The main thing I notice about the American middle class today is how prone to magical thinking they are.
The main thing I notice about the American middle class today is how prone to magical thinking they are.
The American middle class - whatever its surface political affiliation, Democrat or Republican - has been told for 40-50 years now how wonderful they are. Rather like today's middle class children who are told how clever and talented they are and that everything they do is awesome.
But the American middle class is now a hollow shell that, while it retains its high self-regard, has no corresponding economic power to match. It fancies itself an unbeatable bloc, but there is nothing backing up that bloc but an empty slogan ("We are the 99%")
The middle class is whistling past the graveyard when it insists it doesn't need leadership and organization for its OWS adventures because (and here comes the magical thinking again) things are just going to shake out gloriously, rising like a mighty tide.
But the reason why it doesn't have leadership and organization is because "the 99%" isn't actually a real bloc.
The American middle class doesn't actually produce anything any more. It consumes.
This reality of nonproduction is minimized through redefinition, mostly. Buzzwords like "the knowledge economy" help fill the gap. (If the situation doesn't look favorable, just redefine the terms to redefine the reality!) The American middle class has convinced itself that it is filling a vital niche - they're the middle managers to the world (and ought to be paid a manager's salary).
But actually, the elites don't really need those middle managers any more. So the elites have decided that the American middle class should be culled, having grown too large to be truly useful. (The culling, of course, began with those lately arrived to the middle class estate - blacks and Latinos who were railroaded into the bad-loan crisis. Last in, first out...)
The American middle class made the mistake of beginning to believe that they were actually a permanent class of people (albeit with upper-class aspirations), and that society could not do without them.
But the middle class was not actually a "class," but was developed as a workspace where new managers of the corporate world hegemony project could be hatched. Now that that hegemony is virtually total, a large American middle class has become too expensive to maintain in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
A little unrest here and there is a small price to pay for keeping the American middle class distracted from what's really happening to them. This unrest is helpfully absorbed by already-stressed local governments in city squares and college campuses across the country, so that the elites can remain deceptively above the fray.
The American middle class loves new and shiny things - the young men loving them most of all - so they are all too eager to redefine this rotten situation (rotten for them, anyway) as something revolutionary and never-before-experienced-in-human-history. So, their leaderless movement is Something Quite New. And its minimal real-world results will be systematically redefined by the Redefining Committee as great triumphs, until such point that these redefinitions finally cannot overcome bullshit detectors as more members of the middle class come to terms with how much their actual economic power has faded.
On the periphery of this sideshow lurk the real players - the ones with longstanding organization and discipline - the elites and their professional military, and the groups that have long wished to seize power from the elites. These are religious-right groups in many countries, but also anarchist leftists as well. The leftists in the US are currently not well organized, but unlike the middle class, they comprehend the need to be. They are students of ancient tactics, not breathless proselytes of Something Quite New. All these players understand the need for secrecy in their operations, which is also something the middle class, with its love of the open gesture, does not grasp.
At the bottom of all this are the genuine 1% - the truly vulnerable in any society. About the only thing that is predictable about the current situations, is that this 1% will bear the most suffering regardless of who triumphs.
We're already seeing this with how vulnerable women were victimized in Zuccotti Park (both by OWS attached people and by cops after they were arrested), and how women and Copts in Egypt will undoubtedly be victimized after the dust clears from the current unrest in Tahrir Square.
OWS is currently made up of a combination of the American middle class and an unknown number of hardcore leftists of varying degrees of organization.
I don't have any prescriptions for "correct" action to offer. Right now, the movement is still firmly in the gentle, delusional grip of the American middle class. When the pepper spray and tear gas clears, hopefully, the REAL 1% will have battened down the hatches to protect themselves from the depradations to come.