The videos are hard work as the crowd repeats every line after he’s said it – did no-one think to provide a microphone or loudhailer? – though as one of the commentators said, it’s a shame they didn’t also do the hand gestures. The Verso blog has the transcript which is much easier going.
[Update: in comments, David explains that the NYPD has prevented amplification, so the crowd repeat what speakers say to circumvent the restriction and avoid having the protest stopped. Now I know. Thanks David.]
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Thanks for posting this, Stuart.
The reason there is no microphone is because the NYPD won’t allow any amplification at protests, and the occupiers don’t want to give the cops a pretext for breaking up the occupation. The “people’s microphone” is a pragmatic response to this arbitrary bit of authoritarianism.
One of the most glaring problems with the supporters of Occupy Wall Street and its copycat successors is that they suffer from a woefully inadequate understanding of the capitalist social formation — its dynamics, its (spatial) globality, its (temporal) modernity. They equate anti-capitalism with simple anti-Americanism, and ignore the international basis of the capitalist world economy. To some extent, they have even reified its spatial metonym in the NYSE on Wall Street. Capitalism is an inherently global phenomenon; it does not admit of localization to any single nation, city, or financial district.
Moreover, many of the more moderate protestors hold on to the erroneous belief that capitalism can be “controlled” or “corrected” through Keynesian-administrative measures: steeper taxes on the rich, more bureaucratic regulation and oversight of business practices, broader government social programs (welfare, Social Security), and projects of rebuilding infrastructure to create jobs. Moderate “progressives” dream of a return to the Clinton boom years, or better yet, a Rooseveltian new “New Deal.” All this amounts to petty reformism, which only serves to perpetuate the global capitalist order rather than to overcome it. They fail to see the same thing that the libertarians in the Tea Party are blind to: laissez-faire economics is not essential to capitalism. State-interventionist capitalism is just as capitalist as free-market capitalism.
Nevertheless, though Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy [insert location here] in general still contains many problematic aspects, it nevertheless presents an opportunity for the Left to engage with some of the nascent anti-capitalist sentiment taking shape there. So far it has been successful in enlisting the support of a number of leftish celebrities, prominent unions, and young activists, and has received a lot of media coverage. Hopefully, the demonstrations will lead to a general radicalization of the participants’ politics, and a commitment to the longer-term project of social emancipation.
To this end, I have written up a rather pointed Marxist analysis of the OWS movement so far that you might find interesting:
“Reflections on Occupy Wall Street: What It Represents, Its Prospects, and Its Deficiencies”
THE LEFT IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE LEFT!
Ross Wolfe seems to be copying and pasting this comment on every OWS related blog post.
The people’s mic is one of the best parts of OWS. It has permanently altered my imagination. It’s has a quasi-religious aspect to it and it definitely unifies the protesters. It also cuts against the grain of our individualistic tendencies. In the protest in Times Square last week the people’s mic was used in multiple locates for “soap-boxing,” basically allowing people to tell their stories of hardship and resistance. Each person on stack usually began by saying their name and a little bit about their background. So for example, someone will say something like “I’m Sarah and I’m a black woman” and then the mainly white crowd will repeat “I’m Sarah and I’m a black woman.” It definitely forces you reset the default settings of American individuality towards the social realm.
There’s also an aesthetic quality to the people’s mic, it’s ecstatic in the technical sense. You have to leave yourself and fuse with the speaker and with each other to amplify the speaker.
Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD thought they were putting a restriction on the protesters when they outlawed amplification. Little did they know they were offering a big gift to the movement.