although it did challenge the status quo on a discursive level, as we shall see in a first part, the movement indeed may have fallen prey to the same shortsightedness of those theoreticians analyzing the sustainability of the US capitalist paradigm, who tend to “underplay the socio-political role of institutions in their interrelations with the market sphere and economic agents” (Introduction, this volume, p. 2) while also underestimating the potency of the cultural myths within which the American capitalist model is deeply embedded.